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    • They call it Amendment 5, I call it confusing.
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    They call it Amendment 5, I call it confusing.

    Kathleen William Posted on

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    My wife recently asked me what I thought about Amendment No. 5 on the ballot.

    We plan to vote early and typically study the sample ballot sent in the mail to clarify any voting decisions before we go to the polls.

    (Small annoyance: people reading densely worded ballot questions for the first time while voting.)

    I have to admit that I hadn't really given much thought to Amendment No. 5. And after my wife read me the summary of the ballot with the word “soup,” I knew even less.

    It read:

    “Proposing an amendment to the State Constitution to require an annual adjustment for inflation in the value of current or future homestead tax exemptions applicable exclusively to taxes other than school district taxes and to which any person having legal or equitable title to real property and the same “The permanent residence of the owner or another person who is legally or naturally dependent on him is entitled to claim.”

    Yikes. My level of cognitive impairment with these words was Trumpian in its breadth.

    “I have to look at this,” I said.

    The first task was to try to make sense of this 68 word sentence. I tried reading it in Spanish but that made it worse.

    Full disclosure: I don't actually read in Spanish, but I thought it might throw something off.

    I was worried that if I didn't take care of it, the next thing you know, a guy in a lab coat might be asking me to point to the giraffe on the page.

    To calm my nerves, I went straight to calculating the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL) and Flesch Reading Ease (FRE) formulas.

    Luckily for us, in the 1940s, a guy named Rudolf Flesch thought it would be a good idea to make U.S. Department of Defense documents understandable. Therefore, he developed a scale that assessed the readability of texts based on the number of syllables, words and sentences.

    And then, three decades later, researcher J. Peter Kincaid expanded on Flesch's work by developing a formula that helped the U.S. Navy determine the grade level needed to understand the language of a given text.

    This gives us two good standards for evaluating reading material.

    Helpfully, the website Ballotpedia.org runs proposed state constitutional amendments using these two formulas to give us an idea of ​​whether we are losing our minds or whether some of these ballot measures are accidental or deliberate obfuscation exercises.

    To give you an idea of ​​how mathematically accurate these formulas are, the FKGL is calculated as follows:

    The Flesch-Kincaid grade level score is 0.39 multiplied by (total number of words divided by total number of sentences) plus 11.8 multiplied by (total syllables divided by total number of words) minus 15.59

    It should produce a number that corresponds to the grade level required to understand the words presented. For example, a FKGL score of 7 would mean that seventh grade education would be required to understand the passage.

    The FKGL score for Addition #5 is 13, meaning it is at a college level of understanding that is considered “advanced.”

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    The Flesch Reading Ease Score is an equally complex mathematical calculation that returns a number between 100 and 0, with 90 to 100 corresponding to a 5th grade reading level and 0 to 30 corresponding to college level.

    The FRE value of Change 5 is 19. This falls into the range of “very difficult to read; best understood by college graduates.”

    It turns out that most of the questions surrounding Florida's constitutional amendment are similarly broad. In 2013, state lawmakers passed a measure that limited summaries of voting changes to a maximum of 75 words.

    This shrinking mandate has resulted in huge, complex, multi-sentence sentences that strain overall competency.

    The two most strongly supported and attacked constitutional amendments on the ballot — those about legalizing marijuana and expanding reproductive rights for women — are good to Floridians because of the multimillion-dollar effort to support or attack them and the extensive media coverage become known.

    But relying simply on ballot summaries, FKGL and FRE brought their understanding qualities to the college level, while the abortion issue scored at the graduate college level.

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    The lesson here is to do your homework.

    I finally got it done on Amendment No. 5. I'm voting against it because it's an initiative by Republican lawmakers aimed at redistributing the money that local governments have to pay for police and fire services, public parks and other services.

    Giving another tax break to those who already benefit from the home tax exemption and are protected by limits on tax increases creates a burden for local governments to raise money elsewhere.

    Constitutional Amendment No. 5 is not a tax-cutting initiative. It is a tax shift.

    This will, among other things, increase the tax burden for landlords, who will pass this on to tenants at a time when rents are already high. This is one reason the Florida League of Cities opposes it.

    Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to look at the proposed constitutional change in school boards and try to read it in Spanish.

    Frank Cerabino is a news columnist at The Palm Beach Post, part of the Gannett newspaper chain.

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    Kathleen William
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