Partisan Election Officials

Harris' partisan fixers

St. Petersburg Times, July 17, 2001

www.sptimes.com/News/071701/Opinion/Harris__partisan_fixe.shtml

When the outcome of last November's presidential election in Florida was cast in doubt and Secretary of State Katherine Harris' role as the state's top elections official came under scrutiny, Harris didn't go looking for outside help from experts in the mechanics and legal technicalities of ballot-counting. Instead, she sought out the most effective partisan fixers she could find.

J.M. "Mac" Stipanovich is Florida's most famous -- or notorious, depending on your point of view -- Republican political consultant. He has run campaigns for Harris, Gov. Jeb Bush and former Gov. Bob Martinez, and he has been an influential behind-the-scenes GOP strategist for decades. For all his mastery of partisan campaigns, Stipanovich, by his own admission, knows very little about the professional operation of elections. Yet Stipanovich virtually moved into Harris' office after Election Day, serving, in his words, as Harris' "personal attorney" during the recounts.

Stipanovich was joined in service to Harris by Tampa political media consultant Adam Goodman, known for his slash-and-burn ads on behalf of Republican candidates. Stipanovich and Goodman acknowledge that they took the lead in crafting Harris' public statements -- and, in the process, setting policy for the state's top elections official.

Was the 2004 Election Stolen? Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Rolling Stone

www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen

…The man in charge of the counting was Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of President Bush's re-election committee. As Ohio's secretary of state, Blackwell had broad powers to interpret and implement state and federal election laws -- setting standards for everything from the processing of voter registration to the conduct of official recounts. And as Bush's re-election chair in Ohio, he had a powerful motivation to rig the rules for his candidate. Blackwell, in fact, served as the ''principal electoral system adviser'' for Bush during the 2000 recount in Florida, where he witnessed firsthand the success of his counterpart Katherine Harris, the Florida secretary of state who co-chaired Bush's campaign there.

Blackwell -- now the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio -- is well-known in the state as a fierce partisan eager to rise in the GOP. An outspoken leader of Ohio's right-wing fundamentalists, he opposes abortion even in cases of rape and was the chief cheerleader for the anti-gay-marriage amendment that Republicans employed to spark turnout in rural counties. He has openly denounced Kerry as ''an unapologetic liberal Democrat,'' and during the 2004 election he used his official powers to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens in Democratic strongholds. In a ruling issued two weeks before the election, a federal judge rebuked Blackwell for seeking to ''accomplish the same result in Ohio in 2004 that occurred in Florida in 2000.''

…''The secretary of state is supposed to administer elections -- not throw them,'' says Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Cleveland who has dealt with Blackwell for years.

The most extensive investigation of what happened in Ohio was conducted by Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. Frustrated by his party's failure to follow up on the widespread evidence of voter intimidation and fraud, Conyers and the committee's minority staff held public hearings in Ohio, where they looked into more than 50,000 complaints from voters. In January 2005, Conyers issued a detailed report that outlined ''massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio.'' The problems, the report concludes, were ''caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.

Recipe For A Fair Election

Steven Hill

June 12, 2006

www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/06/12/recipe_for_a_fair_election.php

Steven Hill is author of the recently published 10 Steps to Repair American Democracy and director of the Political Reform Program of the New America Foundation.

Part II of a two-part series, Part I appeared on June 5, 2006.

Heading into the 2006 congressional and state elections, fair election advocates need to remain vigilant, particularly in the handful of close races where a swing of a small number of votes could change an election outcome. Longer term, activists must turn their efforts to a more visionary agenda that will ensure fair and secure elections in the 21st century. Here are the reforms necessary for modernizing our elections and making sure that every vote is counted.

1. Nonpartisan election officials. At the top of the list must be creating a bureaucracy of impartial, nonpartisan election officials. We should have learned this lesson in the 2000 presidential election when Katherine Harris oversaw the Florida election as both secretary of state and co-chair of George Bush’s election committee. If it can’t be guaranteed that the partisan loyalties of election managers will play no role in deciding outcomes, then elections become a charade. Election protection advocates fearful of voting technology forget that fraud has occurred throughout American history with paper ballots, whether through ballot box stuffing or entire ballot boxes disappearing. It hardly matters if the voting technology is computerized voting or paper ballots if the election administrators themselves are partisan-motivated or crooked.

Yet for the 2004 election, it was as though Katherine Harris had cloned herself. The secretaries of state overseeing elections in the battleground states of Missouri, Ohio, and Michigan were all co-chairs of their states’ Bush reelection campaigns; in West Virginia, the Democratic Secretary of State oversaw the election for his own governor’s race. In Florida, a highly partisan Republican secretary of state once again ran the election, as did a partisan Democrat in New Mexico

Remove partisan stain from state elections

Hugh D. Spitzer, special to the Seattle Times

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2002351123_spitzer29.html?syndication=rss

During the past eight months, I served on a team of lawyers representing Washington's secretary of state in the many court challenges to last November's governor's election. I had the opportunity to watch Secretary of State Sam Reed, his staff and our elected county auditors as they wrestled with Democratic and Republican complaints about the electoral process.

Robert Pastor of American University, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management, recently noted that the United States is one of only 18 nations among the world's 117 electoral democracies that allow incumbent partisan government officeholders to control the conduct of elections. He wrote that "on all 10 dimensions of election administration the United States scores near the bottom of electoral democracies." One of the key reasons is that our elections are supervised by partisan elected officials, which opens those officers to pressure from their own parties and reduces public confidence in the process.

Every democracy deserves a credible election system, one that is not only completely nonpartisan but also appears fair and nonpartisan to the general public.

Secretaries of State Urge Their Own to Be Apolitical

March 21, 2006 "Secretaries of State Urge Their Own to Be Apolitical"

http://earc.berkeley.edu/news/2006/March/SecretariesOfState.php

From Congressional Quarterly (available at http://www.cqpolitics.com )

By Jesse Stanchak, Mar. 21, 2006

Secretaries of state, who in 39 states are the top supervisors of elections, tend to have a rather low profile — unless there is a major controversy over how an election was conducted. And those controversies tend to be magnified by the fact that, in all but five states, secretary of state is a partisan office held by an active member of the Republican or Democratic party.

The best-known such incident occurred in Florida during the 2000 presidential election. The controversial outcome in favor of George W. Bush was certified by Secretary of State Katherine Harris — then an open supporter of Bush's White House bid and now a two-term House member who is running for this year's Republican Senate nomination.

The fact that Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell oversaw the close 2004 presidential contest in the battleground state of Ohio raised some eyebrows. Blackwell, another strong Bush backer, had already stated his intention to run for governor in 2006.

And the same year, in Oregon, Democratic Secretary of State Bill Bradbury co-chaired the state presidential campaign of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who now chairs the Democratic National Committee.

But Bradbury now thinks that such overt partisanship on the part of a leading elections official was a mistake — so much so that he has joined with Bruce McPherson, his Republican counterpart in the neighboring state of California, on a proposal to depoliticize the position of secretary of state on a nationwide basis.

Bradbury and McPherson on Feb. 6 jointly pledged to carry out their duties in an "independent and non-partisan manner that is beyond question."