CEV Reform

Campaign, Election, & Voting Reform

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/vote3.htm

12/15/04

As the Democratic candidate for governor in the state of Washington pulled into a slight lead in the hand recount (up by a total of four – that’s "4" with a capital "4" – votes) I watched the usual thuggish band of Republicans demonstrating for the cameras, waving signs that were probably remaindered from the Florida recount in 2000: "The votes have already been counted – twice!" and "Sour grapes" Should the Democrat prevail in Washington, maybe we’ll see less of such signs waved by people too stupid to understand what Democracy is.

Voting in America is dysfunctional. It’s a sick process with unreliable and often ludicrous results. It’s an embarrassment to America, a nation that once, fairly recently, prided itself on fairness and honesty in its elections.

Because a fair number of people in my community feel the same way, we’ve been having meetings, working out a policy for voting reform. Endorsing the Oregon Model struck us as the biggest step we could take towards honest and dependable elections. While it would alleviate some of the election day embarrassments to which America has subjected itself, there were a wide array of other institutional problems that our group felt needed to be addressed.

Here are some of the other remedies that our group is proposing in order to give people full representation in their government, the way the Founders intended:

Because the system has been rigged in favor of those presently holding office, it has become almost impossible for a challenger to prevail in an election. Evidence of this lies in the most recent nationwide elections for the House of Representatives, in which only six of the 415 incumbents running lost, and four of those were due to the fact that a partisan state legislature had gerrymandered their districts so they could not win.

The group feels that "Clean Campaign"  reform is perhaps the most effective and a fully constitutional route to having a variety of candidates that represent a spectrum of interests, and who aren’t beholden to backers with large amounts of money to contribute whose interests may not coincide with that of the majority of voters. This system makes it feasible for people who are not wealthy, or who do not have wealthy supporters, to run for office, and may encourage development of alternatives to the present two-party system, which is no longer functional. I’ve been championing the idea ever since I first heard it  two and a half years ago, and I look forward to helping to get it on the ‘06 California ballot as an initiative.

In a nutshell, Clean Campaign reform allows a candidate to fund-raise through private donation, OR accept public funding, but not both. To qualify for public funding, a candidate has to clear a couple of fairly low hurdles on the order of "get 50 people to sign a petition saying they would like to see you on the ballot" and get ten of them to donate $5; enough to weed out the flakes who think their toaster is telling them to prepare America for a flight to the comet or whatever. The candidate then qualifies for public funding for his campaign, up to 110% of the amount spent by the winning candidate in the previous election cycle for that office.

In the states where this has been tried, they have found that the number and diversity of candidates running is sharply increased (and the embarrassing problem of office holders running for reelection unopposed is greatly alleviated), and the reelection of incumbents is no longer the almost foregone conclusion it usually is. It works, and it works well. Needless to say, present office holders and the two major political parties absolutely hate it. The only way it’s gotten to be law in any state (six, so far) is by the initiative process. The crooks in the state lege aren’t going to support a reform that not only decreases their career options, but lets riff-raff who aren’t millionaires run for office.

Another long-overdue reform is that of removing partisan office-holders from controlling the election process. The disgraceful Katherine Harris, who was both Florida’s secretary of state in 2000 AND chairwoman for the Bush campaign, single-handedly turned America into a shabby Marx brothers banana republic joke. Ohio’s Kenneth J. Blackwell is no better this year, as once again, an election is decided by a crooked party hack who is in a position to decide who gets to vote and which votes get counted and how. America needs to remove such creatures from the voting process, out of shame if for no other reason.

The Electoral College has got to go. We had a crazed situation where the three biggest states, with over 1/4 of the county’s population, simply didn’t factor in the campaign for President this year because they were considered locks for one party or the other. While it meant that California, Texas and New York were largely spared the unending drizzle of shit that comprises most presidential campaigns these days, it still meant that even if the election were honest, some 70 million Americans were effectively relegated to unimportant status by electoral college math.

It also gives some Americans more of a voice than others. California has 67 times as many people as Wyoming, but only 19 times as much weight in the electoral college. What gives Wyoming residents so much unearned privilege? They aren’t three and a half times smarter than voters in California, are they? Is it just the fact that they live in a place nobody else wants to live? It’s a stupid reason to give one group of Americans preference over another group.

If the Tom DeLay show in Texas, where he herded the Texas lege into voting for a gerrymander plan that almost automatically gave Republicans four extra seats in Congress in the next election (and subsequently did) didn’t turn stomachs, people will be flummoxed to learn that the power-grabbing Republicans pulled the same stunt in Colorado and are trying to do it in every other state where they have so much as a one-seat advantage in the lege. Oh, and they are busily gerrymandering those same legislatures to make sure they remain the party in power. It’s a power-grab, pure and simple.

Redistricting, which is supposed to be done in the wake of every ten year census, is supposed to make certain that roughly the same number of voters share each district, so their votes have approximately equal weight. Courts have long held that such districts should be contiguous, and not resemble a snake with a broken back, or a plate of spaghetti. The Republicans, intent on solidifying their grip on America, have run roughshod over that.

Accordingly, our group favors taking redistricting away from the state legislatures, and turning it over to any impartial and non-partisan group capable of doing the work. The state judiciary could appoint judges to a blue ribbon panel in each state, members selected for long tenure so as to be unswayed by political winds. And they would base their computations purely on number of people per square mile, without regard to race, socioeconomic status or voting history of any neighborhood.

Our group will be looking at other ideas, such as instant runoff voting, and taking the airwaves back from Kangarupe Murdoch and Time-Warner. We’ve discussed the idea of an "Election channel" which would allow candidates blocks of time (say 15 minutes or a half hour) on a random and/or rotating basis in which they can use the time to explain why the voters should support them. In case CNN or CBS forgot to mention it, the America people, and not the parent corporations of these networks, own the airwaves. Time to take them back, along with elections.

Speaking of taking back the airwaves, it’s time to restore the Fairness Doctrine. The Doctrine was simple: if a station aired a show espousing a particular political view, it was obliged to give time to any responsible opposing viewpoint. It was simple, it was elegant, and it worked. Right wingers hate it, of course, because it breaks their efforts to utterly control what Americans see and hear on their news.

If you are looking for your political party to fight for this, forget it. The Republicans have no interest in sharing power with the American people, and the Democrats lack the backbone to fight for it. It will have to come from the grass roots.

NEXT: What you can do to get a movement going for CEV (Campaign, Election and Voting) Reform in your area.