Several Secretaries of State accused of electoral interference to benefit party
13 replies, posted
http://www.governing.com/topics/politics/gov-secretary-state-brian-kemp-georgia-candidate-conflict.html
When the stakes are high, the temptation is always there to bend the rules to give your own side an advantage. Civil rights groups argue that Georgia GOP Secretary of State Brian
Kemp, who is running for governor, is doing just that.
Kemp denies any wrongdoing, but the controversy echoes questions raised about whether secretaries of state who oversee elections have irreconcilable conflicts as candidates.
"It is a problem that we have partisan-elected secretaries of state as the chief election officers," says Rick Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California,
Irvine. "It creates an inevitable conflict of interest when the person's allegiance is partly to their own political party. But the problem is of a different magnitude when the elected
official is supervising an election where the secretary himself or herself is on the ballot."
Kemp is one of several secretaries of state who have come under fire recently for allegedly abusing their power. After complaints, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, now the GOP
nominee for governor, recused himself from the recount for his own primary race in August. His rival, Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer, accused Kobach of giving improper counting instructions
to county election officials.
In Kentucky, Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, a Democrat, is under investigation by an independent counsel amid accusations that she misused voter data. The executive
director of the state board of elections accused Grimes of improperly accessing voter information and using it to check the partisan affiliations of job applicants. Grimes denies the
allegations. (Last month, her father, a former state Democratic Party chair, pleaded not guilty to charges that he made illegal campaign contributions.)
Meanwhile, Arizona GOP Secretary of State Michele Reagan is being sued for allegedly failing to update voter registration information as required under the federal motor-voter law,
potentially disenfranchising tens of thousands of voters. Last week, journalist Greg Palast published allegations that Indiana's secretary of state's office has illegally removed at least
20,000 voters from the rolls using a method that was blocked in June by a federal judge.
The cases are all different, but the possibility that secretaries of state might be putting their thumbs down on the scale for partisan advantage encourages suspicions about their
ability to be fair and impartial.
"There is a fundamental conflict of interest for an official to administer an election at the same time that he is running for office," says David Kimball, a voting expert at the University of
Missouri-St. Louis. "The tension around this conflict is raised because issues around election laws and voting rights have become more divided and partisan."
In most countries, Kimball notes, elections are overseen by independent bodies. The role of secretary of state in overseeing elections was once viewed as purely technical, much like
their other responsibilities, such as issuing business licenses. That's changed.
"We see partisanship shaping the performance of jobs that in an earlier, less polarized age, would have been seen as more functional, more practical and outside of party politics," says
Stephen Voss, a political scientist at the University of Kentucky.
And this is the way democracy ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.
How is this even allowed? Are there not any conflict of interest laws on the books or something?
I'm going to be surprised if the USA isn't reclassified as a Hybrid Regime in the World Democracy Index come January 2019.
Hybrid regimes are nations where consequential irregularities exist in elections regularly preventing them from being fair and free.
These nations commonly have governments that apply pressure on political opponents, non independent judiciaries, and have widespread corruption, harassment and pressure placed on the media, anemic rule of law, and more pronounced faults than flawed democracies in the realms of underdeveloped political culture, low levels of participation in politics, and issues in the functioning of governance.
It checks all the boxes.
Nope, no one expected this position to be so politicized. The Secretary of State of Alabama is a fullblown MAGA trigglypuff snowflake guy.
https://i.imgur.com/kPNafoP.jpg
Wow, fuck that guy.
US elected officials cannot block anyone for exercising political speech, dude's violating the First Amendment and I doubt he cares. (And yes it counts even though he gave his phone number out; if he has in fact blocked the people he's replying to, they can't see his tweet without logging out.)
one wonders why trust in the government is at an all time low
Just another entry in the list of positions that are inexplicably elected and openly partisan in the US system
During the late 1800s-early 1900s there was a push to make more positions elected to improve democracy and the relationship between government and the citizens, all the way to the Senate with the 17th
Amendment. But only judges in some states are elected nonpartisanly now.
Hey Texas State is the University I go to. All the campaign people seem to be out in full force. Really thought it was strange how the college only gets 3 days for early voting though. Was thinking it was just their way of suppressing.
I'm surprised there isn't but attitudes like that of @Sgman91 where they don't consider conflicts of interest an issue until someone's powers have already been abused doesn't help matters at all. I really hope the GOP gets pushed out of power even with their shitty underhanded tactics and that whoever replaces them focuses on actually fixing these blatant problems with our system, though I have little hope they'd actually take adequate preventative measures rather than paying the barest lip service to the problem.
It's allowed because people voted it to be allowed, even if anyone breaks the rules on any sheet of paper there will be no one / nothing left to make sure the rules are enforced once every position in the federal government falls under complete control by the current ruling party and it may not take that long for that to happen. If Republicans continue to be voted in during this next set of elections then you may as well forget about enforcement of rules and worry about how much time you got left here.
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