An illuminating piece in today’s Providence Sunday Journal lays out the recent court decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and what can be done to rectify it.

Rhode Island state Rep. David Segal, a candidate for Patrick Kennedy’s seat in Congress, has introduced a bill calling for a Federal Constitutional Convention. The aim is to reverse the Supreme Court’s disastrous decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

Under this new decision, private corporations can give unlimited amounts of money to support candidates in congressional elections.

Contributing columnist Corey Brettschneider, an associate professor of political science at Brown University, goes on to urge,

Rhode Islanders and citizens around America should support Representative Segal’s bill to ensure that citizens, and not corporations, will guide the nation’s future.

Meanwhile over at Rhode Island’s Future, Brian Hull discusses Segal’s decision to skip tomorrow’s Democratic Nominating Convention at the Biltmore. Segal, candidate for the First Congressional District seat being vacated by Kennedy, will instead spend the day meeting with voters. The day ends with a meet-and-greet in Newport — bring your questions and concerns to the Blues Cafe. “Our campaign is a grassroots effort,” Segal noted, “and we’re going to spend Monday doing what we do best: talking directly to the voters.”

6:30pm to 8:30pm, Monday, Blues Cafe, 286 Thames Street, Newport

Matt just interviewed Larry Lessig, who testified today in support of a resolution I introduced calling for a federal constitutional convention to address the Citizens United decision:

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Citizens United case, there are many, many outspoken critics of what may now be the next generation of electoral campaigns, bought and sold by corporations with the ability to spend millions upon millions of dollars to influence elections.

David Segal introduced a carefully crafted piece of legislation (cosponsored by Fierro, Ajello, Lima, and Handy) calling for a Federal Constitutional Convention to address the issue of corporate spending in elections.

Lawrence Lessig, one of the premier liberal / Progressive thinkers of our day, appeared at today’s House Judiciary Committee hearing to speak in support of Segal’s legislation.  Matt Jerzyk sat down with Dr. Lessig for a few minutes before the testimony.  Here’s the interview.

An update from FairVote RI — Congratulations to everybody who’s been involved in the effort!  In the last several months, Rhode Island, North Carolina, and California have all adopted this reform, joining Florida and Hawaii, and moving us closer to universal voter registration.

FairVote Rhode Island today congratulated the Rhode Island Board of Elections on implementing a new law that allows 16 and 17 year olds to preregister to vote.

“We know that significantly fewer eligible voters between the ages of 18 and 24 actually register to vote,” said Toby Shepherd, Director of FairVote RI.

“Now, Rhode Island youth as young as sixteen years old can pre-register so that they automatically become eligible on their eighteenth birthday.  We’re confident that this reform will help young people take ownership of their communities and get involved in the political process.”

The bill, sponsored by Representative Edwin Pacheco (D-Burrillville) and Senator Rhoda Perry (D-Providence) was vetoed by Governor Carcieri in July of 2009.  The legislature overrode the veto last January and the Rhode Island Board of Elections has recently printed new registration cards that comply with the new law.

Other states such as Hawaii and Florida also allow preregistration for teenagers.

“I am thrilled that this legislation finally passed,” said Rhoda Perry (D-Providence).  “We hope that pre-registration will motivate young people to vote.”

Fair Vote RI Director Toby Shepherd noted that “voting is habitual – people who get in the habit young will continue to vote later in life.  This new law is a win-win for everybody.”

It’s hard to understate the potentially devastating impact of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case yesterday.  Here’s Matthew’s take on it:

Without having read the entire 183 pages of the decision and the dissents, it appears to me that this decision overturns Rhode Island’s current ban on the use of corporate dollars in a state election.

In other words, the decision appears to make plausible the following scenario.

Textron could spend $500,000 on television ads that urge voters to vote for John Robitaille for Governor.

And the movie whose airing started it all:

Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel has a blog post up about the recent FairVote RI legislative victories — The pre-registraion bill sponsored by Rep. Ed Pacheco and Sen. Rhoda Perry, and the senate vacancies legislation sponsored by Rep. Chris Fierro and  Sen. Paul Jabour:

How do we make this a pro-democracy year? It’s not looking good so far, with so much attention focused on the drama of the horse race–who’s retiring, who’s running. Deep change, structural change, is not as sexy as people change–but it’s exactly what is required for “real change we can believe in”–a phrase progressives need to retrieve in 2010.

One group that deserves far more attention for the work it has done day in, day out, for nearly twenty years, is FairVote, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that makes real the mantra “respect, include, and empower every voice and every vote.”

FairVote just scored two sweet victories in Rhode Island. Two of its initiatives overcame gubernatorial vetoes through bipartisan votes. As a result the state will now allow voter pre-registration for 16 and 17-year-olds and mandate popular elections to fill all US Senate vacancies. Young people who pre-register will automatically be added to the rolls for the first election in which they are eligible to vote.

I’ve been writing for the Huffington Post here-and-there of late. Just authored this piece with my FairVote colleague Rob Richie.

John Gideon was a prominent voting rights activist who sadly passed on Monday night.  Rob proposes a “Gideon Initiative” which would rein in voting equipment contractors — who stymie electoral reform, increase chances of malfeasance, and cost way too much. Please see the post for more info.

But there’s a bigger issue here, about consultants and contractors:  In the voting world, when we contract out to private companies, those companies can come to own a piece of us.  They control when software gets updated and they control the operators — along with the politicians who issued the contracts in the first place.

This is just as true in other facets of governance and the privatization thereof: Perhaps contributor Tom Sgouros will add a bit about the company that cuts Family Independence checks for the State of RI — and charges us $5 million each year to do it.

Rick Hasen, who runs what is probably the nation’s most respected elections law blog and listserv, has this piece in Slate about the unfortunate (and likely) outcome of the NAMUDNO case.

On April 29, the last day of the court’s term, the justices will hear a case from an obscure utility district in Texas, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder. (The shorthand is NAMUDNO. The court will release audio of oral argument right after argument concludes.)

At stake is not only the constitutionality of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act but, potentially, the constitutionality of a host of other civil rights laws. These include the requirement for the creation of majority-minority districts in cities and states with large minority populations and the guarantee of language assistance to non-English-speaking voters in jurisdictions with a fair number of them. The NAMUDNO ruling will come just before the next round of redistricting and could have a major effect on who wins in all kinds of races, from obscure utility districts to state houses to Congress.

FairVote and I argue for proportional representation rather than gerrymandering as the preferred method of ensuring minority representation.  But so long as PR isn’t in widespread use, the current district-drawing method is imperative — and Section 5 of the VRA covers so much more than that.

And, of course, it was used quite prominently and effectively in Rhode Island a few years back, when redistricting packed the largest concentrations of the state’s Latino and African American residents into a single state senate district, pitting the communities against each other in the fight for due representation.

It’s around the 3:20 mark:

The Texas Democratic party and others called on Brown to apologize after she said voters of Asian descent should adopt names that are “easier for Americans to deal with.”

The comments were part of an exchange with Ramey Ko, a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans, during a hearing Tuesday by the House Elections Committee.

UPDATE: I’m reposting this, from November, in response to Beth’s post below about Achorn’s article about the ‘party lever’ system. I agree with the need for more pluralism in the Assembly and in RI and US politics at large. But this paragraph in particular demonstrates that Achorn’s missing the point:

Undoubtedly, Democrats are the more popular party in Rhode Island. But they hardly constitute 91 percent of the voter registration. Indeed, the biggest single block of voters are unaffiliated. They vote for the person, not the party.

We have a plurality-based system, not a proportional system. Plurality systems will always exaggerate the power of the dominant part. To get Republicans and indies elected in large numbers requires changing that system.

ORIGINAL POST: Let me start by saying that I tend to support getting rid of the straight-ticket lever. And I’m a math nerd, and have enjoyed reading TPublico’s analyses of recent voting patterns.

I believe that it’s incredibly important to work towards a true multi-party democracy. (I discuss this in detail here, in the context of proportional representation.)

But the notion that the straight ticket is one of the fundamental determinants of who wins elections in Rhode Island, again purveyed today in an Achorn colum, is baseless and condescending, to readers and voters. more »

Hertzberg (seated on left) with Carter and Chris Matthews in 1980.

FairVote has spent the last 15 years pushing for a true democratization of our political structures — a real multi-party, multi-ideology representative democracy, expansion of the franchise, and more. The RI chapter started up last year, and we’re trying to build a broader local base for it.

Our keynote speaker is Hendrik Herztberg, senior editor at The New Yorker and former speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, is coming to Providence (and he’s in the blogosphere). Here he is getting beat-on by Bill Oreilly last week.

Details on time and location: Monday, December 15th, the Hi-Hat in Providence, from 6pm to 8:30pm. Suggested donation for guests is $50.

Hertzberg will be joining FairVote’s national executive director, Rob Richie, to talk about this year’s presidential election, the national popular vote movement, and election reform in general.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Hertzberg’s work (you should be — check his latest on Obama) his New Yorker bio is after the jump.
more »

When FairVote booked New Yorker editor Hendrik Hertzberg for our fundraiser (Monday, Dec. 15th at the Hi-Hat from 6-8:30pm), we only knew he was a brilliant writer who loved election reform.

We didn’t know he could also hold his own in a streetfight…

My first inkling of my week as a Bill O’Reilly guest star came on Tuesday morning, December 2nd, as I was leaving home to go to work. I hadn’t had my coffee yet. I hadn’t even checked my e-mail. I was not at my most intellectually acute.

Two youngish guys dressed in slacker clothes—one with a microphone, the other with a camera—accosted me on the sidewalk in front of my apartment building. [...]

At that point, I suppose, I should have just given the guy my business card and suggested that if Mr. O’Reilly wanted to interview me, he should have someone get in touch with me at the office. But, as I say, no coffee yet. Also, I have a weakness for street weirdos.

Let’s roll the tape (skip ahead to about 60 seconds in):

Do you want to ask Hendrik Hertzberg questions without camping out in front of his house? Come to FairVote’s fundraiser this Monday. Details:

New Yorker senior editor and former Jimmy Carter speechwriter Hendrik Hertzberg is coming to Providence (and he’s in the blogosphere too).

Time and location: Monday, December 15th, at the Hi-Hat in Providence, from 6-8:30. Mr. Hertzberg will speak beginning at 7:45pm. Suggested donation for guests is $50; students and youths under 25 are asked to donate $15.

Hertzberg will be joining FairVote’s national executive director, Rob Richie, to talk about this year’s presidential election, the national popular vote movement, and election reform in general.

Ah, the travails of being a boot-strap democracy reform organization: You usually need a huge scandal to get things moving, and FairVote (for which I recently started working as a consultant) has been crying in the dark for some time about the need to change the way Senate vacancies get filled. Here’s today’s press release:

FairVote Rhode Island, the state’s non-partisan and non-profit advocate for election reform, today renewed its call for the direct election of US Senators in Rhode Island in light of the criminal complaint unveiled against Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. FairVote was a leading voice calling for direct elections to fill vacant US Senate seats this year in the General Assembly. FairVote supported H 7586 and S 2324, companion legislation sponsored by State Rep. David Segal and State Sen. Paul Jabour that would have given the people, not the governor, the final say on filling vacant senate seats.

“There is only one legitimate way to select the people’s representatives in a democracy, direct election,” FairVote RI director Matt Sledge said. “A verdict on Rod Blagojevich’s behavior may be years away, but the final verdict on allowing empty senate seats to be filled at the arbitrary whim of governors is in. Even if Governor Blagojevich did nothing wrong, he never should have been given the only effective vote for a United States Senator.”

According to the complaint, Blagojevich considered his ability to appoint anybody–including himself, a possibility which he seriously contemplated–to Senator Obama’s seat an unparalleled opportunity for personal gain.

Last year, I sponsored legislation to require special elections to fill senate vacancies. In doing some research for an op-ed on the issue, I recently learned the astounding fact that nearly 1/4 of Senators who have taken office since the 17th amendment went into affect were appointed.

(The ACORN voter registration ’scandal’ has spurred a push for automatic, universal voter registration, which exists through much of the west.)

Electoral and third-party concerns that may or may not be of interest to y’all:

• The Greens pick up their first state legislature seat in a few years, in Arkansas.
• Instant Runoff Voting wins big in Memphis.
• Proportional Representation comes close in Cincy, but succumbs to a nexus of corporate interests. (Well-financed pols, the Bengals, and the corporate media.)
• Cindy Sheehan flops in her run against Pelosi.
• The Progressive Party has a strong showing in Vermont, apparently beating the Dem in the gubernatorial race.

UPDATE: I’m reposting this, from November, in response to Beth’s post below about Achorn’s article about the ‘party lever’ system. I agree with the need for more pluralism in the Assembly and in RI and US politics at large. But this paragraph in particular demonstrates that Achorn’s missing the point:

Undoubtedly, Democrats are the more popular party in Rhode Island. But they hardly constitute 91 percent of the voter registration. Indeed, the biggest single block of voters are unaffiliated. They vote for the person, not the party.

We have a plurality-based system, not a proportional system. Plurality systems will always exaggerate the power of the dominant part. To get Republicans and indies elected in large numbers requires changing that system.

ORIGINAL POST: Let me start by saying that I tend to support getting rid of the straight-ticket lever. And I’m a math nerd, and have enjoyed reading TPublico’s analyses of recent voting patterns.

I believe that it’s incredibly important to work towards a true multi-party democracy. (I discuss this in detail here, in the context of proportional representation.)

But the notion that the straight ticket is one of the fundamental determinants of who wins elections in Rhode Island, again purveyed today in an Achorn colum, is baseless and condescending, to readers and voters. more »