by Susan J. Demas
March 16, 2008

Let’s face it. Election reform ain’t sexy. There are no heart-pumping stump speeches by Barack Obama declaring, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for!” or John McCain growling he’ll follow Osama bin-Ladin “to the gates of hell.”

When reform laws actually get passed, there’s no red, white and blue balloon drop at an effervescent bash. If history’s any guide in Michigan, measures usually end up in court.

Michigan’s electoral laws, last overhauled in the cathartic post-Watergate era, desperately need to be dragged into the 21st century, according to a growing chorus. Reformers point out that it’s jarringly easy to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot if you’ve got $1 million to shell out for signatures, but we make citizens jump through a series of hoops for absentee voting. And our campaign finance laws contain holes big enough to plow a semi through.

Both chambers have made some sputtering attempts at reforms this session, with a mix of student voter, anti-robocall and ethics bills passing the House last year. They languished in the upper chamber while Michigan almost imploded over the budget last year. House Ethics and Elections Chair Marc Corriveau (D-Northville) is still prodding the Senate to address them.

But Sen. Michelle McManus (R-Lake Leelanau) isn’t impressed by the Democratic-led House’s efforts. And in Lansing, she’s the gatekeeper to reform.

“The House knee-jerks everything,” the Senate Committee on Campaign & Election Oversight chair told Domemagazine.com. “They’re more interested in headlines rather than real legislation. The Senate is more deliberative.”

To that end, the committee devoted the last year to gathering testimony across the state for its 20-page “Michigan’s Elections in the 21st Century” report issued in February.

Sen. Michelle McManus — the gatekeeper

The report, which is painstakingly free of any policy positions, is a laundry list of reforms good government folks have been batting around Lansing since the polyester pants era. Some election highlights include revising the ballot question process, standardizing polling places and increasing early voting options. But the survey takes a much broader focus and throws in tantalizing morsels like cleaning up the Constitution, chucking term limits and cracking down on the revolving door from the legislature to lobbying firms.

“From the very get-go, I wasn’t quite sure what the topic was,” grimaces Craig Ruff, senior policy fellow with Public Sector Consultants (and Domemagazine.com columnist).

It’s not clear that the senators know, either. Or perhaps more precisely, Democrats have one agenda (heavy on increasing voter turnout) and Republicans have another (cracking down on voter fraud.)

Partisanship cleaves the chambers, but it’s also carved through the Senate committee. Senate Minority Leader Mark Schauer (D-Battle Creek) was removed last year by Republicans for missing several meetings, but Democrats denounced it as a political stunt. For months there was only one Democrat on the five-person committee until Schauer was reinstated. None of that is a promising sign for reform.

The House, Senate and secretary of state tried to hammer out a compromise on ballot initiatives, but talks broke down at the end of last year. Now the Senate committee has rolled out some interesting changes — like requiring signatures to be gathered in 83 of 110 House districts. The current modus operandi is to hit a few metro Detroit malls.

Bottom line is: Don’t expect a sweeping package introduced this session, but rather a smattering of piecemeal reforms. How much attention they get depends largely on the state’s still-struggling finances and election-year politics.

“It’s baby steps,” acknowledges McManus. “We’re taking on things we can all agree on.”

Michigan Campaign Finance Network Executive Director Rich Robinson says he has seen this movie before. “I hope something significant comes out of this,” he sighs. But it could be another case of all talk, no action, like when Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land’s 2006 package couldn’t bust through the bottleneck in a friendly GOP legislature.

White elephant
And then there’s the white elephant in the room: campaign finance reform. No serious discussion of election restructuring is complete without it.

“It’s the single-most critical challenge to the political process as we know it,” Ruff says. “It’s done great harm to the image of politicians who want to be seen as honest and upright. You can’t imagine how uncomfortable people are with how much money is being raised, where they’re getting the money and the last-minute ads.”

Yet neither party has marched into this minefield with much gusto. An omnibus House bill would transfer oversight from the secretary of state to the nonpartisan director of elections, regulate phone and e-mail ads and prevent a candidate committee from paying the candidate. The measure has been gathering dust in the Senate since May, and more comprehensive bills are trapped in the House committee. “We’re not diving into that at the moment,” Corriveau confirms.

Meanwhile, McManus says campaign finance reform is the second part of her committee’s work, but “I don’t know when we’ll get to it. The election part is very timely in an election year.”

Robinson can certainly lend a hand. He’s already worked with the Midwest Democracy Network to craft a blueprint for comprehensive reform, which includes stiffer penalties for campaign finance violations, more frequent reporting and limiting individuals’ contributions to all state candidates, political action committees and parties to $100,000 for the cycle.

Of course, as the McCain-Feingold legislation demonstrated on the federal level, reforms can butt heads with the First Amendment — and often lose. Laws have to be crafted with care, as lawyers lie in wait to hack them apart.

Which brings us back to the last time Michigan revamped its election laws — under Gov. William Milliken in the 1970s. “It was born in the fumes of Watergate,” recalls Ruff, a former Milliken aide. After castigating fellow Republican President Richard Nixon in a speech, the governor tirelessly negotiated a reform package with the legislature.

For the first time, the Great Lakes State lifted the veil of secrecy on campaign donations, enacting a disclosure process. It was the birth of the Open Meetings Act, lobbyist disclosure and public financing for gubernatorial elections.

It wasn’t an instant success — the state Supreme Court struck down the law and Milliken had to regroup. But he was aided by a bipartisan coterie of legislator-reformers like Dale Kildee, Bill Ballenger and David Hollister, who passionately believed that public scrutiny makes democracy flourish.

Bipartisanship
So what’s it going to take to get comprehensive election reform passed this decade?

Bipartisanship clearly is the key. But short of a cataclysmic event like Watergate — and the traumatic 2000 Florida recounts and stomach-churning Swift Boat ads of 2004 failed to mobilize lawmakers — it seems unlikely that wholesale reforms will be swallowed by both parties.

In this session, it appears the best we can hope for is that legislators clean up a few of the simpler problems. It may take some fresh eyes to tackle the big fights — and thanks to term limits, there will be plenty of them when the House and Senate turn over in 2010. But perhaps it’s time for a drastically different approach. After all, election reform is the kind of wonky policy debate that puts most people to sleep. The ultimate goal, of course, is to get more people involved in their government.

Ruff suggests starting with a radical overhaul of the act of voting itself, which he compares to a visit to “your local funeral parlor.” “You can’t talk, except in hushed tones, and the poll workers, God love them, are all older people,” he notes.

So why not make it as festive as an election night gala? Give smiling students the day off from school to work the tables. Bring in the marching band. And yes — blow up the balloons.

“Make it fun for people to participate in the process,” Ruff declares. “And that doesn’t take any law.”

Susan J. Demas is a political analyst for Michigan Information & Research Service and a syndicated columnist.