As I picked up the current Newsweek, I turned first, as always, to see what George Will had to say. Someday, someone will have to explain to me how a major news-magazine can waste one of the most important pieces of journalistic real estate on the soft musings of Anna Quindlen. But that is another matter.
As he has quadrennially for the last eight years, Mr. Will is writing of his disdain for pre-election day voting. Four years ago, I remember the column well, he referred to election day as our civic liturgy. I loved that phrase and thought it so apt. I am an opponent of all this pre-voting. I have been long before Mr. Will started writing about it. While the right to vote is and should be a sacred constitutional guarantee, its method should also be sacrosanct. As I have said I am a libertarian and believe in a fairly strict interpretation of the 10th Amendment. Voting should be left to the states to decide in matters of machines, balloting, petitioning and routine regulations. But the basic notion of voting is too important to leave to Katherine Harris, et al.
We come together at a single moment to make a choice. We all have the exact same information or access to it. Our ability to decide, like our vote, is equal. Pre-voting eliminates that entirely. Our modern, technological age is supposed to conform to the original intent of our democracy. To wit - that all free men gather in the public square at the same time and raise their hand. Not the other way around.
Let us say - and I do not believe for one moment this could happen, but accept the example - that in the next debate John McCain, in a moment of pique, calls Barack Obama a nigger. Do you not believe that a considerable number of the millions and millions of people who have already voted for John McCain might, just might, want to change their votes? But they cannot. They have pre-voted and lost the right to make a totally informed decision. Am I mistaken or if the example I just gave actually happened there would be a tidal wave to eliminate pre-voting? The storm of protest from people wanting to recast their votes would be overwhelming. Is it possible that some people might have wanted to change their vote, had they already cast it, when they heard Gerald Ford say that Eastern Europeans didn't consider themselves under Soviet subjugation, if pre-voting had existed in 1976?
What is this need we have to trivialize voting? Why are people always advocating that everyone go out and vote. Everyone should have the right to vote but I've never believed that everyone should. If you are an uninformed boob who has never read a newspaper, watched the news or knows anything about the candidates or the issues, why would anyone urge you to cast a vote? And yet the airways, the rock stars, MTV, progressive groups are basically pushing for this all the time. It is the same thing with registration access. Is it too much to ask someone to call, e-mail, or write the Board of Elections and ask for a voter registration form to be mailed (or printed on-line), that you fill-out, send back - postage paid - and are quickly registered and enrolled, should you choose, in a political party? Is this really too difficult? Well it seems so according to many.
The George Will column has lead me to publish something I was going to hold off from posting for a few weeks; but timeliness and current events, as I said early on, will change when and the order in which I post. Here then my involvement, officially, in the voter registration process.
At some point in 1995 I went to a meeting with Peter J. Powers (PJP) in his office. When I arrived Gordon Campbell - Peter's Chief of Staff - not Peter, was waiting for me. Gordon explained that they were trying to free up more of Peter's time and farm out some of his responsibilities. Being first deputy mayor is a very taxing job with many demands on your time. Peter had decided that his ex-officio position at the Voters Assistance Commission (VAC) would be delegated to me. Peter had mentioned VAC to me briefly a few times before but we never had any substantive conversations surrounding it. It was mainly along the lines of what a pain in the ass it was that he had to attend these meetings. He and Gordon had apparently gotten an opinion that his role could be delegated.
Gordon explained to me that Dennis Wolcott was the Chairman at VAC. He was an appointed member, there was an executive director. But Dennis was a forceful presence in whatever he did and was the person at VAC that Gordon explained we would have the most interface with. He was the head of the local chapter of the NY Urban League. I knew Dennis a little as he was a person in the black community who had tried to maintain reasonable and civil relations with the Giuliani Administration. There weren't many of them back then.
Gordon explained further that VAC's main mission at that point had been to promote the Motor Voter legislation. That they had serious issues with the executive director who, I would later discover, was considered very left, very anti-Rudy and totally off-agenda (off-agenda was a term PJP coined very early on in the administration and usually referred to appointees either holdovers or new, who were not promulgating the Mayor's policies and in fact might be working against them). At the time of the initial Gordon conversation the executive director had already been fired or was about to be shortly, I cannot recall exactly. Gordon explained that I would have to find a replacement for him and that our interests did not lie with those of Dennis or the Commission. He explained that Peter would get into that further with me.
A few days later in his office PJP produced a document, which he signed, delegating his VAC appointment to me. He told me what he expected. "This Motor Voter legislation is no good. The agencies are supposed to have registration forms everywhere. We know what's going to happen. People are going to ask city employees, union members, for help filling them out when they get to a window at HRA or DOT. "What party should I enroll in?" What do you think a member of DC 37 or 1191 is going to tell them? They are prohibited from assisting, but it's going to happen. I don't want us facilitating this. You are the point person now on coordinating this with the agencies. Dennis is a friend but our interests don't align. I know you can handle this," Peter said. "Don't worry about it. I know what to do," I told him.
Dennis didn't turn out to be the problem. He knew from day one that I was not going to apply Motor Voter standards across city agencies. The legislation required that all city agencies have voter registration forms wherever there was contact with the public. I read the legislation carefully and found some city agencies that I felt weren't technically covered. You had to meet specific requirements to be a covered agency. They didn't meet the standards as set forth in the legislation. I immediately excluded them and told the agencies so. They were no longer covered by Motor Voter.
The person who turned out to be a pain in the ass was Vallone's representative to VAC. She was constantly pressuring me to do more. She apparently had sources who were telling her that point of contact sites were not distributing the forms. When she complained to me at Board meetings I never outright lied to her but always said I would look into it.
Luke and I went to great pains to keep the agencies on-agenda as far as this went. Luke regularly received calls about whether forms should be placed here or there or not at all. Also, what efforts should be made to facilitate assisting voters. Clearly none. But we did set clear policy about the collection and referral of completed forms when they were turned in. As much as I thought Motor Voter rife with potential fraud, once someone turned in a completed form it had to be sent immediately to the Board of Elections.
Peter and I spoke regularly about VAC. He was always very pleased with what I was doing. I explained that agency compliance was being kept to the barest possible minimum. He also pointed out repeatedly the insanity of expending resources on this compliance while he was spending his days in budget meetings figuring out ways to close the gap.
Peter had tasked me to do similar things before. I was the point person in the Mayor's Office for agency contact with the City and State Comptrollers (and Public Advocate) when they conducted an audit of a city agency. The agencies had to work through my office, never directly with the audit team, over hammering out the specifics of what would be given and when. My instructions from PJP in those instances were the same: close em down, give them as little as possible, delay and obstruct. It was easy to throw off Carl McCall's auditors or Mark Green's. I had a personal relationship with Hevesi and Jack Chartier, so it made those audits much tougher. The McCall and Green audits were always politically motivated so I never felt badly about throwing them off. I found Hevesi to be a first-class Comptroller. I agreed with him privately about the idiocy of selling off the water system to pay our short-term bills and was glad when his lawsuit succeeded.
As part of my regular weekly one-on-ones with PJP I always briefed him on the status of the audits. Naturally, thwarting Mark Green audits was always uppermost in his and Rudy's minds. They really hated the guy.
As for VAC, the only time Rudy's involvement was known to me was when PJP, at a one-on-one, happened to mention that Vallone had brought up VAC to Rudy at their weekly Friday meeting. He was unhappy with agency compliance. "It's that appointee of Vallone's pissing in his ear. I cannot believe he wasted this as an agenda item with Rudy," I said. "What did Rudy tell him?" I asked. "He told him he would look into it. I explained to him what you were doing with the agencies. He agrees completely," PJP said.
When I left City Hall for EDC in May of 1996 I also left VAC as PJP's representative.
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