From West by Northwest.org Voices of the Northwest Sadler's Sense: A Snapshot of Electorial Politics and Power in Oregon By Russell Sadler Aug 25, 2006 August 23, 2006 No one really believes state election law is designed to increase voter participation. Election law is deliberately designed to deliver predictable votes for Republican and Democratic candidates. Anyone else has more hurdles to jump to get on the ballot in the first place. After all, Republicans and Democrats in the Legislature write the election laws. So, it should surprise no one that former Republican legislator and West Linn attorney Kelly Clark made a formal complaint against the Constitution Party. Clark claims that the party did not follow proper procedure in nominating their gubernatorial candidate, Mary Starrett. He wants her removed from the ballot. In a complaint filed with the State Elections Division, Clark charges the Constitution Party failed to publish notices of its nominating convention in newspapers of “general circulation” at least 10 days before it occurred in June. Apparently officials of the Constitution Party published the required notices 10 days before the county meetings at which delegates to the June Convention were chosen. These notices once had a purpose. Published notice of a nominating convention is designed to prevent a small clique from taking over a party and perpetuating itself by nominating candidates in obscurely scheduled meetings. In the Age of the Internet, demographically fragmented media audiences and plunging newspaper circulation, however, the concept of reaching people with newspapers of “general circulation” is increasingly obsolete. Clark has provided no evidence the Constitution Party deliberately evaded the notice requirement. On the contrary, when rumors that Starrett, a former television anchor and anti-abortion activist, might become the Constitution Party’s nominee, the June 3 convention got far more advance publicity that it would have if less well-known candidates had been involved. So what’s really going on here? Oregon Republicans have grudgingly nominated Ron Saxton, their first business-oriented candidate in many elections. Saxton has some chance of winning the votes of independents and Democrats. That is crucial to any Republican, because their party only represents about one-third of the state’s registered voters. A Republican needs every Republican vote and substantial crossover voters. In recent years, Republican candidates for governor -- Kevin Mannix, Bill Sizemore, et al -- have been too extreme or unqualified to attract the crucial crossover vote. A more traditional business-oriented Republican who can win the crossover vote, often can’t hold the vote of the “social conservative” Republicans who believe in black or white choices. No shades of gray for them. If any significant number of far right Republicans cast their ballots for a splinter party candidate, the Democrat wins, often by a plurality. That’s what happened to Republican Dave Frohnmayer in 1991. Al Mobley, a Christian Nationalist and anti-abortion activist ran as a third party candidate and Democrat Barbara Roberts won the governor’s race with less than 50 percent of the vote. The Saxton campaign says it knew nothing about the challenge to the Constitution Party’s nomination of Starrett. I’m inclined to believe that. Clark has become Oregon’s “designated hit man” for national, not state, Republicanå interests. Clark has been a reliable Oregon attorney for national social conservative issues like abortion. He was the attorney challenging Multnomah County’s effort to file marriages for homosexuals which national Republicans wanted to use to “stir up their base.” Who is financing Clark? We’ll never know for sure. National Republican interests launder their contributions through sympathetic “educational” organizations that do not have to disclose their contributors. Then these organizations pay Clark who hides their identities behind “attorney-client confidentiality.” This is a deliberate evasion of disclosure laws. Its legality is a gray area even black and white Republicans appreciate. Call it “funnel-the-money.” So what will happen? If the Elections Division follows precedent, they will hold that the Constitution Party inadvertently failed to follow the proper procedure for notice of a nominating convention. This is a civil violation and the party will be fined. It is unlikely the Elections Division will overturn the results of the party’s convention because there is no evidence of deliberate evasion. That will not be enough for Clark. He will go to court and demand that Starrett’s name be removed or her results not be counted. Republicans are busily transforming our election laws. For decades they were interpreted broadly to insure that voters choices were recognized and properly recorded even if it took elections officials extra effort. Now Republicans want narrow, legalistic interpretations when it suits their interests. They want to disqualify candidates and voters before votes are cast. They want narrow interpretations that refuse to count ballots after they are cast. Since the 2000 presidential election, the Republicans have learned that is how to win elections without necessarily having a majority of votes. August 18, 2006 Independent Ben Westlund’s exit from the governors race is variously getting the horse race, celebrity or cutesy treatment. From the start, Westlund’s candidacy was subjected to the horse race treatment that has become the unsatisfying standard of political journalism, as in “He-can’t-win-but-who-will-he-take-support-from-and-who-might-win-as-a-result.” The celebrity treatment included the inevitable article on “What-will-the-State-Senator-who-recovered-from-cancer-surgery-in 2003-do-now?” It’s a good heart-tugging yard, but does little to illuminate the consequences of Westlund’s withdrawal from this year’s governor’s race. The cutesy treatment is summed up in an Oregonian columnist’s headline, “Ben Quixote: The Windmills Win Again.” Westlund is not Don Quixote. Dismissing Westlund’s independent candidacy as quixotic deliberately marginalizes the threat he represented to entrenched political interests and the voters who rallied to him. Westlund’s independent candidacy threatened the established Republican and Democratic parties. Neither party is a majority party any longer. Both parties represent a dwindling percentage of registered voters. The Oregon Legislature responded by passing a law prohibiting voters who cast ballot in either party’s primary from signing nominating petitions for any independent candidate. Any Republican or Democrat who is unhappy with their party’s nominee is prohibited from participating in the nomination of an independent candidate. Westlund’s candidacy also threatened the lobbyists for interest groups that have hijacked Oregon initiative process and turned it into a private, parallel form of shadow government that bypasses the constitutional system of checks and balances imposed on the Legislature. These interest groups, now organized as the grandly misnamed “Tax Coalition,” no longer represent Oregon interests. They are thinly-disguised, wholly-owned subsidiaries of national interests, like Movement Conservatism’s Freedom Works and scandal-tainted Grover Norquist’s American’s for Tax Reform.” Their Oregon subsidiaries are astroturf. Their agenda and finances come from the national organizations or money from a handful of wealthy Oregon conservatives whose identities and contributions are conveniently laundered through Norquist’s organization. Any resurgence of independent Oregon political leadership threatens the effort of this shadow government to impose their national agenda on Oregon through the initiative process. This shadow government has also discovered that while the Oregon Legislature is constitutionally prohibited from deficit spending, the voters exercising the initiative are not. Thus the voters can pass initiatives requiring new spending that suits the shadow government while the Legislature cannot. The Legislature no longer controls Oregon’s purse strings. The shadow government controls spending by manipulating the initiative. The voters who were rallying to Westlund’s candidacy included the deliberately disenfranchised independents and disenchanted Republicans and Democrats who hold more moderate opinions that the dwindling members of their respective parties. The cynical manipulation of the registration process for independent candidates has infuriated these voters. Arguably, Ron Saxton, with his inexperience and narrow base of support in the Portland metropolitan area, would not be on the November ballot if he had been forced to follow the same laborious, contribution-sapping process of collecting qualifying signatures arbitrarily imposed on Westlund. Saxton simply signed up for the Republican primary with its easy access to the ballot, beat an opponent with a record as a loser and is the party’s nominee in November. This deliberate discrimination infuriates independents and other who are not satisfied with the nominees of the Republican and Democratic parties. Frustrated by a closed primary system that deliberately prevents them from influencing the candidates presented to them in November elections, these independents have stayed away from the polls in frustration in recent years. The response of the partisans is to dismiss independents as “people who just can’t make up their minds,” which just alienates them further from the existing political system. Westlund withdrew, I suspect, for the reasons he stated publicly. He wanted to win, not be a spoiler for one side or the other. Polls suggest the Legislature’s manipulation of independent candidates was successful. Westlund ran out of time and money trying to qualify for the ballot rather than campaigning for office on the issues he thought important. The consequences of Westlund’s withdrawal means that the issues he and his supports thought serious -- Oregon Republicans’ practice of borrow and spend, the lobbyists who have hijacked the initiative and turned it into a private, parallel form of shadow government, the bitter and excessive partisanship that has paralyzed the Legislature in recent years, school finance, tax reform, a new direction for the state -- will simply not be discussed -- again. With these issues unresolved, Oregon government will continue to drift, leaderless, rudderless, buffeted this way and that at the whims of the shadow government and the initiatives that buy their way onto the ballot. Those are not quixotic consequences. Copyright ©2006 by Russell Sadler Russell Sadler is a journalist and a lecturer at Southern Oregon University. You may write him c/o publisher at westbynorthwest.org. 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