One Month to "Claim
Democracy Conference"
October 24, 2003
Greetings!
Have you ever wondered why more people don't
vote?
Are you hoping more people vote in the 2004 elections?
Would you like to get to the bottom of the controversy over
the security of new touchscreen voting equipment?
Are you
amazed at how much money candidates spend in elections -- and
wondering how that affects political equality?
Would you like
to see more candidates and legislators who reflect our diversity of
opinion, racial background and gender?
Are you surprised that
our Constitution does not affirm the right to vote -- and that
more than four million Americans cannot vote due to felony
convictions, more than a half million American citizens in the
District of Columbia are governed by a legislative body where
they have no voting representative and as many as six million
Americans did not cast a valid vote for president in 2000 despite
seeking to do so?
Are you wondering if anything can be done
to challenge the growing crisis of power-grabs and incumbent
protection in legislative redistricting?
Would you like to
see Ralph Nader debate the merits of multi-party democracy, Rep.
Jesse Jackson, Jr. make the case for a right-to-vote in the
Constitution, Marie Wilson showcase the importance of electing more
women to high office, Donna Brazile talk about voter turnout in the
upcoming elections, and Sen. Chris Dodd explain steps needed to
modernize ballot-counting?
Would you like to roll up your
sleeves and dig deep into reform workshops on topics like election
day registration, campaign finance reform, instant runoff voting,
fusion, full representation, voting equipment and practical advice
for starting and running state and local reform
organizations?
Would you like to talk one-on-one with
representatives of our nation's leading pro-democracy
organizations?
Then....
Please come help claim
democracy! My organization, the Center for Voting and Democracy, has
joined with a broad coalition of the nation's pro-democracy
organizations to organize a major conference entitled "Claim
Democracy: Securing, Enhancing and Exercising the Power of the Right
to Vote." The conference will take place at the Washington, D.C.
Convention Center on the weekend of November 22-23, 2003 with a
pre-conference gathering on the evening of November 21at the nearby
Washington College of Law.
We've just updated the agenda on
our conference website, and are excited about the remarkable array
of state and national reform leaders who will be speaking and the
wide range of topics to be addressed. Please see the full agenda
at: http://www.democracyusa.org/events/conference.html
For
those attending the conference and for those in the Washington, D.C.
area, I also would like to urge you to attend a dinner to "Celebrate
Democracy" on the evening of Saturday, November 22. Jointly
sponsored by our Center for Voting and Democracy and by Common
Cause, the dinner will feature presentations by Chellie Pingree of
Common Cause and John Anderson of the Center for Voting and
Democracy, awards to leading figures in the pro-democracy movement and remarks about reform and the 2004 elections by Hendrik
Herzberg, the stylish senior editor of the New Yorker
Magazine.
If you're planning to come to our conference and/or
the dinner, don't delay in registering. The earlybird rate for
registrants ends on October 31 -- just one week from today. The room
block of low-rate hotel rooms at a nearby hotel ends a week
later. Visit www.democracyusa.org for all the
details.
A REQUEST: HELP FUND CVD WITH YOUR VOTE - TODAY!
We are honored to be one of the fifty organizations selected
by the Working Assets long distance phone company for support in
2003. If you are a customer of any Working Assets service, you now
can vote to allocate funds to the Center. If you are not a customer,
you can sign up for long distance, cell phone or credit card
services or by making even a single purchase on the ShopForChange
website. You can then choose to allocate your vote equally among all
50 groups, or you can assign your vote to a fewer number of groups,
or just one. These votes result in a wide range of giving, from
a low of about $35,000 in 2002 to a high of some $150,000. The
Center is listed among groups in the civil rights category. For
information, please see: http://www.fairvote.org/op_eds/workingassets.htm
US SENATE VOTES TO TRIPLE HAVA FUNDING
A
bi-partisan group of U.S. Senators voted yesterday to add $1
billion in funding to the Help America Vote Act to the
Treasury-Transportation appropriations bill (H.R. 2989) for a total
of $1.5 billion. For tracking this critically important effort to
ensure fairer elections in 2004 and beyond, see the website of the
Leadership Conference on Civil Rights electoral reform page at
http://ga3.org/campaign/electionreform_HAVA?email and
at ElectionLine.org -- www.electionline.org
.
RECALL REDISTRICTING: LESSONS FROM TEXAS
The
national media intermittently has zeroed in on Texas this year,
where the newly-dominant Republican Party decided to break from
tradition and impose a new congressional redistricting map less than
two years after the last map was adopted and used. U.S. House
Majority Leader Tom Delay invested an extraordinary amount of time
and energy into this cause, ultimately spending three days huddled
in conference committee with state legislators as they
negotiated a final map. His reason? The new map -- finally
enacted after Democrats thwarted the change with a series of
political maneuvers and two flights from the states by legislators
seeking to break quorum -- should give Republicans up to seven more
seats in the U.S. House. The same voters will turn drastically
different results based on how legislative lines are
drawn.
The Center for Voting and Democracy has tracked the
Texas story closely, writing commentaries for national publications
like the Washington Post and adding articles about developments to
its 50-state public interest guide to redistricting. See links to
these items from www.fairvote.org
The Washington Post
wrote about Texas well in its October 14th lead commentary on "The
Soviet Republic of Texas ." Here's the lead of the editorial
and its conclusion:
<<You might think America's
rigged system of congressional elections couldn't get much worse.
Self-serving redistricting schemes nationwide already have left an
overwhelming number of seats in the House of Representatives so
uncompetitive that election results are practically as preordained
as in the old Soviet Union. In the last election, for example, 98
percent of incumbents were reelected, and the average winning
candidate got more than 70 percent of the vote. More candidates ran
without any major-party opposition than won by a margin of less than
20 percent. Yet even given this record, the just-completed
Texas congressional redistricting plan represents a new low.
... The current Texas House
delegation includes 17 Democrats and 15 Republicans. This balance,
no doubt, is a residue of a time when Democrats were more powerful
in the state than they are today and reflects deliberate
incumbent protection by past legislatures. It also, however,
reflects the fact that some Democratic members have effectively
represented their increasingly conservative districts and remained
popular. The pernicious effect of partisan redistricting in general
is the weakening of the center with the creation of "safe" seats for
both parties -- which encourages the election of people considerably
to the left or right of the state's political center of gravity. Do
Texans really want a polarized delegation of 22 conservative
Republicans and 10 liberal Democrats, as the current plan envisions?
Do they really want a state with a white party and a minority party?
Republican politicians are engineering it that way, whatever voters
may want. For redistricting -- quite the inverse of elections -- is
a process in which politicians get to choose their voters. It is a
process that a healthy democracy would seek to reform.
>>
Here are a two links relating to Texas
redistricting:
- History of the 2003 TX redistricting law
(type in HB3 and click submit) http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/tlo/legislation/bill_status.htm
-
The new congressional map http://www.tlc.state.tx.us/research/redist/redist.htm
CALIFORNIA
RECALL: NOT SO HIGH TURNOUT AFTER ALL
The California recall
dominated politics in the early fall, culminating in voters
rejecting Gov. Gray Davis and voting to replace him with movie star
Arnold Schwarzenegger. The election truly was historic -- Davis is
only the second governor in the nation's history to be recalled --
and the fact that voters handled such a large field of candidates
with general ease shows that they are ready to handle more
choices than some observers would grant them.
But amidst the
ballyhoo about the recall, note one sobering fact: less than
37% of California adults and barely 60% of the state's registered
voters went to the polls. That's hardy the titanic tidal wave
conveyed by some commentary, and shows that we still must engage
with the complicated roots of under-participation in the United
States.
Note further that Schwarzenegger won less than 50%
of the vote. Once taking office next month, Schwarzegger
will join 24 other governors around the country who won one of
their gubernatorial elections with fewer than half the votes --
meaning that theoretically they could be in office only by the fluke of
the majority splitting its vote among other candidates. For a
full report on non-majority rule in America, see http://fairvote.org/plurality/index.html
.
For the Center's take on the recall, see http://www.fairvote.org/californiarecall.htm
I
did a number of radio and television appearance at the time of the
recall, including WBAL-Baltimore, KTAR-Phoenix and CNN
International. Minnesota Public Radio's "Marketplace" program,
distributed by Public Radio International, featured CVD's Steven
Hill in a program on instant runoff voting on October 7, the day of
the recall.
DEMOCRACY BYTES AND LINKS
*
Congress has voted itself a pay raise for the fifthstraight year,
with pay rising more than $20,000 to more than $150,000 a year.
Members of the U.S. House aren't looking over their shoulders,
however. More than 98% of House incumbents have won re-election
since 1996, with a record low of four challengers defeating
incumbents in 2002. See our Center's Monopoly Politics report --http://fairvote.org/2004 -
for why this happens and whether your Member is among more than 350
sure-winners in 2004.
* Canada is one of just three major
democracies that, like the United States, only uses winner-take-all
election to elect its nationally elected representatives. But Fair
Vote Canada - www.fairvotecanada.org - and its
allies are making great inroads to change that. This month, the
Canadian parliament voted on whether to hold a national referendum
to adopt full representatino. With near blanket opposition from the
ruling Liberal Party, the measure lost 145-76, but three of the
country's five mamor parties backed it strongy: the conservative
Canadian Alliance, New Democratic Party and Bloc Quebecois.
Meanwhile, even more activity is moving ahead in the
provinces. The new Liberal Party government in Quebec has
pledged to adopt full representation before the next elections, and
several other provinces are moving that direction. Perhaps the most
intriguing situation is in British Columbia, where a citizen's
assembly has been convened to choose among alternatives and place
one measure on the ballot. For more on this development, see:
http://www.citizensassembly.bc.ca/public
*
Links
- www.ofbyforthepeople.org
The Citizens Convention meets November 2nd in Concord, New Hampshire
in an effort to bring together Republicans, Democrats, independents,
and non-voters in an effort to renew democracy
- www.democracycaravan.org
The Democracy Caravan is travelling the nation talking about the
importance of electoral reforms.
- http://www.charter88.org.uk/pubs/brief/vote_guide.html
Charter 88's guide to electoral systems, prepared as the United
Kingdom continues to move away from winner-take-all
elections
- http://www.rwinters.com/vote
Civic activist Robert Winters tracks
the politics of the this fall's choice voting elections for city
council and school committee in Cambridge (MA)
- http://www.electionworld.org/
Collection of information about elections around the
world.
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The Center for Voting and Democracy is a non-profit
organization based in Washington D.C. It is headed by former
Congressman and presidential candidate John B. Anderson. We are
devoted to increasing public understanding of American politics and
how to reform its rules to provide better choices and fairer representation. Our website (www.fairvote.org) has information on voting
methods, redistricting and voter turnout. As we rely heavily on
individual donations, please consider a contribution by mail
(6930 Carroll Avenue, Suite 610, Takoma Park MD 20910) or on-line at
www.fairvote.org/donate.htm
I hope see you next
month as we claim democracy!
Rob Richie, Executive Director The Center for Voting &
Democracy [email protected], www.fairvote.org
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