By John Nichols
Published June 8th 2006 in The Nation
No one who paid close attention to the last two presidential
elections can doubt that, come election time, secretaries of state play
pivotal, sometimes defining, roles. Though most Americans would be
hard-pressed to name the holder of the office that manages elections in
their home state, after 2000 everyone knew that Secretary of State
Katherine Harris was in charge of deciding who voted and whose votes
counted in Florida. And after 2004 everyone knew that Secretary of State
Ken Blackwell was doing similar duty in Ohio. These two "down ballot"
officials served as co-chairs for George W. Bush's campaign in their
respective states, but the real "service" they performed for the Republican
cause came in what critics have identified as their aggressive manipulation
of voting registration standards, unequal distribution of voting machines,
intimidation of prospective voters and meddling with recount procedures to
favor Bush.
The Ohio voting and vote-counting debacles of 2004 so unsettled Mark
Ritchie, who coordinated that year's nonpartisan National Voice
voter-registration and -mobilization campaign, that the veteran activist
decided to leave the sidelines and jump into the electoral fray. Ritchie
left his job as president of the Minneapolis-based Institute for
Agriculture and Trade Policy, one of the largest nonprofit organizations in
the country promoting sustainable development and rural communities, and
announced he would mount a Democratic challenge to Mary Kiffmeyer,
Minnesota's Republican secretary of state, with whom he had sparred over
voter registration and access to polling places. Recalling the work he'd
done as head of the 2004 coalition that registered 5 million new voters,
Ritchie said, "Although we were very successful, we had to overcome
obstacles created by the secretary of state's offices in Ohio, Florida and
right here in Minnesota. Through this experience it became clear to me that
we could not have fully free and fair elections under our current secretary
of state."
Ritchie is not the only prominent figure to make a career change in order
to run for a post on a platform that promises to manage voting and
elections--a task that in most of the country falls to elected secretaries
of state--in a manner that helps rather than hinders democracy. Debra
Bowen, a California state senator who as chair of the elections committee
led the fight to force firms that produce high-tech voting
machines--especially the controversial Diebold Corporation--to guarantee
that their equipment is reliable and accurate, just won the Democratic nod
for secretary of state. As the progressive San Francisco Bay Guardian
observed in its endorsement of Bowen. "She's saying what few in politics
want to openly admit: It's possible to rig elections with this gear, and
there aren't enough safeguards to prevent fraud." In Ohio, Franklin County
Common Pleas Court Judge Jennifer Brunner resigned her position to mount a
campaign that pledges to end the politicization of the secretary of state's
office that has characterized Blackwell's tenure. Brunner says she'll work
to assure that vote counts can be audited and verified, to enforce laws
against voter intimidation and to distribute new voting machines equally in
order to break the pattern of favoring GOP-leaning suburbs while saddling
cities and rural areas with inferior equipment.
In Massachusetts, National Voting Rights Institute founder John Bonifaz,
who led the legal fight for a full recount in Ohio two years ago, surprised
political insiders by winning enough votes at this month's state Democratic
convention to earn a place on the ballot for his against-the-odds
Democratic primary challenge to veteran Secretary of State William Galvin.
Urging voters to "elect a voting rights leader," Bonifaz accuses Galvin of
failing to fight for common-sense election reforms, such as same-day voter
registration and practices that encourage participation by citizens for
whom English is not their first language. He says he wants to "create a
model for free and fair elections for Massachusetts and for the nation."
What links the new crop of candidates for secretary of state posts is a
determination to address rather than exploit the vulnerabilities of
electoral systems and a faith that, by replacing predictable partisans with
"champions for democracy," to borrow Ritchie's slogan in Minnesota, the
oft-neglected office of secretary of state can be transformed into an
activist position--much as New York's Eliot Spitzer remade the image and
operations of the down-ballot position of state attorney general. Ritchie
says that when he began pondering a run, he thought his opponent would be
the Republican incumbent. After several months on the campaign trail,
however, he says that the real fight is with "the cynicism and alienation"
born of uncertainty about whether every vote counts and whether candidates
who get the most votes will actually take office. "We've got to overcome
that cynicism and alienation if we ever want to restore faith in
democracy," says Ritchie. "That's something that the right secretaries of
state can do, one state at a time, until ultimately we've created the
pressure that's needed so that the whole country accepts that we must make
elections free and fair."