Here is my Sunday column...
Twelve years ago, the Florida recount revealed that our
nation relied upon an election process that was outdated and unreliable.
And embarrassing.
With the whole world watching, we learned day
by day of archaic ballots (damn those chads), faulty counting methods,
and a tally system infused with partisan politics. At the time, Michigan
looked comparatively solid, and then-secretary of state Candice Miller
quickly pushed for steps to remedy our state’s faults.
But more
than a decade later, Michigan has fallen behind most of the nation in
several categories: the limited ways we allow people to vote; how we
count the ballots; the process used to elect our “nonpartisan” state
Supreme Court; and the foundation of our partisan elections, the drawing
of legislative districts.
The first place to modernize the system
is to allow no-reason absentee voting and early voting. This is not a
partisan issue. Many of the reddest of the Red States allow absentee
voting without requiring a reason, such as a voter who will be out of
town on Election Day, plus they established certain days and sites for
voting in advance.
Twenty-seven states have no-reason absentee
voting; 32 states have early voting; 17 states allow some elections to
be held entirely by mail. Michigan? None of the above.
Absentee
voting – at the kitchen table, with campaign materials at the ready – is
smarter voting. And early voting allows the electorate to avoid long
lines, if it is done correctly.
Long waits were reported across
Metro Detroit on Election Day, in part due to faulty voting machines.
The nonpartisan Michigan Election Coalition received hundreds of calls
to their voter protection hotline, with distraught voters reporting
dozens of cases of broken machines and poll workers ill-equipped to
handle the matter.
Those situations certainly don’t build
confidence that those precincts counted all the ballots correctly when
Election Night was over. In addition, the excruciatingly slow election
returns in Michigan don’t build faith in the system, not when a
computerized optical scan process cannot produce results from a
mid-sized town until 2 a.m. the next day.
Perhaps a better state
standard that limits the number of voters per precinct is needed. Why
not require that absentee ballots are counted by 8 p.m., when the polls
close?
A group of state senators has stepped forward to propose
several fixes to the system, plus a plan to explore online voting. Sen.
Steve Bieda, a Warren Democrat, said “it would be an insult to voters
who were forced to stand in lines for hours if we did not take action.”
At
the top of the senators’ list is eliminating the position of secretary
of state as a partisan elected post. That was supposed to be one of the
lessons learned by all states during the 2000 presidential recount.
Michigan’s
Republican Secretary of State, Ruth Johnson, who foolishly engaged in a
losing court fight over mandatory voter declarations of citizenship at
the polls, hasn’t sufficiently focused on the real work at hand. In
fact, the day before last Tuesday’s vote, she wasn’t engaged in election
preparation, she was riding the Republican Party campaign bus across
the state and taking part in partisan speech-making at every stop in
favor of Mitt Romney and a host of other GOP candidates.
One
so-called nonpartisan on that bus was Supreme Court Justice Steven
Markman, who delivered a high-energy speech at the stop in Utica, at the
Macomb GOP’s Victory Center that had the crowd cheering and chanting.
A
few years ago, Michigan’s process of electing Supreme Court members was
labeled the worst in the nation. If anything, it’s gotten worse.
Though
they are technically nonpartisan, the candidates are nominated by the
political parties and the campaigns have devolved into nasty, partisan
slugfests. Yet, nobody knows who’s paying for all this.
The
Michigan Campaign Finance Network, a watchdog group, found that the
state’s reporting system does not identify who funded $11 million in TV
ads for the Democratic and Republican candidates. And the MCFN estimates
that the GOP spent $15 million on glossy pieces of campaign literature,
yet their report to the Secretary of State’s Office indicates they
spent nothing on direct-mail electioneering.
To be fair, both
parties are responsible for the mess. Michigan Democratic Party Chairman
Mark Brewer instigated this new tone several years ago.
Obviously,
the lack of transparency creates all kinds of ethical issues, as it
gives the appearance that the justices on the state’s highest court are
bought and paid for. What do the people in black robes have up their
sleeves?
As for redistricting, so-called “dark money” from
corporations and special interest groups plays a role, behind the
curtain, when states draw new district lines, according to a new report
by ProPublica, an online news organization.
Some states enacted
reforms that take partisan politics out of the process but in Michigan,
we still do it the old-fashioned way – the politicians from the party in
power draw the lines to their maximum advantage.
The result is
legislative boundaries like the 14th Congressional District, one of the
most obvious examples of gerrymandering in the nation. That district
snakes its way from the Detroit River northwest through the city, into
the Oakland County suburbs, and tails off in Pontiac.
Our state
has reached the point where more than 90 percent of the races for
Congress and the Legislature are waged in noncompetitive districts –
nearly every piece of election territory is clearly a Red District or a
Blue District.
Tuesday’s election returns lay bare the silliness
of this system. Democratic candidates for the state House garnered
2,186,729 votes across the state and Republican candidates managed just
1,913,604 votes. Yet, thanks in large part to district lines drawn by
GOP strategists, Republicans will control the state House 59-51.
So,
it appears we have a rigged election system – and one that makes it
unreasonably difficult for voters to participate. That’s not where we
were headed in 2000.
More than a decade later, Florida certainly
didn’t learn its lessons. Gloomy officials in “The Sunshine State” were
expected to finally finish counting its ballots yesterday. Thankfully,
we were not waiting on them for our presidential election result.
But
some day it could be “The Great Lakes State” that the nation awaits,
and after a decade of economic failure that tarnished our reputation, if
we don’t prepare for that moment we may take another hit by looking
uncomfortably similar to hapless Florida, rather than a “great” state.
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