"you can’t be both a player and a referee"
The role Katherine Harris played as both chief elections officer in Florida and co-chair of the Bush/Cheney campaign, was one of the reasons we founded the SoS Project. When the 2000 election hung in the balance, she had dual loyalties - to the voters and to the Bush campaign. She chose the Bush campaign, and thus began one of the of the most disastrous presidencies in history.
In yesterday's New York Times, Ian Urbina writes:
Across the country, state voting officials routinely participate as candidates in races they are responsible for overseeing or act as leaders in their political parties. In the last presidential election, the secretaries of state in Arizona, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri and Ohio, were chairmen of their states’ re-election campaigns for President Bush.
Reform-minded Secretaries of State - like SoS Project success stories Mark Ritchie in Minnesota and Jennifer Brunner in Ohio - are running on platforms that specifically reject this kind of double dealing. But unfortunately SoS Project values are in the minority among today's Secretaries of State. The new president of the National Association of Secretaries of State is Indiana's Todd Rokita. He's currently the co-chairman of his state's finance committee for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. With leadership like that, who needs ethics reform?
There are efforts to legislate a solution to this ethics crisis, but opposition is deep and widespread within the community of elections officials as well as the Republican party, an opponent to voting rights in recent history.
Representative Susan A. Davis, Democrat of California, has introduced a bill prohibiting chief state election officials from serving on the political campaigns of federal candidates. When Ms. Davis submitted the bill to the National Association of Secretaries of State for its support, she said she was initially told that they would present it for discussion at the annual convention. Later, however, she was told that it would not be because opposition was too strong...
A similar bill in the Senate is sponsored by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California. Mrs. Feinstein’s bill has 11 co-sponsors, all Democrats, and is expected to face significant Republican opposition, as is the House bill.Neither bill would prohibit election officials from overseeing elections in which they are candidates. Aides to both Ms. Davis and Mrs. Feinstein said such provisions might raise First Amendment or states’ rights challenges.
And neither bill is likely to pass anytime soon. The SoS Project is currently working on its targeting for 2008. Electing reform-minded Secretaries of State is the single most effective way to take back our elections and restore transparency, fairness and uniform protection of civil rights to our democratic process.
Rep. Davis describes the crisis among Secretaries of State simply:
“No one likes anyone to meddle in their jobs,” she said. “But you can’t be both a player and a referee at the same time."
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