Gavin is an Iowa native, and covered the 2008 first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses for the Ames Tribune. His work has also appeared in the Agence France-Presse, Iowa Independent, Manhattan Media, and VillageVoice.com.
The 2012 election wrapped up barely a week ago, which means that fundraising for the 2014 midterm election has begun in earnest. But a new campaign to get money out of politics has just launched as well. Represent.Us says its goal is to pass the American Anti-Corruption Act, a nine-point plan to crack down on lobbyists, strengthen the flimsy law intended to prevent super-PACs from coordinating with campaigns, and put a stop to undisclosed donations funneled through dark-money nonprofits. (Represent.Us is a project of United Republic, a campaign finance reform group that, like many of the outside spending organizations it takes aim at, is a 501(c)(4).)
Represent.Us boasts a high-profile, bipartisan board of advisors, among them former Federal Elections Commission chair (and Stephen Colbert's "personal lawyer") Trevor Potter, Lawrence Lessig, disgraced lobbyist-turned-reformer Jack Abramoff, representatives from Occupy Wall Street and the DC Tea Party Patriots, and even Teddy Roosevelt's great-grandson, Theodore IV. The group hopes to to convince 1 million American citizens to join its cause, building on popular revulsion to what it deems "the worst political corruption in American history."
After that, Represent.Us plans to introduce the Anti-Corruption Act to Congress by the end of 2013 and rally cosponsors. It's also got its eye on 2014: The group says it will wage a "hard-hitting campaign" against members of Congress who fail to sign on. No word yet on how it would fund its efforts to unseat those incumbents.
James Bopp, the legal architect of the Citizens United case.
Last month, James Bopp, the legal mind behind the Citizens United case that gave rise to super-PACs and the dark-money boom, told me he didn't really believe Americans were all that upset with the increasing amounts of money spent on politics. "There's a general cynicism among the American people about politicians and politics," he said, but "they could care less about campaign finance."
Now that the election's over, Bopp says he's been vindicated. When I caught up with him late last week, he told me he figures that Mitt Romney's loss was probably due to a variety of factors like poor messaging and spending. Without Citizens United, though, he says the election would have turned out much worse for Republicans: There would have been no counterbalance to the mainstream media. "The lesson here is all the hype over independent spending was just completely overblown," Bopp says. "Nobody can buy an election."
The poor return on investment among the biggest conservative outside spending groups would appear to back that up. You can only spend so much to sway voters, says Bopp. "There's a diminishing returns as you saturate a market. Once you've got your message across, the addtional spending accomplishes nothing." The pro-Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future, for instance, made significant ad buys just one week out from the election in Minnesota and New Mexico, two states that Obama was at no risk of losing. Those moves led reporters to wonder if outside groups had raised more money than they knew what to do with. "That's why this thing about buying elections is fundamentally false," Bopp concludes.
The $6 billion in total spending in 2012 dwarfs that of any recent election, but Bopp simply attributes that to an increasingly bloated system that requires increasing amounts of money to compete against incumbents.
Bopp says the election was "fought to a draw," and "neither side accomplished what they set out to do." The county still has the same president, Republicans still have control of the House, and Democrats still lack a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. As for Obama's consideration of a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, Bopp hopes he pursues it. He's confident that Republicans at the national and state level could block any serious efforts to undo the decision, especially with Republican supporters of the now-defunct McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill like Richard Lugar and Olympia Snowe departing the Senate.
"I hope [Democrats] spend all their time on that," Bopp says, "because it's not going anywhere."
"The billionaire donors I hear are livid. There is some holy hell to pay." —A Republican operative speaking to the Huffington Post about Karl Rove, who "has a lot of explaining to do." Rove's super-PAC American Crossroads and dark-money group Crossroads GPS spent at least $175 million, but just nine of the 30 candidates that Crossroads supported won. Rove, who claimed that Obama won reelection "by supressing the vote" and with the help of Hurricane Sandy, reportedly held a phone briefing with top donors on Thursday to explain Crossroads' lack of success.
chart of the week
Rove wasn't the only operative with a lot of explaining to do. Other conservative super-PACs and dark-money groups that spent a lot did not see great results at the ballot box. Meanwhile, some smaller liberal and labor groups saw respectable returns on their investments.
stat of the week
More than $57 million: The amount of disclosed donations from casino magnate and Gingrich-Romney supporter Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam. The Adelsons' money got more mileage than Rove's, but about 58 percent of the candidates it supported still lost. Asked by a Norwegian journalist how he thought his money had been spent, Adelson replied, "Paying bills. That's how you spend money. Either that or become a Jewish husband—you spend a lot of money."
attack ad of the week
Conservative super-PACs had the clear money advantage throughout the 2012 election, but in the end it was an ad from the pro-Obama super-PAC Priorities USA Action that became the most effective campaign spot, according to TV analytics company Ace Metrix. The ad, "Stage," was part of a nine-spot, $50 million buy in contested states hitting Romney's record at Bain Capital. During the campaign, Republican pollster Frank Luntz told the Huffington Post's Howard Fineman that "that ad alone has killed Mitt Romney in Ohio."
• Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock, who unsuccessfully challenged the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, was elected governor despite a last-minute outside-money assault. Center for Public Integrity
• The US Chamber of Commerce was another major outside-spending loser this election. Washington Post
• And Sheldon Adelson wasn't the only megadonor to back a score of losing candidates. Center for Public Integrity
• Even the anti-incumbent super-PAC Campaign for Primary Accountability had better luck than Karl Rove on Tuesday. Slate
Last month, we took a look at 23 ballot measures worth watching in yesterday's election, from same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization to a voter ID amendment and anti-Obamacare initiatives. Here's a look at how those, and a few others, fared last night:
Same-sex marriage
For the first time ever, voters legalized same-sex marriage at the ballot box in Maryland, Maine, and Washington, as MoJo's Kate Sheppard and Adam Serwer report. The night was a huge loss for antigay groups led by the National Organization for Marriage, which also saw a ballot measure in Minnesota for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage go down in flames.
Pot legalization As Josh Harkinson reports, Colorado became the first state to legalize marijuana outright last night, followed an hour later by Washington. The question now is how far the federal government will go to crack down on the historic new laws. Another legalization measure in Oregon failed, in large part due to concerns that the law would have been overly broad. Meanwhile, voters legalized medical marijuana in Massachusetts but rejected it in Arkansas, and in Montana approved a measure that tightens restrictions on the state's existing medical marijuana laws.
Read on for our full coverage from Election Day 2012; a brief explainer on voter suppression follows below.
Update 15, 12:42 p.m. PST, November 7: Disproportionate disenfranchisement of minorities Black and Hispanic voters were more likely to enounter voting problems than whites in yesterday's election; see this AFL-CIO survey via Adam Serwer.
Update 14, 4:20 p.m. PST, November 6: Tales from the voting meltdown in Florida
Long lines continue to plague Florida voters, who have been forced to wait up to seven hours to cast their ballots today. Josh Harkinson has one woman's painful story, and more.
Update 13, 3:50 p.m. PST, November 6: Pennsylvania's voter ID law causes mayhem
Across the state of Pennsylvania voters have reported encountering signs and election volunteers requesting voter identification, even though a court ruling halted the state's voter ID law until after the election. Voters, needless to say, are confused and upset—many don't understand whether they are required to show ID. Erika Eichelberger and Josh Harkinson have more here.
Update 12, 2:56 p.m. PST, November 6: Parking signs at Pa. polling place attempt to block Democrats In Charleroi, Pennsylvania, five signs were placed on barricades near a polling station parking lot that read: "NO PARKING FOR DEMOCRATS - WALK THAT WILL BE THE MOST WORK YOU DO ALL DAY." Brett Brownell has more here.
Update 10, 2:20 p.m. PST, November 6: Pennsylvania voter purge?
"We suspect there has been an unreported purge of voters in Pennsylvania," Barbara Arnwine, head of the Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights, tells Mother Jones. There are "too many voters being affected by this" in major urban areas like Philadephia and Pittsburgh "for us to think it’s voter error or voter confusion." The Committee's Jon Greenbaum, a former Justice Department attorney, said that the only other explanation for the reports was administrative error. Adam Serwer has more details here.
Update 9, 2:14 p.m. PST, November 6: Fox News' Black Panther bogeyman
2008 flashback! Fox News is once again hyperventilating about voter intimidation in Pennsylvania allegedly by the New Black Panther Party. As it was four years ago, the NBPP's actual presence at the polls is negligible. In fact, there was reportedly only one of them this time. Adam Serwer has more details here.
Update 8, 12:05 p.m. PST, November 6: Big problems with absentee ballots in Ohio?
A coalition of voter advocacy groups called the Ohio Fair Elections Network just held a conference call this afternoon in Columbus to provide an update on Election Day voting problems. The top concern involves a new program started by Secretary of State Jon Husted that mailed absentee ballot applications to nearly 7 million voters earlier this year. Because of various voting restrictions set in motion since 2008—and because some voters never received the absentee ballots they requested through the program—those voters will have to cast provisional ballots today unless they take their absentee ballots (if they received them) to their local board of elections office. And there are now red flags with Ohio's provisional ballot process, thanks to a controversial last-minute maneuver by Husted regarding voter IDs.
About 209,000 Ohio voters cast provisional ballots in 2008; Brian Rothenberg of ProgressOhio said he expects to see 30,000 to 50,000 more this year because of the new absentee ballot program. By state law, officials don't have to count provisional ballots until this November 17. After that, if Obama and Romney are within 0.25 percent of the entire state's vote a recount would be required.
Other problems today, which multiple representatives from the Fair Elections Network said were "isolated," have reportedly included malfunctioning optical ballot scanners, confusion over correct polling locations, and long lines, primarily in Cuyahoga and Summit Counties. Aside from the provisional ballot concerns, "things seem to be running smoothly," said Carrie Davis, a spokeserson for the League of Women Voters of Ohio.
Update 7, 11:20 a.m. PST, November 6: What was the deal with this Romney-loving voting machine? An electronic voting machine in Perry County, Pennsylvania that changed a President Obama vote to one for Mitt Romney is now back online, after officials received a complaint and recalibrated the machine, Mother Jones has confirmed. Watch the video that's been circulating this morning:
Update 6, 9:17 a.m. PST, November 6: Polling troubles emerge in key states; watchdogs report "thousands" of calls
The Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights says it fielded thousands of calls Tuesday morning from voters around the country, including in Pennsylvania and Ohio: voters turned away from the polls because they lacked photo ID, voters facing polling places with inadequate staff and equipment, and voters whose polling stations opened late. Adam Serwer has more details here.
Update 5, 8:36 a.m. PST, November 6: Conservative group's poll-watching operations—focused on black neighborhoods—blocked in Ohio
True the Vote, a conservative group that sees itself as fighting voter fraud but that voting rights groups see as engaging in voter suppression, has been denied its application to place observers at polling places in Franklin County, Ohio, according to the Columbus Dispatch. The Franklin County Board of Elections said that the requests were not properly filed. Not only that, but the Dispatch reports that county officials said that some of the names on True the Votes applications may have been falsified, and that the group could be investigated after the election.
A crucial detail about True the Vote's intentions: Many of the requests, according to the Dispatch, were to observe polling stations in predominantly black neighborhoods. True the Vote emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 election, when many conservatives had been convinced that the now-defunct community organizing group ACORN had illegally influenced the outcome. They set a goal of fielding thousands of poll watchers in 35 states on Election Day.
Update 4, 4:30 p.m. PST, November 5: Could voting machines really be used to steal the election in Ohio?
According to Verified Voting, a nonprofit that advocates for more transparent elections, 25 percent of Americans will vote in this year's election on machines with no paper trails. That's led to fears that a few hacked machines in a decisive state could swing the entire election.
One popular conspiracy theory is that Mitt Romney's son, Tagg—who owns part of Hart InterCivic, a company with machines in two Ohio counties—plans to steal the election for his father. But as NPR reported, the theory has little connection with reality. Tagg Romney has only a tenuous connection to Hart: He owns the private equity firm Solamere Capital, which is invested in another firm, HIG Capital, that took over Hart's board last July.
Another conspiracy theory has been floated by the Columbus Free Press, which previously reported that a private IT firm helped steal Ohio from John Kerry in 2004. The Free Press claims it has confirmed that staffers in the Ohio secretary of state's office have added experimental software patches to machines in the state that could steal votes. That doesn't add up, according to Joseph Lorenzo Hall, a voting expert at the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, DC. "To be sure: voting systems are exceedingly vulnerable," he told the Awl, but there's "no contact between [a] voting system and reporting software."
Update 3, 2:50 p.m. PDT, November 5: Protecting the voting rights of people with mental disabilities
Fourteen states categorically bar people who are under guardianship or are judged to be mentally "incompetent" or "incapacitated" from voting. The laws "are based on a faulty stereotype" and violate constitutional guarantees of equal protection and due process, says one legal expert. Deanna Pan has more here.
Update 2, 1:30 p.m. PST, November 5: Ohio GOP's ID switcheroo, dirty robocalls against Dems in Arizona, intimidation in Pa.
Will this be the dirtiest election ever? Most people won't go to the polls until tomorrow, but reports of trickery aimed at would-be voters have have been piling up: A last-minute directive from Ohio's Republican secretary of state on voter IDs that could swing the election, epically long lines at early voting locations in Ohio and Florida, and GOP robocalls directing Democrats to the wrong polling places in Arizona. (For much more, explore the icons on the interactive map above.) And are the tea party's "election monitoring" efforts targeting African Americans? MoJo's Josh Harkinson has more details here.
Update 1, 10:45 a.m. PST, November 5: Voting chaos in Florida—no small thanks to Romney's man, Rick Scott
Mitt Romney's final pre-election visit to Florida on Monday morning included a surprise guest: the state's Republican governor Rick Scott. MoJo's Adam Weinstein runs down Scott's various moves during his administration to tighten voting restrictions, leading up to this weekend's mess with long lines and controversy over early voting.
MoJo's Brief Guide to Voter Suppression Tactics In our July/August issue, Kevin Drum investigated the decadelong campaign by Republicans to confront voter fraud. Despite the fact that incidents of in-person voter fraud in the United States are exceedingly rare, the GOP has used the issue to tighten election laws around the country, including pushing for controversial voter ID measures. Mother Jones has tracked this and other efforts apparently aimed at suppressing turnout among minorities, the elderly, and other voting constituencies that traditionally favor Democrats at the polls.
Here's more of our recent coverage to get you up to speed on voter suppression tactics that may affect Election 2012:
A look at 10 of the top dirty tricks used to swing elections, including deceitful robocalls and flyers, making voter registration more difficult, purging voter rolls, and deploying poll "watchers" with ulterior motives.
Felon disenfranchisement laws across most of the country have made significant populations ineligible to vote on Tuesday. The most stringent such laws are in Kentucky, and in the swing states of Florida, Virginia, and Iowa.
Check back regularly from now through Election Day—we will be updating this explainer and the interactive map above with more information as it emerges. Know of a voting problem in your area? Report it to Mother Jones here.
Need help finding your polling place? Try looking it up here:
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