The Democratic Piece

For those waiting with baited breath for the results of Saturday’s presidential vote in Zimbabwe -

Keep waiting. In the meantime, the Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN) released a press statement this afternoon with the results of its Sample Based Observation - essentially a parallel vote tabulation by a more regime-acceptable name - based on officially posted results from a random sample of polling stations, weighted to account for the country’s urban/rural divide. ZESN is a group of 38 domestic civil society organizations in Zimbabwe, which has monitored elections and conducted democracy-building activites in the country since 2000.

The SBO results show opposition candidate Morgan Tsvangirai of the MDC in the lead with 49.4% of the vote, coming out ahead of 28-year ruler Robert Mugabe with 41.8%. Simba Makoni, a recent challenger within Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party, comes in a distant third with 8.2%.

ZESN’s numbers indicate that a fair and accurate official vote count will lead to a run-off between Mr. Tsvangirai and Mr. Mugabe, as neither appears to have managed to capture greater than 50% of the vote. Whether or not the official election results (still unreleased by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission at the time of this posting) will reflect the monitors’  findings remains to be seen.

ZESN’s statement should be available online soon at www.zesn.org.zw. It does not reference results for the simultaneously-held local or parliamentary elections.

We are holding a symposium on Thursday called Assessing the State of Democracy in America: Is This the Best We Can Be?

Panelists from the academic, democracy promotion and U.S. political reform communities will discuss current work by Freedom House on American democracy, the presidential nominating system and what types of political reform the next administration should champion.

Keynote: Tom Melia, Freedom House

Panelists:
Algernon Austin, Economic Policy Institute
Patrick Basham, Democracy Institute/Cato Institute
Doug Chapin, electionline.org/Pew Charitable Trusts
Ryan O’Donnell, Common Cause
Rob Richie, FairVote
Mark Rom, Georgetown Public Policy Institute

Moderators:
Dan Brumberg, Georgetown Democracy & Governance
Barak Hoffman, Center for Democracy and Civil Society

Join us at the Carnegie Endowment off Dupont Circle on April 3 from 9:00 a.m. until 12:00 p.m. Come a little earlier for continental breakfast.

For more information and the RSVP address, see the listing on Georgetown’s site.

Via Richard Winger, Mike Gravel has joined the Libertarian Party.

On the face of it, this is odd from a guy, ostensibly left of center, who nominally sought the Democratic nomination just months ago.

Then again, Gravel’s self-interest calculation probably has shifted to long-term instrumental. The Dems having rejected him, he has to seek voice through other channels. One is electoral reform. Closely related, another is a minor party. If one wants to effect reform or party-building, one should join a relatively viable organization. That gives him a choice between the LP and Greens. In that case, this is not so odd.

On February 1, the National Republican Congressional Committee revealed “irregularities” in its accounting practices. Wachovia Bank, which had made a $9 million loan to the NRCC in 2006, was notified and the FBI called in to investigate. Over the past four years, it was discovered, the NRCC treasurer Christopher J. Ward had funneled as much as $1 million of the NRCC’s funds to other political committees and, perhaps, campaign accounts; “dozens” of which he oversaw as treasurer. How was this permitted to happen?

According to the Federal Elections Commission’s rules, summarized in this Post article, “Campaign committees are not required by law to perform an internal audit each year… But most corporations and large campaign committees do perform regular reviews to ensure their numbers match the reports they file with the FEC.” Reporting inaccurate numbers to the FEC is, indeed, a violation of FEC rules and so punishable by fine.

Recognizing that under these rules organizations with sound accounting practices could be penalized due to the illegal actions of an individual staff member, the FEC issued a “Statement of Policy” in May 2007 entitled: “Safe Harbor for Misreporting Due to Embezzlement.” This document proposes a set of guidelines that, if followed, could absolve organizations of liability for inaccurate reporting. The guidelines are mostly commonsensical in nature, suggesting for example that bank accounts be opened in the organization’s name and that no single individual both “[receive] incoming checks and [monitor] all other incoming receipts.”

Bresnahan and O’Conner write at Politico that Rob Kelner, a lawyer hired by the NRCC to oversee its internal investigation, “admitted that the NRCC — which had not done a legitimate financial audit since 2001 — lacked some of the basic internal financial controls laid out by the FEC. Instead, he said, Ward was solely responsible for tracking much of the money that flowed through the committee.” Under Representatives Tom Davis and Thomas Reynolds, the NRCC relaxed other regulations, including a requirement that the executive committee sign off on expenditures exceeding $10,000.

The decision to reduce regulatory oversight was undoubtedly driven by the desire to increase electoral competiveness. With financial controls resting in the hands of a single individual, money could be rapidly disbursed to needy campaigns. Of course, this advantage comes with disadvantages that Christopher J. Ward, buoyed by his penchant for creative art (i.e. forging audit documents), was able to exploit.

New NRCC Chairman Tom Cole, claiming “we were the victims here,” hopes that the FEC will be swayed by the NRCC’s efforts to come clean and refrain from slapping the NRCC with a harsh fine. I beg to differ, not because I’m not a Republican, but because regulation – enforcement of the rules of the game – is what makes the U.S. political system function as well as it does (or as poorly, if you want to be negative about it). The NRCC tried to gain an electoral advantage – against the FEC’s recommendations – and got burned by one of their own good ole’ boys, resulting in the NRCC’s violation of FEC rules. “I told you so” should be the refrain of the FEC.

On a final note, Cleta Mitchell, a campaign finance lawyer for a number of Republican campaign committees, remarked of the people at the NRCC: “They’re not businesspeople… They won’t spend a dime on management.” Does Ms. Mitchell know that she’s working for the party of “small government?”

Tensions are rising in Zimbabwe ahead of Saturday’s presidential elections. For those of us who have not been following (and I wasn’t until Tom Melia gave each member of our class ZWD$10,000,000 - for use before June 30th only), Zimbabweans will go to the polls to choose between three candidates in what will hopefully be the country’s most free and fair elections to date. The favorite, of course, still has to be Robert Mugabe, who has led the governing party, Zanu-PF, since the 1980s. Per Freedom House, 2006 was a bad year for opponents of Mugabe, who faced increasing repression, and Zimbabweans altogether, whose economy has rendered my ZWD$10,000,000 worth little more than 30 cents - and that only temporarily.

But the Zimbabwean political terrain has undergone some interesting changes over the past few weeks. Simba Makoni, a former finance minister and member of the Zanu-PF politburo, recently announced that he will run against Mugabe in the presidential election. Makoni has the support of a sizable faction within Zanu-PF, and it remains to be seen how this very public split in the party will impact not only the elections, but the future capacity of the party to maintain a united facade.

Meanwhile, as Mugabe remains preoccupied with Makoni, Morgan Tsvangirai and the MDC have found more room to manuever. Tsvangirai supporters have been wearing campaign t-shirts, illegal in the past, and have been carrying neat little flyers that fold into little red cards that symbolize the ejection of Mugabe from the political pitch. As the BBC profile link above clearly suggests, Tsvangirai is no George Washington. However, the hope is that he’s no Robert Mugabe either and that the balance of competition between MDC and Zanu-PF will compel Zimbabwean politicians to be more accountable for their actions.

Whether or not the elections will be allowed to run their course is another unknown. Events over the past week suggest that Mugabe may be preparing to save his presidency the old-fashioned way. Yesterday, the MDC accused the government of printing 3 million excess ballots and over 600,000 mail-in ballots for just a few thousand soldiers and police officers who work away from home. Today, an MDC candidate and his adviser were arrested while picking up campaign materials.

The likelihood of a candidate gaining a majority in Saturday’s vote appear slim, so we could be headed for a runoff. It’s going to be a long next week in Zimbabwe and it could be a very long election season.

I have some photos online. They are from a recent trip to Italy. It happily coincided with local elections and national campaigns leading up to April 13, 2008.

Some highlights: prominent graffiti, social and ideological cleavages, localism, relative messaging strategies and the adoption of themes like “security” and “yes, we can.” Berlusconi’s characterization of “the left” is especially interesting in light of how Prodi’s government fell. (Good photos of that at Spiegel Online.)

Thanks to Nick S. for the camera work.

Update: To see the captions, don’t view in slide show mode.

Santa Fe, NM voters on March 4 overwhelmingly approved instant runoff voting for municipal elections. The margin was 65-35.

A charter amendment for public financing also won, but the margin there was only 61.4-38.6.

Most people adhere to the “never gonna happen” theory of electoral systems reform. In relative terms, the public financing movement (aka “clean elections”) receives boatloads of cash annually. Yet here’s an example of how the impossible - changing the voting system - can be more popular than the slightly less impossible - “getting the money out of politics.”

Here’s a list of who uses/will/wants to use IRV. In 2002, San Francisco was the only jurisdiction on that list.

I don’t know the comparable list for public financing. Anyone?

Monday’s revelation that New York Governor Elliot Spitzer was a customer of a high-class prostitution ring, and his subsequent resignation, has raised once again the issue of politicians’ sense of immunity to law and societal norms.  It is not just in the United States, where politicians solicit sex in public restrooms and harass underage congressional pages, that uncouth and illegal behavior on the part of those responsible for making the laws bedevils the political system.  N.R. Kleinfeld’s article in the New York Times points out that power and sex go hand-in-hand, and that the fickle nature of democratic politics attracts particular personality types that thrive in democracy’s high-risk atmosphere.   So how should the U.S. address this problem? 

The purpose of a democratic political system is to engender conduct that is mutually accepted by political actors within a given society.  This occurs through the provision of incentives and disincentives that limit bad behavior and encourage good behavior.    Where a particular activity is illicit and enforceable (without exception), citizens have a disincentive to perform such an activity. 

In the United States, where adultery is not illegal, the formal rules of the political system offer little help in promoting sexual responsibility among members of congress.  One’s sexual life is typically regarded as a private matter and, indeed, it would have been unconstitutional to impeach President Clinton for having sex with Monica Lewinsky.  While adultery is not illegal per the Constitution, it defies the norms of acceptable behavior and often causes politicians to break the law.  The Lewinsky scandal is instructive of the illegal behaviors (lying under oath) to which politicians will resort in order to save face in the ‘court of public opinion.’    

Adultery, thus, is not illegal because the US Government cannot dictate how one may act in private.  However, it has a negative impact on the political system by causing people to lose faith in their representatives as well as their political parties.   In a recent speech at Duke University, Karl Rove cited the Republican Party’s manifold corruption scandals – and not the Iraq War – as the reason for the Democrats’ success in the 2006 congressional elections.   The revelation of a politician’s extramarital affairs and the corrupt behaviors that may accompany also damage the political parties.  Not all of these scandals had a sexual component, but what they do have in common is the insidious belief of the politicians involved that they would not be held accountable for their actions.  Clearly, the present structure of incentives is not doing the trick.

The Republicans and/or Democrats can combat corrupt behavior by adopting internal codes of conduct that provide real incentives and disincentives to promote good behavior.  Just as both parties penalized states that broke party rules by revoking some or all of these states’ delegates to their national conventions, so too can parties leverage their resources against members who break party rules.  Elected officials who hurt the party image by, for example, having extramarital affairs, can be docked funding from the parties’ campaign committees.  Or, those who engage in corruption while in office or in official party positions can be banned from the party.  There are many options in terms of the shapes that these rules can take and the penalties they can impose.

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Mandated by Congress, this year’s assessment of human rights in the countries, territories, etc. of the world by the U.S. Department of State was released yesterday.  Country reports can be accessed here.

A little constructive criticism is always useful.

From the Helsinki Commission, 3/7/2008:
HELSINKI CO-CHAIRS HASTINGS AND CARDIN CALL FOR US TO STEP UP EFFORTS TO END RACIAL DISCRIMINATION

(Washington, D.C.) Today, Congressman Alcee L. Hastings (D-FL), Chairman of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (U.S. Helsinki Commission) and Co-Chairman Senator Benjamin L. Cardin (D-MD), responded to a decision released by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). The Commission says the United States must do more to eradicate racial discrimination and address racial disparities.

“The civil rights struggle and the resulting changes in this country have often served as a model for other nations. At a time when hate crimes and discrimination are on the rise, we are making a mockery of the gains of the civil rights movement by backtracking on initiatives that address racial disparities. This is a global struggle, and the U.S. must do more and set a better example abroad,” said Chairman Hastings.

CERD is charged with periodically reviewing the performance of the 173 countries that have signed and ratified the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. 18 independent experts make up CERD, including a U.S. representative. The U.S. appeared before the body on February 22 and 23. CERD’s decision on the United States was released earlier today.

“It is incredibly important that the United States appeared before the UN in line with our treaty obligations, but our commitment cannot stop there. We must continue to take actions that correct the historical injustices that have unfairly disadvantaged minorities in this country and address new challenges that arise today in our growing population,” said Co-Chairman Cardin.

CERD called on the U.S. government to increase efforts to address discrimination and disparities in housing, education, health, and the criminal justice system impacting racial minorities. It also called for the U.S. to improve efforts to return Katrina victims to their homes and support existing laws and programs aimed at redressing past injustices.

Full report here.