Editorials

Opinion pieces and editorials on voting issues.

James O'Keefe's voter fraud prank fail | Oliver Burkeman/guardian.co.uk

May 182012

I suffer fairly severely from what psychologists call “empathic embarrassment”: I find it agonising to the point of physical discomfort to watch other people making fools of themselves. Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat often had me writhing and cringing on behalf of his victims – even, troublingly, when his victims were spouting horrible bigotry. I’m really not proud of this. It’s an annoying problem. And lately, it’s been particularly disconcerting to find that the person prompting me to cover my face with my hands is the notorious “conservative provocateur” James O’Keefe III. O’Keefe, of course, is the rightwing prankster who helped bring down Acorn and was then convicted in connection with a sting at the offices of Louisana Senator Mary Landrieu. But with the significant exception of the ambush of Acorn, there’s something epic – almost worthy of awed respect, if it didn’t make me cringe so much – about how astonishingly inept he is at “punking” the liberals he despises. Read More »

Suppressing the student vote? New residency rules could affect Wisconsin’s recall election | The Daily Page

May 182012

The voter ID law passed last spring by the Republican-controlled Wisconsin Legislature was widely criticized for requiring that voters show a driver’s license or other form of photo identification at the polls. These provisions are now under two court injunctions by judges who found that the photo ID requirements likely discriminate against minorities, the poor and the elderly. Meanwhile, it is the bill’s new residency requirements, largely lost in the controversy over photo ID, that are much more likely to keep students away from the polls in the upcoming June 5 recall elections for governor, lieutenant governor and four state Senate seats. Turnout among students, a voting bloc traditionally thought to favor Democrats, was already low in the May 8 recall primary. The new rules require that voters live at an address for 28 days before being eligible to vote. Dorm leases for 6,900 students at UW-Madison end May 20, and many of the other students living off campus will leave for the summer around the same time. Do the math and the dilemma is clear: There is no time to reestablish residency to vote June 5. Read More »

The Third Party Fantasy | NYTimes.com

May 172012

“Third parties are like bees,” the intellectual historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in 1955. “Once they have stung, they die.” It’s an aphorism that aptly describes the anti-slavery and anti-immigrant parties of the mid-nineteenth century, the Populists and Progressives who ushered out the Gilded Age, as well as more recent third-party standard bearers, from George Wallace to Ross Perot. All of these movements and figures influenced American politics dramatically, before fading away and leaving the basic two-party duopoly intact. Of late, though, our potential third parties have been skipping the stinging part and going straight to the dying. This was true of Unity ’08, the much-ballyhooed attempt by former Democratic and Republican politicos to put up an independent alternative to Barack Obama and John McCain. Despite enjoying a wave of free publicity and boasting Sam Waterston of “Law & Order” as their spokesman, the Unityers never even came close to conjuring up a plausible candidate or platform, and their movement fizzled out amid attempts to entice an unwilling Michael Bloomberg into the lists. Read More »

Is Campaign Disclosure Heading Back to the Supreme Court? - Don’t expect to see Karl Rove’s Rolodex just yet | Rick Hasen/Slate Magazine

May 172012

The news this week that a federal appeals court has refused to block a lower court ruling requiring the disclosure of more funders of campaign ads has campaign finance reformers tasting their first victory in a long time. “It’s the first major breakthrough in overcoming the massive amounts of secret contributions that are flowing into federal elections,” Fred Wertheimer of Democracy 21 told the Los Angeles Times. But don’t expect to see Karl Rove’s Rolodex just yet. Crossroads GPS and other groups have found that raising money from donors who don’t want to be disclosed is good for business, and they’ve got a few ways to keep the unlimited money poured into campaigns secret yet. And before you get too excited it’s worth considering that the Supreme Court could well help them keep their secrets in 2012, even though the court has so far been a big supporter of disclosure laws.

Since 1974, federal campaign finance law has required the disclosure of campaign donors and spenders. Opponents of disclosure have long argued that at least some disclosure is unconstitutional under the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech and association, because compelling someone to reveal the names of those funding political speech will chill vigorous participation in politics. As I’ve explained, the Supreme Court rejected that constitutional challenge in the 1976 campaign finance case, Buckley v. Valeo. Confronted in that instance with a law that required disclosure of even very small contributions, the court held that the disclosure laws were justified by three important government interests: First, disclosure laws can prevent corruption and the appearance of corruption. Second, disclosure laws provide valuable information to voters. (A busy public relies on disclosure information more than ever.) Third, disclosure laws help enforce other campaign finance laws, like the ban on foreign money in elections. But the court has repeatedly said that if someone could demonstrate a real threat of harassment, they could be exempt from the disclosure laws. Read More »

Americans Elect meets reality: third-party effort may be viable — just not now | Doyle McManus/latimes.com

May 172012

What happens if you start a political party and nobody comes? Six months ago, a newfangled third party burst onto the scene, full of hope and promise. It was called Americans Elect, and it sought to give voters a choice many said they were looking for: “centrist” candidates who could break the partisan gridlock paralyzing Washington. In its founders’ heads danced visions of middle-of-the-road candidates who could transform American politics: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Colin Powell, Michael Bloomberg, Jon Huntsman Jr. Wealthy donors invested millions in a fancy website for an Internet primary, signed up 420,000 would-be “delegates” and got on the ballot in 29 states. Newspaper columnists, including me, pondered what effect it might have on the election. Then the grand idea collided with reality. Read More »

Voter ID Laws: Silencing the American People | John W. Whitehead/Huffington Post

May 172012

“There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today. Why should we disenfranchise people forever once they’ve paid their price?” – Bill Clinton

Despite the propaganda being advanced by the government, the purpose of voter ID laws is not to eliminate voter fraud and protect the integrity of elections. Rather, their aim is to silence and suppress as many American voters as possible and increase the already widening chasm between the electorate and our government representatives. In fact, voter ID laws are the icing on the cake when it comes to public officials shutting Americans out of the decision-making process, silencing dissent, and making sure that those in power stay in power and have the last word on government policy. In other words, voter ID laws are the final step in securing the American corporate oligarchy, the unchallenged rule by the privileged and few. Read More »

5 Voting Laws That Make People Angry | Huffington Post

May 162012

A wave of Republican-sponsored laws restricting who can and cannot vote may mean that fewer Democrats, especially those who are low-income or minorities, vote in the 2012 presidential election. Since the beginning of 2011, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin, and West Virginia have passed, or have plans to pass, restrictive voting laws. More than 70 percent of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency will come from these states, the Brennan Center reported in March. Republican lawmakers argue that the laws are necessary to prevent voter fraud, but fewer than 100 people have been charged with voter fraud in the past five years, according to the Washington Post. In 2011, former President Bill Clinton condemned the laws for disenfranchising Democrats, describing them as “the disciplined, passionate, determined effort of Republican governors and legislators to keep most of you from voting next time.There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the other Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today,” he said. Read More »

Protecting your vote | Ron Rivest/Boston.com

May 152012

Sometimes, a few votes make a huge difference. Just ask Rick Santorum. In January, Rick Santorum won the Iowa caucuses, but, because of vote counting and tabulation errors, Mitt Romney was declared the winner. In the two weeks before the error became clear, Romney’s campaign gained momentum, while Santorum’s withered. Unfortunately, the same problem – or worse – could easily occur in Massachusetts. This year, voters will choose the president, and control of the US Senate may come down to the race shaping up between Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren. Read More »

Are Libya's elections premature? | CNN.com

May 152012

In less than 40 days, Libya is set to witness the first elections since the ouster of the late Moammar Gahdafi. But are the elections coming too early? Post-conflict elections should mark the pinnacle point in the recovery and reconstruction of Libya. Libyans and the international community look at the election on June 19 as a milestone toward peace and democracy. But some studies show history can paint a gloomy picture of elections held soon after bloody armed struggles, when political institutions may be weak or non-existent. Many believe elections soon after the armed conflict that ended Moammar Gadhafi’s regime would foster the promise of peace and democracy. It would show a democratic transition and effective recontruction, which in turn would assure the international community about the stability of Libya. Elections would also help post-conflict Libya attract much needed foreign assistance and investment to help rebuild the country. Read More »

Money Unlimited: How John Roberts Orchestrated Citizens United | Jeffrey Toobin/The New Yorker

May 142012

When Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was first argued before the Supreme Court, on March 24, 2009, it seemed like a case of modest importance. The issue before the Justices was a narrow one. The McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law prohibited corporations from running television commercials for or against Presidential candidates for thirty days before primaries. During that period, Citizens United, a nonprofit corporation, had wanted to run a documentary, as a cable video on demand, called “Hillary: The Movie,” which was critical of Hillary Clinton. The F.E.C. had prohibited the broadcast under McCain-Feingold, and Citizens United had challenged the decision. There did not seem to be a lot riding on the outcome. After all, how many nonprofits wanted to run documentaries about Presidential candidates, using relatively obscure technologies, just before elections? Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., summoned Theodore B. Olson, the lawyer for Citizens United, to the podium. Roberts’s voice bears a flat-vowelled trace of his origins, in Indiana. Unlike his predecessor, William Rehnquist, Roberts rarely shows irritation or frustration on the bench. A well-mannered Midwesterner, he invariably lets one of his colleagues ask the first questions. Read More »

Buddy Roemer, the Anti-Spoiler | Lawrence Lessig/The Atlantic

May 142012

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the some of us who believe that the corrupting influence of money in American politics is the most important issue facing this nation, and that those who believe like us face a difficult dilemma: neither major party candidate is going to make this his issue for this campaign (indeed, the Obama campaign has just airbrushed his criticism of Citizens United from their webpage). So those of us who think this way must either accept that the issue will go dark for four years at least, or push a third-party candidate who will make this his central issue. I grabbed the second horn of that dilemma, arguing here that supporters of corruption reform should join Americans Elect and endorse a reform candidate. Two obvious choices lead the Americans Elect pack: Buddy Roemer, the four-time congressman and former governor of Louisiana, and David Walker, former Comptroller General of the United States. Both, I said, would be important reform candidates. Either could push corruption onto center stage. Read More »

Is Black and Latino Voter Registration Threatened or Not? | The Nation

May 122012

On May 4 the Washington Post published what Brian Beutler at Talking Points Memo called an “alarming—and darkly ironic” story stating voter registrations have dropped for African-Americans and Latino Americans. WaPo reporter Krissah Thompson wrote in her lead:

The number of black and Hispanic registered voters has fallen sharply since 2008, posing a serious challenge to the Obama campaign in an election that could turn on the participation of minority voters.

By some accounts, it was true. Census numbers, which measured between the 2008 presidential and the 2010 midterm elections, showed that the number of African-American registered voters had fallen from about 17.3 million to about 16.1 million nationally. But the Obama campaign and a number of academics disputed the Post’s conclusion that Obama might be in trouble, instead saying the Census’s methodology is flawed and that voter registration among African-Americans and Latino Americans is actually up. Read More »

Indie Block - Americans Elect Near the End? | TIME

May 112012

When Americans elect announced last July that it was pouring millions into placing a third-party presidential candidate on the ballot in all 50 states, the political world snapped to attention. Barack Obama’s longtime political adviser David Axelrod revealed his concern by publicly criticizing the group, while pundits gushed. “Watch out,” declared New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who wrote that Americans Elect might change politics the way the iPod changed music. So far, Americans Elect is looking more like the Zune than the iPod. The group canceled a May 8 online caucus after no candidate met the necessary criterion of 1,000 backers in each of 10 states. More voting scheduled for later this month may also be scratched; it’s possible that Americans Elect won’t nominate a single candidate. That might say more about this well-intentioned effort’s shortcomings than it does about the durability of our two-party system. Founded by a group of political centrists, including former investment banker Peter Ackerman, Americans Elect had a promising plan: “break gridlock” and challenge “special interests” by helping elect a President beholden to no party. It invited people to join online, nominate candidates and ultimately select one through Internet voting. (To be eligible, candidates needed credentials meeting the group’s somewhat subjective criteria.) Read More »

With Failures Rapidly Mounting, What Is Americans Elect's End-Game? | AE Transparency

May 112012

Having now been forced to cancel two primary ballots in a row due to the American electorate’sutter failure to respond to its spiel, Americans Elect may now be judged by any rational observer of the political scene to be an abject failure, and dead in the water. So what happens now? When Americans Elect’s predecessor, Unity08, failed similarly in 2008 (albeit much earlier in its existence, before a single ‘vote’ had been cast), that organization simply silently evaporated. That was really the only option available to Unity08′s leadership, because it was a worthless property: it was merely a thin web site, with no money behind it, and its founders had scattered to the four winds (many to their next failure, a ‘Draft Bloomberg’ initiative). So its operators simply abandoned it. Like a rusty old Buick up on cinder blocks in a weed-choked vacant lot, its twisted carcass had no significant scrap value. Read More »

Recalling the Wisconsin governor could swing the 2012 presidential election | Slate Magazine

May 102012

In mid-January, Wisconsin Democrats unloaded 128 cardboard boxes from the back of a moving truck outside the Government Accountability Board, which is just around the corner from the state capitol that served as a stage for last summer’s epic legislative fight over union bargaining rights. Democrats were optimistic about the boxes’ contents, reams of petitions to set in motion the process that will subject the state’s governor, Scott Walker, to a recall vote. When, two months later, the board formally accepted the petitions, they confirmed that the truck’s arrival had consummated a staggering feat of political organizing: 900,039 valid signatures collected by 35,000 unpaid volunteers over two months. That was well over one and a half times the number required to trigger a statewide recall ballot, and nearly matched the number of votes the Democratic nominee for governor received in 2010. Walker won that election with only 1.2 million votes cast in his favor. That math may herald the premature end of Walker’s term when he has to defend his office next month. (Democrats will select their nominee in a primary today.) But there’s a consolation for Republicans: They’re thrilled to get their hands on the petition documents, and the 900,039 names they believe will help them make sense of the state’s political geography on behalf of Mitt Romney this fall. Indeed, the boom in large-scale signature-gathering efforts—most visible in 16 different recall campaigns filed in Wisconsin over the past year, and similar efforts elsewhere in the Midwest—has fixed attention on a largely unmined source of political data that can help clarify fault lines in a difficult to gauge electorate. “They’ve just handed us the names of 900,000 people who are known, or are likely to be, anti-conservative voters. It’s a huge favor they’ve done.” says Rick Wiley, the political director of the Republican National Committee, which has 22 offices open in Wisconsin coordinating anti-recall efforts. “Without it you were stuck with somehow IDing these voters.” Read More »

Assessing Electoral Fraud in New Democracies: Refining the Vocabulary | IFES

May 102012

While electoral fraud has been studied for decades, it has never been defined in a practical way that allows for its detection, deterrence and mitigation. In the third white paper in an ongoing series on electoral fraud, IFES presents a set of practical definitions that will help election managers, experts and observers to accurately identify and address the problem. Read More »

Algeria’s election: Still waiting for real democracy | The Economist

May 102012

Parties competing in Algeria’s general election on May 10th faced a weary cynicism among voters. So far the Arab spring has passed the country by. Still recovering from the grim legacy of a civil war of the 1990s, in which at least 100,000 Algerians are thought to have died, few people seem tempted to take the revolutionary road. But nor do many see much of a way forward using the ballot box, at least not in the form being presented by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Since a general election in 1992 was interrupted by the army to prevent a win by the Islamic Salvation Front, Algeria’s powers-that-be have not left national elections to chance. Mr Bouteflika came to power in 1999 after six leading candidates had withdrawn from the contest in protest against alleged fraud. With a nod to demands for democracy elsewhere in the region, this time the authorities let in more than 450 foreign election observers, including, for the first time, 140 from the EU. They do not seem to be making much of a difference. In any case, few commentators predicted that as many as the 35% who turned out last time would bother to vote. Yet 21 new parties had been approved since February. The authorities’ preferred outcome is said to be a parliament made up of a “mosaic” of parties, with no strong block having a dominant voice. A handful of genuine opposition parties, including the old Socialist Forces Front (FFS in French) and the moderate Islamist Justice and Development Front (FJD), evidently believed it worth striving to limit the scope for fraud. So they highlighted the dearth of their party representatives at polling stations and secured, as a last-minute concession, the interior ministry’s agreement to put party representatives on the commissions that supervised vote-counts at governorate level. Read More »

Voter Fraud Facts and Fiction | FrontPage Magazine

May 092012

With six months until Election Day, conspiracy theories are percolating on the Internet like bubbling mud pots at Yellowstone: Left-wing billionaire George Soros is going to rig the election for Barack Obama. Foreigners will oversee the nation’s entire vote-counting system. The fix is in, and all is lost. Before conservatives go all Michael Moore-moonbatty, let’s calm down and separate voter fraud facts from fiction. There’s no time to waste worrying about manufactured scares. And there are plenty of legitimate threats to electoral integrity without having to inflate or concoct them. FACT: Scytl is a Spain-based business that specializes in “electoral securitytechnology” and electronic voting applications. Its cryptographic research initially was funded by the Spanish government’s Ministry of Science and Technology and later was spun off as a private-sector e-voting venture. FACT: In January 2012, Scytl acquired U.S.-based SOE Software. SOE writes “election management” programs that assist officials with everything from “Internet voting to election night reporting and online poll worker training.” Read More »

Fix the election glitch in South Carolina election law | Rock Hill Herald

May 092012

There is something fundamentally wrong with any law that disqualifies 180 candidates from running for office because of a paperwork technicality. That, of course, was not the intention when South Carolina lawmakers enacted the law requiring disclosure of monetary dealings by candidates. But last week the state was rocked when the S.C. Supreme Court ruled that any candidates for the June 6 primaries who did not file a hard copy of their statements of economic interest when filing for office is off the ballot. The ruling, which represents a to-the-letter interpretation of a law by the court, affects about 180 city, county and state candidates. Most thought they were complying with the law as long as they filed the statement sometime before the April 15 deadline that applies to incumbents. In fact, they were required to file both the economic statement and a statement of intention to run at the same time on or before the March 30 deadline for challengers. While scores of challengers were disqualified, including six in York County, no incumbents were kicked off the ballot. Incumbents automatically file economic statements as a requirement for holding office. Read More »

Is Minority Voter Registration Really Declining? | Michael P. McDonald/Huffington Post

May 082012

The Washington Post reports that voter registration is down among Blacks and Hispanics, and could pose a “serious challenge” to the Obama campaign. Unfortunately, it is the Washington Post’s statistics that are seriously challenged. The source of this information is the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, also called the CPS. The CPS is a very reliable survey. The federal government uses the CPS to calculate the unemployment rate — among many other important uses — and expends considerable resources to ensure that it is accurate. The CPS has a huge sample size, an impressive response rate, and is meticulously scrutinized by the world’s best survey researchers. It would appear that I am leveling a very serious allegation that the CPS is flawed in disputing theWashington Post’s reporting. Read More »

Public financing of presidential elections - An Idea Worth Saving | NYTimes.com

May 082012

Public financing of presidential elections, the greatest reform to come out of the post-Watergate era, died this year after a long illness. It was 36 years old, and was drowned by big money and starved by the disdain of politicians who should have known better. From 1976 until 2008, every major-party presidential candidate took public money for the general election, adhering to spending limits that significantly reduced the influence of money on American elections. Candidates began dropping out of public financing for primaries in 2000, and then in 2008, Barack Obama abandoned the system entirely, preferring to raise more money from small donations, and promising to fix the public program. He has made almost no attempt to fulfill that promise. This year will be the first since Richard Nixon’s day that neither major candidate will accept public financing. Both Mitt Romney and President Obama plan to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, far more than they could get from the public system. Read More »

A Black Cloud Over the Ballot Box - The battle over voter ID | American Prospect

May 082012

Americans who care about the right to vote are faced with an ugly reality as the 2012 elections come into view: no matter how many courts rule that voter identification laws will disenfranchise eligible citizens and no matter how many states U.S. Department of Justice analysts determine—using data supplied by the states themselves—that strict voter ID laws discriminate against people of color, voter identification laws will be in place in a number of states throughout the country in November. Numerous articles written over the last few months have presented the incredibly sad stories of Americans, particularly the elderly, who, unable to obtain the necessary identification, won’t be able to cast a ballot. We know from comparisons of voter registration lists and state Department of Motor Vehicle records that hundreds of thousands of citizens don’t have the ID needed to vote. What does this mean? Quite simply, we must redouble our efforts to protect American voting rights. While we will continue to fight disenfranchising laws in the legislatures and the courts, we must also go to work at a grassroots level in communities, assisting citizens—even on a case-by-case basis—in obtaining proper voting ID if it is at all possible. Local, state and national organizations must work together to try to provide the practical assistance and money it will take for Americans to overcome the hurdles legislators have thrown in their way to the ballot box. Read More »

Europe's Election Rumble: Noise, Then Fury? | Forbes

May 072012

German Chancellor Angela Merkel (L) welc

The headline news from Sunday’s elections in Europe is the defeat of Nicolas Sarkozy for a second term as president of France. Although this was frequently billed as a right vs. left runoff with the victor, Socialist Party leader Francois Hollande, it looms less likely to be an ideological result than the more obscure voting elsewhere on the continent–in Greece, Serbia and in a German state. First, to France: Hollande’s near 52% of the vote is a decisive if not overwhelming rejection of Sarkozy, whose initial mandate to re-energize French productivity on his win in 2007 fell afoul not just of the subsequent financial crisis but also of the statist overhang of the nation, where government accounts for a clear majority of GDP and state-shielded unions have a grip on key sectors, public or private. Tinkering with its labor laws was not enough to restore competitiveness, so growth stayed slow and unemployment high. Read More »

Pennsylvania Voter-ID law will penalize seniors | philly.com

May 072012

The longtime Pennsylvania voters who have joined a rights group’s lawsuit against Gov. Corbett’s new voter-ID mandate put a face on the fight against a law whose only apparent purpose is to serve as a weapon in a Republican-inspired assault on open and fair elections. In presenting their cases last week, these citizens clearly demonstrated that they will have a difficult time on Nov. 6 meeting the requirement that voters produce government-issued photo identification at the polls. Among them was one-time civil-rights marcher and wartime welder Viviette Applewhite, 93, who uses a wheelchair, lives in Philadelphia, has no driver’s license, and has been unable to obtain the birth certificate required to get a state-issued ID. Read More »

Canada: Our electoral system can’t be perfect, but it can be fair | Ottawa Citizen

May 072012

When — if ever — does a clerical error become an “irregularity” under Part 20 of the Canada Elections Act, sufficient to judicially overturn an election? That question has never been tested, but it is now in an Ontario courtroom, and the decision may have a huge and unknowable impact on how Canadian elections — federal and provincial — are administered. Ontario Justice Thomas Lederer originally set aside five days for hearings into the contested federal election of Etobicoke Centre, narrowly won by Conservative Ted Opitz over Liberal incumbent Borys Wrzesnewskyj — a 26-vote difference, confirmed by judicial recount, now appealed. On Day One, Lederer expressed some skepticism that an extreme interpretation of the section would be in the public interest. He is quoted as having observed that thousands of people are involved in running elections, adding that “It would appear inevitable that some sort of mistakes are going to be made,” and suggesting that allowing blind application of procedural rules to get in the way of legitimate voting could itself “create distrust” among the voting public. Truer words were never spoken by a judge. Read More »

Syria holds 'farce' elections as rebels target Bashar Assad's tanks | msnbc

May 072012

Polls opened in what Syria’s government said were its first multiparty elections in about 50 years on Monday, after renewed fighting between rebels and President Bashar Assad’s forces reportedly broke out in an oil-producing part of the country. The opposition have said the election will change little in a rubber-stamp assembly that has been chosen by the Assad family, backed by the powerful secret police, for the past four decades. The assembly currently does not have a single opposition member and official media said half the seats would be reserved to “representatives of workers and peasants,” whose unions are controlled by Assad’s Baath Party. Stories of atrocities carried out by Syrian government forces shortly before the ceasefire began are emerging. ITV’s John Irvine reports from Taftanaz, Northern Syria, where 60 people were massacred in one day. Read More »

Americans Elect: They Built It, And Nobody Came | TechPresident

May 052012

Americans Elect has postponed their online “caucuses” for a month. The problem, it seems, is twofold: 1. They don’t have a candidate and 2. Lacking a candidate, they don’t have much online traffic. I’ve written about this before, in relation to my spiffy new hat. But the lesson here deserves further examination. I’m going to go ahead and call this one a failure. If the mainstream media blitz and SXSW awards of the past year haven’t generated enthusiasm, it isn’t going to appear out of the ether in the 11 days between now and May 15th first “caucus.” What’s more, Americans Elect is evidence of a common misunderstanding of Internet politics. Elsewhere, I’ve termed this the “Field of Dreams Fallacy.” The Field of Dreams Fallacy (“if you build it, they will come”) plagues all sorts of expensive, half-baked projects in online politics. A few years ago, dozens of interest groups looked at the success of social networking sites like Facebook and became convinced that they should launch their own, branded social networks. Millions of dollars later, it turned out that they were all building virtual ghost towns. Technology alone doesn’t create political communities. If your members are already happily on Facebook, they’re unlikely to divert that time and spend it on a Sierra Club- or NRA-specific social network instead. The real successes in online politics comes at the intersection of motivated communities-of-interest and supportive technological platforms. Read More »

Election Regulations and Voter Disengagement | Sundeep Iyer/Huffington Post

May 042012

The super PACs and nonprofit groups dominating the 2012 election filed their latest financial disclosures with the Federal Election Commission. The reports showed that these outside groups — some of which do not disclose any information about their donors — are poised to continue playing an outsize role in this year’s elections. Karl Rove’s Crossroads groups, for instance, raised about as much in the first quarter of 2012 ($49 million) as they did during all of 2011. This breakneck fundraising pace will only accelerate as November approaches. But this fundraising is not just affecting the ads we see on TV. It may also be having a troubling influence on voter attitudes toward our electoral process. According to a national survey conducted on behalf of the Brennan Center for Justice, 41 percent of Americans already say their vote does not matter because big donors to super PACs have so much more influence than they do. Alarmingly, nearly one in four Americans say they are less likely to vote because of the influence big donors have over elected officials. This is nothing less than a crisis of confidence in the power of average citizens to effect change through the electoral process. Read More »

Mr. McDonnell faces a quandary with Virginia voter ID bill | The Washington Post

May 032012

Faced with Voter ID legislation that would disenfranchise thousands of Virginians, Gov. Robert F. McDonnell is in a quandary. He can veto the bill and incur the wrath of fellow Republicans, or sign it and reinforce the GOP’s image of hostility toward young, poor and black voters. Mr. McDonnell is all too aware that the bill, passed by Republican lawmakers despite his warning about legislative overreach, is gratuitous at best. That’s why he sent it back to the General Assembly with amendments that would eliminate its most obnoxious feature: a requirement that ballots cast by voters who lack identification be thrown out unless the voters make a separate trek to local electoral offices to prove their identity. But the General Assembly restored that provision and sent the bill back to Mr. McDonnell, who now faces a decision: Does he want to be known as a partisan street brawler, or as a grown-up who governs with restraint? Read More »

Between Voting Rights and Voting Wrongs | NYTimes.com

May 012012

Since the beginning of 2011, lawmakers around the country abruptly enacted laws to curb voting rights and tighten registration rules. These measures are fiercely controversial. But lately the debate has taken a surprising turn. Suppressive voting laws have met resistance at the polls and in the courts. This surprisingly emphatic twist is good for our democracy. If the restriction of voting rights can be blocked or blunted, it will give us an opportunity to move forward with bipartisan reforms to our ramshackle registration system. Consider the recent backlash.

In Maine, voters reversed a new law, passed in June 2011, that ended same-day registration. Now voters will be able to register on Election Day in 2012. In Ohio, more than 300,000 citizens signed petitions, enough to temporarily suspend the state’s new law that curbed early voting and force a statewide referendum in November. Now nervous Republicans are close to a deal with Democrats that would repeal the law and restore early voting for the three days before the election. Florida, meanwhile, imposed onerous penalties and paperwork burdens on volunteers who sign up voters. Helping your neighbors participate in our democracy is not something we should restrict, which is why the Brennan Center is leading the fight to challenge this law. We represent the League of Women Voters, Rock the Vote, and other civic groups that have shut down registration drives. The league has won similar lawsuits twice before and now awaits a judge’s ruling, which is expected soon. Even on the contentious issue of requiring government-issued photo identification to vote, the strictest new laws have slammed into legal barriers. Read More »

The GOP’s crackdown against those who would vote | The Washington Post

May 012012

Republicans are waging the most concerted campaign to prevent or discourage citizens from exercising their legitimate voting rights since the Jim Crow days of poll taxes and literacy tests. Four years ago, Democrats expanded American democracy by registering millions of new voters — mostly young people and minorities — and persuading them to show up at the polls. Apparently, the GOP is determined not to let any such thing happen again. According to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, which keeps track of changes in voting laws, 22 statutes and two executive actions aimed at restricting the franchise have been approved in 17 states since the beginning of 2011. By the center’s count, an additional 74 such bills are pending. Read More »

Anchorage grading itself in integrity of election | Shannyn Moore/adn.com

May 012012

Remember standardized testing when you were a kid? You’d fill in those ovals with that Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2 until your eyes bugged out. Schools provided “smart snacks” of carrots and apples on testing days. I’m sure you’re good, honest folks, but what a horrible position to put you in. “Oh, I knew this answer, I just forgot.” That’s basically what Anchorage Assembly chair Ernie Hall and the “election commission” appointed by Mayor Dan Sullivan, did this week. They graded their own performance on a debacle of an election and said, “There’s nothing to see, nothing wrong, and we don’t want anyone else to grade us either!” Read More »

FCC Brings Sunlight to Elections, But the SEC Needs to Help, Too | Ciara Torres-Spelliscy/Huffington Post

Apr 282012

2010 was a dark, even apocryphal election during which much of the political spending was from groups who did not reveal themselves. In the 2012 election, we might just have a bit more transparency. In Citizens United, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations could spend unlimited sums on elections. The case also ruled that transparency rules still apply to political ads. Justice Kennedy wrote, “A campaign finance system that pairs corporate independent expenditures with effective disclosure has not existed before to-day.” This phrase from the court basically cries out for the political branches to act to bring better disclosure to elections. At long last, at least one federal agency has awakened from its deep slumber to bring the public improved transparency on political spending. It wasn’t the moribund Federal Election Commission (FEC). On April 27, 2012, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to place broadcasters’ political files online. This is a big step in the right direction. Read More »

Voter ID - what lurks in Minnesota's proposed amendment | Mike Dean/TwinCities.com

Apr 282012

As the saying goes, “the devil is in the details.” Unfortunately, Kent Kaiser’s piece (“Photo ID: An end to ‘same-day’ registration in Minnesota? Not true,” April 17) attempts to distort what is actually lurking in the voter ID constitutional amendment. Under current Minnesota law, this proposed constitutional amendment to change Minnesota’s election system would force every person who registers in the polling place on Election Day to submit a provisional ballot; that is, they would not be allowed to cast a real ballot. This fundamental change is required because the amendment says that “All voters must be subject to substantially equivalent eligibility verification prior to a ballot being cast or counted.” While most people understandably won’t grasp the implications of this statement when they read the ballot question, an election official understands that immediate eligibility verification is not possible. Read More »

Phony party candidates dilute Wisconsin election process | River Falls Journal

Apr 282012

Last July Isaac Weix, an apparent Republican, entered the election recall race of state Sen. Sheila Harsdorf as a Democrat to force a primary election for Harsdorf’s Democrat opponent Shelly Moore. Weix’s motivation was that a primary would give Harsdorf more time to campaign for the general recall election. This year recall fever revs up again. More state lawmakers, including Gov. Scott Walker, are facing recall elections. Statewide, six Republicans are running as fake Democrats to force primaries. Walker, too, has a “fake” opponent: Arthur Kohl-Riggs, whose motto is “Less of a joke than Scott Walker,” has collected enough signatures to force a Republican primary. Kohl-Riggs has never been associated with the Republican Party. Read More »

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