NY Progressives Declare Civil War on IDC Dems Working with GOP

The Civil War among Democrats in the New York State Senate is escalating, with Progressive Activists Planning to Call 1,000 Voters in each District of Eight Democratic Senators who have teamed up with Republicans.

The Independent Democratic Conference (IDC) is a Group of Eight Members of the New York State Senate who were Elected as Democrats and are in a Majority Coalition with the Republicans in the Chamber.

The IDC is led by Jeffrey D. Klein (34th District), and also includes: Marisol Alcantara (31st District), Tony Avella (11th District), David Carlucci (38th District), Jesse Hamilton (20th District), Jose Peralta (13th District), Diane Savino (23rd District), and David J. Valesky (53rd District). "IDC" is not a Recognized Political Party in New York State, so Members of the Caucus appear on the Ballot as Democrats, but support the Republican Leadership once Elected.

Democrats Lost Control of the State Senate in the November 2010 Elections, and removed Klein from his Role as their Chief Election Strategist. In 2011, Klein Resigned as the Democrats' Deputy Leader and formed the IDC. Brooklyn Senator Simcha Felder (17th District), who is not a Member of the IDC, also Caucuses with the Republicans, giving the Republican Party the Majority and outright Control of the Chamber.

“Are you aware that your state senator who is up for re-election is aligned with Republicans?” the Robo-Calls will say, according to Arthur Schwartz, Treasurer of the Progressive Action Network.

The Goal of the Campaign is to persuade the Eight Renegades to unify with Mainline Democrats, or Run Primary Challenges to try to Defeat them. “Is this a civil war? I would say so,” Schwartz said.

Ideally, “Round 2” will be targeting Republican Incumbents, he said.

The Six-Week Campaign will Run from Nov. 16th through Jan. 10th.

Democrats are making a push to take back the Senate Majority following big Victories in Tuesday’s Election. But they can’t do so without the Dissidents working with the GOP under the Independent Democratic Conference.

IDC Spokeswoman Candice Giove said, “Our constituents know their senators are Democrats and will not be fooled.”









NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker

Texas and the National Voter Registration Act

Thousands of Texans are being disenfranchised thanks to chronic failures in the state’s voter registration system, a Democratic group alleges based on government records and extensive additional evidence. The charges raise serious questions about Texas’s commitment to making the ballot box accessible to new voters, and about its compliance with federal voting law.

In a letter sent Wednesday to Texas Secretary of State Carlos Cascos, lawyers for Battleground Texas, which works to register voters in the state, wrote that the state government’s “voter registration failures are widespread and systematically undermining the right to vote in Texas.”

The letter is likely to precede a lawsuit under the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), more commonly known as the Motor Voter law, which requires states to offer registration opportunities through their motor vehicle departments and other government agencies. “If the state does not want to engage and take the steps necessary to fix this, then we’re prepared to initiate legal action,” Peter Kraus, a lawyer representing Battleground Texas, said in a phone interview.

The allegations offer the latest evidence that Texas’s Republican administration is creating obstacles to voting as the state’s soaring Hispanic population threatens to shift the balance of power in the state. Around 2 million Texas Hispanics are unregistered, and just 39% of eligible Hispanics in the state voted in 2012, compared to 61% of eligible whites and 63% of eligible blacks.

Battleground was launched in 2013 by former Obama campaign staffers with the goal of making Texas competitive for Democrats by registering new voters.

Voter registration snafus also disproportionately affect people who move frequently: the poor, minorities, and young people. All those groups tend to vote Democratic.

It’s impossible to quantify just how many Texans have been disenfranchised thanks to the registration breakdowns identified by Battleground Texas. State records obtained via an open records request submitted by the group show that over the last four months of 2013 and all of last year, counties received over 4,600 complaints from would-be voters about registration issues, some of which appear not even to have been investigated.

Probably not all of those voters were ultimately kept from the polls, since Texas says some have subsequently been registered, though it’s not clear whether that happened before or after they tried to vote. But the 4,600 number is itself likely the tip of the iceberg of those who have had problems. For one thing, the tally only included data from the fewer than half of the state’s counties that reported complaints to the state. For another, lodging a complaint with the county can be a multi-step process that takes a certain level of initiative. That strongly suggests the number captures only a small fraction of those who faced obstacles.

Whatever the actual figure, the data make clear that the number of eligible voters being kept from the polls thanks to registration problems is exponentially greater than the number of ineligible voters casting ballots in the state, a concern that led Texas to pass the country’s strictest voter ID law. Since 2000, there have been just two proven cases of in-person fraud that would have been prevented by an ID requirement.

Battleground’s letter stops short of alleging that Texas is deliberately making it difficult to register to vote. But Kraus said it’s clear, at the very least, that the state hasn’t chosen to devote adequate resources to the task. “What it comes down to is, there does not appear to be a priority with the Secretary of State to make sure that the Department of Public Safety is taking down the information, and properly transmitting it to the voter rolls,” said Kraus.

To support that conclusion, the letter lays out reams of evidence pointing to serious problems with the state’s registration procedures for those applying to obtain or update their driver’s license:

- Texas’s online procedures, Battleground alleges, “openly violate the NVRA.” When an online applicant is asked whether she wants to register to vote and checks ‘yes,’ the Motor Voter law requires that her registration file be automatically updated. Instead, Texas provides a link to the Secretary of State’s website, where a voter registration form can be downloaded. But Texas counties nonetheless use driver’s license changes of address to remove people from the rolls. “This perverse result cannot be reconciled with the NVRA’s goal of increasing the number of eligible citizens on the voter rolls,” Kraus and Battleground legal director Mimi Marziani write.

- Texas’s in-person procedures likewise violate the NVRA, Battleground alleges. Sixty-five complaints were found to have come from people who checked neither “yes” nor “no” when asked if they wanted to register to vote, or who mistakenly checked both boxes. In both circumstances, Battleground claims, the NVRA requires that the applicant be registered. Keith Ingram, the director of the Elections Division at the Secretary of State’s office acknowledged in an email to Battleground that it didn’t do so, appearing to take the position that the law doesn’t require it.

- Between September 2013 and February 2015, according to state records, Texans reported to the state over 1,700 incidents where they checked “yes,” indicating they wanted to register to vote, when completing a driver’s license application in person at the DPS but did not appear on the rolls. These voters were ultimately registered, Ingram told Battleground. But the fact that they complained suggests the delay kept many from voting.

- Battleground says a hotline it set up for the November 2014 midterm election received “dozens” of calls from voters who had tried to register or update their voter registration information at a DPS office but did not appear on the rolls.

- Some of the complaints received by counties from voters who were forced to cast provisional ballots appear not even to have been investigated. Government records show that four days before the November 2012 election, one DPS staffer wrote in an email to another that an official with the Secretary of State’s office “is going to send an email to all of the county voter registrars to instruct them that they must have their requests for verification for the provisional ballots to us by noon on Thursday, November 8. We will do our best to process all of them and return them by midnight on Friday, but she is telling them there is no guarantee. If we don’t get them all done, then we don’t and she said there is nothing we can do at that point.” Subsequent emails show that complaints from at least 302 voters weren’t received until after November 8, and were ignored.

Administrative problems aside, Texas already has the strictest voter registration rules in the country. Non-Texans are barred from registering voters; anyone registering voters must undergo training through the county; no one can register voters in counties other than the county where they were appointed; and all voter registration applications must be personally delivered, rather than mailed.

Republican lawmakers this month killed a bill that would have established online voter registration in the state, citing the threat of fraud.

Those who do successfully register must also contend with the state’s voter ID law, which has twice been struck down by courts as racially discriminatory but was in effect last fall thanks to an order from the Supreme Court. An estimated 600,000 registered Texas voters, disproportionately minorities, don’t have the ID needed under the law. “I do firmly believe that the state has implemented a series of laws that make it difficult to vote,” Battleground Texas executive director Jenn Brown said in an interview. “Whether or not the registration problems fit into that, I think we’re not sure yet, but it’s something that we’re really thinking about as we’re starting a conversation with them.”

Texas is far from the first state to face claims that it’s failing to make voter registration easy enough under the motor voter law. Last year, California agreed to mail registration cards to nearly 4 million people who signed up for Obamacare benefits, after good-government groups threatened a lawsuit. And the Obama administration itself was accused last year by voting rights groups of not doing enough to help Obamacare applicants register to vote, despite claims by congressional Republicans that it was doing too much.

The New York City Council recently approved a bill to correct this problem.











NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker Technorati Tag in Del.icio.us

New Study Rebuts John Roberts on Voting Rights Act Change

When the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act in 2013, it described the landmark civil rights law as outdated.  The formula that Congress had used back in 1965 to decide which areas of the country should have their voting laws placed under federal supervision no longer matched modern patterns of discrimination, Chief Justice John Roberts claimed.  “If Congress had started from scratch in 2006, it plainly could not have enacted the present coverage formula,” Roberts wrote for the majority, explaining why that formula was being struck down.

But a comprehensive new study by a renowned historian and expert in voting discrimination suggests what voting rights advocates have been saying all along:

Roberts Got It Wrong!

Since 2009, Morgan Kousser, a professor of history and social science at the California Institute of Technology, has been collecting data on voting rights “events” across the country that resulted in a win for minorities.  Kousser looked at over 4,100 voting rights lawsuits, inquiries by the Justice Department, and changes to laws in response to the threat of lawsuits, the great majority at the county level, stretching from 1957 to 2013.

Kousser found that over 90% of these events occurred in “covered jurisdictions” that is places that until the Supreme Court’s decision, were required to submit their voting changes to the federal government for “pre-clearance.”  The great majority of these jurisdictions were in the South.

The evidence, Kousser writes, “shows that the Chief Justice’s factual assertions were incorrect, that the coverage formula was still congruent with proven violations.”

Kousser also looked at cases brought under the Voting Rights Act (VRA)’s Section 2, which bars racial discrimination in voting, and was unaffected by the Shelby ruling.  He found that from 1982, when Congress broadened Section 2, through 2005, 83.2% of successful Section 2 cases originated in covered jurisdictions, even though Section 2 covers the whole country.

Another key rationale that Roberts offered for striking down the formula was that the number of successful voting rights lawsuits has declined in recent years, rendering the Voting Rights Act’s pre-clearance system unnecessary.  But Kousser offers compelling evidence that this has happened in large part because of a series of Supreme Court rulings, mostly in the 1990s, that narrowed the VRA’s scope, thereby creating a self-fulfilling prophecy about the decline of discrimination.

“By rendering decisions that make it easier or harder to bring and win voting rights cases or make objections, the Supreme Court can, in effect, manipulate the evidence of discrimination, which it can then use, in a second stage, to justify a decision to further weaken or strengthen the tools,” Kousser writes.  “It can create the reality that it subsequently reacts to.”

The new study doesn’t look at what happened after the Supreme Court’s decision.  But if it had, it might have found more fodder for its case.  Several southern states have moved forward with restrictive voting laws that had been on hold until the Shelby ruling ended federal oversight.  One such law, Texas’s voter ID measure, was found by a federal judge last year to be intentionally discriminatory against minorities, but remains in place thanks to the Supreme Court.  And numerous local jurisdictions have made changes to their election rules that, voting rights advocates say, have reduced minority political power.

CLICK HERE to read the study.











NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker Technorati Tag in Del.icio.us

5 States Who Could be Next to Pass Voter ID Laws

Republicans in Congress last month confirmed that, despite an aggressive campaign by civil rights groups, they have no intention of strengthening the Voting Rights Act, which was badly weakened by the Supreme Court in 2013.  Meanwhile, GOP officials in Texas, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Ohio aren’t backing off from high-profile court fights in support of their states’ voting restrictions.

In fact, in several states the GOP is looking to play offense on the issue.  Emboldened by their party’s gains in last fall’s midterms, they’re pushing ahead with plans to impose new photo ID requirements for voters.

The efforts suggest that at the state level, where the rules are set on who can vote, blocking access to the ballot is as high a GOP priority as ever.

Iowa figures to be a voter ID battleground.  “I want to lead that charge and get that job done,” Republican Secretary of State Paul Pate said while campaigning last fall, referring to an ID law.  Pate’s predecessor, Matt Schultz, pushed hard in recent years on the issue but was stymied by Senate Democrats.  The Senate remains in Democratic hands, but just barely, and that’s emboldening Pate and his allies.  Republican Gov. Terry Branstad is on board.

Missouri ID supporters have a trickier task.  Ever since the aftermath of the contested 2000 election, state Republicans have been sounding the alarm over voter fraud and pushing for an ID law.  But the Missouri Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that voter ID is unconstitutional.  So Republicans, who last fall expanded their majorities in both houses of the state legislature, have been looking to pass a constitutional amendment to fix that.  State Rep. Tony Dugger has introduced legislation that would put such an amendment before voters in 2016.  “I am 100% sure that voter impersonation fraud is taking place in the state of Missouri,’’ Dugger said at a committee hearing last week.

Nevada looks most likely to be next to join the list of voter ID states.  In recent years, several efforts to pass voter ID have been blocked by Democrats, but in November, Republicans gained full control of the state legislature for the first time in decades.  GOP Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske indicated before taking office in November that she expected to see at least one such bill introduced, and one GOP lawmaker has said he’s actively discussing the idea.  Gov. Brian Sandoval, a Republican, is a supporter, too.  With its large and growing Hispanic population, this swing state could be pivotal in 2016.

New Mexico could follow close on Nevada’s heels.  There too, Republicans have long tried to pass voter ID, only to be blocked by Democrats.  And there too, the GOP made gains last fall, winning control of the state House of Representatives.  Democrats still hold the Senate, but the popularity of Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican and voter ID supporter who was easily re-elected last fall, could be enough to get voter ID over the finish line.  Secretary of State Dianna Duran, who made support for voter ID a key plank of her re-election campaign, thinks so.  “This is going to be a different year,” she said recently.

Ohio still the most pivotal presidential swing state in the country, would represent the biggest victory for ID supporters.  Republicans have controlled state government since 2011, but efforts to pass an ID law have fizzled in recent years amid fears of a backlash.  But some GOP lawmakers tried to force a vote on an ID measure as recently as November, and they’re getting help from a conservative Christian group that’s mobilizing grassroots supporters.  Still, Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican who has spearheaded other high-profile voting restrictions, has opposed past voter ID bills, and that could be enough to put the kibosh on the effort.

But if these states had Electronic Poll Books with voters images already in their database and signature pads, there would be no need for Voter ID cards.











NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker Technorati Tag in Del.icio.us

NYC Working Families Party Campaign Finance Investigation

The New York City Working Families Party is about to feel the fallout of a five-year-old election on Staten Island.

A lengthy investigation into a 2009 City Council race on Staten Island has resulted in criminal charges against two individuals and two political operations, including an arm of the WFP.

The Staten Island legislator backed by the party, Councilwoman Debi Rose. was named an un-indicted co-conspirator in an 18-page criminal complaint that special prosecutor said defrauded the city’s taxpayer-funded Campaign Finance Board (CFB).

Rose supporter David Jones, and Rose treasurer Thomas were also charged with grand larceny for campaign finance violations.

The prosecutor, Roger Adler, accused Data and Field Services, a subsidiary of the left-leaving WFP, of secretly providing discounted services to Rose’s successful 2009 Council campaign.  During this investigation, WFP was forced to separate from Data and Field Services.

Such discounts aren’t allowed under the city’s campaign finance rules, where candidates are limited in what they can raise and what they can spend.  The complaint said Rose’s campaign got sweetheart deals on services that included get-out-the vote operations, voter lists and the services of campaign workers.

The complaint charged the campaign and its treasurer, David Thomas, with lying about the scheme in filings with the CFB and state Board of Elections.

“Beginning in 2009 and continuing up to the filing of this complaint, the Debi Rose Campaign provided false and misleading documentation to the CFB in an effort to both obfuscate, and conceal, `in kind’ campaign contributions, and coordinated campaign goods and services provided by various labor unions for which `fair market value’ was neither paid, or accurately reported,” the complaint said.

David Jones described as a “political consultant,” was paid $5,000 in city matching funds after both he and his wife contributed $625 to the Rose campaign.  But the complaint said Jones had no written contract, as required by the CFB, to justify the payment.  “David Jones, in turn, knowingly and criminally possessed the stolen $5,000,” the complaint said.

The complaint said NY Citizen Services, paid $7,200 by the Rose campaign, was actually a front group to mask the involvement of the left-wing activist ACORN group.  ACORN staffer Peter Nagy worked on the Rose campaign for three months under a “ sweetheart contract that was below market value,” the complaint said.

The complaint noted that the WFP pumped over $500,000 into DFS from February 2009 to January 2010.

The complaint said Thomas conspired and acted “in concert” with staffers from “DFS, WFP, various labor unions, and members of the Rose campaign to file false and inaccurate campaign filings with both the state Board of Elections, the CFB, and knowingly attempted to cover up those violations.”

Adler said he hoped the case will shake up the political establishment and deter campaign corruption.  “These shenanigans are sickening people. The effort to clean up corruption begins with the little campaign in the smallest borough in the city,” he said.

Reps for defendants blasted the criminal complaint as without merit.

“The charges are baseless. Mr. Jones did absolutely nothing wrong and looks forward to telling his side of the story,” said Jones lawyer, Justine Harris.

Said Brooklyn Councilman Brad Lander, a close WFP ally, “The U.S. Attorney’s Office looked at this four years ago and found no wrongdoing.  Adler should stop tilting at windmills.”

Said Thomas lawyer Sam Gregory, “David Thomas did not commit any crime as the treasurer of the Debi Rose campaign.  This case is an outrageous attempt to criminalize legitimate political activity.”

The defendants are scheduled to appear in Staten Island's Richmond County Criminal Court Monday.










NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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FEC Doubles Major Party's Convention Funds

The deep freeze at the Federal Election Commission may be thawing.

After some five years of ties and gridlock, the commission approved several measures Thursday as part of a compromise brokered between its two newest members: Republican Chairman Lee Goodman and Democratic Vice Chairwoman Ann Ravel.

In a rare 4-2 vote, the long-gridlocked FEC approved a joint request from the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee that asked for permission to create a separate organization to finance the quadrennial conventions.

Currently, both the DNC and the RNC are limited to collecting a maximum of $32,400 from donors per two-year election cycle. The FEC vote allows both parties to collect an additional $32,400 to be put only toward convention activities.

That amount is also scheduled to increase in 2015 due to a pending inflation adjustment, and the extra money that both parties collect can be used only for certain convention expenses, such as, on ads or other election activities.

Both Democrats and Republicans portrayed the request as necessary in an era where presidential candidates no longer get public funds to put on their presidential nominating conventions.

“We appreciate the FEC’s recognition that, as the party convention committees adjust to the loss of public funding, they have authority to raise funds that will help pay the costs of their national conventions.  This is an important, if modest, first step for the parties in continuing to meet their historic responsibility to conduct conventions, which play such a vital role in our democratic process,” the RNC and DNC said in a joint statement.

Reform groups opposed to the influence of money in politics blasted the decision by the FEC.

“This is an absurd interpretation that has no basis in law.  A wealthy donor who had previously been limited to giving $32,400 per year to a national party can now make an additional $32,400 contribution per year to the party’s convention committee,” the reform group Democracy 21 said in a statement.

Previously, both parties and their respective presidential nominees took public money to host party conventions.  But this year, President Barack Obama signed a bill that ended the annual taxpayer subsidy.

The funds, which totaled about $18 million per party in 2012, were instead put toward pediatric medical research at the National Institutes of Health.

Democratic FEC commissioner Ann Ravel joined the three Republican commissioners on the six-member panel in voting for the measure.  Its passage included a handful of other measures like:

- In a 4-2 vote, the commissioners passed a package of changes that enshrined the controversial 2010 case Citizens United into the organization’s rules.

- On a separate 6-0 vote, they approved a similar rules change concerning the 2014 McCutcheon v. FEC decision.

The compromise also involves opening a public-comment period on all manner of issues.










NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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An App to Engage NYC Voters and Candidates

New York City hopes to get more people engaged in this year's pivotal election with a new web app that aims to benefit both campaigns and voters. The web app, named NYC Votes, will streamline campaign donations and also serve as a resource on candidates and the election. The software draws from the city's campaign finance data and is expected to be released in two weeks. It will be available on most browser-enabled devices, including phones and tablets.

"We started from the premise of creating a much more seamless, end-to-end experience for participants in the voting process," said Art Chang, the chairman of the Voter Assistance Advisory Committee of the city's Campaign Finance Board, who is in charge of developing the software. The initial goal of the tool, Chang said, was to make "life easier for candidates, for constituents and for the Campaign Finance Bureau's (CFB) audit staff," particularly surrounding small donations.

The city's 6-to-1 public matching system is designed to encourage a broad spectrum of people to contribute in small amounts. In 2009, contributions of $175 or less made up nearly 70 percent of all contributions, according to the CFB. "In the past these contributions have caused a lot of headaches," said Chang, whose firm lent a project manager to the app effort.

NYC Votes overcomes this by handling the credit card processing while also verifying addresses for compliance, enabling virtually any candidate to start taking plastic. A magnet card swipe reader can also be used with the software, so that even campaign staffers at fundraising events can use their mobile devices to record contributions.

While initially aimed at helping campaigns to deal with donations, developers say they plan to add features in the coming months that will allow voters to find and research candidates; interact over social media; localize their ballot; and get elections results.

The app was developed by the Voter Assistance Advisory Committee (VAAC) of the CFB with the assistance of partners from the city's civic-oriented tech developer community, including Pivotal Labs and Method. TekServe, an Apple sales specialist, has agreed to help candidates get swiping technology working on their devices.

I hope the software interface will be able to determine if a contributor has already met their matching fund limit and total contribution limit. It will also need the ability to enter the necessary information and check-off boxes so the candidate has enough information to properly file the contribution to the CFB.










NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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FCC Cracks Down on Cell Phone Campaign Robocalls

The Federal Communications Commission has issued citations that accuse two companies of bombarding wireless customers with millions of illegal robocalls during last year's presidential election. They face fines of nearly $5 million for allegedly making millions of artificial voice messages without consumers' prior consent.

Working for both the Democratic and Republican parties, the two companies placed more than 1 million artificial voice messages each without consumers' prior authorization, the FCC said. The companies, Dialing Services and Democratic Dialing, also failed to provide proper identification as required by federal law, the FCC said.

"Consumers have increasingly been sounding the alarm on robocalls, rightly complaining about unwanted, intrusive cell phone calls and text messages from strangers, or worse yet computers," Michele Ellison, chief of the FCC's Enforcement Bureau, said in a statement. "These citations set the stage for significant monetary penalties if violations continue."

The companies, which allegedly placed the calls in 2011 and 2012, could face fines of up $4.8 million, $16,000 per call.

FCC rules and the Communications Act prohibit robocalls and autodialed calls to mobile phones and pagers, except in the case of an emergency.

"The Bureau's investigations showed that none of the calls made by either company were for an emergency purpose," the FCC said in a statement. "When FCC staff spoke to a sampling of call recipients directly, not one of them had ever given permission to anyone to robocall them on their wireless phones."

Despite federal law prohibiting them, robocalls continue to plague wireless customers.

The FCC announced a crackdown on the practice in 2012, and the Federal Trade Commission announced last year that it would pay a cash reward of $50,000 to whoever develops a solution to block robotic calling on both landlines and mobiles.










NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!

Michael H. Drucker
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