It never spilled over into claims of corrupt elections, but the
scandal that led to the resignation of California Secretary of
State Kevin Shelley should be ringing alarm bells about the
vulnerability of the office he’s about to leave.
It never spilled over into claims of corrupt elections, but the scandal that led to the resignation of California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley should be ringing alarm bells about the vulnerability of the office he’s about to leave.
And not just because of Shelley’s alleged corruption. In both Ohio and Florida, the two key battleground states in last year’s presidential election, major questions about alleged warping of the voting process are still being hashed out in a variety of courtrooms.
In both states, disgruntled Democrats are convinced Republican fraud swung the election to President Bush. Regardless of how the legal actions are resolved, there is no way most of those disappointed voters will ever believe the voting and the vote-counting were honest.
At the heart of their suspicions lies the fact that the top election officials in both Ohio and Florida are conservative Republicans. Ohio’s secretary of state served as co-chairman of the Bush campaign in his state while presiding over the setup for the election and its aftermath. There are accusations he deliberately sent fewer voting machines to highly Democratic areas than to precincts with large Republican voter registration majorities. Flawed distribution, for instance, caused students at Kenyon College to wait up to 11 hours to vote in a precinct that got only one voting machine, while nearby GOP areas got more machines and had no lines to speak of.
There were similar complaints in Florida, even if they were not as vocal as those following the 2000 election, presided over by another Republican secretary of state who doubled as a Bush campaign co-chair.
So far, California hasn’t had those headaches. But the partisan nature of the secretary of state’s office leaves this state open to the same kinds of problems that have plagued Ohio and Florida.
Plus, so long as secretaries of state are elected officials, they will always have to raise campaign cash and the potential for corruption will exist. On the other hand, if the office became appointive, its occupants would serve at the pleasure of the current governor and their actions could also be suspect at times.
Which means there is no perfect way to handle the secretary of state’s office. But there is a compromise solution, one that’s not perfect but would still add credibility to a vulnerable office: Make future secretaries of state non-partisan. If they didn’t have party labels attached and nominees for the office were chosen outside partisan primaries, at least one potential source of suspicions about their actions could be eliminated.
That’s the way the state school superintendent has been elected for decades, with even onetime partisan politicos like current Supt. Jack O’Connell taking on non-partisan tones. With the exception of 1960s-era Supt. Max Rafferty, a conservative Republican who tried to use the office as a stepping stone to the U.S. Senate, no recent occupant of the office has even tried to use it to move upward in party politics.
Shelley’s troubles center around tainted campaign contributions and alleged use of federal voting act money to hire contract workers whose tasks included enhancing Shelley’s image. That quickly roused Republicans to call for his ouster.
The affair has spurred two proposed constitutional amendments aiming to make the office non-partisan, one sponsored by Republican state Sen. Jeff Denham of Merced and the other by Democratic Assemblyman Joe Canciamilla of Pittsburg. Voters would have to approve any change before it could take effect.
Canciamilla told a reporter his proposed amendment is “not about Kevin (Shelley). This is really about the broader issue, how to ensure balance in the elections.”
And even though no California secretary of state has ever been accused of trying to manipulate elections or defraud voters, the examples of Ohio and Florida are reason enough to make this change.
For as Shelley learned to his chagrin, secretaries of state must be like Caesar’s wife, as close as possible to being totally above any suspicion. Nothing will ever remove this office from all potential abuse, but making it non-partisan would at least remove some obvious motives that could lead to distrust.
That’s why California should make this change before any suspicious situation arises, regardless of who replaces Shelley.
