Pointer from Phil's Blog....

I don't think I knew Brian Dana Akers in the 1970s, but since I was working closely with his brother and knew his parents socially it's pretty likely I met him once or twice. Anyway, he's grown up to write science fiction and has a lengthy online autobiography on his personal website. About a quarter of the way down the page is a word portrait of his father, Owen, which includes Action Now in a long list of organizations Owen participated in. Brian's father was as remarkable as the portrait suggests. What I think the portrait misses is that Owen's heavy workload was fairly seamless; I had contacts with him in several of his roles and he was always the same person, working on the same causes, and finding reinforcement from his friends and colleagues as he moved from meeting to meeting. A strenuous life, yes, and not everyone loved Owen Akers, but many did.

Brian's summation is all too true:

When someone like this dies, it's like standing on the rim of a huge crater. Only as the crater recedes into the past do the survivors comprehend the size of the hole in their lives, appreciate the death's force of impact, and realize all that was vaporized.

More, though. Owen was an inspiration to his friends, and to some of his opponents. That did not end when he perished.

I spent years doing political organizing. Brians' brother, David, was one of my colleagues in those efforts--he was the key voter registration and get out the vote organizer whose activities complemented our voter contact efforts in the early 1970s. That I had his respect was always a source of satisfaction, for Dave's commitment to the work was far greater than mine. David Akers was a formidable organizer, bringing talent and passion to everything he touched. David was quite different from his father, but equally committed to his father's causes.

We lost contact when I moved to Lansing. I'm saddened to learn that he died fairly young.

Postscript: While I was working on this essay, iTunes delivered Rhonda Vincent's performance of Carl Story's If You Don't Love God:

If you say you love Him while you hate your neighbor then you don't have religion. You just told a lie.

Fitting.

Dad passed away fourteen years ago today....

I've done Get Out the Vote (GOTV) from nearly every side.

• I've helped recruit volunteers for GOTV efforts.
• I've assigned folks to do door-to-door GOTV activity.
• I've written scripts for folks making GOTV phone calls.
• I've supervised a GOTV phone center.
• I've spent the day making those phone calls (surprisingly, this came after supervising a GOTV effort).
• I've helped prioritize campaign GOTV budgets.
• I've sat in polling places as a Democratic Party poll watcher.
• I've staffed the phone in the party office, answering the questions of GOTV workers and poll watchers, and collecting the results from the callers as the polling places closed.

I've even organized the post-election party for our GOTV workers....

Fun times, mostly, but I don't miss them.

This is democracy at work, friends.  It's not pretty, and it's really quite messy, but it's part and parcel of making the nation work.  Gonna vote--for John Kerry and a bunch of other folks--in a few minutes.

PIRGIM's Community Voters Project is working to break this cycle of mutual disinterest [between politicians and the poor] by facilitating increased voter registration and turnout.  In early June, PIRGIM's Community Voters Project opened a full-scale canvass office in Lansing.  The trained, dedicated canvassers in this office hit the streets of Lansing every day, finding, registering, and educating thousands of new voters.  [emphasis added]

An excellent intention, though obviously something went wrong.  A few notes....

Voter turnout efforts generally have three prongs:

1. Voter registration campaign. 
   • Although there are partisan activities in this arena, funding availability and reporting requirements generally push these efforts to organizations which are nominally non-partisan.
     • Since both major parties work with "non-partisan" allies, finger-pointing about it is not really common.
     • Abolishing this practice might be desirable.
   • There are also genuinely non-partisan activities in this arena.  Most people have no difficulty telling the two varieties apart.
2. Likely-supporter identification efforts.
3. • This is where the partisan voter-contact money and effort mainly goes, and was where I worked when I was politicking.  Voter contact activities tend to occur concurrently with voter registration efforts but are a separate activity with different leadership (not so true of the worker bees, though).
   • This effort is mainly about identifying the likelihood that a voter household will support a candidate or a ticket.  In general, this is accomplished by interviewing household members by going door-to-door or by telephoning the home.  There may or may not be an explicit campaign effort attached to the voter contact.
   • Voter ID is a separate organization from the main campaign effort, but generally works closely with candidate organizations.
4. Get-out-the-vote (GOTV) activities on election day.
5. • Everybody gives lip service to high voter turnout.
   • Everyone works to get their own voters to the polls.  That's why we've spent months identifying our supporters, and where those efforts pay off.
     • Attempting to discourage the other side's voters is not unheard of, and takes many forms.  While some of these discouragements are more honorable than others, all corrode the process.
   • Again, there are truly non-partisan groups working in this arena.  Those are upstanding folks, and virtually everyone admires them.

In this schema, PIRGIM counts as a nominally non-partisan group doing voter registration--though they style themselves as genuinely non-partisan.  The clerks who've received the bad registrations are reporting a failure of training and supervision, not one of intention.  The PIRGIM canvassers were apparently paid by the signature, a payment scheme which invites fraud.  The canvassers who created the problem were likely convinced that the faked registrations were harmless, and may have believed they were actually doing something good.  Presumably they didn't expect they'd be caught.  My experience is that enthusiasts can be idiots about this sort of thing--and trust me, folks who run these programs try to hire enthusiasts.

It's still fraud, though, albeit small-scale and individual rather than large-scale and organizational.  The effect  is about the same; the sponsor's credibility takes a hit, as does the election process.  Nothing undermines the credibility of an election like the appearance of dishonesty.

If I'd been running the operation, those documents would have been checked before they got passed to the county clerks.  Since the clerks are consistently reporting that the fraudulent registrations are obvious forgeries, that check shouldn't have required great effort.  Supervision, guys.  Due diligence.  Simple caution.

Notes

• Historically PIRGIM's a Naderite organization, and not particularly a Democratic Party ally  This sort of dissonance makes life interesting.
• Been there.  I helped run a county-wide voter contact campaign for the Kalamazoo Democrats in 1972.  Part of the effort was coordinated by a student group whose only real interest was the presidential contest.  A quick glance at the voter survey sheets returned from the campus made it clear that only the McGovern ratings could be trusted.  Since we caught the fraud before passing the forms to other organizations, the faked forms mainly made my sister angry.  Very angry.

The Harvard study concludes that these deficits have become structural, that is, the states are obligated to provide more services than they can afford.  This has been said about the Michigan situation for the last several years, but it has not been addressed.  Instead, quick-fix and stopgap solutions have been used to keep the books balanced.

Detroit Free Press/July 17, 2004
/States like Michigan need bolder budget vision
my thanks to my employer's clipping service

The editorial staff at the Freeps, like me, thinks it's about time we rethought the structure of the state's fiscal compact; since I've already commented on that, I'll not repeat myself.  This paragraph, though, caught my attention:

Few states have shown the political will for the overhaul that is obviously required, in both taxes and services.  States such as Michigan with term-limited public officials minding the store are perhaps the least likely to make bold changes.

While I really dislike the short term limits we've put on the legislature, I don't see this connection.  Methought one purpose of the term limits was to reduce the proportion of career politicians in office, thus reducing those officials' institutional commitments and freeing up the creative juices.  That objective was certainly worthwhile, and ought to still apply.

Regardless, I don't think we'll see a legislative solution.  It's likely time for a new Con-Con.

Unthinkable, I say.  I'm a Democrat.  I used to work in the Democratic Party--hell, I used to work for the party, occasionally for pay.  I usually vote for Democrats.  I send money to Democrats.  My heart's in the Democracy, and voting in the other party's primary's not far from treason.

Except:  Where I live, especially this year, the Democratic primary doesn't much matter.  Few of the primary races are contested, and few of those Dems who'll get my November votes will win; on the other hand, a vote in the Republican primary can affect the real outcome of the election.  I've a strong opinion in the Republican Congressional race, and can develop a preference for the Sheriff's contest.  That's a reason to cast a vote.  I expect I'll do so.

That comment is probably pretty opaque if you've never voted in Michigan, as Michigan's primary laws are a bit odd.  Historically, this state has not required--nor even had a mechanism for--registering to vote for a specific party.  All Michigan primaries are open to anyone who is eligible to vote.  The only rule is that, for a particular primary, you can only vote in one party's contests.

For a short time Michigan had a party-declaration requirement, but the declaration was sufficiently unpopular--an "invasion of privacy"--that the Democrats decided it was preferable to stage a party-run presidential primary--which they (I'll not say "we" about this) choose to call a "caucus."

The national gerrymander habit must die.  The practice of routinely creating one-party election districts undermines political discourse, and subverts republican government.  One party elections encourage extremism, and create a climate where debate, discussion, and compromise are impossible--on many issues, the practice permits folks to honestly believe that reaching a compromise is indecent.  Few politicians, and few citizens, are naturally extremist, but we've created a system which encourages an extremist culture.  Party advantage is not a healthy basis for defining political boundaries, and ideology needs to be tempered by honest discussion.  We ought to do better than this.  We must do better than this.

Modification 7/28/04:  Explanation about the Michigan primary system.

I agree wholeheartedly with his main point, which is that the system is broken.  Part of the fascination of this year's budget negotiations in Michigan has been that it's clear that the legislative leadership disagrees with the governor about key issues, but that both sides have been working to find workable compromises and mutually acceptable solutions.  That's how government is supposed to work, and it's worth cheering when things work out.  But sometimes more is needed, and it's becoming clear that now is one of those times.  The next step is to get beyond the legislative duct tape and the temporary administrative measures to build something we can live with for another generation.  Perhaps this is the opportunity.

American government is designed to accomodate disagreement, though the tension often makes folks uncomfortable.  What we need, sometime soon, is a civil discussion about what Michigan's government is for, how we get to that point, and what tax structure we need to support that effort.  The (less-than-complete) success of the Michigan budget efforts demonstrates that it's not necessary to continue talking past each other just because we've been doing so in the past.  Discussion isn't helped when each side caricatures the other's positions.   The habit many have of simplifying and dismissing the other party's position is really poisonous to the civil culture.  It's time we stopped, and started finding solutions.

Robert Teeter, quite likely the most influential political pollster of all time, passed away over the weekend.  Although Teeter worked the Republican side of the street, he devised methods which have influenced political analysts of all stripes.  His primary legacy, poll-driven political strategy, is unlikely to vanish soon.  While his methods are one of the foundations of modern Republicanism, Democratic campaigns have been built on similar bases.

My sympathies to his friends and family.