http://www.wheresthepaper.org/BloombergComment.htm
Teresa Hommel
12/10/04
Comments on Two Sections of Mayor Bloomberg’s Speech of Nov. 10, 2004
Bloomberg’s words are
italic
and commentary is bold.
Bloomberg begins on elections about halfway through his
speech.
Let me talk for a couple of minutes though about three other areas where I
think improvements are badly needed and long overdue: ballot access, what I
call pay-to-play reform, and reform of the Board of Elections, which has gotten
a lot of press in the last few days.
First in terms of the ballot access reform, I don’t know how many of you know
what the process is, but if you want to get the best people to run for office,
we’ve got to make the rules easier, and simpler, and more understandable to get
on the ballot.
Right now, it is a very complex process, it is just too easy for party bosses
and their lawyers to knock challengers off the ballot for minor
technicalities. It’s hard enough to beat an incumbent without having to
spend all your time and your money defending your petitions in court. And
there’s a game that’s just played, it’s an outrage. If there is one “i” that is
not dotted, one “t” that’s not dotted, the candidate doesn’t get on the ballot
or the candidate gets thrown off the ballot, but what is really worse is the
public is denied a choice. And either you believe in democracy or you don’t.
These endless legal challenges that define elections in New York are a joke in
this country, and they are the reason why it is so expensive, or one of the
reasons, it’s so expensive to run here and why so many people decide not to
run. It’s become a whole cottage industry of you don’t have to beat the other
guy based on positions or your ability to serve, all you have to do is beat him
because you’ve got a better lawyer that can get him thrown off the ballot. I
think its time to end this “gotcha” kind of techniques where lawyers comb
petitions to find some technical violation in what’s literally a hopelessly
complex election law requirement, which some courts have found to be
unconstitutional.
Let us just make it easier to get on the ballot by eliminating those technical
requirements, reducing the number of signatures required, allowing all registered
voters - not just those that belonging to a particular political party - to
sign petitions.
Bloomberg uses a bait and switch tactic. He identifies
what may or may not be a real problem, which is faulty administration of a good
policy. Then he recommends eliminating the policy, rather than correcting its
administration.
The policy of allowing challenges to false petitions is
necessary to protect the integrity of the petitions. If we eliminate technical
requirements, then phony petitions can be used. By reducing the number of
signatures, frivolous candidates can run for the purpose of dirty tricks. By
allowing any registered voter to sign any petition, members of one party can
select candidates to run in the other party for the purpose of dirty tricks.
.
.
.
Let me talk about one other thing and that is reforming the Board of
Elections. The Board of Elections has got a lot of criticism in the last few
days because there were long lines at the polls and some machines broke down.
We need to reform the Board of Elections and most importantly, we need to get
voting machines that make voting easier, quicker, and more secure.
In fact, the old mechanical lever machines, if maintained, are easier, quicker, and more secure than electronic machines. If the Mayor wants to see the old machines repaired, he could allocate more money to the Board of Elections for more technicians and for higher salaries for them.
In 1952, 3.5 million New Yorkers cast ballots in the
presidential election. Last week only 2.2 million New Yorkers voted –
one-third fewer. So why did we have so many problems? I mean if we
could handle it back in ‘52 with 3.5 million voters with the same machines, why
can’t we do it now?
Well there’s two reasons: First, the voting machines themselves, the ones that
we use are more than 40-years old – and they are actually based on a patent by
Thomas Edison that is almost 140 years old!
Elections are not about technology. The honesty of an election is not
determined by whether the technology is new or old.
Elections are about the will of the people being
expressed to select the public servants that will run the government for the
benefit of all the people. The entire history of elections tells us that when
people from every party can observe the conduct of elections, fraud is less
likely to occur.
People say, ‘You know, technology.’ If you are afraid of technology, don’t get
in airplane, don’t get in an automobile, don’t take an elevator; technology
runs everything in our lives, but we have to have a mechanical machine to vote.
Most of us don’t drive cars built during Mayor Wagner’s Administration – unless
maybe we collect antiques–why are we using voting machines from that era I
don’t’ think anybody can figure out. These are technological fossils, and
they belong in the New York Historical Society, not in the polling stations of
this city.
Opposition to electronic voting is due to that fact that it prevents the multipartisan observation that is required for honest elections. The newness or oldness of the technology is not the issue, it is the MISUSE of the technology. Computers must be continuously audited to achieve accuracy, but computers used to record ballots and count votes will not be audited. Moreover, whether or not the computers are accurate today, if election technology prevents observation by ordinary citizens, we can expect that by the next election the software, etc, will be tampered with.
And in fact we
can’t even claim we don’t have the money to do it because the Federal
government’s Help America Vote Act – called HAVA - will pay for the State to
modernize our voting equipment, train election officials and poll workers, and
enhance voter education. And most states qualified for HAVA money in time for the
2004 elections, and bought new machines. A-ha! Not here in New York. We
are still waiting for Albany to finalize a plan that will allow the State to
qualify for more than $200 million in federal funding.
So here we sit, we have budget problems but this is nothing that has to be
solved by the taxpayers of this city, it can be solved by the taxpayers of the
country. Now it’s already too late to have a new system up and running by 2005,
which will be an election I’m sure all of you will come out and vote in, you
have to think about that and who is running – that’s ok. It’s not going to
happen if the State Legislature does not come up with an agreement soon, and
even making 2006 is going to be difficult, but as last week’s elections showed,
we should not delay anymore.
A large percentage of voters believe that fraud occurred in the use of computers in the 2004 election. Many New Yorkers would be satisfied to keep the old lever machines if they were maintained. For voters with disabilities, there are computerized ballot-marking machines that would provide privacy of the voting experience as well as the security of a real paper ballot.
It’s not just money, however. HAVA’s money alone won’t solve the Board’s institutional problems. Under John Ravitz’s leadership, the Board really has begun to try to professionalize its operations, and I think he gets a lot of criticism but we should commend him for the improvements that he’s trying to make, he is however severely hamstrung by the Board’s structure, established by State law, which allows party leaders to dictate hiring decisions based on party connections – or family connections – and not on merit. This makes it very hard to fire incompetent workers, or to recruit qualified ones. And that really is a recipe for ineptitude.
The greatest strength of the New York City Board of
Elections is its bipartisan structure. Elections are more secure when they are
run by people from two parties than when one party runs the show.
It is hard to hire and keep good people, however, when
the pay and benefits are lower than in the private sector.
“Professionalizing the Board of Elections” does not
require a change of its bipartisan structure, it requires competency
qualifications or merit requirements for each job, and pay and benefits that
are reasonably competitive.
In any case, bipartisan ineptitude is better than
single-part control and inevitable corruption. Allowing one party to hire and
fire based on its opinion of merit will not improve the quality that we can
achieve when two parties hire and fire on merit.
Again, Mayor Bloomberg is attacking a good policy
(bipartisan structure) by saying that it is poorly administered (poor quality
employees). The obvious solution is to
add requirements for professional qualifications, as well as competitive
compensation.
The structure of the Board, like our method of selecting
judges, is a remnant of the days when Tammany Hall ruled New York.
Together, the Board and the courts are the city’s last bastions of political
patronage, think about that, we really have- we finally got political patronage
out of the school system, and because a lot of the laws that were enacted after
the city’s 1970’s fiscal crisis we’ve got patronage out of other parts of City
Government, but in the courts and on the board, political patronage still
unfortunately plays a very big part.
Our civil service reforms have bypassed the Board, other states have adopted
nonpartisan boards with professional staffs and we have not. And if we expect
our Board to perform reliable, high-quality, good customer service, we need
exactly the same thing.
In other states, the so-called nonpartisan boards are in
fact highly partisan, and have closed their operations to public observation,
raising suspicion of fraud and many lawsuits. Single-partisan administration of
elections has damaged the legitimacy of our elections and our government.