Sunday, November 11, 2012

Michigan has not learned Florida’s lessons

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Twelve years ago, the Florida recount revealed that our nation relied upon an election process that was outdated and unreliable.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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