Election Officials and Their Conflicts

Election officials. Who in a democracy should be more above suspicion than election officials?

At the place where I vote, the line that is the required number of feet from the voting area is traditionally right along the near side of the sidewalk that runs along the edge of the school parking lot. When candidates, their supporters, and others come to hand out their sheets, hold their signs, and talk to voters, they stand on that sidewalk.

At the last election, for the town and school budget, when there was a great deal of opposition, that line just happened to be placed on the other side of that sidewalk, so that people would have no place to stand except in a small area between cars, which was the only way people could easily approach the polling place.

This is only one of many ways in which election officials can affect the outcome of an election. The most famous way is the certification of Florida's presidential vote in 2000 by Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who just happened to be chair of the Bush campaign in Florida.

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Today's New York Times has a front-page article on election officials' conflicts of interest. It focuses on state and federal officials, particularly secretaries of state, but this is equally a local governments ethics issue. However, as with so many ethics issues, it is hard to deal with at the local level before the issue is dealt with at the state and federal levels.

The biggest problem here seems to be the secretaries of state. The new president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, Todd Rokita, is co'chair of the Indiana finance committee for presidential candidate Mitt Romney. 'Just because you are elected to office doesn't mean you checked your constitutional right to free speech at the door,' he told the Times. He could just as easily have said, When you are in elected to office, you take upon yourself special obligations to the people who elected you. This is what most voters would like to hear from someone who oversees their elections.

Mr. Rokita went on to say that it is better to elect top voting officials rather than appoint them, because then they can be held accountable if they fail to act impartially. As if anyone really knows whether they act impartially or not, not to mention the fact that many voters of the same party may actually want them to act partially, and vote for them for that very reason (Harris became a hero to many).

The Constitution and accountability at the ballot box (as opposed to all the other forms of accountability): are these now the last refuges of a scoundrel?

Mr. Rokita does not appear to have been speaking only for himself. When a federal bill prohibiting chief state election officials from serving on the political campaigns of federal candidates was submitted to Mr. Rokita's organization, the organization said that it would discuss it at the annual convention, but then failed to do so 'because opposition was too strong.'

The other focus of the Times article is the revolving door between being an election official and being an employee of a voting machine vendor or a lobbyist for the voting machine industry. Apparently, few states have laws preventing people from going back and forth between the two, handing out contracts to former employers or possible employers in the very near future.

What can be done at the local level? How can ethics codes be written so that they apply to the particular sorts of conflicts that arise when one wears the hat of an election official, as well as other local government hats, whether they be elected, appointed, or partisan?