“I have seen the future, and it works,” remarked the Californian, Lincoln Steffens, after returning from the post-Revolution Soviet Union. Of course, he was overwhelmingly
“The Secretary of State’s Office is comprised of nearly 500 people who are dedicated to making government more transparent and accessible in the areas of
Crossposted on New Geography You may have heard the old joke about the convenience store with a neon sign blaring, “Open 24 Hours”. A customer
“I just got too involved in my work and family to know what was going on,” said Maria, a retired LA County employee and 33-year
Crossposted on City Journal Recent reports on two high-profile California projects—a historic piece of climate-change legislation and the proposed construction of a statewide, high-speed rail
As
he struggled during an interview on KPCC to
defend his fellow Democrats’ recent assaults on California’s initiative
process, Assemblyman Mike Gatto (D – Burbank, Glendale, Silver lake) blurted
out that the conversation with Republican Assemblyman Don Wagner (R – Irvine)
was becoming a "strange segment with a Republican sounding like a Democrat, and
a Democratic representative sounding like a Republican." The insinuation was
that the state’s Republicans have generally dismissed the public’s involvement
at the ballot box, while Democrats have upheld the virtues of initiative and
referendum.
Gatto’s
appraisal is disingenuous, of course: California Democrats have been remarkably consistent over the last several
years in their endeavors to curb participation in the initiative and referendum
system. Several of their current constraining efforts are warmed over ideas
from Democrats past. I wrote recently on
these pages about
Democratic Senator Ellen Corbett’s attempt to restrict signature gathering to
hourly employees or volunteers – SB 168.
This was the Democrats’ fourth bite at this apple,
with Corbett’s earlier attempt in 2010 (SB 34) falling to Governor
Schwarzenegger’s pen, then-Senator Debra Bowen’s (now Secretary of State) SB
1047 failing to make it out of committee in 2006, and then-Assemblyman Mark
Leno’s AB 2946 falling to veto that same year.
Meet
Claudia McKinney: paid-by-the-hour signature gatherer in Washington state.
Ostensibly, Claudia is the kind of person, Sen. Ellen Corbett’s (D-San Leandro)
SB 168 is meant to
support here in California. A fair judge of human nature, Sen. Corbett believes
that the current "payment per signature" system in California (and most states)
incentivizes the submission of fraudulent signings. The claim is one of those
that makes sense, but is not backed up by national data.
Supported
by Secretary of State Debra Bowen and a number of unions, SB 168 sits on
Governor Brown’s desk awaiting his signature. Please Governor Brown, don’t sign
it. Or at least before you do, call up Washington’s Secretary of State, Sam
Reed, and your old buddy, Joe Trippi.
Just four months ago in Olympia, Washington,
McKinney, was convicted of "felony initiative fraud" and
ordered to serve 160 hours of community service and pay fines. Last fall,
McKinney – paid by the hour – was getting signatures for an income tax proposition,
which Washingtonians turned down at the ballot box in November. After submitting her signature sheets,
elections officials quickly noticed that hundreds of signings were in the same
pen, in the same style. Investigations by Secretary Reed’s office and the
Washington State Patrol confirmed that McKinney had, in fact, submitted over
300 fraudulent signatures.
Cross-posted at CityJournal.
For decades, most Angelenos have known that something was not quite right in Vernon. A 5.2-square-mile city situated in the southern shadows of downtown Los Angeles, a scant few miles from the now infamous Southland cities of Bell and Maywood, Vernon is a company town—or, rather, a companies town. At last count, 1,800 businesses had operations in Vernon, employing over 55,000 people in mostly blue-collar jobs. Yet the city has just 97 residents. A larger, more engaged populace might possibly have prevented Vernon’s public officials from committing a shocking amount of malfeasance recently. The city manager, Bruce Malkenhorst, pleaded guilty in May to illegal use of public funds after investigators for the L.A. County district attorney found that he’d received more than $60,000 in city funds for personal use and was drawing the state’s highest pension (over $500,000 per year). Malkenhorst’s plea followed the 2009 conviction of Vernon’s mayor, Leonis Malburg, for voter fraud. Donal O’Callaghan, the city’s top administrator until mid-2010, was indicted in October for illegally putting his wife’s company on the city payroll. And the city council recently voted to continue receiving salaries of around $70,000 per member per year—nearly the highest in the state.
This is a shortened
version of an essay that appeared originally at The
American.
H. L. Mencken once said, "A newspaper is a device for making the
ignorant more ignorant, and the crazy crazier." The "Sage of Baltimore" knew whereof
he spoke, having infuriated many over four decades’ writing for the Baltimore Sun. From the invention of the
printing press to the advent of the web, the direction of communication from
writer to reader was essentially a one-way street. Now, the more creative
publishers are taking advantage of the Internet’s interactivity to develop
civic engagement tools that both educate and solicit the informed "voice" of
their readers. Because municipal governments have undertaken similar efforts,
relative strengths and weaknesses of government vs. newspaper-hosted online
engagement are emerging.