For those who don’t vote in the US because they think it’s too time-consuming, too complicated or too confusing, consider the voting process in the African nation of Burundi.

Burundi, for the Africa-map-challenged, like me, is landlocked country. It’s that little red dot on the map between Rwanda to the north, Tanzania to the east and southeast, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the west. Lake Tanganyika lies along its southwestern border. Its capital cities are Bjumbura ( the political capital) and Gitega (the economic capital). Burund’s population is about 11 million. The country’s literacy rate is 68 percent. It operates politically as a constitutional republic with a bi-cameral parliamentary structure. Currently, 24 different political parties hold seats or are vying for them.

And that’s where the complexity sets in. According to the Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa [EISA], in parliamentary elections, each valid voter is given 24 ballots – each bearing the name and symbol of a different party – and two envelopes. In the polling booth, the voter puts her chosen ballot paper in the white envelope, and the rest into the black one. Exiting the booth, voters then put the white envelope with their chosen ballot paper into one box for votes cast, and the black envelope into another box, before having their thumbs marked with indelible ink so they can’t vote again. The number of black envelopes containing useless ballot papers (at any given polling station) have to match with the number of white envelopes to avoid cheating.

I have now read that description about a dozen times, and I think I’m beginning to understand it. But still, I’m glad I’m not a first-time voter in Burundi.

Burundi is slated to hold a presidential election on May 20. 2020. With six candidates vying for the job, voting will presumably be somewhat simpler than the complicated routine of parliamentary elections, and the current ruling party is expected, by knowledgeable observers, to win the day. Notably, other African nations have postponed their national elections due to the coronavirus pandemic, but as of this writing, Burundi is moving ahead.

The post How to vote in Burundi appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Today, I accompanied a group of 28 fourth-grade students on a tour of my local election headquarters. I’ve taken this tour at least four times, but never with anyone—adults or teens—who asked more creative or challenging questions.

I’ll list some of them below. Some may strike you as amusing, in a “Kids Say the Darndest Things” way. That’s not why I’m sharing them. I’m not here to demean or condescend to these kids, or to draw a laugh at their expense.  I’m awed by them–and not in an “Aww, aren’t they cute way.” They earned my respect and admiration for their confidence and their creative thinking.

Observing them, I could see that they haven’t yet learned much about how elections work. (I’m sure that’s about to change, as their fourth grade theme is “Citizens Making A Difference.”) But the questions they asked reflected a level of curiosity and engagement that was very impressive. The first question was, “How do you register to vote?” I think the sophistication of that question impressed the staff, and they knew, instantly, that this was a group of really smart and well-prepared kids.

These young people will be eligible to vote in eight years. If they manage to stay civically engaged until then–and beyond–and if schools, religion, mass media and the entertainment world don’t kill their souls and brains before then, we’ll have a new generation of voters who just might save us all.

Here are some of their questions and the responses (paraphrased) they received from the election staff. (I learned a few things, myself.)  Kudos to the staff for taking every question seriously and not talking down to the students.

Q: Do people have to vote?

A: No. But there are some countries where you’re required to vote, and if you don’t, you pay a fine. That’s how it is in Australia and Brazil, and maybe some other places, too.  Some people in those countries go to the polls and sign in, but then just leave their ballots blank.

Q: Which part of government are you? [Last week, these same students visited the state capitol, so government branches may have been on this student’s mind.}

A: Great question! We’re not part of the judiciary branch, because we’re not judges. We’re not part of the legislature, because we don’t make the laws. And we’re not part of the executive branch, either. Elections are sort of a branch of their own. It’s kind of odd.

Q: So, if you guys are in charge of running the elections, are you allowed to vote?

A: Yes. But we have to vote absentee, because on Election Day, we have to be here in the office from 4 a.m. until we finish counting and reporting the votes—that can be after midnight.

Q: If you think you’re a Republican, can you still vote for a Democrat?

A: Yes. Anybody can vote for anybody.

Q: Can the President vote for himself? Does the President’s vote count more than anyone else’s?

A: The President can definitely vote for himself, or herself. I’d be surprised if candidates didn’t vote for themselves. The President gets one vote, just like everyone else: One person, one vote.

Q: Can you vote if you’re on house arrest? Can you vote if you’re in jail?

A: In Missouri, if you’ve been convicted of a crime and you’re in prison, you can’t vote. If you haven’t been convicted yet, and you’re in jail waiting for your trial, you can vote. If you’re on house arrest, that means you can’t leave home. But in that case, you can vote absentee.

Q: Do celebrities get special votes?

A: No. But in some states, if people don’t want to be seen in public, they can vote absentee, too. In Missouri, you have to have a better reason than that if you want to vote absentee. And you can’t vote early in Missouri, either.

Q: Is there a dress code for voting?

A: No. Well, actually, you have to be wearing something. We won’t let you in if you don’t have any clothes on. It’s okay to vote wearing flip flops, workout clothes, a business suit, or even a bathing suit. We’ve even had people come to vote wearing Halloween costumes.

Q: Can you go to jail if you cheat at voting? How do you make sure no one steals the votes or changes stuff around?

A: We have a lot of security. Everything is locked up. We have security cameras everywhere. We have a lot of checks and balances. Every time someone touches a ballot, there has to be a Republican and a Democrat to okay it. None of our counting machines or voting equipment is connected to the internet. And yes, you can go to jail if you cheat at voting.

[As a bonus, the election staff set up a mock election for the students, where they used the county’s new paper ballot-on-demand system and digital scanners to cast their votes for fictitious and/or historical candidates. One staffer told me that the the students did a much better job of filling out the ballots than many adults. Voting was clearly the highlight of the tour. It prompted questions, too.]

Q: Where should I sign my ballot?

A: Nowhere. You might have to sign a test paper at school, but in voting, we have a secret ballot. No one gets to see how you voted, and we don’t keep track of who each person voted for.

Q: […As she placed her paper ballot into the scanner…] Is that a shredder? Does it just eat the ballot?

A: It’s definitely not a shredder. It’s a ballot box. When you feed your ballot into the scanner, it records your vote and then drops the paper into the ballot box. We collect all the paper ballots, and we count them  by hand, if we need to.

Q: Do you get paid to do this?

A: Yes. [Author’s note: But not enough for the level of democratic responsibility they take on, or for the long hours they work, especially during Presidential election years, but in “off-years” as well. We got a free tour today. It was worth a lot.]

The post 12 election questions posed by smart 10 year-olds appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In another attempt to destroy a long-standing international agreement, Donald Trump threatened to create chaos for overseas voters by withdrawing from the Universal Postal Union (UPU), a United Nations body that has regulated mail services for 145 years. But disaster was averted today, when UPU, in tense last-minute negotiations, agreed to changes in its rate structure that satisfied U.S. concerns.

If Trump had gotten his way, overseas voters could have found themselves on the outs on Election Day, because they would have had no way to mail in their ballots and could have been left with the necessity of sending them via air-express services at a very prohibitive cost.

U.S. trade negotiators had contended that postal rates set by UPU gave unfair advantages to America’s economic rivals, especially China—and they may have had a valid point. But in focusing solely on that imbalance, and by making international postal rates part of Trump’s ongoing trade war with China, they ignored the impact that a withdrawal (which had been dubbed “Pexit”) would have had on U.S. elections.

How Pexit would have affected military and overseas voters

The National Association of Counties (NACO)—whose members include the election officials who administer voting across the U.S—had been strongly opposed to “Pexit.” Here’s how NACO explained its potential impact:

Military service members, their eligible dependents and U.S. citizens living abroad face unique challenges in participating in our elections. The Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) estimates that about three-quarters of the 1.3 million active duty service members and three million other U.S. citizens across 170 countries are covered under the Uniformed Overseas Citizen Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA), which allows these citizens to vote absentee while away from their voting jurisdiction.

One of the largest barriers for UOCAVA voters is the transit time to receive and return a ballot, which can vary depending on ballot delivery method, submission options allowed by state law, duty location and internet connectivity. As primary administrators of our nation’s elections, counties are responsible for transmitting and processing military and overseas ballots. To allow extra time and mitigate possible delivery issues, federal law requires these ballots be transmitted no later than 45 days before federal elections. In the 2016 presidential election, counties sent nearly a million absentee ballots to UOCAVA voters. Most ballots are returned to the county through postal mail.

As many counties prepare to mail UOCAVA ballots in mid-September for state and local elections this November, any disruption to the mail service could negatively impact the ability for military members, their spouses and other overseas citizens to participate. Additionally, a U.S. withdrawal from the UPU this October could have even broader implications on the 2020 primaries and presidential election.

Talking Points Memo interviewed Tammy Patrick, a senior advisor at the Democracy Fund, which works with election officials on voting administration issues. Patrick said, “I’ve had sleepless nights worrying what will happen for voters that won’t have the ability to return a ballot.

She and others in the voting space feared it would be more expensive for overseas voters to cast ballots, if they had to rely on private carriers to do so, or that it would be altogether impossible for them to know for sure whether they’d be able to get their ballots submitted in time.

“This action could seriously jeopardize the integrity of the overseas vote,” said Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat, president of the U.S. Vote Foundation, a non-partisan organization that offers voting assistance to overseas Americans.

In addition to military members, those Americans include their families, U.S. contractors working internationally, other Americans whose jobs take them overseas, as well as students, missionaries and participants in programs like the Peace Corp.

Many of them rely on the mail to submit ballots, with 19 states requiring that overseas ballots be sent back by mail only.

So, the crisis appears to have been averted, for now. But still, as long as Trump is in the White House, I will vote for continued vigilance.

The post US to stay in Universal Postal Union, averting chaos for overseas voters appeared first on Occasional Planet.

It’s not a hoax. The recently released (July 25, 2019) Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election makes that very clear. All you have to do is read it. It’s only 67 pages, and about a third of it is blocked out. But, of course, Donald Trump didn’t do that, nor did he listen to briefings that would have left no doubt that Russians not only tried, but succeeded in breaking into election databases in all 50 states—that they continued their efforts during the 2018 mid-terms, and that they’re on track to do it again in 2020, perhaps on a much larger and more damaging scale.

He doesn’t want to know. But I do, and I imagine so do many others. So, I read the report and copy/pasted some highlights, so you don’t have to. Here they are. Sub-headings in bold are my interpretations, not from the report. The excerpts are in the order in which they appear in the report.

Why they did it: Just to let us know that they can?

“While the Committee does not know with confidence what Moscow’s intentions were, Russia may have  been probing vulnerabilities in voting systems to exploit later. Alternatively, Moscow may have sought to undermine confidence in the 2016 U.S. elections simply through the discovery of their activity.”

Should we have heard more about it? Maybe not.

“In 2016, officials at all levels of government debated whether publicly acknowledging this foreign activity was the right course. Some were deeply concerned that public warnings might promote the very impression they were trying to dispel—that the voting systems were insecure.”

What were they doing, exactly? Checking to see if we’re home. Maybe they’ll come back later.

“One security expert characterized the activity as simple scanning for vulnerabilities, analogous  to somebody walking down the street and looking to  see if you are home. A small number of systems were unsuccessfully exploited, as though somebody had rattled the doorknob but was unable to get in…[however]a small number of the networks were successfully exploited. They made it through the door.”

“What  it mostly looked like to us was reconnaissance…I would have characterized it at the time as sort of conducting the reconnaissance to do the network mapping, to do the topology mapping so that you  could actually understand  the  network, establish a presence so you could  come back  later and actually execute an operation.

How widespread were the attacks? Very.

“By late August 2016…the Russians had attempted to intrude in all 50 states, based on the extent of the activity and the apparent randomness of the attempts. “My professional judgment was we have to work under the assumption that they’ve tried to go everywhere, because they’re thorough, they’re competent, they’re good.”

“Several weeks prior to the 2018 mid-term election, DHS assessed that “numerous actors are regularly targeting election infrastructure, likely for different purposes, including to cause disruptive effects, steal sensitive data, and undermine confidence in the election.”

Did they change any votes? Probably not.

“Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple U.S. state or local electoral boards.  DHS assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying.”

Illinois was hit first. The attack reached deep into voter information files. Be afraid.

“In June 2016, Illinois experienced the first known breach by Russian actors of state election infrastructure during the 2016 election. As of the end of 2018, the Russian cyber actors had successfully penetrated Illinois’s voter registration database, viewed multiple database tables, and accessed up to 200,000 voter registration records. The compromise resulted in the exfiltration of an unknown quantity of voter registration data. Russian cyber actors were in a position to delete or change voter data, but the Committee is not aware of any evidence that they did so.”

“The compromised voter registration database held records relating to 14 million registered voters. Records exfiltrated included information on each voter’s name, address, partial social security number, date of birth, and either a driver’s license number or state identification number.”

“Russia would have had the ability to potentially manipulate some of that data, but we didn’t see that.” …The level of access that they gained, they almost certainly could have done more. Why they didn’t…is sort of an open-ended question. I think it fits under the larger umbrella of undermining confidence in the election by tipping their hand that they had this level of access or showing that they were capable of getting it.”

They were ballsy.

“The Russian Embassy placed a formal request to observe the elections with the Department of State, but also reached outside diplomatic channels in an attempt to secure permission directly from state and local election officials. For example, in September2016, the Secretary of State denied a request by the Russian Consul General to allow a Russian government official inside a polling station on Election Day to study US. election procedures.”

They had a Twitter campaign ready, to question the results, if Hillary Clinton had won.

“Russian diplomats were prepared to publicly call into question the validity of the results…and that pro-Kremlin bloggers had prepared a Twitter  campaign on election night in anticipation of Secretary Clinton’s victory.”

They got access via a phishing scam.

“After a county employee opened an infected email attachment, the cyber actor stole credentials, which were later posted online. Those stolen credentials were used in June 2016 to penetrate State4’s voter registration database. The actor used the credentials to access the database and was in a position to modify county, but not statewide, data.”

They were playing a long con, and still are.

“Russian intentions regarding U.S. election infrastructure remain unclear. Russia might have intended to exploit vulnerabilities in election infrastructure during the 2016 elections and, for unknown reasons, decided not to execute those options.”

“Alternatively, Russia might have sought to gather information in the conduct of traditional espionage activities.”

“Lastly, Russia might have used its activity in 2016 to catalog options or clandestine actions, holding them for use at a later date…Russia’s activities against U.S. election infrastructure likely sought to further their overarching goal; undermining the integrity of US elections.”

“It is classic Russian espionage….They will scrape up all the information and the experience they possibly can, and “they might  not be effective the first time or the fifth time, but they are going to keep at it until they can come back and do it in an effective way.”  -Andrew McCabe, former FBI Director.

Tampering with voting machine is hard. Causing election day chaos is a more achievable goal.

“While any one voting machine is fairly vulnerable, as has been demonstrated over and over again publicly, the ability to actually do an operation to change the outcome of an election on the scale you would need to, and do it surreptitiously, is incredibly difficult.”

“A much more achievable goal would be to undermine confidence in the results of the electoral process, and that could be done much more effectively and easily….A logical  thing would be, if your goal is to undermine confidence in  the U.S. electoral system— which the Russians have a long goal  of wanting to put themselves on the  same moral plane as the United States… one way would be to cause chaos on election day.”

“How could you start to do that? Mess with the voter registration databases.”

Here’s how voter-registration tampering would play out on election day:

“So if you’re a state and local entity and your voter registration database is housed in the secretary  of  state’s office  and it is not encrypted  and it’s not backed up, and it says Lisa Monaco lives at Smith Street and I show up at my [polling place] and they say ‘Well we don’t have Ms. Monaco at Smith Street, we have her at Green Street,’ now there’s difficulty in my voting. And if that were to happen on a large scale, I was worried about confusion at polling places, lack of confidence in the voting system, anger at  a large scale in some areas, confusion, distrust.”  -Lisa Monaco, US Homeland Security Advisor to President Barack Obama.

Changing elections on a large scale would be difficult, but there are ways to make a significance difference.

“The level of effort and scale required to change the outcome of a national election would make it nearly impossible to avoid detection.”

“Nationwide elections are often won or lost in a small number of precincts. A sophisticated actor could target efforts at districts where margins are already small, and disenfranchising only a small percentage of voters could have a disproportionate impact on an election’s outcome.”

Some people don’t want to talk about Russian interference at all and want the press to shut up.

“Many state election officials emphasized their concern that press coverage of, and increased attention to, election security could create the very impression the Russians were seeking to foster, namely undermining voters’ confidence in election integrity. Several insisted that when ever any official speaks publicly on this issue, they should state clearly the difference between a “scan” and a “hack,” and a few even went as far as to suggest that U.S. officials stop talking about it at all.

To talk about it or not: a dilemma for the intelligence community.

“We know that the Russians had already touched some of the electoral systems, and we know that they have capable cyber capabilities. So there was a real dilemma, even a conundrum,  in terms  of what do you do that’s going to try to stave off worse action on the part of the Russians, and what do you do that is going to…[give]the Russians what they were seeking, which was to really raise the specter that the election was not going to be  fair and unaffected.” –John Brennan, former director of the CIA

Potential problem: Only a few companies make voting machines.

“The number of vendors selling voting machines is shrinking, raising concerns about a vulnerable supply chain. A hostile actor could compromise one or two manufacturers of components and have an outsized effect on the security of the overall system.”

Some states don’t want help: They fear “a federal takeover of elections.”

In an August15, 2016, conference call with state election officials, then-Secretary Johnson told states, “we’re  in a sort of a heightened state of alertness; it behooves everyone to  do everything you can for your own cyber security leading up to the election.”

“But states pushed back. A number of state officials reacted negatively to the call.  Secretary Johnson said he was surprised/disappointed that there was a certain level of push back from at least those who spoke up…The push-back was: This is our responsibility and there should not be a  federal takeover of the election system.”

Elections are critical infrastructure.

“We should think of the electoral infrastructure as critical infrastructure…it’s just as critical for democracy as communications, electricity, water. If that doesn’t function, then your democracy doesn’t function. That is the definition of critical.”

The post I read the Russia election-tampering report. Here are some highlights. appeared first on Occasional Planet.

“I don’t wanna be brave. I just wanna be safe.” – Lyrics from “The Most Vicious Cycle,” by Kesha.

Two must-watch videos. Two approaches to get out the youth vote. One is of the mind, and one goes straight to the gut.

In the first, Barack Obama, showing off his signature combination of brain and wit, obliterates the seven most often repeated excuses why young voters fail to show up at the polls.  The most spot-on moment is when Obama narrates over an image of a bespectacled, white-haired lady and asks, “You wouldn’t let your grandparents pick your play list, so why would you let them pick your representatives who will determine your future?”

The second video, called “The Most Vicious Cycle,” was produced for March for Our Lives, the gun-control advocacy group founded by survivors of the mass shooting that stopped short the lives of seventeen teens at the Marjory Stoneham Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The video powerfully inserts the viewer into the moment in a high school corridor when bullets fly and the sound and blast of gun fire shatter the every day. Music and rap lyrics are by singer Kesha, and production is by Sage Sebert, a graduate of Marjory Stoneham Douglas.

I dare you not to chuckle at one and cry with the other. But after you’ve finished, share these videos and talk about them with your friends and family. Then work like hell to make sure that the people in your lives get out and vote.

Here’s what March for Our Lives wrote upon the video’s release: “After every shooting, there’s outrage, prayers and false promises. Then it happens again. End #TheMostViciousCycle. Vote for morally just leaders and share the video.” #VoteForOurLives on 11/6.

The post Two get-out-the-vote videos, one for a chuckle, one for a tear appeared first on Occasional Planet.

With a few heartening exceptions, the trend in voting rights in America is toward suppression and trickery—with just 9 weeks to go before the crucial 2018 midterm elections. As I recently observed, voting rights in the Trump era is a one-step-forward-two-steps back story. And just when you think you’ve caught up on the news, another state, another county, or another White House authoritarian surprises you with a new wrinkle. Here’s a roundup of some voting-rights developments that cropped up in just the past few days:

In Georgia’s Randolph County, a consultant recommended closing seven of the county’s nine polling places, as a cost-saving measure. The trouble was that Randolph County is predominantly black, and the closings would have forced many midterm voters to travel as far as 30 miles to get to a polling place. Also, it just so happens that there’s a hotly contested election for Governor on the November ballot that pits Democrat Stacy Abrams, who would be Georgia’s first black chief executive, against a white Republican—Brian Kemp—who  has been called a “master of voter suppression” by his political opponents.  Democrats cried foul—and won. At its August 18 meeting, the Randolph County election board rejected the proposed closings by a vote of 2—0.

So, will voters know whether their polling place is open, or will they be unsure and give up? Failing to complete their mission of suppressing the minority vote by making it impossibly inconvenient to get to a polling place, Georgia still has managed to sow confusion, which is a voter-suppression tactic in itself.

In North Carolina, a three-judge panel ruled – on Aug. 27, just 10 weeks before the midterms—that  the state’s congressional districts were unconstitutionally gerrymandered to favor Republicans over Democrats and said it may require new districts before the November elections, possibly affecting control of the House.

According to the Washington Post,

The judges acknowledged that primary elections have already produced candidates for the 2018 elections but said they were reluctant to let voting take place in congressional districts that courts twice have found violate constitutional standards… North Carolina legislators are likely to ask the Supreme Court to step in. The court traditionally does not approve of judicial actions that can affect an election so close to the day voters go to the polls.

One judge has proposed some unusual ideas for remedying the situation: appointing a special master to draw new districts; holding general elections without party primaries; or even turning the November elections into a primary and holding the general election sometime before the new Congress convenes in January.

North Carolina’s record in voter suppression and racial gerrymandering has a long history, so this development is not a surprise. This is the kind of chicanery that was institutionalized in North Carolina before Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Then, in 2013, the Republican Congress gutted the 1965 act, and all hell broke loose in states, like North Carolina, whose voting authorities had previously operated under the watchful surveillance of the courts. States like North Carolina, freed from supervision, reverted to their natural states of voter suppression and discriminatory practices.

The question now is: How will this latest court ruling affect the November 2018 midterms? Can the state redraw its district maps with less than 10 weeks to go before the election? If it does, will voters know what district they’re supposed to vote in? The net effect is more confusion—and the logical consequence is less voter participation.

Meanwhile, at the White House, Donald Trump has made his own contribution to the confusion agenda. The Trump administration has pressured its Republican allies in the Senate to squelch a bipartisan bill to protect American elections against interference, Yahoo News reports.

Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) proposed the Secure Elections Act, which was then cosponsored by Democratic senators like Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Republicans Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and Susan Collins (R-ME).

Before the White House got involved, the bill was expected to pass the Senate and become a rare bipartisan success story for Congress.

The bill would have given the top election official in each state security clearance to receive information on electoral threats, formalized information sharing between the federal government and the states, mandated an audit of federal elections, and incentivized the purchase of voting machines that leave a paper trail.

This move, passively supported by Republicans who constantly refer to themselves as “patriots” and guardians of the U.S. Constitution, reveals the true Republican agenda: Republicans benefit from election interference, and they will do anything to preserve their own seats in Congress and their overall majority—at whatever cost to the “democracy” they claim to defend.

The post Confusing the vote: 2018 midterms edition appeared first on Occasional Planet.

When you’re running for a school board position in suburban St. Louis and tweet out memes about banning Islam in America, what could possibly go wrong?

Well, you could be invited to speak at a candidates’ forum at the local mosque. And that’s how it came to be that the first words Parkway School Board candidate Jeanie Ames spoke to the assembled crowd at the mosque were, “I am not a xenophobic, homophobic, anti-Islam, anti-Semitic racist.”

In fact, Ames spent the better part of her two-minute opening statement trying to defend herself against charges of bigotry and racism that had arisen, in part, from her retweet of a graphic calling for the banning of Islam in America.

She has since claimed that the offending tweet — and  others — were misconstrued or taken out of context. Unfortunately for Ames, her personal Twitter feed makes the context of her remarks crystal clear: Her motto, MAKE PARKWAY GREAT AGAIN, may offer a clue as to who has influenced her thinking.

In her Twitter profile, she describes herself as a “Proud wife mommy – Free market Capitalist – Constitutionalist – Catholic – Confederate – Lily-wearing – Metal lovin – Grass Roots – American Badass.”

Yeah, she called herself a “confederate.”

On January 24, the St. Louis Post Dispatch ran this article with the headline, A self-described ‘Confederate’ is running for Parkway School Board. Residents are alarmed. The article called her out not only for wanting to ban Islam, but also for referring to Michelle Obama as a “giant rat.”

Ames’ attitudes had begun to alarm a lot of people. Some who spoke to the newspaper noted:

“Jeanie Ames’ record of racism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, and other bigotry prove beyond any doubt that she has no place on the Parkway School District’s Board of Education … All people of conscience who believe in the value and place of all children at Parkway schools should oppose Ames’ candidacy in the strongest terms.”
— Anna Baltzer of Jewish Voice for Peace

“It is quite disturbing to say the least that a person with views such as ‘banning Islam from America’ is running for the Parkway School Board.”
— Mufti Asif Umar, imam of Daar-Al-Islam Masjid a mosque situated in the school district.

What else motivates Ms. Ames? Have a look at the banner on her Twitter page.

What does Jeanie Ames really want to do for the Parkway School Board? Is she misunderstood? Have her many offensive tweets somehow been taken out of context? The people in the photo below protested outside the March 25 candidate forum because they don’t believe she’s been misunderstood. They think Jeanie Ames has made herself perfectly clear.

This is an important moment in the community. Will Ames win or lose? And what will that tell us about ourselves?

Postscript:

Many of Ames’ neighbors have yard signs for the more progressive candidates in the race. None have Ames signs. Some are coming more to the point by posting yard signs stating “Hate has no home here.”

In the end, Ames lost, getting just 12.2% of the vote.

The post “Xenophobic, anti-Islam, anti-Semitic racist.” Who, me? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

First-time political candidate Kelli Dunaway thought she had a shot at unseating Ann Wagner, the conservative Republican Congresswoman from Missouri’s 2nd District. She never really got the chance.

Dunaway dropped out of the four-way Democratic race in the St. Louis area last month, but she learned some valuable lessons from her attempt. In a recent interview with Occasional Planet, she candidly shared her insights into what she did wrong, how the political system worked against her, and what other female candidates can do to overcome the obstacles.

“The bottom line was that I just couldn’t raise as much money as the other candidates,” she said, noting that in our political system, money raised is the measure of viability for a candidate. “I kept hearing—from potential donors—‘You are not raising enough money,’ and ‘You are not visible enough’—from grassroots supporters. It was a Catch 22.”

But more important than her fundraising totals are the reasons behind her inability to wring cash from donors.

“It’s a structural problem,” said Dunaway, a a single mom with two young children. “The system is set up so that only two kinds of people can successfully run for office: People who are wealthy, or people who are retired. There’s no place for a single mom. I was trying as hard as I could. But I felt anxious and stressed, because I was disappointing everyone. I wasn’t a good Mom, I wasn’t a good employee, and I wasn’t a good candidate.”

“There just wasn’t enough of a support system for a candidate like me,” she added. “I thought women would get excited about a strong capable woman taking the risk of running. I thought they’d help me more—be surrogates when I couldn’t be at events, give a little more of their time to help when my family responsibilities made being a candidate extra difficult. That didn’t happen enough.”

“Now that I’ve done this,” she said, “I see that no one benefits from the system as it is. Even if you win, you’re going to spend 20 hours a week on the phone raising money. It’s grueling, and it’s not good for anyone.”

Dunaway acknowledges that her opponents worked the system more effectively than she did. “They lined up donors early. They got endorsements from the Missouri Democratic elite. They made better connections earlier in the process. Maybe if I’d have been doing what they were doing a year before announcing my candidacy, I’d still be in it,” she said.

Dunaway admits to being frustrated by her opponents’ ability to get those “power elite” endorsements. “It was unfortunate that women in power didn’t really give me a chance, because I got into the race later, and they had already decided to back my opponent. But I was surprised that they were supporting a 29-year-old male. I got into the race in the first place to help make Congress more reflective of the overall population. Congress is only 20 percent women. I wanted to be part of the change. I thought having a woman in the race this time would give us a shot to put a Democrat in that seat.”

Issues—or, rather, the lack of them—played a role in Dunaway’s truncated campaign, too. An unashamed progressive, Dunaway wanted to talk about guns, reproductive rights and other hot-button topics, so she posted her views on her campaign website. That tactic, she learned, defied conventional wisdom. Other candidates, she learned, just ask for money—they don’t take public stands on issues on their websites.

“I am not just about money. The issues are important to me,” she said. “I don’t listen to establishment advice. We’re at a critical time in our history—we need to talk about these issues. But I learned that you get more money when you do not talk about these things. We are democratically electing a kleptocracy—donors see issues as a distraction. Other candidates keep their views on issues beneath the radar, because that’s what the donors want them to do. It’s sad, but that is the system.”

The solution, said Dunaway, is for more people to care about what is happening. “As of now, we leave it all to the donor class,” she said. They make the money decisions and that determines who runs. The people who care about issues—like me—are on the outs: we’re the weirdos.”

Dunaway says she has learned her lessons the hard way, and she seems resigned to the notion that, to be successful, future women candidates will probably have to play the system according to the current rules of engagement. Will she run again? She’s not sure what’s next for her, other than a general idea about helping to empower women.

“I want to help position women to take 50 percent of the seats in Congress—50 percent of everything: board rooms, executive suites, all the areas of power,” she says. “The last thing America needs right now are more privileged, Harvard-educated men.”

The post Lessons learned: Kelli Dunaway’s candid take on running for office appeared first on Occasional Planet.

It has always been hard to unseat an incumbent candidate. The advantages of already possessing a legislative title like State Representative or State Senator are immense. But you know what makes unseating incumbents even more difficult? Allowing them to run unopposed.

In Missouri this year, 72 incumbent candidates for seats in the State Legislature are running without an opponent in the general election. Of those, 53 are Republicans, and 19 are Democrats.  The Missouri legislature has 163 total members. Currently, 117 are Republicans, and 45 are Democrats.

That’s a lot of non-competition in a country that calls itself a democracy.

Missouri’s legislature is dominated by Republicans, who wield their veto-proof majority like a weapon of mass destruction. Our Democratic Governor, Jay Nixon, has been virtually powerless to stop some of the incredibly short-sighted, unfair and damaging legislation passed by the Missouri House and Senate. Examples? This year, Missouri lawmakers passed a Stand-Your-Ground law that is the first such piece of legislation passed anywhere since the ignominious George-Zimmerman-Trayvon-Martin shooting of 2012. They also passed a no-permit-needed-concealed-carry law. Missouri has officially joined the ranks of the most right-wing legislatures in the country.

Clearly, some Missouri legislators need replacing. The usual factors stand in the way: blatant gerrymandering of legislative districts; the built-in name recognition and institutional power of incumbency; the connections to lobbyists, power-brokers and funders.

But by far the best way to get elected is to not have an opponent. So, it’s sad to see that, in so many of Missouri’s state legislative districts, no one has stepped forward to offer opposition in the general election. In so many cases, the stopper is a sense of hopelessness: the belief that there is simply no way to win. Plus, why put yourself out there—exposing yourself and possibly your family to the public abuse that has become a routine part of campaigns– if you’re just going to lose, anyway?

Money is a big issue, too, and campaign costs are escalating. Even the most local races are spending more than ever. Some candidates for state legislative positions are amassing campaign war chests of unprecedented size. I’m guessing that some are piling up the money as a way of demonstrating that opposition is fruitless. Also, knowing that they don’t really need all that money to run against nobody, many will probably share the bounty with other like-minded campaigns, as a way of building power alliances that will come in handy later.

Here are a few numbers [from Missouri Times]:

Sheila Solon, running uncontested in the general election for a safe Republican seat in House District 31 has $93,084.13 in her campaign fund.

Mike Bernskoetter, running uncontested in the general election in the overwhelmingly Republican 59^th House District, has amassed $63,379.72 in campaign funds.

Bonnaye Mims, running uncontested in the general election in the predominantly Democratic 27^th House District, has $32,656.95 in her campaign treasury.

Of course, uncontested elections are not confined to Missouri. Unfortunately, they may be on the rise, and some observers say that gerrymandering is the main culprit.

• According to Richard Winger, of Ballot Access News, in 2012, there were 5,984 regularly scheduled state Senate and House races. About 2,000 of those were in districts where the candidates ran unopposed. Winger says that about 33 percent of all state legislative-district elections in 2012 had only one candidate per seat in the race—and  it’s likely that the vast majority of those candidates were incumbents running unopposed. Many of those races can be won with a mere 3,000 to 5,000 votes or so, depending on the year.
• In 2014, one-third of candidates for the Texas legislature ran unopposed, according to Burnt Orange Report.
• In 2016 elections in Illinois, “even if Republicans win every race where they have a candidate, they cannot win back control of the chamber. That’s because there are too many races where Democrats have an unopposed candidate,” Ballotpedia says of House elections.
• In the Illinois Senate this year, “of the 40 districts up for election, 30 have already been decided because of unopposed candidates,” says Ballotpedia.

I understand why people, on both the Democratic and Republican sides, choose not to run. I wish, though, that Democrats—especially progressive Democrats– would at least try—if only to counteract the right-wing message that dominates Missouri elections and politics. This year, especially with Donald Trump at the top of the ticket, there may be an opportunity for Dems to switch some seats—but that won’t happen when there’s no one listed on the Democratic side of the ballot. It’s sad for Missouri and for small-d democracy, too.

The post Uncontested: One of the worst words in a democracy appeared first on Occasional Planet.

What’s so [small-d] democratic about this year’s [capital D] Democratic and Republican caucuses? Not much.

The first time I caucused–back in 1972, in Missouri–I thought we had started a wonderful, participatory, democratic revolution. Smoke-filled back rooms were out. We the people were in. The format back then was essentially the same as what I saw this year in Iowa: People signed in, congregated with others who backed this candidate or that, and were counted. But it didn’t take long to realize that the format violated at least one sacred, democratic principle: the secret ballot. Man, I really hated that. Even though I was not ashamed to caucus for my guy [was it McGovern? I can’t remember any more], I knew there was something off about the lack of privacy–and the resulting vulnerability to pressure from other candidates’ zealots.

And from what I saw via CSPAN’s coverage of the 2016 Iowa caucuses, that has not changed.

At least Iowa Republicans got to vote on folded slips of paper. But that procedure did not exempt them from other un-democracy-like system flaws. In the precinct I watched on CPAN, caucusers received pre-printed ballots. In other precincts, though, they simply wrote their preference on a blank slip of paper, running the risk that illegible handwriting could disenfranchise them.

Then, there’s that whole pesky business of counting: At Republican caucuses, we saw slips of paper dropping to the floor; counters stacking ballots into unlabeled piles, or tossing them into popcorn buckets with candidates’ names scrawled on them. In the chaotic Democratic precinct I observed on C-SPAN, it took more than an hour just to figure out how many eligible people were in the room. Then, when the Clinton, Sanders, O’Malley and uncommitted groups crowded together, they were counted by a finger-pointing operative. At the end of the counting, numbers were tossed around, added, subtracted, revised and ultimately decided upon by committee. Accountability? Personal responsibility? Fuh-geddabout-it.

Iowa Dems and Republicans are said to treasure the down-homey-ness of it, the historical quaintness, and the sense of community and small-townish-ness, where everybody gets together for a good old electoral hoe-down. But it’s all faux nostalgia for an America that never really was. And it’s not working for America today.

It’s not only the internal procedures that are undemocratic. There’s a meta problem here, too. A more participatory process for nominating candidates is a heckuva lot better than the old party-boss way, no doubt. But the weight given to three mostly rural and very conservative states–Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina–by the parties and by the media–unfairly skews the political debate toward issues outside of mainstream–and, in particular, urban–America. For the months-long runup to the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucus, we heard almost nothing about Ferguson, Black Lives Matter, Flint Michigan, or Baltimore police brutality, because people who care about those issues don’t caucus in Iowa–so who cares. So much for government for and by the people.

It’s also extremely undemocratic to make it impossible for so many potential caucus-ers to express their preferences. Even the worst-offending states in the voting-rights realm haven’t tried to restrict voting to a two-hour window on only one night of the year. At least, in regular elections, voters can cast absentee ballots, or show up before or after work, or on lunch hour. But the norm for caucuses is vastly more restrictive: If you’re not in the door by 7:00 pm on caucus night, you are excluded. If you do care about who might lead your party, but you’re working two jobs and can’t afford to miss a shift, that’s just too bad for you. You don’t count. And as the over-valued Iowa caucus sets the presidential election in motion, the train has left the station without you.

For me, the bottom line is this: We live in a country whose politicians and citizens love to brag about being “the best in the world.” We continually lay claim to having the world’s largest and most successful democracy. It’s a political axiom to point with pride to the power and worldwide influence of the United States–and many politicians and military leaders have a penchant for wanting to spread “democracy” to other nations.

How are we supposed to spread “democracy” when we’re doing such a crappy job of running our own? And shouldn’t we be embarrassed that we go about choosing the leaders of such a “great” country via such a haphazard and undemocratic process?

[There are better ways. To read more about alternatives to our current primary/caucus system, click here.]

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