"Taxpayer Dollars"It was refreshing to see Sean Parnell’s posting at the Center for Competitive Politics ("CCP"), replying to one here, which acknowledges that the case for public funding can be “respectable”. Parnell takes up the point that the public funding can be, and often is, oversold as potentially “transformative”. A respectable case concedes that this goes too far but insists that there are still good reasons to have public funding as an option: to free willing candidates at least a little from the ardors of fundraising, and to provide seed capital to candidacies that might build successfully on this start-up money but would wither without it.
(2/27/09) Read More Public Financing Reform and Its Evaluators Evaluations of public financing, such as those recently in Florida and Arizona, usually show that the criteria for judging these laws are neither settled nor, in specific cases, consistently applied. The Center for Competitive Politics, for example, which devotes a fair amount of energy to pointing out the problems with “clean elections” laws, tends to dwell on their failure to deliver transformative changes in government.
(2/24/09) Read More 2000-2006 in Election Law: The Pace of Change and the Phases of ReformFollowing are remarks prepared for a University of a Miami Law School Symposium Devoted to the Question: "How Far Have We Come Since 2000?"
2000-2006 in Election Law: The Pace of Change and the Phases of Reform This paper takes the position that little has changed since 2000, and so has everything, in most of the subject areas we put under the label "election law." Election law never moves sure-footedly toward its goals: it adjusts with difficulty to changes in politics and it does not chart or hold a steady course toward one jurisprudential port or the other. We are ceaselessly surprised and never satisfied with its results. And yet it seems that this frustration is caused more than anything else by the measure we choose to take of political reform, by our notions of how progress in reform takes place.
(2/9/09) Read More Lines on the Blog, on the ListserveOver the last couple of days, a question debated on the Hasen blog and on the lisetserv has been the prevalence and—if widespread—the significance of lines of voters waiting too long to vote. Heather Gerken and Ned Foley believe on the strength of election day reports that these lines were a problem; another view, expressed on the listserve, is that the press reports may be overstated, and that voters will gladly stand for lines, within reason, just as they do on other occasions, for other reasons.
(11/19/08) Read More A Further Note on "Appearances" in Election Administration ReformChris Elmendorf and I had an exchange about the goal of strengthening "public confidence" in any election law reform. It seemed that chasing this ghost, as a primary objective, would lead quickly nowhere, and that election reform would produce confidence if confidence was earned--by performance. So far the term "confidence" has shown up to ill effect in the Supreme Court's jurisprudence: it is the easy way out in empowering election officials to adopt "anti-fraud" measures in the absence of any evidence that fraud occurs. But Elmendorf makes the point that the objective of higher public confidence should not be discounted altogether, especially in encouraging the losing side to accept the results.
(11/13/08) Read More Also...Approaches to Reform: Chris Elmendorf on the Problems with the “Federal Fix” Model 11/10/08 After this Election Day, Looking to the Next…. 11/6/08 The Rokita Standard of Public Service 10/29/08 Understanding the Voters—and Respect for Them 10/28/08 McCain and the "Fabric of Democracy" 10/16/08 Vote Suppression and the Daily Call 10/15/08 Now Mum on Caging Plans—But the Silence Tells All 9/25/08 Fraud on the Election Law Listserv 9/19/08 Objections 9/17/08 More from CCP on (Against) Public Financing 9/2/08 |