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| 8/19/2008 | | | from the Washington Post:
Monday, August 18, 2008; A10
PARTISANSHIP IS like the weather: Everybody complains, but no one does anything about it. But unlike bad weather, partisanship and the gridlock it helps bring to government could be reduced. The key is redistricting reform, an admittedly unsexy subject that nonetheless deserves more attention from Congress and the presidential candidates.
Gerrymandering of congressional districts is an old skill that has been perfected with the advent of computers. Technology allows the drawing of increasing numbers of increasingly safe House seats after each decennial census. The problem has been exacerbated by moves in several states -- most notoriously Texas -- to engage in mid-cycle redistricting. Safe districts tend to drive candidates to the extremes, since their biggest worries come from primary challengers, not the general election.
Hence, polarization and gridlock, since compromise and moderation can be hazardous to lawmakers' political health. Incumbents of both parties protect themselves. Even in turbulent 2006, only 14 percent of House seats were decided by fewer than 10 percentage points. As Rep. John Tanner (D-Tenn.) explained in a speech on the House floor last month, "As a Democrat, it behooves me to give my next-door neighbor all my Republicans, and it behooves my next-door neighbor Republican to give me all of his or her Democrats, which means that both of us have a more secure seat and the voters are often completely left out of the mix."
The remedy would be to put redistricting in independent hands; to require that districts be drawn without regard to partisan concerns; and to prohibit redrawing between censuses. A dozen states have some form of nonpartisan commission or other process to draw district lines; nearly half ban mid-cycle redistricting.
But the problem is serious enough to justify federal action. In anticipation of the 2010 Census, a few thoughtful lawmakers -- Mr. Tanner, Reps. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.) and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), and Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) -- have introduced measures to this end. The bills have gone exactly nowhere. A newly formed group, Americans for Redistricting Reform, has called on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to schedule hearings. There's not a lot of incentive for elected officials to change rules rigged in their favor, but we hope that Ms. Pelosi and others will recognize that self-interest must give way.
It would be helpful if the presumptive presidential nominees -- one of whom will have to live with a polarized House--would push this issue. Both have spoken about the importance of redistricting reform; neither has been clear about whether federal legislation is warranted. "We need more competitive races. We need more moderation," Sen. John McCain said in supporting a failed 2005 ballot measure in California that would have put retired judges in charge of redistricting. "The fact of the matter is that we now have a system where, too often, our representatives are selecting their voters, as opposed to the voters selecting the representatives," Sen. Barack Obama told a Brookings Institution forum in 2006. "That is a situation that I think the American people should not accept." We couldn't agree more. | | | | 8/1/2008 | | | Today, Americans for Redistricting Reform (ARR), a national nonpartisan umbrella organization committed to raising public awareness of redistricting abuses and promoting solutions that benefit voters and strengthen our democracy, announced its formation and launched a new website: www.americansforredistrictingreform.org. ARR is comprised of groups from across the political spectrum that recognize the critical need to reform our nation’s redistricting process. Advisory Committee member organizations in ARR include: Brennan Center for Justice, Campaign Legal Center, Committee for Economic Development, Common Cause, Council for Excellence in Government, Fair Vote, League of Women Voters, Reform Institute, Republican Main Street Partnership, and U.S. PIRG. A number of civil rights groups are also involved in this project and have offered helpful advice and information on redistricting reform. In conjunction with the web launch, numerous advisory committee member organizations sent a letter today to the House urging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Minority Leader John Boehner to hold hearings on pending redistricting reform legislation introduced in the first year of the 110th Congress (the full letter is below). The letter asks House Leadership to take action on reforming the redistricting process before the post-2010 census round of redistricting gets underway. The letter notes that redistricting reform will bring about more transparency and an expanded role in the process for our citizens, and will help ensure that competitiveness, accountability and fair representation remain healthy parts of our democratic process.
“The faith of our citizens in government will be weakened and our democracy undermined,” the groups stressed, “if we continue with a system that allows elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than a system where voters choose their elected officials.”
ARR partners have a wide variety of interests and viewpoints from across the political spectrum, they agree that there two essential elements to redistricting reform. The first is changing the procedures that states use to draw legislative districts, including the establishment of independent commissions, transparency and effective opportunity for participation by all segments of the general public. The second is establishing uniformly accepted standards for how to draw and evaluate districts, including adherence to the commands of the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act, competitiveness, partisan fairness, respect for political subdivisions and communities or interest, and compactness.
ARR activities are supported by the partner organizations as well as generous assistance from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
Below is the full text of the letter to House leadership in support of redistricting reform and urging hearings on bills pending in the 110th Congress:
July 30, 2008
The Honorable Nancy Pelosi
H-232
The United States Capitol
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Speaker Pelosi:
We, the undersigned groups, strongly urge the House to hold hearings this session on the issues affecting congressional redistricting reform. Two bills and a House Resolution on this important matter have been introduced this Congress: H.R. 543, the Fairness and Independence in Redistricting Act, introduced by Representatives John Tanner (D-TN) and Zack Wamp (R-TN); H.R. 2248, the Redistricting Reform Act of 2007, introduced by Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA); and H.Res. 1365, introduced by Representatives Tanner and Wamp. The bills were referred to the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties of the House Judiciary Committeeouse Judiciary Co, more than a year ago.
Both bills seek to fundamentally improve the congressional redistricting process by, among other things, increasing citizen participation, permitting only once a decade redistricting absent a court decision striking down the districts, and by creating independent commissions in the states to conduct congressional redistricting. The H.Res. 1365, introduced on July 22, advocates the use of independent commissions.
A number of our organizations, as well as others from both sides of the political spectrum, have recognized the critical need to reform the process and have founded a new organization, Americans for Redistricting Reform, to raise the profile of the issue and seek solutions. We hope you will support this undertaking.
The post-2000 redistricting cycle saw unprecedented efforts to use the redistricting process purely for partisan purposes. This was done by both parties through extreme gerrymandering in order to create carefully calibrated districts that lacked any serious level of competitiveness in order to protect incumbent officeholders and to gain additional congressional seats for one party or the other. In order to maximize political advantage, some states even resorted to re-redistricting by repeatedly shifting voters among districts in order to weaken the minority political party and shore up the majority's political base. The end result was to still further undermine voter confidence in the integrity of our political process. Our democracy deserves better.
Reform of the redistricting process will bring about more transparency and an expanded role in the process for our citizens. House action is needed to ensure that competitiveness, accountability and fair representation remain healthy parts of our democratic process. The faith of our citizens in government will be weakened and our democracy undermined if we continue with a system that allows elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than a system where voters choose their elected officials.
It is time for the Congress to hold hearings on the pending bills in order to begin the critically important conversation inside and outside of Congress on potential solutions to fixing the broken redistricting process. H.R. 543 and H.R. 2248 are good starting points for this conversation. Accordingly, we urge you to schedule hearings on redistricting reform.
Thank you for your time and consideration of this matter that is so critically important to the future of democracy in the United States.
Sincerely,
Americans for Redistricting Reform
Campaign Legal Center
Committee for Economic Development
Common Cause
Council for Excellence in Government
FairVote
Reform Institute
U.S. PIRG
cc:
Representative John Boehner, Minority Leader
Representative Steny Hoyer, Majority Leader
Representative Roy Blunt, Minority Whip
Representative John Conyers, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee
Representative Jerrold Nadler, Chairman of the Subcommittee of the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties of the House Judiciary Committee
Members of the House Judiciary Committee
| | | | 7/29/2008 | | | Census Bureau counts its options
By David Rogers
Politico (July 21, 2008)
The Census Bureau's unhappy relationship with Harris Corp. is coming to a head as pressure mounts to significantly scale back the role played by the politically connected Florida contractor in the 2010 count.
With annual revenues of over $5 billion and 16,000 employees, Harris has achieved major success in the defense field, earning close to two-thirds of its income from government contracts.
But its encounter with the Census has become a textbook case of what can go wrong when a government bureaucracy bets too heavily on an outside contractor to provide technology so vital to its mission. And concern is growing in Congress as the delays multiply, since an accurate count is vital to the realignment of House districts prior to the 2012 elections.
A Harris spokesman said the firm remains "fully committed to helping the Bureau achieve the most successful 2010 count possible." But sources familiar with the discussions said that the Bureau is leaning toward a plan that would continue to use Harris to carry out the address canvassing - due to begin next April - but would otherwise reduce the contractor's role to providing equipment and material.
"A major contract negotiation is underway," a Census spokesman said on Monday, refusing to discuss details. Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez, who oversees the Bureau, was briefed earlier this month on the new options but also declined to comment.
The strains in the Harris-Census partnership are reflected in the fact that the Bureau recently declined to pay a bonus performance payment to the contractor. And there have been months of bad blood over cost estimates and the failure of the two sides to talk to one another earlier about the specific details of the contract.
Harris responded to a letter from the Bureau last January saying that it would need $1.3 billion, more than double the cost of its initial contract. The company says this was only a crude "rough order of magnitude," or ROM response, and last week submitted new estimates. These have not been publicly released but run close to $989 million, a substantial adjustment but still more than $250 million higher than independent estimates.
The Government Accountability Office warned in March that the success of the Census, which must be completed by the end of 2010, is at risk. Even when measured in constant dollars, the projected costs for the total Census are already more than tenfold what the government spent on the 1970 count.
The Field Data Collection Automation contract, won by Harris in 2006, is just one piece of the cost problem facing the Bureau. But few contracts go more to the heart of what the Census does: collect data from the field and go door-to-door to search out those households that don't respond to the mail survey.
"To control costs and improve accuracy, the Bureau is relying as never before on contractor-provided technology," the GAO warned last spring. And the FDCA contract amounted to a very large-scale systems integration project attempted by a government unit often faulted by critics for lacking skills in managing information technology.
Under the contract, Harris is charged with equipping regional census centers but is also responsible for the operational control system that is at the heart of Census field operations. New handheld devices would be developed for address canvassing, the backbone of confirming data from surveys mailed to households. But even more vital is the Non-Response Follow Up function, in which field workers must go back and find the increasing share of households who don't respond.
Between 1970 and 2000, the response to the mail survey sent out by the Census fell by 14 percentage points to 64.3 percent - and could very well drop even more in 2010. A huge share of the Census's expenditures go toward finding people who don't respond, and the effectiveness of that effort is what ultimately measures the accuracy of the full count.
Democrats have a special stake, since minorities and low-income households are more likely not to respond to the mail survey. This makes the non-response operation all the more important to the new majority in Congress, since the final count influences the makeup of the House as well as funding formulas for aid to states and cities.
Harris' success in government contracting has been matched by a strong Republican political bent. Since Democrats took over Congress last year, the company's political action committee has been more bipartisan in its political giving. But in the prior decade, Harris was almost single-minded in its giving to Republicans, who received more than $960,000 in contributions, compared with less than $14,000 for Democrats.
This history raised some eyebrows when former Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) weighed in on behalf of Harris last winter as part of an advisory panel. And there have been tensions between some people in the Census Bureau and Republican political appointees at the Commerce Department, who have appeared more sympathetic to the company.
But others suggest that the real clash may be cultural, and Harris' success in the defense field has been harder to repeat given the often unique demands of the Census.
For example, there are about 7 million blocks of addresses in the United States, of which about 2,400 have more than 700 addresses per block. This became a problem for the Census when handheld computers used in the address canvassing had trouble processing more than 750 addresses per block, one official said.
Harris said that its equipment can overcome any such hurdle in a "timely, secure and accurate manner."
"They didn't [work] in the dress rehearsal," the official said. "Do we have to specify that it has to work in Manhattan?"
| | | | 7/8/2008 | | | By Leslie Lenkowsky
On Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign Web site, he offers no place for people in philanthropy to sign up, even though environmentalists, veterans, students, labor-union members, and other groups are all encouraged to provide their support. But judging from the demographics of his supporters, it may be fair to assume that a large majority of nonprofit employees back his candidacy against the presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain.
If so, Senator Obama’s actions in the past few weeks should certainly have produced some anxiety. On three important issues, he has taken stands at odds with positions his supporters in philanthropy have long been advocating.
To be sure, he still supports lots of measures they will like, including quadrupling the amount spent on national-service programs to $3.5-billion annually. But on these three significant issues, the Illinois senator’s call for “change” seems to be directed at the nonprofit world as much as at government.
Senator Obama first broke ranks with many in philanthropy when he announced he would not accept government financing for his campaign but instead would rely on donations from the public. Much of the support for limits on campaign contributions, which will not now apply to Senator Obama’s run for the White House, has come from foundations and nonprofit groups.
Next, after ducking the issue during the Democratic primaries and even suggesting that President Bill Clinton had erred in signing the legislation, he declared in a nationwide television ad that he favored the 1996 bill restructuring the nation’s public-assistance system. Advocates for the poor, social-service providers, and others in philanthropy have sharply criticized the measure as one that badly shredded protections for the needy.
And in a speech last week in Zanesville, Ohio, Senator Obama embraced an idea that had been a key component of George W. Bush’s run for the White House in 2000: providing more government support for charities sponsored by religious groups.
For a variety of reasons, ranging from fears of the loss of money for their own programs to concerns about blurring church-state boundaries, nonprofit groups (including some on the right) made Mr. Bush’s “faith-based initiative” the most controversial effort of his presidency, at least until the war in Iraq claimed that distinction.
How serious Senator Obama is about these positions only he and his closest advisers know. But his approach inevitably calls into question what philanthropy has stood for.
In declining government financing for his campaign, for example, the soon-to-be Democratic nominee not only called for fixing current election laws (as many in the nonprofit world would) but also suggested that raising money directly from the public might be a better way to guard against undue influence by lobbyists and others. This strikes at the heart of philanthropy’s calls for stricter regulations on fund raising and spending for elections.
When he endorsed the 1996 welfare-overhaul bill, Senator Obama praised the fact that it had “slashed the rolls by 80 percent.” But to the measure’s opponents, including those at charities and foundations, the problem of public assistance was not that it aided too many but that it aided too few, and not that it gave them too much gave them but too little.
In last week’s remarks, though, he made it clear he also supported secular charities, Senator Obama took pains to emphasize the role of “faith and values” as a “source of strength in our lives,” even going so far as to call his plan to help religious groups “the foundation of a new project of American renewal.”
For more than a century, secular nonprofit groups have claimed that role, arguing they offered greater possibilities for widespread social change than traditional religious charities did, which was one of the reasons for their opposition to the Bush administration’s program.
Yet with Senator Obama now reconsidering this and other issues, his supporters in the nonprofit world could face some difficult challenges if he succeeds in winning the White House.
One is facing up to how little their years of advocacy have really accomplished. Many election observers regard Senator Obama’s recent statements merely as political maneuvers, designed to broaden his appeal to centrist voters.
Yet this implies that a number of ideas that the philanthropic world has long championed with considerable money and effort have still not found much traction among large segments of the public or, for that matter, a presidential candidate who enjoys the nonprofit world’s support.
A second set of problems will arise if he seeks to follow up on his views once elected: How will philanthropy respond?
Nonprofit groups had considerable success blocking the Bush administration’s efforts to provide more assistance to religious charities or expand work and training requirements for welfare recipients; they were also instrumental in a major expansion of campaign-finance restrictions (co-sponsored by Senator McCain).
But in an Obama administration, working against a president whom they wish to see succeed and whose other policies they support would be more challenging and could necessitate making some hard choices.
In any election, it is tempting to treat speeches as just rhetoric, words designed to win votes, not to express serious thoughts. That may explain Senator Obama’s recent reversals on issues of special concern to philanthropy. However, so much of Senator Obama’s appeal rests on his oratory that it would be foolish to assume he did not mean what he said, especially in the context of a campaign whose mantra is “change.”
Election Day is still four months away, and both major-party candidates still have plenty of time to expand, clarify, and adjust their positions. But based on the surprising stands he has taken in recent weeks, Senator Obama may turn out to give the philanthropic world much more than it bargained for.
Leslie Lenkowsky is a professor of public affairs and philanthropic studies at Indiana University and a regular contributor to The Chronicle of Philanthropy. | link to Chronicle of Philanthropy Article | | | 6/16/2008 | | | Last April, as a national debate raged over whether Indiana's voter ID law protects election integrity or disenfranchises low-income voters, a more sinister and potentially damaging voter-vetting proposal sat quietly in nine state legislatures, attracting little attention.
Laws that would require proof-of-citizenship in the form of a birth certificate, passport or naturalization papers in order to register to vote have been introduced in eight states: California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, South Carolina, Oklahoma and Tennessee.
That number was pared down from nine in late May, when, under popular pressure, the Missouri legislature ended their sessions without calling their proof-of-citizenship referendum to a vote. The Missouri bill-HJR 48-was the only such law that had the potential to go into effect prior to this November's elections.
Birdell Owen, a Missouri resident who was displaced by Hurricane Katrina and has no birth certificate, was among those who celebrated the victory.
"I should be able to participate in my democracy, she says, "even if Louisiana can't get me a copy of my birth certificate. I'm glad Missouri politicians had the sense to protect my right to vote."
Supporters of proof-of-citizenship bills say they aren't trying to dissuade people like Owen from voting. Their targets, they claim, are the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.
"When we have close elections in this country, the people have to have confidence that it was lawfully decided by honest, legitimate voters, not non-citizens and illegal people trying to participate in the process," said Mark "Thor" Hearne, national election law counsel for President Bush's 2004 campaign and a prominent conservative voting restriction advocate, on NPR in 2006.
Hearne was an avid supporter of the recent Missouri proposal, but so far, he and other supporters have been hard-pressed for evidence of an immigrant electoral take-over.
In 2002, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft established the Ballot Access and Voting Integrity Initiative - a nationwide effort to find and prosecute fraudulent voters. To date, the effort has nabbed only 15 non-citizens, according to research compiled by Lori Minnite, a Columbia University political science professor and author of The Politics of Voter Fraud.
In 2004, Arizona voters approved Proposition 200 of the Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, making it the only state where voters must prove citizenship in order to cast a vote.
"A lot of people said this isn't going to affect me," says Nina Perales, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, referring to the Arizona law. "But it turned out to be a lot more restrictive than many voters thought it would be."
Perales, who is currently suing Arizona on behalf of disenfranchised plaintiffs, says the state has rejected more than 37,000 applications since Proposition 200 went into effect. She says the state also left uncounted more than 4,000 cast provisional ballots because of polling place ID requirements.
"A lot of these people had ID, but it wasn't good enough under Prop 200," Perales says.
The largest segment of the population affected by the new law is women. A November 2006 report by the Opinion Research Center and compiled by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law found that only 66 percent of women surveyed had ready access to proof of citizenship bearing their legal names.
According to Maggie Duncan, national spokeswoman for the League of Women Voters, broadening documentation requirements could effectively "turn thousands of women away from the polls."
And women wouldn't be alone. People of color, senior citizens, people with disabilities and those with comparatively low incomes were all over-represented among those lacking citizenship documentation in the NYU study. Overall, as many as 7 percent of U.S. citizens surveyed - or roughly 13 million individuals of voting age - reported having no immediate access to the documents.
In Missouri, the League of Women Voters was at the forefront of a movement to defeat the new voting restrictions, and was joined by a broad coalition that included the American Association of Retired People, labor organizations, disability advocates and others.
"We are working in states throughout the country where we are making sure voters are educated and keeping a close eye on legislation," says Duncan. If something were to pop up, our state leagues are on the ground in every state working to make sure voters are protected, and working closely with officials in those states."
"Missouri was the biggest threat, because of the political climate, in terms of something happening this year," says Michael Slater, deputy director of Project Vote, a D.C.-based organization that promotes voting in low-income and minority communities. "But anywhere there is a Republican-controlled legislature, it could feasibly pass in 2009 in places like Florida, Missouri and other states."
"Given the potential impact of new voters in the 2008 election and their historical impact in the past two elections," says Slater, "it's no surprise that we see partisans trying to curb the participation of new voters." | | Election Administration; Voter Protection; Building Change in the State; Election Reform | | 6/13/2008 | |  | Common Cause’s three-year campaign to bring a workable ethics enforcement plan to the US House of Representatives culminated on March 11, 2008 when the House voted to establish the first-ever independent Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) to monitor and help enforce its own ethics rules. The creation of this panel marks the first time that non-lawmakers will have the opportunity to investigate and report on possible misconduct by elected representatives in Congress.
The landmark victory was due in large part to Common Cause’s unique national and local assets and our ability to meld them into a comprehensive and at times lightning-fast campaign. The push for ethics enforcement was also fueled by public disgust over some of the worst congressional scandal in recent history that saw two Members jailed on bribery charges, two Members indicted for corruption, at least two more under FBI investigation, plus the saga of former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, all while the House Ethics Committee remained silent and virtually inactive.
Common Cause laid the groundwork for this effort as early as May 2005, as the scandals were still unfolding, by having Stan Brand, a former general counsel for the House of Representatives and well known ethics expert in Washington, address its National Governing Board, supporting the constitutionality of an independent ethics panel.
In addition, Common Cause sponsored a discussion at the National Press Club on January 23, 2006 that included Mr. Brand, Norman Ornstein from the American Enterprise Institute, and Judge Anthony M. Wilhoit, executive director of the Kentucky Ethics Commission, among others. The panel explored the effective use of outside ethics enforcement by states as an alternative to self-policing and how that model could be made to work in Washington.
Common Cause connected Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) and his staff with Judge Wilhoit to help Obama draft a bill that would have created an independent ethics panel in the Senate. The bill failed in the Senate, but helped spark the interest of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).
In 2006, Republicans lost control of the House, based in part on voters’ anger at the congressional scandals. Speaker Pelosi pledged to clean up the House. She appointed a bipartisan task force to study how an independent body could be incorporated into the House ethics process. | | Election Administration; Voter Protection; Civic Education; Election Reform | | 6/12/2008 | | | SURPRISE, Ariz. -- A 97-year-old Surprise woman who has voted in the past 19 presidential elections said she finds herself a casualty in the voter ID battle.
Shirley Preiss cannot register in Arizona for the November elections without proof of citizenship.
"I'm a legal American," Preiss said. "I'm born here. Born and raised in America."
The Arizona law was approved by voters in 2004 as Proposition 200 on that year’s general election ballot. It requires voters to produce specified types of identification when casting ballots at polling places and to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote either for the first time or in a different county.
Preiss was born in 1910 in Clinton, Ky., before birth certificates were issued. She said she no longer has a driver's license and never had a passport.
"You can see my mother's not a national threat," said her son Nathan Nemnich. "Been voting since 1932." Nemnich produced the files documenting his attempts to get her registered.
"A delayed birth certificate," he said. "You have to have witnesses. Everybody's dead."
When the family tried to get school records from Tennessee, they found out the school no longer exists.
"We're talking about something that is so precious, that right to vote, "said Linda Brown of the Arizona Advocacy Network. "How many hurdles are OK to jump through? How many barriers are we going to accept?"
State Rep. Russell Pearce spearheaded the law and said it protects the integrity of the voting system.
"To get a movie, you have to prove who you are," Pearce said. "To go rent a car, you have to prove who you are. That's part of life."
Preiss said for someone who once lived in a time when women could not vote, the law is a step backwards. The former school teacher said she has voted in every presidential election since 1932.
Nemnich said his next step is to call the governor's office for help.
Experts said it's hard to say how many other people are in the same situation as Preiss. But the Arizona Advocacy Network said almost 40,000 voter registration forms have been rejected since the state's voter ID law went into effect.
| link to article | Voter Protection | | 6/9/2008 | | | By Pamela M. Prah, Stateline.org Staff Writer
First it was the presidential primary calendar that state legislatures across the country upended to give their voters a greater say this year in choosing candidates. Now a few states are orchestrating an overhaul of the way voters select the U.S. president.
Voters this fall will still use the Electoral College to determine the next occupant of the White House, but a movement is bubbling at the state level to bypass the process and instead ensure future presidents are the candidates who get the most votes nationwide — an outcome not always guaranteed under the current system.
Maryland last year became the first state to approve a “national popular vote” compact that would allocate all of its 10 electoral votes to the candidate who wins the most votes nationwide, rather than to the candidate who garners the most votes in the state, as is the case under the Electoral College.
New Jersey, Hawaii and Illinois have since followed suit and passed laws that would allot their collective 40 electoral votes the same way. Identical bills are moving in Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina and Rhode Island, which have a total of 62 electoral votes.
These bills do nothing on their own and would take effect only when states that collectively have at least 270 electoral votes pass identical measures, since a candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win the presidency.
Those who remembers their history classes knows that American voters don’t directly elect a president — states do through “electors” who typically vote for the candidate who drew the most votes in their state.
“Why are all the other elections in this country based on the popular vote except for the most important one, the presidency?” asks Barry F. Fadem, president of the National Popular Vote, a group based in California that aims to persuade state legislatures to implement a nationwide popular election of the president. He called today’s system “flat-out, wrong” and expressed optimism that enough states will pass the legislation in time for the 2012 presidential election.
National Popular Vote was launched in 2006 and is largely founded by its chairman, John R. Koza, a scientist best known for inventing the rub-off instant lottery ticket used by state lotteries and his work in genetic programming at Stanford University. In the 1980s, he and Fadem, an attorney, were active in promoting adoption of lotteries in the states.
Fadem and his supporters say that such a system would make every vote matter, not just those in “battleground states,” while critics argue that the approach is an end-run around the U.S. Constitution and wouldn’t necessarily be more fair than today’s arrangement.
John Samples, director of Cato’s Center for Representative Government in Washington, D.C., called the National Popular Vote campaign a “novel gimmick” that he said is “asking for a mess” if enacted.
Calls to reform or abolish the Electoral College were common after the 2000 presidential election, when former Vice President Al Gore won the popular vote, but didn't have enough votes in the right states to carry the electoral vote over Republican George W. Bush. While Bush won the popular vote in 2004, he could have lost the election if John Kerry (D) had won Ohio.
Despite the hand-wringing over what many call an obsolete election system, little has happened, largely because dumping the Electoral College means changing the U.S. Constitution, an arduous task that requires two-thirds approval of Congress and three-fourths of the states. The National Popular Vote would keep the Electoral College, but change the way electoral votes are awarded.
The way Fadem sees it, a national popular vote would generate the same kind of excitement and enthusiasm seen in the recent primaries because all states — and their voters — would matter.
Under the current system, candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, or pay attention to the concerns of states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind, Fadem said. For example, presidential nominees have long ignored California because the state is considered a solid “blue” state that will award its 55 electoral votes to the Democratic candidate.
Gary Gregg II, director of the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville in Kentucky and a fan of the Electoral College, agrees that the National Popular Vote would change the way candidates campaign, but not in a good way. Candidates would go where most of the votes are, namely cities. “Rural areas would never see a presidential candidate. Small states would never see a presidential candidate,” he said.
Gregg also predicted chaos if there were a close election and candidates challenged the vote count. “You would have the [2000] Florida recount replayed across the country … It would be a very ugly situation.”
Even some supporters of using the popular vote to elect the president have problems with the National Popular Vote’s campaign. “They are trying to circumvent the U.S. Constitution,” said Burdett Loomis, a professor of the political science at the University of Kansas, who advocates changing the system but by having Congress and the states debate the issue and amend the U.S. Constitution.
Fadem says his group is not thumbing its nose at the Constitution since states still would have their right to decide how to allocate their electoral votes.
Supporters also reject critics’ characterization that backers of the National Popular Vote are Democrats who are bitter about the 2000 elections.
“It’s not a partisan issue. This isn’t about electing a Democrat president, but electing a president democratically,” said Jamie Raskin, a Democratic state senator in Maryland, reiterating what he said when he introduced the National Popular Vote plan that was signed into law by Gov. Martin O'Malley last April. Raskin, a professor of constitutional law at American University in Washington, D.C, spoke to Stateline.org from Massachusetts, where he was discussing the measure with state lawmakers there.
But two Republican governors vetoed the bill when it landed on their desks. In his veto message, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said, “It disregards the will of a majority of Californians," pointing out that the state's electoral votes under the new system could be awarded to a candidate most Californians didn't vote for. Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle voiced the same concern when she vetoed the bill twice, but this year, lawmakers overrode her objection.
Cato’s Samples said he wonders if voters who support the concept of a popular vote really understand how it would operate. “Do people in Maryland know under the National Popular Voter system, that their vote may go to someone who didn’t win their state?”
Still, despite the concerns of the National Popular Vote approach, even their critics give the group kudos for bringing the issue to the attention of voters and elected officials. “They are doing a service … We ought to be talking about this,” said Loomis of the University of Kansas. | | Election Administration; Voter Engagement; Building Change in the State | | 6/6/2008 | | | Evidence suggests that rampant voter fraud is a myth, and voter-ID laws may suppress votes rather than protect them. | link to full article | Election Administration; Voter Protection | | 5/19/2008 | | | Missouri lawmakers ended their legislative session on Friday without completing action on a proposed constitutional amendment that would have enabled election officials to require proof of citizenship from people registering to vote.
The bill failed to go to the Senate floor for a vote in part because of pressure by the secretary of state and grass-roots groups, said a Republican lobbyist who worked for the measure.
Click link to read full article.... | link to NYTimes.com article | Voter Protection; Building Change in the State | | 5/16/2008 | | | The battle over voting rights will expand this week as lawmakers in Missouri are expected to support a proposed constitutional amendment to enable election officials to require proof of citizenship from anyone registering to vote. | link to NYTimes.com article | Election Administration; Voter Protection; Election Reform | | 5/16/2008 | | | Flash required to viewUNCOUNTED is an explosive new documentary that shows how the election fraud that changed the outcome of the 2004 election led to even greater fraud in 2006 - and now looms as an unbridled threat to the outcome of the 2008 election. This controversial feature length film by Emmy award-winning director David Earnhardt examines in factual, logical, and yet startling terms how easy it is to change election outcomes and undermine election integrity across the U.S. Noted computer programmers, statisticians, journalists, and experienced election officials provide the irrefutable proof. | link to movie trailer | Voter Protection; Election Reform | | 5/7/2008 | | | Indiana nuns lacking ID denied at poll by fellow sister
By DEBORAH HASTINGS – 17 hours ago
About 12 Indiana nuns were turned away Tuesday from a polling place by a fellow sister because they didn't have state or federal identification bearing a photograph.
Sister Julie McGuire said she was forced to turn away her fellow members of Saint Mary's Convent in South Bend, across the street from the University of Notre Dame, because they had been told earlier that they would need such an ID to vote.
The nuns, all in their 80s or 90s, didn't get one but came to the precinct anyway.
"One came down this morning, and she was 98, and she said, 'I don't want to go do that,'" Sister McGuire said. Some showed up with outdated passports. None of them drives.
They weren't given provisional ballots because it would be impossible to get them to a motor vehicle branch and back within the 10 days allotted by the law, Sister McGuire said. "You have to remember that some of these ladies don't walk well. They're in wheelchairs or on walkers or electric carts."
Nonetheless, she said, the convent will make a "very concerted effort" to get proper identification for the nuns in time for the general election. "We're going to take from now until November to get them out and get this done.
"You can't do this like school kids on a bus," she said. "I wish we could."
Elsewhere across the pivotal state, voting appeared to run smoothly, despite the fears of some elections experts that the Supreme Court's recent refusal to strike down Indiana's controversial photo identification law could cause confusion at the polls.
In a primary expected to draw record numbers, a voter hot line set up by the secretary of state's office mostly received calls concerning precinct locations, spokeswoman Bethany Derringer said.
But a group of voting rights advocates that established a separate hot line reported receiving several calls from would-be voters who were turned away at precincts because they lacked state or federal identification bearing a photograph.
One newly married woman said she was told she couldn't vote because her driver's license name didn't match the one on her voter registration record, said Myrna Perez of the Brennan Center Justice at New York University's law school, coordinator of the 1-866-OUR-VOTE hot line. Another woman said she was turned away from casting her first-ever ballot because she had only a college-issued ID card and an out-of-state driver's license, Perez said.
"These laws are confusing. People don't know how they're supposed to be applied," she said.
According to the New Voters Project, sponsored by Student Public Interest Groups, about a dozen college students at Notre Dame, Butler University and Indiana University said they were told at the polls they didn't have the right form of identification.
Angela Hiss, a 19-year-old sophomore at Notre Dame, presented her Notre Dame ID card and her Illinois driver's license. Poll workers did not inform her that she could have cast a provisional ballot, she told project staff monitoring her polling place.
Indiana's photo ID law is the strictest in the country. The Republican-led effort was designed to combat ballot fraud, said supporters, who also have acknowledged that no case involving someone impersonating a voter at the polls has ever been prosecuted in Indiana.
The state's American Civil Liberties Union sued, calling the law a poll tax that disproportionately affected minorities and elderly voters, those most likely to lack such identification. On April 28, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that the law did not violate the Constitution.
Since then, advocacy groups have fretted that people showing up to vote in Tuesday's primary would not understand their rights under the law, which include being able to cast a provisional ballot and obtain a proper ID within 10 days so that ballot would be counted later.
Rick Rice, a precinct judge at the Charles Martin Youth Center in South Bend, said one person complained about the voter ID law when he attempted to use a federal identification that didn't have an expiration date on it.
"I didn't know who it was put out by, but we couldn't accept it," Rice said. "He had a driver's license, he was just trying to make a point. He wanted to push it and the law is very clear."
Rice said the man voted, then asked where he could write to file a complaint.
Sean Greene, of the nonpartisan electionline.org, was monitoring precincts in the Lafayette area of Tippecanoe County. "It's going pretty well," he said, despite long lines. "Most of the people I've seen today are prepared and used to this. They have their IDs out already."
That thought was echoed in South Bend, where Elizabeth Bridges, 63, said half of the people working in her voting precinct were family members, but still she showed her ID.
"I think the law is a good thing because a lot of people are crooked," she said.
Another voter, John Parker III, agreed.
"I think it's a good thing because I don't want anyone coming in and voting for me," he said. "Someone could come in here and just use my name."
Associated Press Writers Tom Murphy, Tom Coyne and Ryan Lenz in Indiana contributed to this report.
| link to AP article | Voter Protection; Building Change in the State; Election Reform | | 4/29/2008 | | | States can require voters to produce photo identification, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, upholding a law that may keep some poor, older and minority voters from casting ballots. | link to decision | Voter Engagement; Voter Protection; Building Change in the State; Election Reform | | 4/29/2008 | | | Today the Brennan Center for Justice criticized the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold Indiana's voter identification law—the strictest in the country—but noted that the decision did not give other states a blank check to block eligible voters. The Brennan Center called on lawmakers across the country to reject similar laws and to pass affirmative legislation protecting the right to vote. | link to full article | Election Administration; Voter Engagement; Voter Protection; Building Change in the State; Election Reform | | 4/24/2008 | | | Directed by GNN’s Ian Inaba, American Blackout chronicles the recurring patterns of voter disenfranchisement witnessed from 2000 to 2004. Told through the life of Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney who took an active role investigating the scrubbing of the Florida voter roles and then found herself in her own election debacle after publicly questioning the Bush Administration about the terrorist attacks of 9-11. American Blackout travels from Florida to Georgia to Ohio examining the contemporary tactics used to control our democratic process and silence political dissent. | link to trailer | Voter Protection; Election Reform | | 4/23/2008 | | | Facing an "effectiveness paradox," foundations have begun to recognize that some of the measures they've adopted to ensure strategic and accountable grantmaking are backfiring, resulting in a system that drains both foundations and nonprofits of time and energy, a new report from Project Streamline finds. Project Sreamline is an initiative of the Grants Managers Network, which is an affinity group of the Council on Foundations.
The report, Drowning in Paperwork, Distracted From Purpose (43 pages, PDF), found ten ways in which the current system of grant application and reporting creates more burdens than it relieves. Noting that nonprofits don't receive grants as much as "net grants" — the total amount of funding minus the true cost of obtaining and managing a grant — the report found that in many cases grants aren't worth the time and labor spent on applications and reporting. Moreover, the report described a phenomenon of "outsourcing the burden," in which "grantseekers are required to do what is essentially the grantmaker's work without compensation."
In turn, the study found that grantmakers generally limit their use of grant reports to checking compliance. Only 27 percent of grantmakers said they share information about challenges and lessons learned from grant reports with others in their field, due to inconsistencies in guidelines and metrics that make it hard to share data. Some grantees interviewed for the report said they perceived this lack of data sharing as a sign that grantmakers distrust them.
To spur an open dialogue about the grant application and reporting system, the report offers recommendations that grantmakers can adopt to relieve the burden on nonprofits, including assessing what information grantmakers really need to make decisions and minimizing the amount of time, effort, and money that grantees spend getting and administering grants, which will allow them to devoted more resources to mission-based activities. The report noted that a growing number of funders are already taking action in this regard, as eight out of the ten grantmakers surveyed indicated that they had taken steps to streamline their application and reporting practices.
"Almost every funder has a unique application and reporting process, and they're adopted for sensible and responsible reasons," said Richard Toth, Project Streamline chair and director of the office of proposal management at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. "But the problem our research underscores is the cumulative effect of these measures. Imagine each set of requirements multiplied by thousands of grantmakers and you get a sense of the gauntlet nonprofits face. We've created Project Streamline to do something about it."
Project Streamline is funded by the David and Lucile Packard, Ford, Frey, Harold K.L. Castle, Kansas Health, Kresge, McKnight, Robert Wood Johnson, and Saint Luke's foundations.
“Streamlining Philanthropy's Grants System.” Project Streamline 4/22/08.
Primary Subject: Philanthropy and Voluntarism
Location(s): National | Link to article | | | 4/10/2008 | | | ElectionLegislation.org
Bill Alert: April 10, 2008
Yesterday, Missouri's legislature amended House Bill 1317 to require voter registration applicants to establish citizenship by providing a birth certificate, passport, naturalization papers or a Native American tribal document. The bill also requires the state’s motor vehicle department to issue drivers’ licenses and identification cards that indicate the cardholders’ citizenship status.
In Florida last week, an amendment requiring voter registration applicants to establish citizenship was introduced to Senate Bill 866 during a hearing but later withdrawn. Florida’s legislature allows for an amendment that is withdrawn to be re-introduced at a later date.
Project Vote has identified 18 states where legislators have introduced bills for 2008 requiring individuals to provide documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. Several bills failed with the adjournment of the legislatures in Utah, Maryland, Virginia and Washington. However, one variant of citizenship requirements (H 1185) was signed by the governor in Virginia. This bill allows the registrar to remove “all persons known by him not to be United States citizens” from voter rolls if the voter does not provide a sworn statement of citizenship within 14 days of receiving notice of cancellation.
Twenty bills are currently pending, including the following:
• California: A 2317
• Colorado: H 1177
• Delaware: S 196
• Georgia: H 43, H 1175
• Illinois: S 103
• Kansas: H 2019, S 169
• Maryland: S 34
• Massachusetts: H 4625
• Michigan: H 5337
• Missouri: H 1317
• New York: S 6543
• Oklahoma: H 1803, S 417
• South Carolina: H 3343
• Tennessee: H 408, H 3050, H 3502, S 1611
Currently, only one state (Arizona) requires documentary proof-of-citizenship to register to vote, but the introduction of copycat bills in a number of legislatures poses a threat to eligible citizens who would want to register and vote in November.
Documentary proof of citizenship create unnecessary barriers to voting that hurt women, the elderly and people of color hardest. Polling data by the Brennan Center for Justice shows that proof of citizenship requirements create obstacles for new registrants:
• 13 million individuals do not have ready access to citizenship documentation, including birth certificate, passports and naturalization papers
• 12% of citizens earning less than $25K do not have ready access to documents
• Less than half (48%) of voting age women with ready access to birth certificates have them with current, legal name.
Despite their best efforts, the federal government was only able to secure convictions of 15 non citizens for voting illegally between 2002 and 2005. More than 214 million ballots were cast for elections to federal office in the same period.
| | Election Administration; Voter Protection | | 4/10/2008 | | | It may be hard for primary-fatigued political junkies to believe, but the excitement of this primary season has actually been lost on some voters, specifically, the 45 percent of young people with no college experience. Those are the findings of a study released by CIRCLE in February which found that young people who had gone to college were more than three times as likely to had cast a ballot on Super Tuesday: 25% to 7%.
But it’s the college have-nots who have the most at stake in this election, because they have lost the most ground in the generational economic backslide. Today, the typical young male worker with a high school diploma earns 29 percent less than his dad did 30 years ago. And despite the enormous financial gains won by the mass movement of women into the workplace, the typical young woman with a high school diploma earns 6 percent less than her mom did when she was a 20-something.
Young people who’ve never gone to college are now a minority among the under 30 population, making up 45 percent of young people. That’s good news in the sense that more young people are continuing their studies. But it’s bad news in the sense that their struggles are likely to get even less attention than the modest amount paid to this generation’s economic decline as a whole. Sixty-four percent of the young people who haven’t attended college are non-white. Their challenges and experiences are shaped by the nexus of race and class—and are compounded by the bad timing of birth. Today’s 20-somethings are coming of age in an era shaped by three decades of laissez faire economics and disinvestment in the public structures that help create opportunity and provide economic security, such as higher education and unemployment insurance. It has simply gotten harder for this generation to work their way into the middle class. And that isn’t the fault of globalization or technology—it’s the failure of public policy to invest in our future.
On May 8 and 9, hundreds of young people will assemble to begin the hard work of turning the country around and creating a new social compact. “A Better Deal: Reclaiming Economic Security for A New Generation” is a conference sponsored by Demos, along with nearly two dozen partner organizations. We will start building constituencies for ideas to benefit the college have-nots, including career ladder programs, green job training, child care supports and a Contract for College to end to the debt-for-diploma system that’s shutting out so many low-income students. We’re demanding that all the presidential candidates answer a series of questions about this generation’s economic crisis, and we’re making their answers public. Demos was founded on the belief that democracy and economic opportunity are inextricably linked. We’re hosting “A Better Deal” in part to help give today’s college have-nots a community, an agenda, and a reason to get involved.
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Tamara Draut is the Director of the Economic Opportunity Program at Demos: A Network for Ideas & Action, and author of 'Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead'".
| link to article | Voter Engagement; Civic Education | | 4/7/2008 | | | Advancement Project is very disappointed with a ruling in a Florida voting case issued yesterday by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, but made clear its determination to press forward with the lawsuit. The ruling, in part, reversed a Florida federal trial court’s decision that blocked a Florida state law prohibiting applicants from registering to vote if the state cannot match or otherwise validate the driver’s license or Social Security number on a registration form.
In September 2007, Plaintiffs, the Florida State Conference of the NAACP, the Haitian-American Grassroots Coalition, and Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, filed a lawsuit in a federal court in Gainesville, Florida to challenge the Florida law as violating both federal statutory law and the U.S. Constitution. Plaintiffs showed that this error-laden matching process kept voters off the registration rolls for reasons unrelated to their eligibility—such as typos in their names or having a hyphenated or non-traditional spelling of a common name—and disproportionately affected African-American and Latino applicants, among other minority communities.
In December 2007, the trial court held that Florida’s law conflicts with both the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and blocked enforcement of the law. As a result of that ruling, more than 14,000 eligible voters were added to the voter rolls. Since then, many more thousands of voters have been able to register without the Florida law as a barrier.
The appellate court’s ruling represents a setback for voters in Florida; particularly voters of color who wish to register to vote and participate in the upcoming presidential elections.
The court’s ruling does not, however, end the case. The trial court must now consider whether disenfranchising thousands of eligible citizens because of typos, is consistent with the U.S. constitution.
The plaintiffs are represented in the case by Advancement Project, The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law; Project Vote; Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP; and Greenberg Traurig LLP. | Click here to read the court’s ruling. | Election Administration; Voter Engagement; Voter Protection; Building Change in the State; Election Reform | | 4/7/2008 | | | Our election system is broken, but with an active, informed, electorate, working together far in advance of elections, we can remove barriers, overcome obstacles, and fight hard to ensure that all eligible persons who want to vote, can vote and have their votes counted. The core strategy of our voter protection efforts must include monitoring the registration process and election administration early in the election cycle, in order to expose and address problems that could create barriers to successful participation prior to Election Day. | Click here to download. | Voter Engagement; Voter Protection; Civic Education | | 3/26/2008 | | | To salvage the effort to introduce hand-held computers, the Census Bureau needs an emergency appropriation for 2008. | Link to NY Times editorial | Voter Protection; Building Change in the State; Election Reform | | 3/24/2008 | | | A group that aims to get nonprofit organizations more involved in nonpartisan election activities will unveil the 2008 National Nonprofit Vote Campaign on April 1. | | Voter Engagement | | 3/19/2008 | | | Weekly digest of "News from the States" and "News from the Media" focused on election reform and voting rights. | Link to current eDigest | Election Administration; Voter Protection; Building Change in the State; Election Reform | | 3/5/2008 | | | Turnout prompts concerns for Nov.
Election officials ask for more machines
By Richard Wolf
USA TODAY
Record turnout in this year's presidential primaries has election officials worried about possible shortages of machines, ballots and poll workers in November. | Turnout prompts concerns for Nov. | Election Administration; Voter Engagement; Voter Protection | | 2/25/2008 | | | The latest volume of Rock the Vote's Polling Young Voters takes a look at young voters' level of interest in the 2008 elections, political party identification, top issues, and preferences for president and Congress in 2008. From recent RT Strategies, Democracy Corps, Harris Interactive, Time Magazine, Pew Research Center, and YouGov/Polimetrix polls, this report delves into which 2008 candidates are currently winning support from the large and potentially powerful youth electorate, and which issues are driving them to the polls. | | Voter Engagement | | 2/12/2008 | | | FCCP member and former co-chair, Donna Edwards, won her Democratic primary race for Maryland's Fourth Congressional seat. Defeating the odds, Edwards unseated an eight-term incumbent Rep. Albert Wynn. If elected in the November general election, Donna Edwards will become the first African American woman in Maryland's Congressional delegation. | | | | 1/22/2008 | | | Charities are responsible for not only the contents of their websites, but the website’s links to political sites as well, an Internal Revenue Service official stated at a meeting of the American Bar Association. Links directing visitors to election advocacy sites or sites endorsing a candidate are being examined. “IRS did not take the easy route and simply ban 501(c)3 links to advocacy sites. Rather, it continues to rely on facts and circumstances to determine whether such links violate the strict prohibition against 501(c)3 interventions in political campaigns,” said Judith Kindell, senior technical advisor to the director of the IRS Exempt Organizations Division. Kindell also stated that the IRS would look at a charity’s policy for monitoring “bloggers” who endorse a candidate on its site. Source: BNA Daily Tax Report | Add'l Info Here | | | 1/17/2008 | | | William G. Mayer leads a group of political scientists and public pollsters in answering basic questions about swing voters. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including American National Election Studies data, Gallup polls, Pew Center surveys, and the National Annenberg Election Survey—the authors track swing voters across six decades and in national and local elections. | Link to Publisher | | | 1/16/2008 | | | Since 2004, 19 states have introduced legislation that would require voter applicants to provide documentary proof of citizenship upon registration. Although only one state (Arizona) requires documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, the legislative trend has re-emerged in the 2008 legislative session. | Link to ElectionLegislation.org | Election Administration; Voter Protec |
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