My Democratic Reunion

I keep forgetting to post about my attendance on Saturday at The Democratic Reunion, a series of events which brought Democrats from all over the country to meet, organize, and activate. My event was a Potluck BBQ and fundraiser for the West LA Democratic Club, which featured some candidates and a lot of food.

Debra Bowen, maybe the most engaged politician in the country when it comes to election issues, was there. She's running for California Secretary of State against incumbent Bruce McPherson, and the SoS position in the states is becoming as important as the governor, given the difficulties with voting over the last several years. Bowen is smart, tough, and well-informed about this burgeoning crisis in our democracy. We talked briefly, and she didn't think that the lawsuit filed in San Diego would do much to overturn the Francine Busby-Brian Bilbray race, but she thinks it will be a powerful bit of imagery for her election, and a warning that the system is broken. As you may know, poll workers in San Diego took home the electronic voting machines two weeks prior to the June 6 election on unsupervised sleepovers, opening them up to all kinds of potential hacking.

Just yesterday Bowen held a hearing in Bakersfield on statewide voting problems. She's very tenacious and she's exactly who we need to get the potential for mischief out of the electoral process. And the rest of the committee was just as fiery:

Committee Chairwoman Sen. Debra Bowen, D-Redondo Beach, said the mission of the committee is to prevent problems in future elections.

"One thing that's always frustrated me about government is we don't do a good job learning from our mistakes, or the mistakes of others," she said [...]

Committee members pelted local elections officials with searing questions about why they failed the voters.

State Sen. Roy Ashburn, R-Bakersfield, asked why touch-screen voting machines failed and paper ballots ran out making voting nearly impossible for as many as 500 Kern County voters.

County Deputy Registrar of Voters Sandy Brockman, sitting in for elections boss Auditor-Controller Ann Barnett, took the brunt of Ashburn's questions.

Under his questioning, she said Barnett decided not to train elections workers on the use of paper ballots and decided to send only the minimum number of paper ballots to each polling place.

Elections workers testified they were told not to use paper ballots.

But when electronic voting cards failed, the paper ballots ran out and as many as 500 voters could have lost the chance to vote, Brockman said [...]

The third member of the committee, Sen. Joseph Dunn, D-Garden Grove, asked hard questions of Diebold Election Systems official Mike Rockenstein.

Diebold made the voting machines and electronic ballot cards that malfunctioned in Kern County on June 6.

Through the negligence of Diebold, Dunn said, hundreds of Kern County voters were turned away at the polls and lost their chance to vote.

If a chance to vote is priceless, Dunn asked Rockenstein, how much would Diebold be willing to pay voters who could prove they couldn't vote because of the company's mistakes.

Rockenstein said he had no answer to that question.

The other politico I met on Saturday was Julia Brownley, who will be the next Assemblywoman in my district. California's State Legislature is so gerrymandered that no seats changed hands from Democrat to Republican in 2004. That's a problem, and I support the proposed deal that would remove some term limits for legislators in exchange for sensible redistricting run by citizens rather than courts. The term limit process mandates that inexperienced politicians populate the State House and lobbyist influence increases since they're the only ones that know the playing field. And this redistricting proposal is much more fair than the one defeated by the voters in 2005.

But the other problem I found out from Brownley is how pervasive and corrosive money truly is to our democracy. During her primary campaign, I was beseiged with literature from all the Democratic candidates, to the tune of at least five or six pieces a day by the end. I asked Brownley how much money was spent on the primary by all the candidates. "$3.5 million dollars," she said.

$3.5 million. For a Democratic primary for State Assembly.

That's outrageous. And it needs to be changed. Ezra Klein reports that it might be this year:

California's politics are so screamingly dysfunctional that I long ago gave up any hope that they could be reformed. But a new proposition proposes to dynamite the system, and it looks to me as if it just might work. The only question: Can a ballot initiative to kill the special interests survive the campaign the special interests will mount to defeat it? I'm unconvinced.

The Clean Money Elections coalition that's sponsoring Prop. 89 is indeed going to need a tremendous effort to get this thing passed. It's bitterly ironic that they're going to need lots of money to pass an initiative to get money out of politics. It's almost like the system is set up against change. Well, it is. But a grassroots army can change that and bring Clean Money Elections to California the way it brought them to Arizona and Maine. I think full public financing of elections is as important to restoring democracy as anything we can do. There's going to be so much mud flung at this initiative because it would effectively kill entire industries devoted to raising and distributing political money. A lot of it will come from outside the state, because California is an incubator for national legislative action, far more than Arizona or Maine. This initiative represents a threat to the status quo.

But it can be done. Common Cause and the League of Women Voters are already on board. There are less than 100 days left. Please consider a contribution. This will end up costing you so much LESS in the long run, as a democracy not besotted with money is one that's responsive to the needs of ALL people.