I have been getting buckets of emails pleading for support for HR-1 which, by the way, I have signed. We need lots of disinfectant for our corrupted government and society but we also need to be very clear about what is wrong. This is a short and quick diary to get closer to the root cause before a new House majority starts real work on HR1’s electorial fixes. So again,

Gerrymandering is not the problem. Neither are “Voter ID” laws or restoring the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These are all band-aids and point solutions that attempt to fix the problem around the edges.

So what is the problem?

Simple. The problem is the elected Office of Secretary of State in each of the 50 states.

How is this so? One of the tasks of the Secretary of State, besides recording things and archiving stuff is the running of elections. They certify the results of elections they set up and manage. They also do the grunt work of re-apportionment. They buy the voting machines. That sounds innocent enough except… It is a partisan office. We have seen this over and over again with the worst being the fiascos in Florida and the outright in-your-face conflict of interest and abject corruption in Georgia. Some states would object that their Secretary of State is a non-partisan office — it says so on the ballot. However, taking CA for example, sure, it is “non-” but everybody knows the party that the person has made their career in. California has had a Democratic SoS for years. There has been a long line of termed-out members of the Assembly who have made a stop in this office as their entry to statewide office. We know what they did in the Assembly and the trail to higher office shows they continued as Democrats once they left “non-” land. It is even more blatant in states like Kansas where Kobach didn’t even drop the fig leaf over his GOP privates. Brian Kemp has made the case in as blatant a manner as possible in Georgia.

As long as we have elections run by a politician, we will have the corruption of elections. It is that simple. Gerrymandering et al are but details.

How about if we try something else? Something the Founding Fathers didn’t have as an example to work from. Remember, we invented the Federal Civil Service in 1883, almost 100 years after Madison and friends wrote the first draft. The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, note the word reform, was put in place to fix the widespread corruption of the “spoils” system where everybody got fired at every change of administrations to make room for a new set of loyalists. Sound familiar?

Well, corruption is back with a vengeance and the soft target is the core mechanism of our democracy, our elections systems.

I propose a completely civil-service run elections system managed by a federal level non-partisan commission. This is not the current “bi-partisan” commissioner model that is shifted every election cycle to reflect the party majorities. They would be long-term civil service members who operate under a strict set of rules. Namely,

It is essential that all employees are, and are seen to be, politically neutral. All staff, both permanent and temporary are required to provide a declaration of political neutrality which is designed to ensure that there is no conflict of interest before they are considered for employment. Having had a party affiliation at some time in the past does not automatically rule someone out but all officials are required to behave neutrally and face instant dismissal if they do not.

The important point, in addition to being totally civil service with its employment and merit procedures behind a legal firewall, is in the last sentence — “behave neutrally and face instant dismissal if they do not”. This is a simple reform. We have had political interference and machine politics skulduggery since our beginning over two centuries ago. It is time to take the party’s toys away from them and have career adults impartially run elections instead.

Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution states:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.

That is how we got State control of elections. All that “State’s Rights” stuff that led to Jim Crow both old and new and the elections scandals past and present. Congress, being a political body run by self-interested politicians, simply threw the responsibility over the wall to the political machines in each state. Some states have had consistently clean records and others have crashed through the bottom of the barrel on a regular basis. But Congress does have the sole authority to change things. They did it with the Voting Rights Act in 1965. They can do it again, this time to fix the problem not apply more lipstick to the pig. Even the Supreme Court hinted at this when it struck down the parts of the Act that singled out Jim Crow states. They said, “make it for all states or no states”. It is time to take them up on their suggestion.

We can do better than the current Federal Elections Commission. It is a toothless, “bi-partisan” eunuch currently in charge of fig leaves. The current FEC was gelded on day one by bipartisanship. Bipartisan is not only still partisan, it also welds on the fixed notion of only two parties. If we want truly and verifiably honest elections, we need all of the people who run them clearly tasked to run professionally honest elections and nothing else without any interference from “interested” parties.

I propose that central to the elections reforms in HR1, Congress create a completely independent replacement for the FEC to do the following:

The federal commission directly controls subsidiary electoral commissions at the state and local level. The state legislatures can still set things up but any deviation from federal standards is not allowed. The federal commission sets the standards. The states implement them. The federal commission approves or rejects their implementation.

Congress defines the parameters. They decide things like whether to use preferential or other voting methods. The federal commission works out the details and supervises the state’s implementations. The power of Congress however stops at this level. Individual members are forbidden to involve themselves in the day-to-day particulars. In other words, if a member or a party wants a change in the election system, they do their job which is to get the rest of the Congress to pass legislation to direct the commission to make the change.

Reapportionment is the sole responsibility of the commission. The federal level establishes the criteria and the states implement the details subject to review by the federal level.

All ballot design, vote counting, election process, and voter registration is uniform and compliant to federal standard.

Every employee from top commissioner to voting station janitor affirms by oath their neutrality as defined above. Failure to do so is cause for immediate dismissal.

Interfering in an election either with the election itself or with and individual’s duty to vote is a federal crime. The case is tried in a federal elections court similar to FISA. Appeals of this court go to the federal appellate and Supreme Court.

I am sure there are other details but these are the high points. Reapportionment is both standardized and conformant nationwide which puts an end to local gerrymandering tricks. Nationwide standards for ballot equipment and ballot papers etc. saves us the embarrassment of Broward County, Florida. If interfering with a person’s vote is a federal crime, it would give pause to party hacks and their handlers to do things like scooping up absentee ballots as we saw in Georgia this year. Loyalty to party or ideology is one thing. Hard federal time is another.

There will be, of course, the objection of “states rights” and other excuses for the sorry mess we have now. However, when the GOP political machine realizes that as we (libtards) make further gains and solidify gains already achieved in “blue” land we too can play the game. It would not be hard to ensure that the GOP, withered as it is in CA (actually the whole of the west coast), stays weak and unable to recover. In other words, the best way for the right to save itself from well deserved retaliatory backlash is to be “bipartisan” and back an independent commission that takes the temptation away from both sides. It is in the GOP’s survival interest to help take this topic off the partisan table.

Those who are familiar with earlier diaries from me might recognize this impossible proposal that has actually worked in such backward countries like Australia. The quote above is directly from the Australian Elections Commission (AEC) web site employment page. You can see that I did a slight edit to their section on Political neutrality half way down the page. Check out the rest of the site and weep — and then get motivated. Our system is corrupt. They saw that decades ago when they prepared for their own independence — and took measures to prevent it.

There is more to say about things that need to change now that we at least have one foot in the door. More later. There are more things that need fixing. We can no longer settle for a band-aid just before we go back to sleep.