Tag Archives: democracy

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Errol says that while I haven’t convinced him

that felon disenfranchisement is unconstitutional, irrational, or undemocratic, I am convinced that the purging of elible voters from voting rolls because the state is too lazy to double-check a list is all of those things.

Whichever side you fall on on the first question, this is good news for those concerned with constitutionality, rationality, and democracy:

Florida’s top election officials conceded Tuesday that they will take no legal action to force the state’s 67 election supervisors to remove nearly 48,000 voters who have been identified by the state as potentially ineligible to vote. This means the fate of these voters, some of whom appear to have been wrongly placed on the list, will be up to the election supervisor in each county, many of whom have been hesitant so far to remove any voter from the rolls. Some supervisors have said they were unsure if they had the time or staff needed to independently verify the background of voters prior to this fall’s elections, but other supervisors have moved ahead anyway.

Hesitant they should be.

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More on felons and the political process: The Associated Press apparently did some research, discovered that America Coming Together (ACT), one of the largest national groups sending canvassers out to register and educate voters for the election, had hired some former felons, and they were shocked – just shocked. ACT’s response, to their credit, has been defending its policy:

We believe it’s important to give people a second chance,” Elleithee said. “The fact that they are willing to do this work is a fairly serious indication that they want to become productive members of society.”

RNC Chair Ed Gillespie, shamefully but unsurprisingly, is claiming that having been convicted of a felony should disqualify Americans from handling official documents with private information. His essential contention – that the democratic process is too pure to be sullied by the involvement of those with crimminal records – should be all too familiar to those who saw it marshalled by a slew of dKos posters to defend Arizona’s disenfranchisement of felons in the name of keeping Nader off the ballot.

More power to ACT for hiring everyone who’s prepared and qualified for the hard, urgent work of empowering people to make demands of our democracy. I know I’ve found few people as excited about that work here in Florida as those felons who’ve been purged from the process. Everyone (almost) claims to want to see those who’ve served their time productively and smoothly reintegrated into society. Except not into my neighborhood. Not into my workplace. Not into my democracy.

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Governor Jeb Bush yesterday restored the civil right of voting to only 22,000 previously disenfranchised felons out of 150,000 included in a suit against the state demanding restoration of rights. The ACLU estimates the number of disenfranchised felons in Florida at 600,000. So what happened yesterday was progress, but not nearly enough of it.

Deeply problematic arguments have always been marshaled and sold in defense of disenfranchising felons. The value to which Americans – explicitly or implicitly – appeal in staking out such a position, as the ninth circuit appeals court observed, is often a conception of “the purity of the ballot box” as a state interest worth defending – or otherwise, as Keyssar argues in The Right to Vote, “a general pronouncement that a state has an interest in preventing persons who have been convicted of serious crimes from participation…” Such reasoning describes Judge Friendly’s defense of states’ prerogative “that perpetrators of serious crimes shall not take part in electing the legislators who make the laws…the prosecutors who must try them…or the judges who are to consider their cases.” Friendly’s argument is immediately sympathetic, and seems eminently reasonable. It is, however, profoundly undemocratic.

For democracy to be “the worst system except for the all the other ones” demands a faith – a gamble – that more times than not, the decisions of a large group of human beings will be better for them than the decisions of any select group or individual chosen from among them without their consent. Democracy is, at best, a medium which brings the will of the people (however determined or constructed) into power as the policy which governs the people. If pure is a meaningful term in reference to democracy, it must refer to how representative we judge the process – not how desirable we find the result. Purity, as the 9th court references it, however, is a subversive undercurrent in the debate: the purity of the voters who take part in the process. Pure democracy, in these terms, is a democracy in which the morally pure cast the votes. This is – unless the impure have been expunged from society entirely – not democracy at all.

Friendly appeals to an intuitive sense that the views of criminals don’t belong in formation of policy on the criminal justice system. The assumption, presumably, is that criminals have vested interests in certain policy results. But our voting booths, unlike our juries, demand no assumption of neutrality. Rather, democracy is a struggle between interests. Friendly’s argument implies, clearly, that criminals have self-serving interests that would, if realized, be detrimental to society as a whole. This too, however, is not nor should be a barrier to voting in the American system. Klansmen are as free to vote against reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act as CEOs are to vote against overtime protections. Much as Franklin asked why going from the moment of having a donkey to the moment of not having a donkey should change the worth of someone’s vote, we must ask why going from possessing a burning desire to murder and being unable to follow through to successfully committing the act should have such an effect. Had Friendly argued in his opinion that American policy should be made by those who are pure, it would be much less frequently cited and much more intuitively off-putting. It would rightly raise the specter of campaigns for purity throughout American history, and the tremendous damage they wrought to the welfare of countless people and to the legitimacy of our democracy.

There are severe negative consequences to disenfranchising felons – removing those most affected by criminal justice policy from the political discourse denies them the primary avenue available to reform it. This creates a vicious cycle in which bad policy can systematically disenfranchise communities while denying them the vote and the voice with which to reverse it. Considering which Americans are in fact losing the franchise for felonies, for felony convictions, or for false records – as Greg Palast documents in the case of Florida – of felonies, suggests that this is more than an idle prospect. Overwhelmingly, such policy is denying the vote not to the theoretical cold-blooded murderer of the hypothetical, but to legions of working-class people of color, most for drug-possession, reinforcing the stratification of wealth and power which distinguishes the modern United States.

Registering voters in low-income neighborhoods here in Tampa has provided me a powerful reminder of just how many people are forced out of the process by felonies for which they’ve already served time, and just how how unrepresentative a sample of America these disenfranchised voters are. No one we talk to here is more adamant about the urgency of voting than the ex-felons who can’t, or more critical of those who insist that there’s no point in voting. It’s frustrating to be able to offer little more than a form to apply for executive clemency – a process which, as we saw yesterday, leaves much to be desired – and demanded.

(Cross-posted at Undernews)

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The Center for Voting and Democracy reports back from the Take Back America Conference, at which it advocated the advantages of instant run-off voting (IRV) and offered participants a chance to take part in a simulated IRV election to determine the Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee, with Edwards winning and McCain and Dean in second and third places respectively. Don’t think they’ll be getting offered tickets to the Democratic Convention though. Which is a shame, because a political party which really put a premium on democracy would put IRV front and center in its platform (more of my thoughts on IRV are in the archive here.

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The latest in the “funny if it weren’t so sad” department:

The latest issue of Mother Jones Magazine, at the top of page twenty (for those of you following along at home), has an ad for The New School with an image of the statue of liberty with a flag covering her mouth and the question, “Must we dismantle democracy at home in order to export it overseas?” The New School, accordng to the ad, “helps you find answers.” That’s right – this is the same New School that, in defiance of its liberal reputation and the principles of liberal democracy, refused to recognize a vote by its graduate students for a union on the grounds that the percentage turnout – while higher than that which elected its President to the Senate – was too low.

Many alternative ads come to mind, perhaps involving a grad student with their mouth covered by Bob Kerrey and the question “Must we dismantle democracy in our schools in order to teach it?” Readers are encouraged to send more ideas, or to lay their own ads out if they’re more artistic than myself.

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The New York Post has Kerry announcing a running mate by the end of May and offers its “sources'” top picks:

Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.), Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, former Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsak and Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.)

Memo to John Kerry:

Do not tap Bob Kerrey, who besides creating an awkward “Kerry-Kerrey” ticket just made it into the news flouting democracy, the right to organize, and the values of The New School of which he’s President by refusing to recognize the results of its graduate student election.

Do not tap Evan Bayh, who voted for the Bush tax-cut, one of a select group of awful Bush ideas which you actually voted against, and whose presence on the ticket would critically undercut your message on the issue.

Do not tap Ed Rendell, who gave the god-forsaken Democratic Leadership Council an inspiration to hold their conference back home in Philly this summer to celebrate his not being much of a leftist, about a month before he backed down in the face of resistance from a plan to equalize school funding in the state.

You can do better.

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Turns out that, as I posted my thoughts, (scroll down) in the early hours of this morning, on why Nader would be wrong to run and why the Democrats would be wrong to respond to a Nader run by Sister-Souljah-ing the left, my classmate Dan Munz had, a mere forty minutes earlier, posted his (brilliantly titled) thoughts on why Nader would be wrong to run, and why the Democrats would be right to respond by Sister-Souljah-ing (his reference) the left. It’s a small shtetl after all, eh?

Dan and I disagree, like many registered Democrats who fall into this debate, on both a tactical level and an ideological one, and given that we apparently both lost sleep last night setting forth our visions for the party, I won’t rehash that debate except to say again that I believe the Clinton years and the Gingrich revolution are only the most recent demonstrations of the danger in seizing the center and the power of offering a choice rather than an echo. It’s not surprising, of course, that Dan and I are each largely convinced that a party more in line with our respective ideology would also be more effective at building a governing majority (that, of course, is part of the weakness of the “electability” discourse).

Dan is right, of course, that to argue that there’s no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is a weak straw-man argument, and one that hurt Nader’s case. I would add on the one hand that it’s an argument that’s particularly easy to make from a position of relative privilege, in which the comparatively progressive reforms that Clinton accomplish – the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Earned Income Tax Credit, more progressive NLRB nominees, and others – make relatively little impact on one’s life. I would add on the one hand, however, that relatively few of those who condemn the two-party consensus in America would argue that there is, in fact, no difference between the parties (some of course do for rhetorical effect).

Dan goes on, however, to make an equally unfounded claim: that there’s no difference between the Greens and the Democrats. While Dan’s right that Nader’s agenda is “certainly more in alignment with Democratic than Republican values,” that isn’t saying much. It’s hard for me to imagine many of the sixteen issues Nader lists as the core of his campaign as the centerpieces of a Kerry Presidential run. “Full public financing of public elections with the necessary, broad changes for a more fair and representative election process, replacing present charades?” “Universal health insurance — single payer embracing prevention, quality and cost controls”? “A redirected federal budget for the crucial priorities of our country and away from the massive waste, fraud and redundancy of what President Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex,” as well as the massive costs of corporate welfare”? Dan may not share these as priorities – or even as goals – but I think it’s disingenuous to argue that Nader doesn’t stand for anything the leadership of the Democratic party doesn’t.

Dan argues that “when I see an organization I don’t like, I try to join and persuade it to change. I don’t bail and get all distructive.” I’d argue that social change depends on having folks on the inside and the outside of institutions – be they the Democratic party or, say, the State Department. The system needs to be both kicked and dragged (I’ve tried to act this out with my arms and legs a few times, and I’m told it’s been amusing, if perhaps not enlightening). Dan argues that

These days, a lot of the major battles have been settled, and largely in Democrats’ favor. Both parties now admit we need civil rights, we need social security and other entitlement programs, we need better health care, we can’t be completely isolationist, &c.

To which I’d respond, along the lines I alluded to in my earlier post, that today neither party is proposing the kind of ambitious, radicial, structural change – in areas from public school funding to healthcare to the crippling effects of the drug war – demanded before we could really talk with a straight face about “starting gate equality” for Americans of color, and those who do find themselves labelled “race-baiting demagogues” and are candidates for the Sister Souljah treatment; that neither party is articulating reforms like raising the income ceiling on the payroll tax to make social security a more secure entitlement and a less regressive tax; that neither party is offering the kind of healthcare reform that has saved costs, saved lives, and saved millions from healthcare insecurity in most industrialized nations; and neither party has offered an comprehensive alternative to the use of unilateral military and economic power as American leadership in the global community. As Dan said, “One man’s homogeneity is another man’s consensus…”

Dan and I agree that Nader would be wrong to mount a 2004 Independent Campaign. And we agree that the way for the Democrats to respond to a Nader challenge would be to illustrate the real differences between them and the Republicans. The difference, maybe, is that I think to so compellingly would require more than just a shift in rhetoric.

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A co-chairman of U Penn’s graduate student union, GET-UP, calls on Penn’s leadership to let the ballots from ther election be counted:

Our movement is part of a larger pushback against the structural reform under way in the academic labor market. For several decades now, universities have been replacing full-time, tenure-track faculty with part-time instructors and graduate employees. Like adjunct faculty, graduate employees suffer unprofessional working conditions, crummy salaries and virtually no job security. We have little recourse if the terms of our employment are arbitrarily changed, and we have no grievance procedure if we’re harassed or abused.

We had hoped that President Rodin’s new willingness to engage with GET-UP would bring this impasse to resolution. But despite an atmosphere of cordiality and some stimulating discussion at the mid-December meeting GET-UP’s leadership held with President Rodin, the song remains the same: Penn’s graduate employees voted in a democratic election, and College Hall continues to abuse the loopholes in labor law to deny our basic rights.

The legal limbo in which graduate students at Penn, Brown, and Columbia find themselves is exactly the one which Levin has committed himself to inflict on Yale graduate students should an NLRB vote be held. While he’s argued for an NLRB process over the Card Count Neutrality on the grounds that “democracy means voting,” Levin continues to act as though he’s forgotten that democracy means counting, and following, the results of the vote.

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That liberal media, at it again:

Representative Dennis Kucinich has every right to keep campaigning despite his minuscule vote tallies, but he should not be allowed to take up time in future candidate debates. Neither should the Rev. Al Sharpton, who is running to continue running, not to win

Kucinich and Sharpton were, of course, perhaps the two most interesting candidates in those debates. And their presence raises the burning issues muffled by the consensus of the Democratic establishment. Lieberman’s presence, for that matter, should force the four NYT-approved candidates to argue for a vision of the Democratic party as meaningfully to the left of the Republicans – practice that could only help them.

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The New York Times has a piece today about the Free State Project, the brainchild of some libertarian Yalies (not surprising, given the tendency of an Ivy League college environment to inculcate – rightly – social freedom and – wrongly – a false faith in economic meritocracy), to move as many libertarians as possible to New Hampshire and achieve a critical mass so to swing elections and eventually build the kind of libertarian state which neither the Democrats nor the Republicans want to see realized:

“Having so many people move into a state means we can really raise issues,” Mr. Somma said. “Once we start to elect people to the Statehouse, I think the low-hanging fruit will be issues like educational reform and medical marijuana.”

Like many on the left, I’d argue that libertarians are right to embrace civil liberties but that the substantive ability of the individual to live a full and self-determined life depends much more on freedom from want than property rights. I have little sympathy for folks like Jackie Casey, who wants a machine gun for Christmas, hopes to destroy the government safety net entirley, and says:

“I want to be a billionaire in my lifetime…and I don’t want to live among people who think that’s bad…I radically oppose public education. It’s demeaning and it creates criminals…The thing that hurts poor people is they don’t know how to think of themselves as rich.””

That said, I think these libertarians are right to recognize that their voices – like those of Catholic workers, socialists, anarchists, nativists, and a slew of other ideological groups (some more savory than others), as well as those of most sexual, religious, or ethnic minorities – are underrepresented in a two-party, winner-takes-all, regionally-based system. That underrepresentation is a vital culprit in the narrowing of political discourse in this country. So what I as left-of-Democrat and Jackie Casey as a libertarian have in common is a shared interest in a political system that really represents us – even without asking us to pack up and leave our state.

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The Times on the scene of the election building on the deadline to file to run in the CA recall:

There was the 100-year-old woman from Long Beach who was sponsored by the 99-cent store chain; the busty pornographic film star; the cross-dresser in pink; the soul food restaurateur; the angry car salesman; the techno geek; the student too young for whiskers; and the structural engineer worried about earthquakes.

It’s strange how many anti-populist conservatives have had a convenient change of heart just in time to herald the recall as the epitomy of the democratic process. This election is, in many ways, the strongest case for instant run-off voting. For those who don’t know, instant run-off voting essentially allows each voter to rank their preferences among several candidates. In the first round, every voter’s vote is counted towards his/her first choice. The candidate receiving the lowest votes is eliminated, and in the second round, everyone who voted for him/her has their vote counted for their second choice. The process continues, eliminating one candidate each round and counting each voter’s vote for their preferred candidate of those remaining each round, until only two candidates remain, and the one of the two who’s preferred by the majority of the voters wins.

Let’s say, for example, that the eight candidates above are the only ones on the ballot, and my preferences are:

1st: Cross-dresser in pink
2nd: Soul food restaurateur
3rd: 100-year-old woman from Long Beach
4th: Student too young for whiskers
5th: Busty pornographic film star
6th: Structural engineer worried about earthquakes
7th: Techno geek
8th: Angry car salesman

In the first round, my vote is counted towards the cross-dresser, and the angry car salesman (apologies to any angry car salesmen who are reading this site…), who was the first preference of the fewest voters, is eliminated. In the second and third rounds, my vote is still counted for the cross-dresser, and the student too young for whiskers and the 100 year-old woman are eliminated for being the favorite (out of the remaining candidates) of the fewest voters in the second and third rounds respectively. In the fourth round, the votes that had been going to the angry car salesman (in the 1st round), the student too young for whiskers (in the 2nd), and/or the 100 year-old woman (in the 3rd), spread mostly between the structural engineer, the techno geek, and the busty pornographic film star, and the soul food restaurateur has a strong base because of his outstanding corn bread, but the cross-dresser, who automatically receives my vote as long as he’s in the race, is the preference of the fewest voters and is eliminated. In the fifth round, my vote goes automatically to the soul food restaurateur because he was my second choice, and the techno geek receives the fewest votes and is eliminated. The sixth round thus pits the soul food restaurateur, the busty pornographic film star, and the structural engineer against each other. Most of the voters whose votes had been going to the techno geek had marked the porn star as their next choice (thought it would be the structural engineer, didn’t you?), and the soul food restaurateur has a strong enough base to come in second, eliminating the structural engineer, who hopefully will continue to worry about earthquakes in some not-gubernatorial capacity. In the last round, thus, every voter’s vote is counted either towards the restaurateur or towards the porn star. Someone who rated the restaurateur 7th and the porn star 6th, for example, is now automatically voting for the porn star. In this final round, while my vote goes to the restaurateur – an unreconstructed liberal Democrat whose politics are my favorite second only to the more radical cross-dresser – more people are drawn to the, well, platform of the busty pornographic film star, and she emerges the winner of the gubernatorial race.

The advantages of this system are clear. It demonstrates the actual level of support for various candidates by allowing everyone to rank them based purely on how much they’d like to see them in office. It eliminates the fear of hurting your second – (or maybe eleventh-) choice candidate’s chances by supporting your first-choice. Unlike the California recall, instant run-off voting is a sustainable, viable measure which would increase the democracy of our republic – and, not coincidentally, rock the casbah that is the two-party system. That’s why it’s been part of the platform of the Green party for years, and is part of the platform of its candidate in the recall, Peter Camoje, who I would likely vote for first in an instant run-off election, followed by Arianna Huffington, then likely Cruz Bustamante. That’s why you don’t hear a lot about it from the Democrats – who came up with progressive reforms like the recall election and now are suing to to have it stopped – or the Republicans – who become populists overnight when it means embarassing the Democrats.

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Israel’s Supreme Court made the just choice and the reasonable decision today in allowing Palestinian Knesset Members Ahmed Tibi and Azmi Bishara to run for reelection at the end of this month, overturning the Central Election Committee’s ruling disqualifying them on the grounds that they’ve challenged the Jewish nature of the state. It upheld the CEC’s decision to allow Baruch Marzel to run, despite his connection to the late Meir Kahane’s outlawed Kach party and his public support for forced “transfer” of Palestinians out of Israel and the territories. That too is reasonable, insofar as democracies around the world trust the voters, rather than a subset of elected politicians, to evaluate whose vision is or is not worthy of their vote. What was disturbing and unconscionable was the CEC’s choice to strip Palestinian citizens of Israel of the chance to vote for Palestinian candidates while suggesting that separating church and state is a greater violation of Israel’s fundamental values than ethnic cleansing. TIbi, Bishara and others now face the challenge of convincing Palestinian voters that their vote still counts and that the system can work – as one Professor noted, the damage has already been done. New Israel Fund President Peter Edelman got it right: “The decision today upholds a bedrock principle that underlies democracy – the right of all citizens to stand for election, the right of minorities to political representation, and the supremacy of the rule of law. At the same time, all who love Israel’s democracy must be concerned that it continues to be necessary to call on the Supreme Court to be the last line of defense for such critical democratic values.” Meanwhile, Sharon’s problems continue to mount…