NewOrleans

Going on their website this morning, the first impression is that the site is beautiful, clear and easy to navigate.  All of which smoothly slides you into registering as a “delegate” in their process, whatever that might be.  The number of current ballot access signatures looms over it all with the number 1.7 million, seeking to legitimize the whole operation.  There was a “click” sequence in the “about” which gave their basic rap for their operation.  Hmmm.  All good, but then I couldn’t find anything anywhere that really explained the petitioning operation or what was afoot.   I liked their rap about money, which was basically they were going to repay all of their frontend donors once their contributions built up so that no donor would have contributed more than $10K to the enterprise, which seemed both creative and smart, especially since I’m now obsessed with self-sufficiency.  On the other hand, I couldn’t get a grip on who their donors where now to understand who was really behind all of this and what was up, which made me suspicious.   For a website that seemed so clear, why was Americans Elect so opaque, rather than being transparent?

Finally, the survey tool that would supposedly “match” my interests to these potential, but currently unknown, candidates was disturbing.  Despite all of the high tech advice and help they tout on the website, if you thought better of an answer you had chosen, you could not “erase” and change it.  The questions on the survey clearly herded the taker into narrow chutes.  Alternative energy led you into a box canyon for example forcing you to choose more expensive utility costs, if you favored any green alternatives, and any green choices were only solar and wind.  Democracy may be a messy give-and-take, but technocracy seems little more than a no mess autocracy when entered through a survey match.  Incidentally, it seemed clear that though Americans Elect is anti-party, they are pretty insistent that the “slate” that will be nominated will include one Democrat and one Republican, which seems pretty “partied” to me.

Looking around to understand the petitioning operation, it turns out they have contracted with ProVote, which admittedly is a big operation, but also a sketchy one know for its efforts on the conservative side.  Furthermore, their staff recruitment material clearly stated that they were hiring people who would be paid “by the signature” and even stating that the pay would be $1.25 per signature, which might be fine and dandy for some efforts, but has actually been illegal in a significant number of states around the country for some years now!  (ACORN in our efforts over the last years when I was Chief Organizer had a clear policy abandoning such methods of payments, though I have read that the problems in Nevada after I had left that were recently adjudicated focused on rogue efforts in Vegas that involved something that might be construed as financial incentives.)  All of which could both lead to ballot disqualifications and endless controversy.

More research on the internet, and given that this is an internet thing it seems only fair that what lives by the internet should die by the internet as well, turned up some notions of their investors, many of whom were linked to efforts to run shadow party spoiler efforts in the past with the Greens and with Ralph Nadar in behalf of Republican candidates and causes.  Hardly seems like they are wearing the “good government” coat they were trying to show off on the public runway.

At the bottom line despite the obvious intentions of Americans Elect to create an interesting, but undoubtedly, spoiler effort most likely targeting Obama in the main, the real problem is not only their sketchy petitioning operation, lack of transparency, bait-and-switch surveying and other problems, but their autocratic ideology about democracy and the role of people, especially in political organizations like parties, in shaping the process.  They reject direct election campaigns and direct party primaries conducted state by state in the throes of the candidate selection process run by the existing dominant and wannabe parties and offer instead virtually nothing other than a survey.  I’m not sure what this is about, but it’s not about democracy even in the failed way it operates now in America.

“roughly 1.1 percent of voter registrations, about 6,000, were received …in 2009-10….a little more than 1,200 voter registration forms were received from disability offices, or about 0.2 percent of all voter applications forms in the same period….”

The Republican voter registration strategy for the poor and differently able is clear:  “don’t ask, don’t tell!”
Furthermore, make the DOJ sue in Louisiana and other states…diddle around, then settle, but do so late enough that registrations will not be encouraged or filed in time for the 2012 federal elections cycle.
The DOJ lawsuit is a good thing.  There should be more active litigation in this area.  There should also be a field program that is aggressively bringing access into these communities now being cutoff.  I fear that time is already ticking off the clock on that effort as well.

Yesterday, I noted that in the top dozen states where federal benefit payments were 20 to 30 percent of personal income, 10 of the 12 had Republican governors.  If this strategy prevails successfully in all of these states on the “Louisiana model,” then we will see a precipitous drop in new registrations in these areas as well, where the numbers are huge.

Missoula

I’ve had my eye on this dude for a couple of years ever since I read – and saved, ok! – an article from the May 29, 2009 edition of the Salina, Kansas paper headlined, “ACORN Prompts Kobach to Run” in which some yahoo said he was running for Secretary of State in this fair state because of ACORN (http://www.saljournal.com/news/story/kobach-5-28-2009).  He was fired up that ACORN might topple the pillars of Kansas democracy through its organizing and voter registration work, and by god he was going to stop it by requiring birth certificates to be able to register to vote and then photo IDs to be able to vote.  I thought this was perversely hilarious, since I knew that when I left ACORN in mid-2008, almost three years ago, that ACORN was almost weaker than water in the state, and the ace reporter of the Salina Journal, couldn’t resist inserting in this crazy article that ACORN’s three offices in Kansas showed now email addresses on the ACORN website or working phones in May 2009, as Kobach saddled up to stop this Red menace.

I was wrong.  This guy was not just a cynical, prairie whack.  He was really a dangerous threat to democracy.  Having crawled on the dead body of ACORN to get elected, he has been a scourge to immigrants assisting in writing and promoting SB1090 the unconstitutional anti-immigrant bill in Arizona that has been copycatted in other states, and as frighteningly he has made good on his voter suppression promise and gotten a bill passed in Kansas that is also being copied widely to prevent as many lower income voters as possible from being able to participate in any pretense at democracy that we have left in America.

A New York Times editorial quoted the Brennan Center and didn’t play around:

A survey by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law found that 11 percent of citizens, 21 Bmillion people, do not have a current photo ID. That fraction increases to 15 percent of low-income voting-age citizens, 18 percent of young eligible voters and 25 percent of black eligible voters. Those demographic groups tend to vote Democratic, and Republicans are imposing requirements that they know many will be unable to meet.

In Kansas alone, “…because of that vast threat to Kansas democracy, an estimated 620,000 Kansas residents who lack a government ID now stand to lose their right to vote,”
according to the Times.

Eight states have some form of voter ID requirements, which amount of little more than harassment, though not surprisingly some of them have been upheld on Supreme Court challenges.  Another thirty states are proposing voter suppression, and given the number of states that Republican forces now control, this is big fat trouble for democracy.   Remember the earlier poll numbers.  Knockout 21,000,000 people and 15% of the lower income voting population, and that might be the margin in some places especially as I commented a couple of days ago given the limp efforts at voter registration and GOTV among these populations and the effective intimidation that the Republican hate machines have directed at various organizations and their likely donors.

This is really evil stuff!  More than tornadoes are coming out of Kansas and it’s really not about the children left behind in their schools, but about the people in the way of the right.  It won’t get better, until we get busy.

Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania

My book on Citizen Wealth had been the excuse for Professor Josh Miller in the government department to invite me speak during the winter, when I was unable to travel due to a massive snowstorm in the East disappointing me and the local Tea Party folks who had been spreading the word to protest my appearance.  Thirty years before Josh had worked for ACORN in Texas and Arkansas, so this was also an opportunity to reconnect.  Larry Ginsburg, another old comrade from ACORN and the labor unions drove up.  Josh’s sister, Rebecca, also a veteran union warrior now specializing in back office miracle work much needed by many, was also in the house.  Besides the pleasure of old stories about friends and work, Josh had labeled my talk, “The Call to Citizen Action,” which gave me an excuse to talk about the special challenges of these dark times in America in the shadow of the rising right, shrinking left, weakening of unions, and death of ACORN.

I don’t have to worry about a lot of requests to speak at commencements, because my message in the malingering depths of this Great Recession, where job prospects are so meager for coming graduates, where the chance of these kids becoming homeowners is minor, where their school debts will be weights tied to their leg dragging them even further underwater, was essentially, “hey, you are so screwed, you are lost generation, you’re Japanese and stuck for the next 10 or 20 years, you might as well answer the call to citizen action,because there’s absolutely no one else on the phone reaching out for you.”  And, unless you to sober up, get real, and build you’re own “party,” and take action as citizens, you’re future is totally bleak and depressing.   My pitch was that they needed to push the college, their professors, and each other to help them learn how to create a job and get comfortable raising money so that they could create opportunities for their own future in citizen action to express their anger and find their passion.  I’m not saying there was standing in the aisles applause, but I will say, I had their attention.

The questions and answers were especially interesting around the issues of voter registration, voter education, and even election protection.  The students were struggling to get their arms around how it was really possible in an ostensible democracy to have voting impediments and perhaps even more confounding to some was the ability to cross over the empathy bridge to other life experiences and imagine why huge numbers of people in other circumstances did not just “naturally” feel an inherent obligation to vote.  One or two of the students wanted the call to action to be embedded like a computer chip in a dog collar or some such so that people just naturally could hear the high pitched dog whistle only available to them to run vote without any fuss or bother or work by their fellow citizens to move people to participate.  My response to the queries about whether registration, protection, or education was the chicken or the egg was to advise the students to fry all of it up in a large pan and eat away.  It wasn’t worth having the argument, the call to citizen action needed to be answered in all of these directors, so whatever moved someone was worth moving forward on to the future.

Sometimes you have to throw a lot of seed in the fields to hope something grows, and this visit at Lafayette felt a little bit like that, but it wasn’t boring for either the students or me, so I enjoyed the listening and maybe someone heard something special in what I was trying to say about their future, so it was all good.  Citizen Wealth flew off the shelves enough to make the bookstore happy.  Joey Carey and Loren got some more good footage for their documentary, “ACORN Under Attack:  The Past, Present, and Future,” and we had a good visit, so I guess it was a day well spent all in all.

New Orleans

Missing ACORN

The Washington Independent’s Jesse Zwick reports:

After more than a decade of success expanding voter rolls, voting rights advocates are noting a disturbing trend in the run-up to the 2010 elections. Dramatically fewer groups are engaged in registering voters during the current election cycle than in previous midterm elections, and fewer voters, especially in poorer areas that are traditionally underrepresented and therefore the usual target of voter registration drives, are registering to vote as a result.

Registration patterns vary significantly from state to state, but 26.7 percent fewer new voters have registered in

Florida this year than in 2006, along with 21.4 percent fewer in Maryland and 16.9 percent fewer in Tennessee, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy and law institute at New York University. And while there’s no single cause for the decline, experts point out that many independent organizations are withering under a combination of public attacks by conservative activists alleging voter fraud and new state laws making it difficult for such groups to operate.

The biggest piece of this seems to be ACORN’s absence…

What’s the surprise?  None really, but the impact is going to have a longer shadow.  Studies have long established that the percentage of “first time” voters who actually vote is huge, so the GOTV drop-off will be significant as well.  Of course, ACORN will not be engaged in GOTV either among low-and-moderate income voters, so that’s a double-whammy.

This is a huge victory for the right wing and the elites, regardless of party affiliation, and culminates a successful campaign dating a decade in which the Republican Party and its operatives targeted ACORN registration efforts in the election run-ups in order to try and dampen turnout with scores of charges and filings which would all disappear within weeks and months following the election.  The lack of both understanding and support from the any part of the community that believes in a democracy of full participation of the poor and in fact every citizen, not surprisingly will also mean that fewer resources will move in this direction and fewer organizations will take the huge risks of standing out alone and enduring the brickbats of opposition.

Our democracy may have been permanently diminished which is even sadder than the immediate tactical advantages the right will have in coming weeks.

Portland

On the web the news out of Nevada indicates that a Project Vote and ACORN voter registration worker is due for trial after Thanksgiving.  The AG in Pennsylvania is scrapping around the cases of another couple of workers.  For all the sound and fury two years ago about ACORN and its voter registration efforts among the poor and disenfranchised, these two efforts seem to be all that remains of a forest of press coverage back then, and both are mighty thin soup.

All of these ironies come in focus for me as I realize that even as ACORN Canada and ACORN Kenya work to expand voting access and participation in that country, the fire has been snuffed out in the United States.  Two years on as some observers look at the impending election and the absence of huge, large scale registration efforts like those mounted by ACORN; some understand that the loss is huge to democracy when such forces are removed from the battle.

A recent piece by Tonyaa Weathersbee, regular columnist and member of the editorial board of the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville that was published in the Louisiana Weekly called “We’ll Soon Wish We Still Had ACORN,” is worth noting:

”Call it a piece of democracy done in by deception.

ACORN, the community organizing group that became an obsession of right-wingers appalled that scores of black people dared to exercise their right to vote in 2008, was recently vindicated by the General Accountability Office.

As it turns out, the GAO found that the group, which is formally known as the Association of Communities Organizing for Reform now, did not misuse any of the $40 million in taxpayer funds it received between 2005 and 2009.

Seems that when Congress voted to strip it of its funding last year, all it was guilty of was employing some dimwitted folks who allowed conservative operatives masquerading as a pimp and whore to dupe them into doling out illegal  advice.

But now, ACORN is in tatters – done in by a doctored videotape and a Republican witch hunt. And their demise couldn’t have come at a worse time.

I say this because in 2008, the organization helped to register millions of voters in key swing states that President Obama won. And while there’s no denying that the communities ACORN serves tend to be filled with black and poor people who are constantly marginalized and vilified by the GOP, the key thing that they did was help millions of people understand the power that voting gives them.

Perhaps, just perhaps, ACORN could have used its power to persuade many of those same people who voted for the first time in 2008 to vote in the upcoming midterm elections – because there are lots of people who are counting on them to stay home as they vote to undo what was done two years ago.

I know this because recently, Gallup released a poll showing that Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are more enthusiastic about voting in the midterm elections this year than they’ve ever been in the past. Fifty-nine percent of them say they plan to vote in November, compared to 44 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents.

That’s the highest average that Gallup has found among Republicans since it first asked the question in 1994 – the year that the GOP swept both housing of Congress and saddled us with Newt Gingrich and the Contact with America.

That tells me that that a whole lot of GOP voters see a chance to, by way of their vote, accomplish what all the town hall screaming and racial epithets couldn’t: Neutralize Obama’s agenda. It also tells me that a lot of Democrats are, at this point, either disillusioned by what he hasn’t done, or don’t understand that he still needs them to vote if he is to get anything done.

For some of that, Obama has himself to blame.

When black people and Latino people went out and voted for him in unprecedented numbers, they did so because they saw him as representing a new social and political order; one in which their needs and issues would be a priority.

But so far, that hasn’t happened.

There’s no immigration bill. Black unemployment is still triple that of whites, and while Obama inherited an economy that will certainly take years to fix, he’s shown little inclination to create any programs that target black joblessness.

Of course, Obama continues to poll high among those key constituencies. But he isn’t on the ballot, and the voters who put him over the top in 2008 haven’t seen enough difference in their own lives to make the connection between the president’s success and the success of his party in the midterms.

The Democratic Party realizes this is a problem – and it plans to spend $50 million to get those new Obama voters to return to the polls come November.

Still, I wish ACORN was around to help because voting shouldn’t just be about putting a particular party in power, but about helping marginalized people realize their own power to hold all politicians – Obama included – accountable.

I also wish they’d vote because it’s disturbing to hear right-wing pundits continue to paint Obama’s election as an anomaly – because what they’re really saying to white politicians is that without Obama’s name on the ballot, they never have to worry about black folks voting again.

That alone ought to be enough to make black people mad. Mad enough to prove them wrong.”

Takoma Park

They come at the problem from the perspective of moving from a paper world to a more modern technological means in tune with modern society.  However they get there is fine with me as long as we get there.  The key to me is that we start, like other world democracies, to automatically register citizens rather than making them run through a registration maze and end up disenfranchised.

According to the Weekly Standard…

“Elias and Potter are emphatic that their initiative is not a federal takeover of state-run elections. Rather, federal data — like the selective service list, or immigration lists, or social security lists — will be resources that states could use to automatically register eligible voters. Then, voters can opt-out of the system if they do not wish to be registered — “the presumption is you’re in, not out,” says Elias.”

I don’t know that I understand the whole idea of “opting” out of being a registered voter any more than I could understand how one could opt out of the tax system or citizenship.  Seems like to me that if you are a citizen, then you are a registered voter and that the “opting” out comes, as it does now, with the exercise of the franchise.  I think voting ought to be mandatory, too, but we can argue about that later.  Let’s at least finally give EVERYONE the right to vote automatically, and we are in way better shape than we are in America now.

The unfinished job emerged as glaringly in the facts and figures embedded in the piece by Sam Roberts.  The need for a system that automatically registers citizens as voters and demands more accessible, if not mandatory, voting as other countries practice is also starkly apparent.

Look at these two points from the Census Bureau’s survey and join me in worrying about them because of the severe challenge they pose to any semblance of democracy in America:

“Of the 206 million citizens 18 and older, 71 percent were registered to vote. Among those who were registered, 90 percent voted in 2008.”

Wow!  90% participation of registered voters – that’s unbelievable!  But, only 71% registered?  That’s shamefully embarrassing and shouting for change.

And for the 10% that did not vote:

“Over all, 18 percent of nonvoters said they were too busy, 15 percent said they were prevented because of an illness or disability and 13 percent each said they were not interested or did not like the candidates or issues.”

Too busy, I bet is another way of saying, “I was working,” and we could deal with that, too.

If we really wanted to make this work, it would not be too hard to fix.  Makes me wonder, why we don’t step up and fix this thing, rather than ranting and raving, moaning and groaning.