Representative Jake Zimmerman (D – 83) introduced a bill to change Missouri election law yesterday:

HB 499 Changes the laws regarding the use of paper ballots at elections

Sponsor: Zimmerman, Jake (83) Proposed Effective Date: 08/28/2009

CoSponsor: Colona, Mike (67) ……….etal. LR Number: 1035L.01I

Last Action: 01/29/2009 – Introduced and Read First Time (H)

HB499

Next Hearing: Hearing not scheduled

House Calendar HOUSE BILLS FOR SECOND READING

The bill language is straightforward:

FIRST REGULAR SESSION

HOUSE BILL NO. 499

95TH GENERAL ASSEMBLY

INTRODUCED BY REPRESENTATIVES ZIMMERMAN (Sponsor), COLONA, LAMPE, McCLANAHAN, LeVOTA, SCHOELLER, HUGHES, TALBOY, WILSON (119), WETER, WELLS, SKAGGS, FALLERT, LOW, MUNZLINGER, DAY, SCHIEFFER, MORRIS, GRILL, HOLSMAN, KANDER, PACE, WALTON GRAY, SCAVUZZO, CHAPPELLE-NADAL, OXFORD, KIRKTON, ROORDA, McNEIL, YAEGER, SCHAAF, SCHUPP, ATKINS, STORCH AND WEBB (Co-sponsors).

1035L.01I                                                                                                                                                  D. ADAM CRUMBLISS, Chief Clerk

AN ACT

To amend chapter 115, RSMo, by adding thereto one new section relating to ballots.

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the state of Missouri, as follows:

           Section A. Chapter 115, RSMo, is amended by adding thereto one new section, to be known as section 115.428, to read as follows:

           115.428. 1. For each election in which a state or federal office or measure is on the ballot, each individual who is eligible to cast a vote in the election shall be offered the opportunity to cast their vote using a paper ballot card. It shall be the responsibility of each election authority to provide a sufficient number of paper ballot cards to comply with this section.

           2. Any paper ballot card which is cast by an individual under this section shall be counted and otherwise treated as a regular ballot for all purposes, unless the individual casting the ballot would have otherwise been required to cast a provisional ballot.

           3. The election authority at each location where ballots are cast shall post in a conspicuous place a notice stating that paper ballot cards are available at that location and that a voter may request to use such a ballot. Such notice shall be printed by the secretary of state as part of the voting instructions required by section 115.417 and provided to the local election authorities.

           4. Notwithstanding the provisions of section 115.063, the direct cost incurred by an election authority for the actual physical printing of a sufficient number of paper ballot cards to comply with this section and section 115.247 for all elections in which a state or federal office or measure is on the ballot shall be paid by the state in the manner provided for in section 115.077.

[emphasis added]

That’s right, it would require that voters be given the right to request a paper ballot. Why is that so important (aside from the mistrust of electronic touch screen machines in the popular culture)?

First, lets take a look at an excerpt from recount procedures from the Missouri Secretary of State’s office (DRE is the terminology for a touch screen voting machine. LEA is the “local election authority”.):

…Ballot counting – DREs

NOTE: Only the LEA, LEA staff, and the bipartisan teams will conduct the recount, without additional assistance. Everyone else may observe, but may not handle the paper trails, containers, and DREs.

1. The LEA shall break the seal on the DRE component that contains the voter verified paper audit trail and retrieve the paper trail.

2. The voter verified paper trail shall be examined by the bipartisan team and the votes hand tallied for the State Representative, District 121 race using a separate tally sheet. The results will be recorded on the tally summary sheet (form provided) and added to the final results in the Report of Findings.

3. In the event that the voter verified paper trail is not usable for the recount, the LEA shall next use the audit trail* from each DRE that was created contemporaneously with the voter verified paper trail (*as defined in 15 CSR 30-10.010), and proceed with the process described in #2. The LEA shall then separately seal and secure any such DRE component for possible further inspection.

[emphasis added]

Let me spell it out for you. The Missouri Secretary of State’s office has a provision in its recount procedures which addresses the failure of the “voter verified paper trail” in an electronic device. That is, if it is not possible to use the printout that the voter used at the time they voted to verify their vote (and in a sense the direct artifact to the voter’s wishes is gone) then the recount must rely on an electronic record reproduced internally from the electronic machine. In addition, the procedures call for sealing the machine for possible future inspection if that internal audit rather than the voter verified paper trail is used.

A paper ballot is a direct artifact from the voter. We keep hearing that touchscreen machines allow us convenience. Try telling that to someone who has had to wait in line to use a machine. All you need to increase the volume of voters executing their vote at any one time on a paper ballot is more pens/pencils and a flat surface.

For the purposes of voter intent the only irrecoverable single point of failure on a paper ballot is the actual voter. They can and will sometimes screw it up, but ultimately it is their screw up. If the optical scanner fails then we still have the actual ballot which can be counted by hand.

Electronic machines can and do fail. If we have multiple points of failure and things get screwed up what would we have to do then?

From personal experience I will always chose a paper ballot if I have the option. If I ever lose that option you can bet I’ll scream bloody murder until I get it back.

I forget whether Friday evening was billed as a banquet. Whatever they called it, I wouldn’t call it a banquet. The food, which was strictly incidental, was a rubber chicken buffet–without the chicken. Cold roast beef, sandwiches three times the size of a postage stamp, dice made of cheese, and sliced veggies.

Also incidental were any speeches that were made. Somebody spoke to himself on the microphone for five minutes. I couldn’t decipher a word of it at the back of the “banquet” room. No one paid the least attention to him. They were there for the main attraction: each other. It was a chance to network, trade war stories, briefly make the acquaintance of like minded people you’ll never see again. Everybody nibbled fried mushrooms from their five inch plates and circulated.  In fact, I dropped a fried mushroom and the woman I was talking to–we’ll allow her to remain nameless–smiled, picked it up and popped it in her mouth. She was efficient and unembarrassed. I hadda love it.

Jay Nixon spoke for five minutes or so to rally the troops. Maybe three fourths of the people in the room quit talking for that. As soon as he stopped, a couple of hundred conversations resumed. So did the band. Hearing what was said was problematic.

I talked to Ken Jacob and Judy Baker, both vying for Hulshof’s seat in the Ninth. Ken likes to split wood. “Like Bush,” I said, but Ken explained that he himself chops wood. Bush saws it. OK. Judy’s excited about the year and her campaign. But she does moan that she’s got to find a way to be less … “boring.” Not that she is. All she means is that she’s no fun to gossip about.  She should start a rumor that she has ties to organized crime.  That’ll jazz up her image.

Steve Gaw was there, too, but I didn’t get a chance to meet him. Saturday, maybe.

Jeff Harris told me the latest on his nasty little e-mail skirmish with G. W. Blunt. Harris says he communicated to the guv today his preliminary estimate of how much material he’ll be turning over in answer to the administration’s sunshine request: about 75,000 pages of documents and 5,000 e-mails at a cost to the state of something in the neighborhood of $10,000.

Jeff figures they were mighty surprised at his swift compliance since he’s a lawyer. They probably expected him to do what they would do: use lawyerly tricks to stonewall. They’d assume he’d have lots of embarrassing shenanigans to hide, just like they do. Nope. He’s turning it all over to them.Take that, you weasels. Your snotty little game just fell flat.

Jake Zimmerman was in his element, schmoozing, wise cracking, and having a helluva good time. He’s delighted that House Republicans and Senate Republicans are so cheesed off at each other that they can’t even get passed what they both want to pass. He says they may be so busy hating each other that they might slip up and fail to get the Voter I.D. amendment ready for the ballot. Maybe. But probably not.

Tommy Roberts, the chair of the Democratic Committee in St. Charles County was telling me that he just won an aldermanic election in St. Peters: he’s the first ever Democrat to win an aldermanic election in that staunch Republican stronghold. More on that race in the next week or so.

Byron DeLear was there. Of course. I’ve been saying for several months now that I expect to start running into him at Schnucks. I see him everywhere else.

The party’s over now. Time to hit the sack.

Jake Zimmerman (D-HD 83)is still in the “we might do it” stage of planning a post legislative session fundraiser. A given dollar amount would get you in and give you one vote in the “goofiest Republican bill of the session” contest. Additional money would get you more votes.

Jake is thinking maybe five would be a good number of bills to put in the running. If this fundraiser happens, one of the hottest contenders for the award will have to be the bill filed by Jim Lembke (R-HD 85) banning human-animal hybrids from being developed in Missouri.

How stupid can one man be? Doesn’t Lembke realize that it would put Missouri on the world map to have–in the flesh!–a centaur, a satyr, or a minotaur? Sheesh.

But, hey, let’s just pray that Pervez Lembke continues idling away his hours coming up with this kind of nutcake idea instead of focusing on impeaching judges who rule the “wrong way” in child custody cases.

The picture is courtesy of Wikipedia, as part of its explanation of the term “tin foil hat”.

When Jake Zimmerman spoke at the last West County Dems meeting, he painted himself as a one time St. Louis County Council candidate and then “party-unifying state rep candidate”.  The crowd laughed, knowing that Temporiti had talked him out of running against Barbara Fraser in the primary for the Council seat and into running for her just vacated state rep seat. Jake joked, “I’m sorry, did I just pat myself on the back?”  But joking aside, his point was that Democrats have to find ways to work together to get as many Dems elected as possible.

Don’t misunderstand Jake’s character. He’s not into increasing our numbers just as an exercise in power.  Rather, he’s thrilled to help write the laws that govern this state. It feels like a childhood dream come true to him, but that dream would be “a heck of a lot more vivid, and in bright, beautiful colors that involve good public policy, if we had a majority in the House of Representatives.”  It’s because he wants the possibility of a passionate debate about policy where he actually has the chance to win, to keep thousands of children from being cut from the Medicaid rolls, for example, that he–and Rachel Storch–have allowed themselves to be tasked with becoming cold and calculating cynics. Think of Rachel as Nancy Pelosi and Jake as a slightly chubby Rahm Emanuel. His job is to look at Mike Garman and to look at Byron DeLear, both running for Akin’s seat, and see–not a person in either case–but a turnout machine.

His job is to look at Jay Nixon and think, not “Boy I really hope you’re going to be governor”, but think instead “What have you done for me lately as far as helping Dem candidates running for the House?” As an aside, Jake adds that no matter what his “job” is, of course he cares passionately about whether Nixon becomes governor and passionately about getting a Democrat into the White House. Because we are all team players.

But for the next ten plus months, his job is electing a Democratic House. He will focus on that, not just because it’s his little parochial bailiwick, but because, aside from electing Nixon, it’s our best chance to change the course of this state. Matt Blunt is the weakest Republican governor in the nation right now, thank god, and we stand an excellent chance of getting him out of there.

But we also stand a good chance of changing a trend in this state that has been going on for 25 years and that has only just recently started to realign itself. The numbers in our favor are so compelling that the possibility of change sits tantalizingly before us. Jake wants that and he wants it bad.

Here’s the reason it looks so good.  In 2006, Democrats at the national level had a really good year, much better than it should have been.  To understand just how good, you have to understand how lousy the maps were.  

If you looked at the U.S. Senate races in a non-presidential year election, Democrats weren’t supposed to do very well.  Dems had tough open seats and vulnerable incumbents to defend. Republicans had relatively few open seats and a couple of incumbents that might be vulnerable if everything went wrong, but were probably OK.  Democrats, in order to take the Senate, would have needed to run the table, to take every single seat they were perceived as even having a shot at–and hold on to all their vulnerable ones.

2006 was such a good election year that the Democrats did exactly that, with one exception: Tennessee.  We came close in Tennessee but didn’t take it.  On the other hand, Jim Webb picked off a popular Southern senator with presidential ambitions.  And Jon Tester beat a not so popular senator in a very conservative state called Montana.

That’s not supposed to happen.  You’re supposed to get one goofy upset like that, but each side is supposed to get one goofy upset like that. The fact that Democrats are in charge of the U.S. Senate today is a testament to what an amazing year 2006 was.

Similarly, in Missouri, Democrats weren’t supposed to have a whole lot of opportunities, and we were supposed to have a bunch of people we needed to worry about.  Instead we picked up five seats in the House and could have picked up seven or eight if a couple of races had gone the other way by a couple of hundred or a hundred and fifty votes.

That’s striking.  It’s even more striking when you consider that since 1978 House Democrats have not had a net gain in seats in the legislature. Period. You’re waiting for the comma after that; there’s no comma. Since 1978, House Democrats have either lost seats or, at best, held steady in every single election.  Finally, in 2006 we won five additional seats.

That movement away from the Democratic Party has been happening in a number of border Southern states for thirty or forty years. It’s a shift that happened after the civil rights movement. Before that, lots of yellow dog Democrats voted for the party reflexively, because their grandpappy did. But the civil rights movement and the growth of evangelical megachurches has caused a realignment–which is, by now, pretty much complete. The people who moved away from the Democrats are likely to stay where they are because that’s where their ideology fits.

At the same time, old line, moderate Republicans, Nelson Rockefeller types in the Northeast, have pretty much become Democrats.  That realignment is also pretty much complete.  So Jack Danforth bemoans that the Republican Party of his earlier years has been hijacked.  Right, and he ain’t getting that party back.  The Republican Party now is the property of the Christian right and it’s going to stay that way.

This new alignment in Missouri means that the old Democratic territory down in Southeast Missouri probably will never come back.  Sure, there are places down there where we can still do well, like the Bootheel, for example.  As Jay Nixon likes to say, “If you farm cotton or watermelons in this state, you’re a Democrat.”

But the best opportunities for us now in this state are in the suburbs and in the exurbs, where a lot of moderate Republicans used to live.  In fact, they do still live there and consider themselves moderate Republicans, but the Republican Party no longer represents them.

That is the nature of our opportunity, that is the reason we took some seats in 2006.  The far right religious ideology of the Republicans, coupled with the fact that they became so controlled by corporations, allowed us to take some seats, and will allow us to take more.

The picture looks, as he said, tantalizing. All we have to do is … work for it.

In my next posting, I’ll let Jake describe for you more specifically how he sees 2008 playing out for us in Missouri.  

This posting, like the last one–and the next one, no doubt–is largely in Jake’s own words, but so mixed with my words that I despaired of separating them with quotation marks.

Last Monday, Jake Zimmerman, the Democratic rep from Olivette in St. Louis County, spoke at the West County Dems meeting.  But he had nothing of substance to say.  He announced that to begin with.

He and Rachel Storch are heading the House DCCC, and, on the assumption that he was speaking to people who already understood the importance of getting Ds elected in this state, he spoke not about policy issues but about his new responsibility to be “a cynic”, to calculate coldly what moves will get the most Democrats elected to the Missouri House in 2008.

What follows is close to being a transcript of the first ten minutes of his talk, but his words and mine are so intermingled that I gave up on putting in quotation marks.

The last election showcased a grand strategic debate within the Democratic Party at the national level, and that debate is important to understand, not only for its national implications but also because the same debate is currently playing out at the state level.  

The debate involves three universes of people. The first universe is represented by Nancy Pelosi and Rahm Emanuel.  Their goal before the 2006 election was short term, to get the Democrats into the majority in the House.  The only thing we care about, they’d have said, is immediate victory, because if we control the House, we can stop the Bush agenda and change the direction of the country.

The second universe of people is represented by Howard Dean, who was intent on building a movement for the next thirty years. With so many citizens furious at G.W., Dean said we had an historic opportunity, the best chance in a generation to get the names of people who care passionately and who will take the fight to Republicans even on their own turf in states like Mississippi and Utah.

The third universe of Democrats is represented by someone like Nancy Boyda in Kansas.  She was in between the pure numbers-oriented focus of Pelosi and Emanuel and the vision of Howard Dean.  She was a perceived long shot, running against a Republican incumbent who hadn’t done anything remarkably wrong.  Not many figured she had much of a chance, but she was working hard anyway.  She’d have said to the other two groups:

Listen to me.  Give me a chance, right?  I can do this.  You gotta take me seriously, people.  Don’t brush me off, Rahm and Nancy, just because I’m not on your list of twenty districts that look like the best possible opportunities to flip.  But, Howard, don’t go wasting your money on just a bunch of field organizers here in Kansas.  Send me something.  Send something to my campaign.  Get me some professional assistance because I can do this thing. And even if I can’t beat this guy, Jim Ryan, I can make him work his tail off.  I can keep him busy in his home.  I can prevent him from helping out all those other Republicans.  I’m good for you in those other districts.

The tension among these three groups, common in many elections, played out particularly loudly in 2006, with a nasty public spat between Emanuel and Dean. Dean was in charge of the DNC budget, and when he announced that he was going to put field organizers in Mississippi and three people in Salt Lake City to canvass all of rural Utah, Pelosi and Emanuel went batpoop.  Why, they wanted to know, are you spending millions of dollars there when you could split that money into $300,000 increments and portion it out in the top ten congressional races.  That money could get you five more congressional seats.  It could be the difference between a Democratic majority and a minority, the difference between whether we sustain or override Bush vetoes.

Dean’s attitude was that last year was about something bigger than just that election.  

And there was Boyda saying, Don’t forget about me.  If it’s really about opportunity, then don’t constrain yourself.  Don’t just look at those top twenty opportunities.

A tense compromise ensued, with Dean funding the field operations as he had planned and with Pelosi and Emanuel raising astounding amounts of money just before the election.  Most of that last-minute money didn’t come from the true believers because their money was already in.  Oh sure, there were the last desperate appeals to the party faithful: We can do this if you’ll just send a check to …. fill in the blank.  We’ve all gotten so many of those, we could write them ourselves, right?

No, the big money that poured in at the end was the cynical money from lobbyists for, say, coal companies, who suddenly realized, hey, these guys might end up being in charge.  Better send them some love. And the coal company money went to fund many of the second and even third tier candidates like Boyda (who won, by the way).

That three-universe scenario that played out at the national level last year is also playing out here in Missouri for the coming election.  Jake pointed out that there were examples of all three types among the people attending the West County Dems meeting.

Joe DeLuca, for example, could represent Pelosi and Emanuel.  Joe, who is president of the Creve Coeur Township Democratic Club, is fighting to see that Jill Schupp gets House DCCC money in her run to keep Sam Page’s seat (district 82) in the D column.  It’s an open seat with about a fifty-fifty shot at winning for each side.  Dems need to hold that seat, both to show that they are competitive in the Creve Coeur part of St. Louis County, to hold this new bastion for Democrats and possibly to give themselves the incumbency advantage for the next eight years.

Susan Cunningham, the departing West County Dems president, lives in Republican territory-Franklin County–and plays the role of Howard Dean.  She would say:  You know what you forget about?  You forget that there’s lots of good Democrats out in this ex-urban area, and the way things look now may not be the way they’ll look in five years, ten years.   They’re especially likely to look different ten years down the road if you put some resources out here now. We need to build the party out here, and the way to make a change is to take advantage of the fact that people are angry with Republicans now. 2008 is the year to do it because it looks to be a great year for Democrats.

The Nancy Boyda figure locally could be Deb Lavender, who is running in Kirkwood (district 94).  She’d tell the HDCCC:  Don’t forget about me.  I’m running against an incumbent who is a little too conservative for his district, who won reasonably well in a close election last time around, but I can do this.  You didn’t take me seriously six months ago, so I went out and raised some money.  And I may still have a primary, but I’m working at this, and I’m following the playbook, and I’m doing it right.  Don’t forget about me.

This tension that we see at both the national and the local levels is inherent to our style of politics and to our primary and general election system.  The tension is especially palpable this time around because we won’t have too many more opportunities like the magical one we had in 2006.  2008 looks like it will be great, too.  All the metrics say so. But after that, we won’t have George Bush to kick around anymore. If we have Democratic majorities in D.C. and if we get the White House, some voters will become disillusioned.  They’ll be saying that we elected these guys to change the world, and they only changed 30 percent of it.

So 2008 is the year to … do everything.  And the question won’t be where to start; it will be: if we can’t do everything who do we give the short end of the straw to?