What's Wrong With America's Election Process?
Part 1: The Casting and the Counting of Votes
I have no objection to letting the people vote at any time on any issue and I will count their ballots. For elections are not determined by those who cast the votes but by he who counts them. –Josef Stalin
The elections of 2000 and 2004 produced many charges of fraud. In an effort to address those charges the Republican controlled Congress attempted to “reform” the election process by requiring the uniform use of electronic voting machines and ballot counting machines that local election officials must rent or lease from private corporations.
Most of these corporations, most notably Diebold, are owned and run by staunch Republican conservatives who have stated that they would do “whatever it takes” to produce Republican winners in the election.
The software code used in these computerized machines has been found by federal courts to be proprietary. This means that the corporation may refuse to disclose its code to government regulators. Thus, there is no way to objectively determine whether a particular corporation’s product has or has not been tampered with to produce a desired vote count outcome. The voter has only blind faith that the partisan owners of the equipment would resist the temptation to ‘fix’ the vote count with the sure knowledge that they would never be caught having done so.
This corporatization of the voting process has created another transfer of public moneys into the bank accounts of corporate owners while leaving the public with a deeply flawed, unregulated system open to dishonesty and fraud.
The privatizing of America’s election process has effectively ended democracy as it was previously known.
Part 2: Election Profiteering
Although the use of privately owned, unregulated voting machines and vote counting machines has probably ended democracy in America, there is a second, older, and more pernicious attack on democracy in America. That is the high price all Americans pay for media moguls' salaries and bonuses.
The single most challenging and expensive obstacle to overcome for a candidate running for elected office is informing the voters about the candidate’s message.
There are three avenues now available for educating the public and specifically voters to anyone who aspires to public office. The first is the print media. This includes signs, billboards, flyers, mailers, brochures, magazines, and newspapers. Of this group the least censored are the signs, flyers, mailers, and brochures. They may also be the least expensive due to competition among printers in the marketplace. The use of billboards, magazines, and newspapers, the mass print media, can be very expensive for placing ads and those ads increasingly are subject to the politics of the media owner. For example, Clear Channel, owner of the majority of the nation’s radio stations and billboards, has refused to publish ads from candidates and groups with which its primary owner disagrees. Rupert Murdock’s newspaper empire, NewsCorp, has also refused to publish at any price campaign ads from individuals and groups is has identified as “irresponsible” these have tended to be anti-corporate or anti-Republican groups.
The mass print media is largely owned and operated by political conservatives. The publishers and editors they hire are similarly conservative. To different degrees those media managers will exercise censorship over the message any candidate can give to the public via their publication. For many years however a sure way to circumvent editorial censorship was by purchasing an advertisement. The dollar cancelled censorship as long as the ad was within legal and moral bounds. In recent years, however this avenue has been shut by very ideologically inspired owners who see control over the message as being more important in the long run than achieving a profit in the short run. A liberal, progressive candidate will not be evaluated favorably by those owners and editors and they will exercise as much control as they can over the content of the message the candidate wishes to inform the voter of. The choice is that a candidate can attempt to publish an anti-business or reformist message in an ad but the media controllers and censors will now refuse to sell the ad space for that message.
The prices charged for political advertising is also marked up over commercial advertising. Some may argue that this is merely obeying the law of supply and demand, but in fact it is more closely akin to profiteering. Candidates are faced with the choice to pay the going rate or not communicate their message with the voters.
There is a basic law of advertising that repetition is the key to improving sales. The more the public is exposed to a message, commercial or political, the more likely they will believe all or part of it. So the candidate who wants to be successful will produce and get published as many advertisements as possible.
The broadcast media is the second avenue for publishing a message. Unlike the print media, the broadcast media utilize public property, the airwaves, to send out their product to the public. Each broadcaster must apply for a license to use a defined portion of the airwaves and pay a fee for that use. The exception to this is the public’s broadcasters (i.e. PBS) who are granted a portion of the airwaves gratis by statute. In theory, a broadcaster is regulated and the public is given opportunities to complain about the service or content that broadcaster has produced during the license period. At the end of the license period, the broadcaster must renew the license before the Federal Communications Commission. At that time the public’s input is supposed to be considered in granting a renewal, however Clear Channel’s owners changed the rules regarding this when they were successful in paying a fine of $2 million in exchange for having hundreds of public complaints cleared from their record just prior to license renewal hearings by the commission. To put it in perspective, that fine was equal to the revenue generated by just two and a half minutes of commercial time during a single Super Bowl, but the complaints regarding a variety of practices by Clear Channel had been accumulating for the entire license period, year and years.
The same censorship that exists in print media is present in broadcast media as well. Owners who tend to be political conservatives – indeed, too often they are the very same persons who control many of the print media outlets – are increasingly refusing to broadcast political messages with which they disagree. These advertisements or candidate messages are censored and labeled as “controversial” or “irresponsible” by the station owners who disagree with them and want to keep the public from learning of the content of the message.
One of the most famous examples of this kind of censorship was when an anti-war group, MoveOn.org conducted a contest to create a TV commercial that was critical of President Bush. The winning commercial, “Child’s Pay,” depicted small children engaged in menial labor and asked the viewer who they thought would have to pay for the enormous national debt President Bush was running up. It was a powerful video. MoveOn.org had raised the money to purchase commercial broadcast time during the Super Bowl game but the owners of the network refused to sell the airtime for the commercial to MoveOn.org saying that its was a “biased and irresponsible message.” There is no record of such censorship of messages by the same network supporting President Bush or his party or attack ads against his opponents for being “biased or irresponsible.”
Broadcast media also runs up the prices for airing candidate commercials. Unlike the print media where a newspaper, for example, could add pages to accommodate extra ads, the broadcaster has only 24 hours of broadcast time per day to sell. This induces a true competitive market between candidates in which the candidate with the most money can send his message to the public more often. The question is whether the best interests of the electorate are served by a market driven campaign system in which the voices and messages of the richest candidate are the only ones heard.
We see, then, that America’s electoral system is also deeply flawed as it regards political campaigns. The various privately owned media exercise extreme control over both content of political messages and who gets exposed to them. To a certain degree the censorship exercised by the media owners is related to profits but as we have seen, there are too many instances where profit was not involved. Most of the time it is though.
Thus, a candidate must, to be successful, raise substantial sums of money to purchase commercial time and advertising space. This can be done most efficiently by seeking donations from a relatively few very wealthy donors. Otherwise a candidate must gather small sums from hundreds of thousands or even millions of individual supporters. Although, Howard Dean’s campaign of 2004, opened a new source of revenue: the Internet appeal.
The third avenue available to a candidate to send a message to the public is the Internet. Much has been made of this possibility but it is unlikely that a candidate will be successful in reaching out to an undecided voter via a web page. By their nature, web sites are passive and voluntary. That is to say, that TV viewers who are undecided about who to vote for will watch whatever commercials shown during the program they viewing (research suggests the view may mute the audio though). An Internet user must seek out a candidate’s message thus the candidate is essentially fishing for viewers of a web page and those will most likely be supporters rather than undecided people.
A web page can be the least expensive of all of the three avenues of influencing voters during an election.
The influence of money on elections in America is overwhelming. Candidates do not have time to contact hundreds of thousands of people and convince them to give small contributions so they focus on persuading wealthy people to give large contributions. The rich, then, have a very great influence on election results and on the opinions of the voters, for people believe according to their experiences in life, and so he who controls those experiences controls how people will believe. It is also known as “controlling the message.”
To reform elections in America we must attack the root of the problem: money. There are many proposals that claim to do this. The various “campaign finance” laws that regularly are issued by Congress are merely cosmetic and none are designed to open up the election process to challengers to the status quo. To do this we must follow the money.
Politicians, the people’s servants, are dependent on wealthy donors. They need the donors’ money to buy commercial airtime and advertisements. Most of the money raised by a campaign goes into these two avenues of getting the message to the voters. So, any true election reform must address the power exercised by broadcasters and print media owners. Until the 1994 election this was done by the Doctrine of Fair Time. Under that doctrine, broadcasters and publishers were required to provide commercial and advertising space equally to candidates. After the Republican “Revolution” of 1994, Congress acted to change this doctrine to one where “the market” ruled the election process. Money became the only factor in the amount of advertising a candidate could expose the voters to. The cost of elections, and the corresponding windfall profits to the owners of broadcast and print media took off after the doctrine was dropped. The move increased the power of the rich dramatically.
How to fix it? Remove the influence of money for advertising. There are several methods that can be employed. One might be to restore the Fairness Doctrine so that each candidate has equal access to media. Another might be to restrict candidates’ media outlets. Say only to PBS television and radio where campaigns would have to “sponsor” programming much as corporations do. The profits from the “sale” of sponsorships for PBS programming by political candidates would benefit a broader spectrum of the public than does funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into the accounts of a relatively few number of media owners. If a cap on charges for such broadcast commercial time were also imposed the power of the rich in elections would be broken. More candidates with progressive or reformist messages could be heard by the general public, who polls show, favor liberal progressive social services programs such as health care and social security. It also would severely reduce censorship by media owners of the messages that they permit the public to see or hear, which, in turn, will benefit individuals and groups espousing liberal, progressive, and reformist causes.
I have no objection to letting the people vote at any time on any issue and I will count their ballots. For elections are not determined by those who cast the votes but by he who counts them. –Josef Stalin
The elections of 2000 and 2004 produced many charges of fraud. In an effort to address those charges the Republican controlled Congress attempted to “reform” the election process by requiring the uniform use of electronic voting machines and ballot counting machines that local election officials must rent or lease from private corporations.
Most of these corporations, most notably Diebold, are owned and run by staunch Republican conservatives who have stated that they would do “whatever it takes” to produce Republican winners in the election.
The software code used in these computerized machines has been found by federal courts to be proprietary. This means that the corporation may refuse to disclose its code to government regulators. Thus, there is no way to objectively determine whether a particular corporation’s product has or has not been tampered with to produce a desired vote count outcome. The voter has only blind faith that the partisan owners of the equipment would resist the temptation to ‘fix’ the vote count with the sure knowledge that they would never be caught having done so.
This corporatization of the voting process has created another transfer of public moneys into the bank accounts of corporate owners while leaving the public with a deeply flawed, unregulated system open to dishonesty and fraud.
The privatizing of America’s election process has effectively ended democracy as it was previously known.
Part 2: Election Profiteering
Although the use of privately owned, unregulated voting machines and vote counting machines has probably ended democracy in America, there is a second, older, and more pernicious attack on democracy in America. That is the high price all Americans pay for media moguls' salaries and bonuses.
The single most challenging and expensive obstacle to overcome for a candidate running for elected office is informing the voters about the candidate’s message.
There are three avenues now available for educating the public and specifically voters to anyone who aspires to public office. The first is the print media. This includes signs, billboards, flyers, mailers, brochures, magazines, and newspapers. Of this group the least censored are the signs, flyers, mailers, and brochures. They may also be the least expensive due to competition among printers in the marketplace. The use of billboards, magazines, and newspapers, the mass print media, can be very expensive for placing ads and those ads increasingly are subject to the politics of the media owner. For example, Clear Channel, owner of the majority of the nation’s radio stations and billboards, has refused to publish ads from candidates and groups with which its primary owner disagrees. Rupert Murdock’s newspaper empire, NewsCorp, has also refused to publish at any price campaign ads from individuals and groups is has identified as “irresponsible” these have tended to be anti-corporate or anti-Republican groups.
The mass print media is largely owned and operated by political conservatives. The publishers and editors they hire are similarly conservative. To different degrees those media managers will exercise censorship over the message any candidate can give to the public via their publication. For many years however a sure way to circumvent editorial censorship was by purchasing an advertisement. The dollar cancelled censorship as long as the ad was within legal and moral bounds. In recent years, however this avenue has been shut by very ideologically inspired owners who see control over the message as being more important in the long run than achieving a profit in the short run. A liberal, progressive candidate will not be evaluated favorably by those owners and editors and they will exercise as much control as they can over the content of the message the candidate wishes to inform the voter of. The choice is that a candidate can attempt to publish an anti-business or reformist message in an ad but the media controllers and censors will now refuse to sell the ad space for that message.
The prices charged for political advertising is also marked up over commercial advertising. Some may argue that this is merely obeying the law of supply and demand, but in fact it is more closely akin to profiteering. Candidates are faced with the choice to pay the going rate or not communicate their message with the voters.
There is a basic law of advertising that repetition is the key to improving sales. The more the public is exposed to a message, commercial or political, the more likely they will believe all or part of it. So the candidate who wants to be successful will produce and get published as many advertisements as possible.
The broadcast media is the second avenue for publishing a message. Unlike the print media, the broadcast media utilize public property, the airwaves, to send out their product to the public. Each broadcaster must apply for a license to use a defined portion of the airwaves and pay a fee for that use. The exception to this is the public’s broadcasters (i.e. PBS) who are granted a portion of the airwaves gratis by statute. In theory, a broadcaster is regulated and the public is given opportunities to complain about the service or content that broadcaster has produced during the license period. At the end of the license period, the broadcaster must renew the license before the Federal Communications Commission. At that time the public’s input is supposed to be considered in granting a renewal, however Clear Channel’s owners changed the rules regarding this when they were successful in paying a fine of $2 million in exchange for having hundreds of public complaints cleared from their record just prior to license renewal hearings by the commission. To put it in perspective, that fine was equal to the revenue generated by just two and a half minutes of commercial time during a single Super Bowl, but the complaints regarding a variety of practices by Clear Channel had been accumulating for the entire license period, year and years.
The same censorship that exists in print media is present in broadcast media as well. Owners who tend to be political conservatives – indeed, too often they are the very same persons who control many of the print media outlets – are increasingly refusing to broadcast political messages with which they disagree. These advertisements or candidate messages are censored and labeled as “controversial” or “irresponsible” by the station owners who disagree with them and want to keep the public from learning of the content of the message.
One of the most famous examples of this kind of censorship was when an anti-war group, MoveOn.org conducted a contest to create a TV commercial that was critical of President Bush. The winning commercial, “Child’s Pay,” depicted small children engaged in menial labor and asked the viewer who they thought would have to pay for the enormous national debt President Bush was running up. It was a powerful video. MoveOn.org had raised the money to purchase commercial broadcast time during the Super Bowl game but the owners of the network refused to sell the airtime for the commercial to MoveOn.org saying that its was a “biased and irresponsible message.” There is no record of such censorship of messages by the same network supporting President Bush or his party or attack ads against his opponents for being “biased or irresponsible.”
Broadcast media also runs up the prices for airing candidate commercials. Unlike the print media where a newspaper, for example, could add pages to accommodate extra ads, the broadcaster has only 24 hours of broadcast time per day to sell. This induces a true competitive market between candidates in which the candidate with the most money can send his message to the public more often. The question is whether the best interests of the electorate are served by a market driven campaign system in which the voices and messages of the richest candidate are the only ones heard.
We see, then, that America’s electoral system is also deeply flawed as it regards political campaigns. The various privately owned media exercise extreme control over both content of political messages and who gets exposed to them. To a certain degree the censorship exercised by the media owners is related to profits but as we have seen, there are too many instances where profit was not involved. Most of the time it is though.
Thus, a candidate must, to be successful, raise substantial sums of money to purchase commercial time and advertising space. This can be done most efficiently by seeking donations from a relatively few very wealthy donors. Otherwise a candidate must gather small sums from hundreds of thousands or even millions of individual supporters. Although, Howard Dean’s campaign of 2004, opened a new source of revenue: the Internet appeal.
The third avenue available to a candidate to send a message to the public is the Internet. Much has been made of this possibility but it is unlikely that a candidate will be successful in reaching out to an undecided voter via a web page. By their nature, web sites are passive and voluntary. That is to say, that TV viewers who are undecided about who to vote for will watch whatever commercials shown during the program they viewing (research suggests the view may mute the audio though). An Internet user must seek out a candidate’s message thus the candidate is essentially fishing for viewers of a web page and those will most likely be supporters rather than undecided people.
A web page can be the least expensive of all of the three avenues of influencing voters during an election.
The influence of money on elections in America is overwhelming. Candidates do not have time to contact hundreds of thousands of people and convince them to give small contributions so they focus on persuading wealthy people to give large contributions. The rich, then, have a very great influence on election results and on the opinions of the voters, for people believe according to their experiences in life, and so he who controls those experiences controls how people will believe. It is also known as “controlling the message.”
To reform elections in America we must attack the root of the problem: money. There are many proposals that claim to do this. The various “campaign finance” laws that regularly are issued by Congress are merely cosmetic and none are designed to open up the election process to challengers to the status quo. To do this we must follow the money.
Politicians, the people’s servants, are dependent on wealthy donors. They need the donors’ money to buy commercial airtime and advertisements. Most of the money raised by a campaign goes into these two avenues of getting the message to the voters. So, any true election reform must address the power exercised by broadcasters and print media owners. Until the 1994 election this was done by the Doctrine of Fair Time. Under that doctrine, broadcasters and publishers were required to provide commercial and advertising space equally to candidates. After the Republican “Revolution” of 1994, Congress acted to change this doctrine to one where “the market” ruled the election process. Money became the only factor in the amount of advertising a candidate could expose the voters to. The cost of elections, and the corresponding windfall profits to the owners of broadcast and print media took off after the doctrine was dropped. The move increased the power of the rich dramatically.
How to fix it? Remove the influence of money for advertising. There are several methods that can be employed. One might be to restore the Fairness Doctrine so that each candidate has equal access to media. Another might be to restrict candidates’ media outlets. Say only to PBS television and radio where campaigns would have to “sponsor” programming much as corporations do. The profits from the “sale” of sponsorships for PBS programming by political candidates would benefit a broader spectrum of the public than does funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into the accounts of a relatively few number of media owners. If a cap on charges for such broadcast commercial time were also imposed the power of the rich in elections would be broken. More candidates with progressive or reformist messages could be heard by the general public, who polls show, favor liberal progressive social services programs such as health care and social security. It also would severely reduce censorship by media owners of the messages that they permit the public to see or hear, which, in turn, will benefit individuals and groups espousing liberal, progressive, and reformist causes.
posted by S. Munzel | 3:30 PM
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