The Democratic Piece

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?”

The People’s Governor tonight reaffirmed his reform credentials by vetoing AB 1294 (PDF), which would have let general law municipalities use proportional representation and instant runoff (also known as STV).
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Having followed developments there, I should report that the referendum failed with 37 percent voting in favor.

Fruits & Votes has a good analysis of the vote in the wider contexts of the concomitant provincial election and other, past referenda in Canada. (The provincial Liberals won 66 percent of seats on 42 percent of votes.)

In other words, the systemic factors predicting a reform process in Ontario were always weak. But there was some partisan-interest factor at work for the Liberals. The problems with partisan-interest factors, of course, are that they (1) may make it harder to convince voters who favor other parties to think reform is also good for them, and (2) the very interest-based factors may shift if the party starts doing better…

CA Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last night vetoed two bills on write-in votes and ballot initiatives. One would have provided for counting of write-ins when voters filled out the name field but did not check the write-in box. Another would have restricted who may collect signatures for a ballot measure.

Still on Schwarzenegger’s desk is the AB 1294 local options bill. It would legalize the single transferable vote for use in general law municipalities.

The word is that he also vetoed two others: one letting new citizens register on election day if their naturalization wasn’t complete by the registration deadline, another letting absentee voters drop ballots off at any polling station.

If you’re into the dynamic underbelly of American election administration, Richard Winger’s Ballot Access News would be a great addition to your newsreader.

If anyone’s following, 4,588 of 27,669 polls have reported their results, and MMP is losing 37% to 63%. Here are the unofficial results in real time.

Needless to say, it doesn’t look good.

Thanks to Scott M. for the tip-off at Fruits & Votes. Incidentally, there’s an interesting discussion in the same thread as to whether STV would have fared better with voters. STV came within a point of winning in British Columbia’s 2005 referendum.

Much of the opposition to Ontario’s election reform referendum has centered around the “unaccountable elites” who will occupy list seats. Why didn’t the Citizens’ Assembly opt for a more ostensibly democratic institutional design?
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This is it. By this time tomorrow, Ontario will have decided whether to replace its single-member winner-take-all system with mixed-member proportional representation. It’ll be the second time a Citizens’ Assembly convened, studied the options and recommended a PR alternative. It’ll be the second time a ballot question on PR faced a threshold higher than the vote shares of the single-party governments that stoked interest in reform. Will it be the second time a referendum fails?
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The Boston Globe has an interesting article on the role of bullet voting in Boston local elections.

Four of 13 city council seats are elected at-large. Seeking bullet votes to at-large seats is a semi-effective way for political minorities to marshal citywide support and win seats. As a strategy, bullet voting involves using less than one’s full voting strength. In other words, the voter ‘withholds’ votes from all but the most preferred candidate. Bullet votes seem to be the norm in Boston:

In the last election for Boston City Council, each ballot contained an average of 2.9 votes for at-large seats.

Parts of the article suggest that some view the practice in a negative light. At any rate, there’s a hint of how STV could preserve the benefits of and eliminate many of the problems with bullet voting.

The danger is when voters don’t use one of their votes for a popular candidate they support, gambling that that candidate will win anyway. If enough voters make that same calculation, the candidate could lose.

(In Cambridge’s more complex electoral system, however, mathematicians say there is no value to bullet voting. Voters rank the order of their votes, so their first-choice candidate automatically receives a boost over others they may choose but give lower ranks.)

From 1938 to 1967, Massachusetts cities could adopt proportional representation for local elections. Plan E was one of six state-sanctioned charter formats, this one mandating council-manager government with PR elections and no party primaries.

For the Globe, effective bullet voting has high search and info costs:

But deciding whether you should cast a single ballot for your first-choice candidate, mathematicians say, you have to make strategic judgments about the race and how others will vote. And that requires a sophisticated view of the election.

With PR-STV and Plan E, everybody basically bullet votes. Surplus transfers and eliminations increase one’s likelihood of casting an effective vote absent tortuous calculation about whom to rank first.

In my last post on the upcoming MMP referendum, I highlighted some challenges the ‘yes’ side faces:

1. A threshold of 60% of votes province-wide.

2. At least 50% voting ‘yes’ in each of 60% of ridings.

3. Most voters don’t know what mixed member proportional representation is, and voters who don’t understand a ballot measure generally default to the ‘no’ position.

Canoe.ca has some numbers for us (emphasis mine):

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The referendum about to happen in Ontario is important - and not just because it novelly challenges the hegemony of plurality electoral rules in Anglo-America. It could be a referendum on fairness.
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