Polygon, the Dancing Bear

Occasional notes on politics, history, technology, architecture,
and the life of a county clerk

2002:
May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2003:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2004:
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April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2005:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2006:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2007:
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April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2008:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July

Current entries

Monday, November 28, 2005, 12:38 pm

From the Clerk-Register. Today's message to my staff.

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving.

But this past week has been a bad time for elected officials in Washtenaw County.

Our Probate Judge, John Kirkendall, has announced his resignation. Local media coverage of this event has been unjustly negative toward him, with the clear implication that he was somehow under fire. He has been an outstanding judge during sometimes difficult circumstances, and I keenly regret his decision to leave the bench. We will all miss his wisdom.

Three other officials have been affected by charges of drinking and driving, including U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow, whose son Todd was recently arrested in Ypsilanti; Webster Township Supervisor Dean Fisher, who resigned his position after a second drunken driving arrest; and our Drain Commissioner, Janis Bobrin, who was arrested following an automobile accident earlier this month.

The last two were highlighted on the front page of the Ann Arbor News on Thanksgiving Day.

Janis Bobrin, it need hardly be mentioned, is the state's best and most environmentally sensitive drain commissioner, who has put together an outstanding office. I am glad to report that she has confronted this issue directly. In an email sent over the weekend to all county department heads, she invited questions and comments, writing that she didn't want any "elephants sitting in the living room." The reference is to a situation where family members and co-workers dare not bring up a problem that everyone knows about.

My own history led me to be somewhat Puritanical about substance abuse. Growing up in a university town in the 1960s and 1970s, I saw the impact of the rampant use of illegal drugs during that period. I knew people who were damaged or destroyed by drugs or alcohol — some of them brilliant folks who might otherwise have made significant contributions to society. Moreover, my mother, a very heavy smoker, died at age 57 from lung cancer. Appalled by heavy drinking among local politicos in the 1970s, I was part of the informal "Teetotaler's Caucus" of the Democratic Party.

Driving under the influence of alcohol is not only self-destructive, it is community-destructive. I can only add my voice to so many others, to warn against getting into the driver's seat when your faculties are impaired in any way. We in county government should be acutely aware of the consequences: we handle those felony case files and dramshop lawsuits; we see the anguish of the defendants and victims and families in our courtrooms; we file the death certificates for accident casualties.

But I do have compassion for those who struggle with addiction. It must be horribly difficult.

For county employees and family members who have a problem with any sort of substance abuse, there is an Employee Assistance Program which can provide confidential help; you can find contact information in the Employee Zone of the county's web site. Indeed, most larger employers have such a program available. Making that contact can be the first step in taking back control of your own life.

Let us extend our good wishes and prayers to those who are having difficulty in their lives, and let us serve our customers with a renewed sense of purpose.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum.

Wednesday, November 23, 2005, 1:18 pm

In his column in Monday's Ann Arbor News, Geoff Larcom urges a change to nonpartisan elections for city council.

Now that all eleven members of the council are Democrats, such calls are only to be expected. And indeed, maybe this is a time to think about how we elect our city officials. But first, we should consider how we got here.

Fifteen years ago, when I moved to Ann Arbor, it was a veritable museum of archaic political structures. It wasn't just the old-style lever-handle mechanical voting machines, fascinating but scarily unreliable. This was just about the only city in the state still holding annual elections on the traditional Monday in early April; most cities had moved to biennial elections in odd-year Novembers. Ann Arbor's ward system, with two members elected per ward and none at large, was typical in the 19th century, but increasingly rare since the 1950s, at least in Michigan. And Ann Arbor was and remains one of the last cities in the state with partisan city elections.

Because the city elections were annual, partisan, always contested, and not held at the same time of year as other elections, both parties had active organizations in the city which were generally regarded as more important than (and totally independent of) the county political parties. In most parts of Michigan, the county party is where the action is, but among Ann Arbor Democrats in 1990, involvement in the Washtenaw County Democratic Party was considered a kind of offbeat interest. The city Democratic Party had a lot more going on. Each ward had an active Democratic Party organization, too, and the ward chairs had positions of considerable influence.

Those internal party dynamics are all changed now, perhaps because the city elections were moved from April to November, and because a number of key local party activists now live outside the city. The Ann Arbor Democratic Party is just a shadow of the organizational powerhouse it used to be; the energy which used to animate it has been transferred to the county level.

Larcom writes:

local moderate Republicans wear the Scarlet "R,'' the perception they subscribe entirely to the state and national GOP view on social issues. That's now a ticket to oblivion in this town.

Changes at the national level have consolidated and sharpened the concept of what it means to be a Democrat, and what it means to be a Republican. Ann Arbor's political establishment was long accustomed to treating state and national parties as irrelevant, but our voters have embraced what might be called The New Partisanship. Which is to say, given the scant appeal of national Republicans in Ann Arbor, they have embraced the Democratic Party.

Larcom asks:

Why not make these local elections non-partisan? What do the basic municipal questions of water rates, leaf pickup, police patrols and tree taxes have to do with being a Republican or Democrat?

The short answer is that all these issues, not to mention questions of development, transportation, law enforcement and city resource allocation, implicate the values of the decisionmakers, and one of the rules of the New Partisanship (on both sides) is that you can't trust the other party's values.

It may not be literally true that a Republican council member would invariably vote to widen major streets, regardless of trees and neighborhoods, whereas a Democrat will invariably vote against, regardless of traffic congestion, but it's not a bad first approximation for the priorities a "typical" Republican or Democrat might bring to the table.

We ask a lot of our voters. For example, my personal vote, in southwest Ann Arbor, helps choose almost a hundred elected officials: five federal (president, vice president, two U.S. Senators, one U.S. Representative), six state (Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, Attorney General, state senator, state representative), 32 members of state education boards (eight each for U-M, MSU, Wayne State, and the state board of education), 24 judges (seven Supreme Court justices, seven Court of Appeals judges in our district, five circuit judges, two probate judges, three district judges), six county officials (sheriff, prosecuting attorney, clerk-register, treasurer, drain commissioner, and county commissioner in my district), three city officials (mayor and two ward council members), and 21 others (seven school board members, seven community college board members, and seven district library board members). If you're keeping score, that adds up to 97 officials theoretically answerable directly to me as a voter.

When it comes to election time, it's not easy even for an activist to cast an informed vote on every single one of those races. Hence, party labels are a labor saving device for voters. Straight ticket voting is often criticized, but it is very much on the upswing. With the new polarization, growing numbers of Democratic and Republican voters see the other party's values as being fundamentally wrong, so ticket splitting has little appeal.

Larcom points to other nonpartisan boards as an example of what the city council could become:

Reid, who served two terms on council and became the lone remaining Republican, points to local nonprofit organizations and school boards, which draw a broad segment of capable people from the town's university and business communities.

Those people can make decisions without the business or personal risk of tying themselves to one party. Asks Reid: "Are we operating under a system that substantially reduces our available pool of talent when we need it?"

Non-elected boards of directors are not a fair comparison; school boards are very narrowly focused compared to city council, and are elected by a very small constituency of school board voters.

The problem with the talent pool for city council is that few people are really interested in serving. City council, partisan or not, is rightly seen as being Real Life Politics, under the hot lights of media scrutiny and the pressures of interest group lobbying. It is a myth that a change to nonpartisan elections would suddenly unleash a flood of highly qualified candidates. If political parties no longer had the incentive or responsibility to recruit candidates, we might well end up with fewer candidates instead of more.

The funniest part of Larcom's piece is his slam on the ward system and student voters:

A geographic strike against the GOP is Ann Arbor's pie-shaped ward system. Wards emanate from the city's center, so each holds a section of students who vote Democratic and often go straight-ticket.

First of all, the "pie-shaped" wards are mandated by the City Charter, which provides as follows:

SECTION 1.3 (a) (2): The five wards should each have the general character of a pieshaped segment of the City with the point of such segment lying near the center of the city so as to make each ward a very rough cross section of the community population from the center outward.

As far as I know, that language is original to the 1956 city charter. In other words, it was written at a time when Republicans were the majority party, and they chose this arrangement.

Further, until the 1970s redistricting, there was indeed a ward (the old 2nd) which was dominated by student voters. Around 1975, the wards were extensively redrawn, by Republicans over Democratic opposition, to eliminate the student ward and concentrate nonstudent Democratic areas in the 1st Ward. At the time, this was seen as a gerrymander to cement Republican dominance of the city council. And with very slight changes, those are the ward boundaries we still have today.

Perhaps UM students and today's city Republicans could make common cause to amend the charter and create a mostly-student ward in the center of town, removing student areas from the other four wards. But that wouldn't actually elect any Republicans. Student votes are not what made Ann Arbor overwhelmingly Democratic.

It's a surprisingly common misconception. Whenever I mention that Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County have become gradually more and more Democratic over the last thirty years or so, many otherwise intelligent people immediately say, "Oh, you mean because of the student vote."

Um, no. If anything, students as a group are more conservative and Republican today than they were, say, in 1972. And they make up only a small portion of the city's vote, and a tiny portion of the county's vote.

You'd think someone would have learned from Joan Lowenstein's election to the (formerly safe Republican) 2nd Ward city council seat over Jeff Hauptman in 2002. Republican poll watchers were all over the student precincts, obviously fearing that a wave of student voters would overwhelm their candidate. But the Democrat won every precinct, including all the completely nonstudent ones.

All that being said, I do recognize disadvantages to partisan election of the city council. In a one-party town, it means the "real" race happens during the August primary. That's not such a problem in even years, when there are many other partisan primaries going on. But in odd-numbered years, city council primaries are alone on the ballot, and draw few voters. If every ward has a primary, that single purpose election costs some $50,000.

The even-year and odd-year council seats are already somewhat different because of the lower turnout and greater focus on individual candidates in the odd year election. We could accentuate this difference, perhaps giving voice to a wider variety of interests and perspectives, while saving the cost of the August primary, by using nonpartisan "Instant Runoff Voting" (IRV) for the odd-year November seats.

IRV — already enacted in Ferndale and in San Francisco, and used to choose science fiction's Hugo Awards and the president of the American Psychological Association — is the system where voters indicate fallback choices if their first choice candidate is eliminated. If one candidate gets a majority of first choice votes, he or she is elected. However, if no candidate gets a majority among first choices, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and his or her votes are redistributed to the other candidates based on second choice votes. Repeat until one candidate has a majority.

IRV has its critics and drawbacks, as does every possible voting method including the one we commonly use. Many of IRV's backers see it as a way to get rid of the two-party system, which it most certainly is not.

But the most cogent objection is that Ann Arbor's Accuvote ballot tabulators do not have enough memory to accumulate all the possible combinations needed for IRV, or for any other ranked-vote system.

That's why I'm suggesting IRV only for the five city council seats elected in the lower turnout odd-year elections. The electronic tabulators would sum up the first-choice votes, which probably would yield a majority winner in most races. If no candidate had a majority, then the city board of canvassers would supervise a hand count of that ward's ballots to determine the IRV winner. Given typical turnout per ward in an odd year city council race, this would not be a very big job.

By contrast, Condorcet, which is arguably a superior voting method, would always require a hand count to determine the winner. And a hand count for city council among the tens of thousands of ballots cast in an even-year or presidential election would be a nightmare. IRV in odd-year races is very limited and practical by comparison.

Back in the 1970s, Ann Arbor briefly had partisan IRV for mayor only. The goal was to allow voters to support the Human Rights Party candidate without electing the Republican. Ballots were counted by hand; the HRP candidate was eliminated, and almost all of her votes went to the Democrat, who won a majority by a tiny margin. The process was orderly and fair, but the then-city-clerk was strongly opposed, and portrayed it as a mess; soon after, Republicans successfully sponsored a charter amendment to repeal it.

Many things have changed since then. The rationale for using IRV for the odd-year council seats would not be to guarantee any particular result. Rather, the goal is to get rid of the August odd-year primary. That would save money and broaden effective participation in choosing city leaders and policies.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum — Comments

Monday, November 14, 2005, 12:29 pm

From the Clerk-Register. Today's letter to my staff:

During the last week of October, I visited Florida for the first time in my life. Yes, we took Sarah (age 7) to Disney World and Epcot Center. We arrived just hours after Hurricane Wilma left the state, but we saw no damage in the Orlando/Daytona area. The weather during our stay was mostly in the 60s Fahrenheit, which is to say, bitterly cold by Florida standards, but comfortable for us Michiganders.

The hallmark of the Disney operation is customer service and attention to detail. I was awed at how well everything was put together, from the transportation to the architecture to the lighting to the landscaping to the crowd handling. In one area normally reserved for "cast members only" (but opened temporarily to accommodate the flow of people bypassing a crowded parade route), I saw a sign which laid out seven customer service standards, each one based humorously on one of the Seven Dwarfs. All were plainly calculated to keep the staff cheerful and help park visitors to have an enjoyable time. Disney calls its personnel "cast members," because each puts on a kind of performance, from the joke-telling tram drivers to the popcorn sellers.

While I was in Florida, I had the opportunity to see early voting taking place for the November 8 election in Volusia County. For the two weeks preceding the election (up to Friday before the election), they had polling places set up in the county library and several other places in various parts of the county. It was set up just like a regular voting precinct, but each one had all 21 ballot styles available for the various municipal elections going on in various parts of the county.

After voting, each voter's ballot was fed through an Accuvote tabulator, which would signal if there were any problems with the ballot such as overvote or undervote, but not count it. The voter would have the opportunity to correct any such problem. Then the completed ballot would be sealed in an envelope; it would end up in the precinct to be processed the same way absentee ballots normally are.

I had heard about food buffets at early voting polling places, but I didn't see any. Of course, the one I visited was in a library where food wouldn't be allowed anyway.

Outside the building, 100 feet from the door, there was the usual cluster of campaign signs, just as we see on Election Day. The difference is that these signs were for candidates running in different cities all over Volusia County. And instead of being up for a day, presumably, these signs lingered for the entire two week voting period.

I also did some historical research for Political Graveyard, and encountered a very odd customer service situation. I was looking for some election returns for early 20th century mayoral elections, and the Volusia County elections office confirmed that they had those records.

Could I come to the office to see them?

She replied very sternly: "Sir, you need an appointment to see those records!"

How could I make such an appointment?

Long pause. "Um — er — we don't know. No one has ever asked to see those records before."

In the end, I gave up on seeing them in the short time I had. But I sure hope nobody has this kind of experience with our office!

On Saturday morning, October 22, the Washtenaw County Election Commission (Judge Kirkendall, County Treasurer McClary, and myself) held a clarity hearing on the text proposed as reasons for recall of three Pittsfield Township officials. We unanimously decided that the reasons proposed did not meet the legal standard for clarity. New language has been submitted, and the Election Commission will meet tomorrow morning, Tuesday, November 15, at 11:00 am in the Board of Commissioners room, 220 N. Main, to consider and rule on it.

This is the time of year for many meetings and conferences, and I have been called upon to attend or speak at several of them over the last few weeks. Often, preparing something to say to a group, to explain aspects of county government or elections or the court system is an opportunity to think about those issues in a new way, to find new insights, and I'll be sharing some of those with you in coming weeks.

I am continuing individual meetings with staff members. If you haven't heard from me yet, you will soon — I'd like to have seen everybody once before the end of the year, so I can start the second round in January. When the workload permits, please arrange a half-hour with your supervisor and my schedule (perhaps via Outlook) for a meeting in my office.

Let.s have a great week!