Voting and Elections Roundup

By DHinMI

2008 Democratic Presidential Primaries and Caucuses

We all have our fixations. For some folks, one particular political fixation is the disproportionate influence afforded Iowa and New Hampshire as the first two states that get to cast primary votes for President. One of my political fixations is the disproportionate influence afforded the states that cast primary and caucus votes just after Iowa and New Hampshire, which in 2004 were mostly states that were heavily Republican, much whiter than the national population, caucus states where only a very small number of people participated, or states that combined those characteristics. Therefore, I was glad to see in this article, titled Dean Predicts Changes for 2008 Primaries, that much of the discussion by this about the commission studying the issue:

A commission member, former ambassador Terry Shumaker, said the panel has not begun deliberating or taken any votes. Most of its discussions have focused on how more states are moving up their contests to be closer to those held by Iowa and New   Hampshire.

Hopefully we’ll get a more rational process that better contributes to choosing a nominee who appeals to the Democratic base and can be competitive across a wide swath of the nation.

Turn in Those Campaign Finance Reports, or Go To Jail

A Detroit lawmaker could lose his state House seat and another faces fines as the result of charges Tuesday that they flouted election laws and didn't disclose campaign finances on time.

Attorney General Mike Cox charged Reps. George Cushingberry Jr. and LaMar Lemmons III, both Democrats, with failing to file timely campaign finance reports this year and last.

Cushingberry, who did not return calls for comment Tuesday, also faces two counts of felony perjury. Cox charged that Cushingberry falsely claimed in sworn statements that he had filed all required campaign finance statements and paid all fines when he took office in January of this year…

Cushingberry, 52, becomes the first lawmaker charged under a 1999 law that requires legislators to sign election statements and affidavits stating that they have complied with campaign finance disclosure laws.

A conviction could lead to his ouster from the Legislature. Anyone convicted of a felony involving a breach of public trust during the previous 20 years is banned from serving. Whether that applies to a lawmaker who is convicted after taking office would be up to House members.

Each perjury charge carries a maximum penalty of 5 years in prison and a $5,000 fine upon conviction…

Lemmons, 48, was not charged with felony perjury because it could not be proven he intentionally made a false claim by signing the sworn election statements, said Allison Pierce, a spokeswoman for Cox. Lemmons is charged with misdemeanor counts of not filing two or more campaign finance statements.

Pierce did not say how prosecutors could prove Cushingberry knowingly made a false claim by signing the election statement.

Cox alleges that Cushingberry received 21 notices from the Secretary of State's Office regarding missed deadlines from February 2004 to February 2005 and that Lemmons ignored 19 similar notices during the same period.

Lemmons said he was surprised by the charges, maintaining he has done all he could to comply with election laws. He acknowledged he filed his finance reports late.

He said health problems and his grandmother's death last year left his campaign finances in disarray. "I have paid $5,000 in fines," he said. "I thought if you paid the fines you would not be prosecuted."

Lemmons paid $5,000 in late fees and Cushingberry paid $4,500 in late fees in July to the Secretary of State's Office. Both men also have filed the required campaign finance statements, though long overdue.

Neither of the representatives’ seats are competitive and neither are in leadership, so it’s hard to describe this as an attempt to target Democrats. And neither are even close to pristine in terms of political ethics or deception. For example, Lemmons was one of three “Lamar Lemmons” on the ballot last time around. His similarly named father and nephew were on the ballot in adjoining state house districts, a move generally seen as an attempt by this particular Lamar Lemmons to increase his name recognition for another run at the local State Senate seat next year.

Whatever happens, it would make for an interesting discussion should Cushingberry find himself incarcerated:

Prisoner A: I’m in for grand larceny, what are you in for?

Prisoner B: I’m in for auto theft. What are you in for?

Cushingberry: I’m in because I was a state representative who didn’t respond to 21 notices to turn in my campaign finance report, and when I finally did I perjured myself.

Paper Trails Catching On

Three years into a national debate over the security and reliability of computerized voting machines, the skeptics are winning

In the past month, legislatures in five states -Connecticut, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York and  Oregon - have passed laws requiring computer-based voting machines to produce a paper backup that can be verified by the voter, according to Electionline.org, which monitors voting systems. That brings to 25 the number of states that require a paper trail.

Fourteen other states and the District of Columbia are considering similar legislation…

Some election experts fear that paper backup records will add a layer of complexity to an already delicate system. That could lead to even worse problems in the 2006 elections, such as jammed printers and long voting lines, they say.

"The unintended consequence of a (paper trail) mandate could diminish, rather than enhance, voter confidence," says Conny McCormack, who runs elections in the nation's largest voting jurisdiction, Los Angeles County.

"When we start using paper trails in a live election, all of these problems are going to become apparent," says Linda Lamone, administrator of the Maryland Board of Elections. "Problems with paper ballots are going to cause a whole new cloud over the system."

One example already has cropped up. In a California test July 20 of touch-screen voting machines with add-on printers, nearly 20% of the machines experienced problems, including paper jams and computer crashes. The machines were made by Diebold, a leading manufacturer of touch-screen computer voting equipment.

California has since banned the machines, and the test sent qualms through states such as Mississippi and Utah, which had decided to buy machines like those California rejected.

These people complaining about how paper trails will make the systems too complex drive me nuts. If that’s what they’re afraid of, there’s a really simple answer to making it less complex: get rid of the touchscreens. The priority for an election is not to make it easier on the election administrators, it’s to balance the needs of voters to have both a simple system for voting and a honest system that will ensure the integrity of the results. Touchscreens without paper receipts obviously can’t ensure the integrity of the results, so if adding paper makes it too complex, don’t use touchscreens.

One other thing: paper receipts to the voters are fine, but what's really important is a paper receipt kept on hand in the case of a recount and for the random audits that should be conducted in every jurisdiction, every election.

Redistricting Referenda: Moving Forward in Ohio, Stalled in California

First,California:

In another setback to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's "year of reform" agenda, an appeals court on Tuesday blocked his redistricting initiative from the November special election, ruling that supporters of the measure violated state election law in the way they put it on the ballot.

The ruling is a victory for state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer, who sued last month to keep the measure off the ballot and now has won in two courts.

Supporters of the measure promised to appeal yet again, saying they would ask the California Supreme Court to review the case. The high court, which can choose not to act, would have to move quickly, because the state printer is scheduled to begin producing 12 million voter guides Monday.

Anticipating a Supreme Court review, the appeals court allowed the redistricting measure, Proposition 77, to be included in election materials now on public display until midnight Sunday.

The ballot initiative would strip the Legislature of the power to draw the boundaries of legislative and congressional districts and give it instead to a panel of retired judges. Schwarzenegger supports it — one of three measures he backs for the November ballot — because he says it would change a system in which incumbents are almost guaranteed reelection.

Now, Ohio:

Backers of three ballot issues to dramatically change Ohio elections said Tuesday that they are confident that voters are so sick of politics-as-usual that they will support the changes on Nov. 8.

Reform Ohio Now, a coalition of labor unions and Democrat-leaning activists, on Tuesday filed petitions with 521,000 signatures for each of three issues with Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio's chief elections official.

The group cleared its first hurdle on Tuesday when the Ohio Supreme Court unanimously dismissed a lawsuit seeking to keep the issues off the ballot.

One of the ballot issues would change the way congressional and legislative districts are drawn, another would create a state elections board and the third would lower the individual limit on campaign contributions

Backers say Ohioans need to take more control of their elections because of the current investment scandal involving majority Republicans at the Statehouse and an elections system they see as flawed…

Currently, legislative lines are drawn every 10 years by the state Apportionment Board, consisting of the governor, auditor, secretary of state and a lawmaker from each party. Republicans control the board and the Legislature, which draws congressional boundaries.

Lines are drawn to strengthen the ruling party's majority. Republicans, who took over the board in 1990, now control the Ohio House 60-39 and the state Senate 22-11. The congressional delegation favors the GOP 13-5 and both U.S.Sens. Mike DeWine and George Voinovich are Republicans.

Under the proposal, a judge-appointed, five-person board would choose redistricting plans that anyone could submit. The idea has been tried several times over the last three decades by various groups, including the League of Women Voters of Ohio, but has never made it through the Legislature.

Voters in 1981 rejected a similar redistricting amendment backed by Republicans. Democrats took control of all statewide executive offices and both houses of the Legislature the next year.

See any similarities? In short, in California Schwarzenegger is trying to do what in Ohio Reform Ohio Now is trying to do: take redistricting out of the hands of the legislature.

Efforts to design “de-politicized” redistricting processes almost always fail. In a few states they seem to get half-way decent results, as in Iowa. And in the places with which I’m most familiar, it’s often when there’s a stalemate in the political process and the process gets punted to the courts where you end up with generally fair and competitive district maps. For example, it was a court-designed map that the Republicans overturned in the Texas redistricting. And there are some places where the Dems did quite well in the redistricting battles, such as North Carolina and Tennessee.

One thing I wish the AP article would have mentioned: if the Ohio proposal passes, when would it take effect? If it took effect immediately, and the lines were redrawn in the lead-up to the 2008 election, our chances of winning back (or retaining?) control of congress would probably dramatically increase, because Ohio (along with MI, PA and FL) has one of the most pro-Republican gerrymandered Congressional maps in the country.

Comments

[John Lopresti]

I often wish redistricting would shake the power alignments within the Democratic Party in CA, but not along the proposed lines of the "Schwarzenegger" initiative. The CA redistricting could be called better the Ted Costa tax reactionary radical Republican sham redistricting; or even more accurately, the CA subset of the TX Delay Armey grassroots reform. If you look who are the governor's committee members, the people actually writing his scripts, they are the planners at RNC, lots of them not even CA residents. Schwarzenegger is the actor; theirs the plan. On the surface it looks like a "panel of retired judges" would be a more objective way to gerrymander, but if these individuals were retired, they would not be for long, once they were assigned redistricting chores. And the initiative circulated substituted a key verb in one place different from the text approved in Sacramento: instead of nominating retired judges, the judges would be named.
This is electoral deception at its core, and the appeals court voted 2-1 today to reject it. Still, when I hear CA Rep. Chesbro advocating sending Eel River water to Modesto agribusiness 350 miles away, I wish we could redistrict and vote in a less antienvironmental US Rep; there are others nearby, all Democrats, all ensconced in their protected districts; Mike Thompson is a similar barely liberal Democrat who takes antienvironmental stands in the US House of Representatives. His district is much more liberal than he, but we are a lock to vote for the Democrat, and the party machinery knows that verity. But taking the TX redistricting model as an overlay on CA's needs is to acquiesce to the RNC. As a matter of fact, some of Delay's fundraisers just today lost an appeal in TX for some of their illegal fundraising that diluted poor peoples' districts in the 2002-2003 redistricting in TX.
The GOP has redistricting campaigns in 25 states, and a half dozen are similar to the pattern in CA. The flaw in CA was after foisting off the fake initiatives on voters for signature, the governor's committee people hid the discrepant signed forms for three weeks, letting them see the light of day only three days following the Republican Secretary of State's certification of redistricting for the autumn ballot. The Secretary of State is an easy going sort of Republican, yet, one who used the same RNC ultra-reactionary political operatives to organize his office when he took over following abdication of the Democrat. Turns out the Democratic SoS had several illegal fundraising associates, and had personal disputes with people that soured the atmosphere for any possible reprieve once his fundraising irregularities began to hit the legislative hearing room; none of the actual court decisions have been made yet, now a full year since the Democrat left the CA SoS office, and to this day it is very unclear exactly why he left office so precipitiously. After all: his use of Voting Rights funds, another possible disbursement malfeasance, one which the GOP was threatening to put into the courts, was little different from Schwarzeneggers half dozen committees who are hiding donations in a nationwide shellgame. CA politics are nearly as caricature like as TX's.
OH always has been a frontier state, easily staying Democratic for long stretches, even liberal Democratic; but grassroots organizing by the GOP has borne fruit in OH, as your article, above, mentions. I can still hear the echos of Ken Blackwell in OH saying people could vote on temporary ballots, they just would not be counted. After the election scandal there in 2004's presidential election, I contacted an old college acquaintance about the long waits in lines up to 6-8 hours in inclement weather; his reply: he lives in a Republican suburb near where he is a professor at OH State, voting was fast and easy; just the poor districts had long lines.
That reminds me of Rollin Post's brag when Christie Whitman got elected twice in NJ, claiming he had bribed minority leaders to stir anger among the poor and plead with them to stay home and not exercise their franchise to vote.
Old King George would feel right at home in this environment. At least we have no figurehead monarch in this political system, though there are times the current administration appears to have sequestered a sufficient amount of turf to have the functional equivalent.

[Harris]

Word on Rep. Lemmons and Cushinberry of Michigan:

I know they have a safe Detroit seat, but still, what are they thinking about with both the Secretary of State and Attorney General in Republican hands? Talk about asking for it....

The lesson in MI redistricting is that even supposedly "neutral" methods can still be gamed. Especially, if the State has to give up a seat (as was the case in 2000. Moreover, as the state's population has remained steady (and so lost relative to the nation), it has seen significant internal shifts of population, notably a loss of population in Detroit, and substantial growth in the outer counties of the metro region (Livingston, Washtenaw, and on the west side, Ottawa). Combine the shift of population and the loss in Detroit with the loss of a congressional seat and it's easy to see how you get the lop-sided GOP delegation.

[Sara]

The Ohio Initiative very much interests me. The NYTimes had a good story on it yesterday, and I have yet to check the Ohio papers -- but I am impressed they have over half a million signatures (a little over 300,000 required) and that they have a quite non and bi-partisian sponsorship. According to the Times, the lead on this is Common Cause, and I think they know what they are doing.

As to administration of elections, the emphasis seems to be on removing elected officials from any aspect of the election administration system and the necessary rulemaking. I think Blackwell has already ruled Ohio should convert to paper ballots counted by scanner in the precincts -- and this is something I didn't expect of him, but it does produce the lowest error rate of any system in use.

In recent years, the Ohio Republicans raised the limits on political contributions way out of sight -- and one part of this would drastically cut these limits. In many ways it was the high limits that fostered something like coingate.

We progressives really need "principles" for discussion of the matter of drawing legislative and congressional district lines. We already have one we cannot avoid -- and that's the voting rights law -- but we need to discuss others, particularly one that interests me, and that is that as far as possible, all districts should be competitive. I would suggest one reason people don't vote is because they are captive of districts of the opposite party -- and thus they don't matter. The key is to make all elections more competitive -- and increase the rational for following politics and voting. But yes, most districts would be best if they follow existing civil divisions, (city and county lines) where possible.

But anyhow, I have a notion the Ohio Initative will be successful -- so lets keep it in mind. Apparently it is to be on this November's ballot, meaning at least some of the reforms would be in place for 06.