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By Mimi Murray Digby Marziani – 04/29/10
Attorney James Bopp is on a crusade – in his words, a “10 year plan” – to annihilate every American law regulating money in politics. And, over the years, he’s had some success. In the case of Randall v. Sorrell, for instance, he successfully argued that campaign contribution limits can be so low that they violate candidates’ political rights. Recently, Bopp enjoyed his most significant win yet when a bare majority of the Court struck down longstanding limits on corporate political spending in Citizens United v. FEC.
Now, Bopp has moved to his next battleground: disclosure. In Bopp’s view, any type of compelled disclosure – such as laws requiring that funders of political attack ads reveal their identity – violates core speech rights. Bopp advocates a never-before-recognized “First Amendment right to privacy” that would invalidate scores of laws geared to promote transparency and openness in the political process.
Yesterday, in the case of Doe v. Reed, Bopp presented his vision of the First Amendment to the Supreme Court, arguing that signers of a Washington state ballot initiative petition should be exempt from a general law that makes such signatures public. There, Bopp met a formidable opponent: Justice Antonin Scalia.
Cutting Bopp off in the middle of his opening statement, Justice Scalia started grilling Bopp about the implications of recognizing a broad right to anonymous political activity just so that individuals can avoid public criticism: “What about requiring disclosure of campaign contributions? . . . Why doesn’t that fall within your principle that no person should be exposed to criticism? . . . You are asking us to enter into a whole new field where we have never gone before.”
As Scalia’s questioning highlighted, allowing broad exceptions to generally-applicable disclosure laws would cripple the public’s ability to engage in the type of uninhibited, robust, and wide-open political debate our country has cherished since its founding. This is particularly troubling in the campaign finance context – undoubtedly, voters have a compelling interest in knowing who is funding candidates and ballot initiatives so that they can make educated choices at the polls. As Scalia put it, “you can't run a democracy this way, with everybody being afraid of having his political positions known.”
It remains to be seen how the Supreme Court will resolve the Doe v. Reed case. The oral argument made clear, however, that Bopp’s fight against disclosure will not be an easy win. Indeed, after the first round, the score is undisputed: Scalia 1, Bopp 0.
Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Disclosure
By Lawrence Norden – 11/10/09
We've devoted a number of blog
posts to the effects of
poor ballot
design,
whether on
touch-screens or
paper ballots. In fact, we've collected a
fairly large amount of data to make the case that
bad design may be the single biggest cause of lost votes in recent elections.
Last week's election presents
more evidence, if any was needed, of the potentially disenfranchising effects of
poor design. As a political blog in Seattle noted, a poorly-designed ballot probably caused as many as
40,000 King County voters to miss a property tax State Ballot Initiative.
As you can see from this picture of the ballot:
The contest was placed
immediately below the instructions and to the left of all other contests -- very easy for voters to miss. What can
election officials do to avoid these kinds of mistakes in the future? Well, one thing is to use design checklists, like those provided by the Design
for Democracy and the Brennan Center. But I'm not sure that in this case, either of those checklists would have
alerted officials in King County to the problem. (While both checklists emphasize
the importance of consistency in presentation -- and having all contests except
one to the right of the instructions is certainly inconsistent -- I'm
afraid this direction would have been too general to provide sufficient warning
for many officials).
And while it's easy, in retrospect, to say this
problem should have been obvious, I don't think that's fair. Such
problems are almost never obvious beforehand. Election officials and
others working on forms are usually on tight deadlines, trying to get
the ballots to fit into limited space and ensuring that everything and every
name is correct. Even if they are only focused on how a design
might confuse voters, they are often so familiar with the design that they're blind to problems; for the very same reason that it's often so difficult to
spot one's own typos.
What probably would have alerted
officials to this problem ahead of time, and at little or no cost, would have
been a simple usability test: observing ten or fifteen King County citizens as
they "voted" on the ballot before the design was
finalized. This solution is simple, easy and cheap. The Usability Professionals
Association has a great explanation of how it's done.
If county officials watched a dozen people fill out
the ballot, at least a couple might have accidentally skipped the
ballot initiative. And, with that, officials would have been alerted to
the fact that their ballot contained a serious flaw.
The ballot eventually got it's
usability test, of course...but on Election Day. And
approximately 40,000 voters showed -- a little too late -- that this particular ballot
design failed.
Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Ballot & Election Material Design
By Erika Wood – 05/06/09
Cross-posted from the Hill's Congress Blog.
On Monday, Washington Governor Chris Gregoire signed into law the Voting Rights Restoration Act, a new law that eliminates the requirement that people coming out of the criminal justice system pay all fees, fines and restitution, including hefty surcharges and accrued interest, before being allowed to vote. The right to vote in Washington will no longer hinge on one’s ability to pay. With this new law, Washington becomes the twentieth state in the last decade to ease voting restrictions on people with criminal histories who are out of prison and living in the community.
But there remain more than five million American citizens who are disenfranchised because of a criminal conviction in their past. Nearly four million of these citizens are out of prison—living in the community, working, raising families, and paying taxes alongside the rest of us but still denied the right to vote, often for decades and sometimes for life.
Read the rest of this story ...
Tags: Democracy, Voting After Criminal Conviction, Post-Incarceration Restoration of Voting Rights, State-Based Advocacy
By Laura MacCleery – 06/13/08
Some cases are just too ugly even
for the Supreme Court, it appears. Last week it refused to grant review to a
claim from Washington State that challenged an important principle: the
requirement that outside groups disclose their electoral spending.
The group in question, called the
Voters Education Committee (VEC), was a classic astroturf 527 group (named thus
for a section of the tax code), that omitted to register with the state as a
political committee. Its one donor—the Chamber of Commerce—funneled it a
whopping $1.5 million as part of a 25-state campaign in 2004 to push
its agenda in key Attorney General and state Supreme Court races around
the country.
Read the rest of this story ...
Tags: Democracy, Campaign Finance Reform, Other Reforms, Disclosure
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