When Politics Leaves the Neighborhood
One of the rituals of campaigning is getting enough voters to sign a petition to put your name on the ballot. It is a hurdle intended to ensure some minimum level of support and deter frivolous candidates who decide to run after having too many beers.
It is not a high hurdle. To run for county board in Wisconsin requires 20 signatures. For State Assembly, 200. For State Senate, 400. For Governor, 2000. For candidates it is a test of early organizational strength as supporters are asked to gather signatures from their friends and neighbors. It is a very local activity, one of the few remaining in modern campaigns.
In Michigan this election a funny thing happened on the way to getting on the ballot. The Bureau of Elections recommended that the petitions of five Republican candidates for Governor, including the two leading contenders, be denied because there were not enough valid signatures. The petitions of five other Republican contenders met the Michigan requirement of 15,000 signatures.
The story is not the story of a crooked candidate but a story of what happens too often when people with name recognition and celebrity status but no local political roots or organizational support decide to run for high office. The campaign is turned over to outsiders and money is used to buy the activity previously carried out by local political parties and volunteers who personally know and support the candidate.
In its report, the Bureau of Elections said it hadn’t previously seen, “such a substantial volume of fraudulent petition sheets consisting of invalid signatures … In some cases, rather than attempting varying signatures, the circulator would intentionally scrawl illegibly. In other instances, they circulated petition sheets among themselves, each filling out a line.”
The two leading contenders for the Republican nomination were James Craig, a former Detroit police chief, and Perry Johnson, a wealthy businessman. Craig’s campaign submitted 21,305 signatures, more than half of which were invalid, leaving only 10,192, well short of the 15,000 required.
The story of signature gathering by Craig’s campaign goes something like this. Sometime in March about a month before an April deadline for submitting petitions the campaign had only some 500 signatures. It then contracted with a Texas company to collect signatures, which in turn subcontracted with one or more other companies.
It was only after the Bureau issued its report that Craig said he had just learned of a “potential nexus” between his campaign and a firm headed by a person who had pleaded guilty previously to election fraud in Virginia in a similar case involving signatures.
Why do we care about fraudulent signatures being thrown out in Michigan and candidates disqualified from getting on the ballot? It is an example of what happens to the democratic process when politics and political power leave the neighborhood and become centralized.
The concept of representative government is based on communities electing one of their own, who represents them and their interests, to public office.
That was largely true when local political parties were strong, were able to put door knockers on front porches and word of mouth was the dominant political communication technology. Candidates were recruited locally, the campaign resources necessary to elect them were gathered locally. There was an identity between candidate and community.
That all began to change when media messages became more influential than personal messages in determining elections. Money has replaced door knockers. Money that comes from anywhere and buys all of the campaign resources necessary to win from anywhere.
The connections between the candidate, the campaign and the community loosen. People from outside the community are hired to come in as mercenaries, recruit the candidate, gather signatures, do the polling, script the ads, write the policies, and provide the organizers. There are lots of consultants and organizations eager to get paid and do the work. Lots of interest groups and interested individuals willing to put up the money.
What is diminished is local control of our elections and local influence once those candidates are elected.
John Dean, who ran for President in 2004, was among the first to use the slogan, “take back our government”. Not an easy task. If we really want to take back our government, if we want our officeholders to represent the interests of the communities in which we live, then we have to make sure that we are the ones who ensure their election. We recruit them, we plan and finance their campaigns, we work for them, we persuade our neighbors to vote for them, and we elect them.
When we have done that, government will be back in our hands. Politics will be local again when we take the responsibility to do the work.
Douglas Kane is the author of "Our Politics: Reflections on Political Life" published in 2019 by Southern Illinois University Press
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