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Are elected secretaries of state inherently conflicted?
Oct 14 2020
Following up on Kevin Johnson's Election Dissection post Tuesday about the dangers of politicizing election fraud investigations, it's a good time to highlight the Election Reformers Network's comprehensive report examining how the presence of elected secretaries of state can undermine confidence in the vote. Secretaries of state need to be umpires, not players, in the elections they supervise, the report says.
<p>Johnson and his colleagues Larry Garber, Edward McMahon and Alexander VanderKlipp laid out the conflicts of interest involved in the American system in which 33 states elect their chief elections officer. No other industrialized democracy has its elections run by a politician rather than an official who doesn't have a stake in the outcome of the vote. Secretary of state is often one of a handful of statewide elected posts, and many office-holders end up running for higher offices like governor or attorney general. They often endorse political candidates in elections they are supervising, act as a co-chair for presidential candidates or show up at things like party fundraisers. </p><p><p style="text-align: center;" id="sufn"><a style="font-weight: bold;margin:40px auto;font-size:2rem" href="https://thefulcrum.us/st/newsletters">Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter </a></p></p><p>The five secretaries of state who are currently running for office should recuse themselves from any decisions that could appear to influence the election, the analysis says. For the 2020 election, Johnson and his co-authors are urging secretaries of state to observe strict neutrality in the weeks leading up to Nov. 3. They shouldn't attend campaign events, engage in fundraising or electioneering, or publicly endorse candidates. In all ways, they should put the voters first during the pandemic, the report says. </p><p>You can read the <a href="https://electionreformers.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Guardrails_Guardians-ExecSummary.pdf" target="_blank">executive summary</a> <a href="https://electionreformers.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Guardrails_Guardians-ExecSummary.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="https://electionreformers.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Guardrails_Guardians-Recs.pdf" target="_blank">their policy recommendations</a>.</p>
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Louis DeJoy's days as postmaster general should be numbered, writes former GOP Rep. Tom Coleman.
Election mail may flow, but USPS ethical lapses must be stanched fast
Oct 02 2020
Coleman was an assistant Missouri attorney general and Republican congressman from 1976 to 1993. Now retired as a lobbyist, he is an advisor to Protect Democracy, an anti-authoritarian watchdog group.
<p>When I was a teenager enduring Kansas City's summers, a highlight of the day was when Bill, our friendly mailman, arrived at the house. The attraction was not so much the few envelopes he might deliver — but rather the opportunity to chat with him for a few minutes over a glass of ice water.</p><p>I learned how he and his wife had adopted several children from different ethnic backgrounds, providing them a home and lots of love. He learned how my baseball team was doing. Then he would be off to finish his rounds — the sort of dedicated public servant, with the high ethical standards, we have come to associate with the Postal Service.</p><p>For me, those days of blistering heat would soon be filled with minimum wage jobs to earn spending money for high school and college. I saw Bill only occasionally, although 20 years later we did catch up one day when he dropped by my office on Capitol Hill.</p><p>My experience is not unique. Millions have had similar relationships with their mail carriers. That would account for why the USPS has <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/05/14/the-state-of-the-u-s-postal-service-in-8-charts/" target="_blank">the highest favorability rating</a> of all government institutions: 91 percent (and the same share among Democrats and Republicans alike) according to the Pew Research Center.</p><p><p style="text-align: center;" id="sufn"><a style="font-weight: bold;margin:40px auto;font-size:2rem" href="https://thefulcrum.us/st/newsletters">Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter </a></p></p><p>Today postal workers like Bill are having their load significantly increased. The mail carrier's legendary creed — "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds" — is now more difficult to fulfill. </p><p>This year's hotly contested presidential election is being conducted during a pandemic sure to result in an unprecedented number of votes cast through the mail. But that's not all. The post office and its employees are under attack by President Trump and his newly handpicked postmaster general, Louis DeJoy.</p><p>This duo, with an enabling assist from the USPS Board of Governors, is setting the Postal Service up to fail for political reasons. Trump alleges, without proof, that voting by mail is so flawed that it will steal the election from him. </p><p><div class="x12"><div class="htlad-Desktop_Content_Banner"></div></div></p><p>For his part, soon after arriving DeJoy made major changes in postal delivery capability that call into question whether millions of ballots will be returned in time to be counted. He reportedly has removed 671 high-speed machines capable of sorting over 21 million pieces of mail an hour, canceled employee overtime and removed hundreds of local mailboxes. His changes have resulted in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/14/upshot/is-the-mail-getting-slower-tracker.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">slowing down the mail</a>.</p><p>The actions by DeJoy and Trump seem to be designed to create so much confusion that voters will lose confidence in the eventual outcome of the election, or simply not vote. </p><p>With overwhelming approval from the public to be reckoned with, the USPS board would be wise to unwind these misguided efforts — rather than rely on a recent series of four firm but temporary federal court orders in response to lawsuits from almost half the states. </p><p>DeJoy's days as postmaster general should be numbered. He has recently become embroiled in defending himself in light of evidence he pressured his company's North Carolina employees to make political contributions to Republican candidates and then reimbursed the workers. If true, it would be a criminal violation of federal and state campaign finance laws. He may have also committed perjury by lying about it under oath to Congress. </p><p>Then there's Kentuckian Robert Duncan, who is chairman of the USPS Board of Governors and also reportedly a director of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's so-called <a data-linked-post="2636709792" href="https://thefulcrum.us/super-pac" target="_blank">super PAC</a> — a clear conflict of interest.</p><p>Secretary Michael Elston is the board member responsible for carrying out compliance with all statutory requirements and also the Postal Service's chief compliance officer, making him responsible for his colleagues' following the USPS code of ethics.</p><p>"All employees are required to place loyalty to the Constitution, the laws and ethical principles above private gain," it says. "To ensure that every citizen can have complete confidence in the integrity" or the government, it goes on, "each postal employee must respect and adhere to the principles of ethical conduct." </p><p>What's been happening at the Postal Service reflects nothing less than an attempt to undermine our Constitution and the free and fair elections it envisions. Therefore, Elston should immediately open investigations of DeJoy and Duncan for possibly violating Postal Service conduct and ethics breeches. During such an inquiry, the two should be barred from casting any votes on the Board of Governors.</p><p>The USPS says its governors are "comparable to the board of directors of a publicly held corporation." For 18 years now, boards of such businesses have been governed by a law setting standards of corporate governance. The USPS, by embracing that statute, has assumed accountability not to shareholders but to its principal stakeholders — the American people.</p><p>The postal board, therefore, has a fiduciary duty to the public and must govern with loyalty to the mission of the USPS. Its loyalty is not to the president and certainly not to its own financial or political self-interest.</p><p>Board members must follow the USPS codes of conduct and ethical behavior prescriptions — and, most importantly, be loyal to the Constitution they swore to uphold. Doing all that means immediately reversing the harmful decisions DeJoy has implemented, restoring the equipment necessary to handle the onslaught of mailed ballots and paying those who will have to work overtime on election mail.</p><div></div><p>Having accomplished this, they will have done their part in assuring Americans will have a free and fair election, the basis of our constitutional democracy.</p>
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The proposal unveiled by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and seven committee leaders was assembled without any Republican input.
Democrats unveil plan to rein in the presidency once Trump's gone
Sep 23 2020
House Democrats on Wednesday unveiled a democracy reform plan, focused on a rebalancing of power to bolster Congress at the expense of the presidency, signaling it will be an early priority if their party wins control of both the White House and the entire Capitol this fall.
The legislative outline was compiled without any input from Republicans, underscoring its purpose at least in the short term as a campaign messaging manifesto.
But the plan nonetheless makes clear that Democrats would seek to move swiftly in a Joe Biden administration to reverse many of what they see as a sweeping collection of checks-and-balances abuses by President Trump.
<p>"These reforms are necessary not only because of the abuses of this president, but because the foundation of our democracy is the rule of law and that foundation is deeply at risk," the seven House committee chairmen who assembled the package said in a statement. "Our democracy is not self-effectuating — it takes work and a commitment to guard it against those who would undermine it, whether foreign or domestic."</p><p><p style="text-align: center;" id="sufn"><a style="font-weight: bold;margin:40px auto;font-size:2rem" href="https://thefulcrum.us/st/newsletters">Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter </a></p></p><p>The proposals, all of them direct responses to Trump's varied ways of challenging democratic norms over the past four years, include:</p><ul class="ee-ul"><li>Curbing the president's powers to grant pardons and declare national emergencies.</li><li>Tightening ethics rules to prevent federal officials from using their government jobs to enrich themselves.</li><li>Creating a streamlined system for federal courts to referee subpoena disputes between the executive and legislative branches.</li><li>Strengthening protections for government whistleblowers and the supposed-to-be-independent inspectors general at departments and agencies.</li><li>Limiting White House involvement in law enforcement decision-making at the Justice Department.</li><li>Enhancing laws requiring executive branch officials to spend money the way Congress appropriated and barring them from overt political activities.</li><li>Bolstering safeguards against foreign interference in elections, in part by making candidates report such meddling to the FBI.</li><li>Exempting a president's or vice president's time in office from the statute of limitations for any federal crime. </li></ul><p>Democrats said their package is designed as a complement to, and not a replacement for, the sweeping election administration, campaign finance and government ethics legislation the House passed last year. </p><p>Known as HR 1, it would have faced a Trump veto had it not immediately died in the Republican Senate — and this new package would as well, which is why its prospects are entirely reliant not only on Joe Biden winning the presidency but also on his party taking over the Senate by winning at least three seats.</p><p>If that happens, the Democrats would be positioned to advance the most comprehensive set of fix-the-system proposals in the 45 years since Watergate forced the resignation of President Richard Nixon, although probably not without ending the GOP minority's power to block legislation in the Senate.</p><p>The plan was assembled before Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died last week and Trump quickly secured almost unified GOP support for rushing her Supreme Court replacement to confirmation this fall — highlighting the way the Senate has all but abandoned its role as a deliberative body in favor of a more parliament-like posture and raising fresh balance-of-power questions about the future of such matters as the legislative filibuster and presidential dominance over the federal courts.</p><p><div class="x12"><div class="htlad-Desktop_Content_Banner"></div></div></p><p>Progressive good-government groups rushed to embrace the package, while Republicans on Capitol Hill and the more bipartisan democracy reform organizations essentially ignored it.</p><p>It was introduced almost exactly a year after Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the House would pursue Trump's impeachment, an effort which ended in his acquittal by the Senate — and which has almost no resonance in a presidential campaign that's now largely focused on the administration's management of the coronavirus and an economy crippled by the pandemic.</p><p>Pelosi unveiled the bill along with the seven gavel-holders: California's Adam Schiff of the Intelligence Committee, New York's Jerrold Nadler (Judiciary), New York's Carolyn Maloney (Oversight and Reform), Kentucky's John Yarmuth (Budget), California's Zoe Lofgren (House Administration), New York's Eliot Engel (Foreign Affairs) and Massachusetts' Richard Neal (Ways and Means).</p>
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During their own presidential bids, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris emphasized their commitments to different pieces of the fix-the-system wish list.
While ticking the boxes, Democratic ticket hasn’t pushed the reform agenda
Aug 19 2020
Americans are getting their most extensive and unfiltered look this week at the national Democratic ticket, whose election could set in motion the tackling of a democracy reform agenda that's been totally stalled for four years.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the marquee speaker Wednesday at the party's unprecedented virtual convention, have embraced almost all of the most prominent ideas for fixing the country's political system — although with different and complementary areas of focus.
The big question, in the minds of advocates focused on restoring democracy's credibility, is where such proposals would fall on a Biden administration's list of priorities. Except for a recent burst of talk about ensuring a credible and mostly vote-by-mail election, the two candidates have not emphasized improving democratic governance all that much, and the topic received only sporadic mention during the convention's first two nights.
<p>
The reform efforts that got the most attention in Biden's campaign platform and stump speeches during the primary season were focused on limiting the sway of wealthy special interests over the campaign finance system and boosting government ethics.
</p>
<p><p style="text-align: center;" id="sufn"><a style="font-weight: bold;margin:40px auto;font-size:2rem" href="https://thefulcrum.us/st/newsletters">Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter </a></p></p><p>
In her own bid for president (which ended before the first nominating contests) and during almost four years as a senator from California, the newly minted vice presidential candidate was much more focused on the voting rights and election security aspects of the fix-the-system agenda.
</p>
<p>
Both halves of the ticket have focused on the same challenge to democracy in the past week, however, adding prominence to the Democrats' forceful declarations that the Postal Service is central to a stable democracy and should be protected from budgetary harm during the campaign season.
</p>
<p>
"Joe Biden will be a champion for free and fairs elections," Stacey Abrams, who has made voting rights her main cause since losing a close race for Georgia governor two years ago, said in her convention appearance Tuesday.
</p>
<p>
It was a rare mention of what the nominee might do to restore reliability to governance — although plenty of speakers have lambasted President Trump's challenges to governing institutions and warned his re-election could mean the end of American democracy.
</p>
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The newest Democratic Party
<a href="https://www.demconvention.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/2020-07-31-Democratic-Party-Platform-For-Distribution.pdf" target="_blank">platform</a>, adoption of which is a requirement for this week's convention, devotes fewer than six of its 92 pages to "restoring and strengthening our democracy."
</p>
<p>
In addition to protecting voting rights, expanding voting by mail, curbing wealthy and secretive spending in politics, strengthening government ethics and granting statehood to the District of Columbia — all of which Biden has long embraced — the platform also calls for making Election Day a national holiday, nationalizing both early in-person voting and same-day registration, and creating independent redistricting commissions in every state in order to end partisan gerrymandering.
</p>
<p>
During the primaries, Biden did not embrace or repudiate any of those line items. But he agreed to embrace them — at least in the symbolically important, if ultimately unenforceable platform — as part of his effort to bring the more progressive wing of the party, aligned with Sen. Bernie Sanders, into the fold.
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<h3>Biden's harsh view of the swamp</h3>
<p>
From the start of his campaign, however, Biden has sought to position himself against Trump in one way especially dear to the heart of democracy reformers: That he, not the incumbent with his unaddressed "drain the swamp" promises of 2016, is the one genuinely interested in limiting the sway that rich people and lobbyists have over both campaigns and governing.
</p>
<p>
Biden cannot hide the reality that he's spent almost half a century at the center of the Washington establishment, negotiating with lobbyists and advocates by day and taking their campaign money by night. But he says his 36 years as a Delaware senator and eight more as vice president have made him uniquely capable of flushing wealthy special interests and revolving-door corruption out of the system.
</p>
<p>
The most ambitious piece of the
<a href="https://thefulcrum.us/big-picture/biden-ethics-reform" target="_self">reform agenda</a> he unveiled last October would be nearly total public financing of presidential and congressional campaigns, an idea he's supported since he was a new senator in the post-Watergate 1970s.
</p>
<p>
He also wants to heighten transparency around "
<a href="http://thefulcrum.us/dark-money" target="_self">dark money</a>" groups and online political advertising by creating donor disclosure requirements. Also in the name of sunshine as disinfectant, he wants to mandate all candidates for federal office release 10 years of tax returns. (Biden has released his for 22 straight years.)
</p>
<p>
He would create a Commission on Federal Ethics with more power than the Federal Election Commission or the Office of Government Ethics — and would make K Street lobbyists disclose meetings with elected officials every month.
</p>
<p>
To further distance himself from Trump, Biden's campaign has refused to take donations from registered lobbyists. (Harris made a similar promise when running for president.) Biden also shared
<a href="https://joebiden.com/ad1841-23efs884wdfjle357/#" target="_blank">a list</a> of 230 "bundlers" — wealthy and well-connected individuals who help fundraise for a campaign — but <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/campaign-finance/trump-biden-campaign-bundlers" target="_self">has not updated it</a> since December, to the annoyance of some good-government groups.
</p>
<h3>And the running mate? </h3>
<p>
For Harris, protecting the right to vote and ensuring the integrity of U.S. elections were top priorities on Capitol Hill and during her 317-day presidential run.
</p>
<p>
A member of the Judiciary Committee and only the second Black woman ever elected senator, she has frequently called for an overhaul and strengthening of the
<a href="http://thefulcrum.us/voting-rights-act" target="_self">Voting Rights Act</a> to combat a wave of voter suppression laws in mostly Southern states. She was also one of the first to propose, after John Lewis died last month, that the updated law be named for the civil rights icon and veteran Atlanta congressman.
</p>
<p>
Harris has co-sponsored nearly 50 bills related to voting, campaign finance and election security — including the Senate's version of HR 1, the comprehensive ethics, election and campaign finance law overhaul that died in the GOP Senate after Democrats pushed it through the House last year.
</p>
<p>
In April, a month into the pandemic, she introduced her own legislative package to make voting easier and safer during the coronavirus emergency — a symbolic stake in a legislative debate that by then had already moved on.
</p>
<p>
While advocating for stronger election security measures, Harris has often excoriated Trump, who has sought to downplay if not outright deny Russia's efforts to influence the 2016 election. During the first presidential debate, for example, she termed the president himself the nation's "biggest national security threat."
</p>
<p>
On the Intelligence Committee, Harris was a prominent figure in the investigation of Russia's election hacking and disinformation campaign. She has also co-sponsored six election security bills — including one of the few to draw bipartisan support. Written two years ago by Republican James Lankford, it was designed to ease the sharing of information about cybersecurity threats to elections within the federal government and between Washington and state election administrators. It went nowhere, though.
</p>
<p>
Harris also got behind Democratic legislation that would have mandated the use of paper ballots and set minimum cybersecurity standards for federal elections. It also went nowhere — but has provided the senator with one of her better-known quips on the campaign trail, at least on the narrow topic of bolstering democratic institutions.
</p>
<p>
"The best and smartest way to conduct voting" is paper ballots, she likes to say, "because Russia can't hack a piece of paper."
</p>
<p>
Biden and Harris both support somehow overturning the Supreme Court's 2010 decision in
<a href="http://thefulcrum.us/citizens-united" target="_self">Citizens United v. FEC</a>, which opened a new and largely deregulated era of corporate influence over campaign financing. That's a huge priority for democracy reformers but would be achievable only with a constitutional amendment — a non-starter for now — or if Biden was able to win confirmation of enough justices to shift the court's ideological balance solidly left, which seems almost as unlikely.
</p>
<p>
The future of the Supreme Court is one of the few places where Biden and his running mate part company. He flatly opposes adding more justices to the bench, which Harris has said is worth considering. She also said she's open to the idea of abolishing the Electoral College — another longshot idea for transforming a democratic institution Biden has labeled a reform too far.
</p>
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