The Ohio Secretary of State has finally published the booklet “Election Statistics” for the November 2004 election. The booklet does not include the labels that were printed on the ballot for the few minor party and independent candidates who ran in that election. Of course, Republican and Democratic nominees are labeled as such in the book.
An independent candidate won a lawsuit in the 6th circuit, forcing the state to begin printing labels for independents. Previous to that, independent candidates on the Ohio ballot had no partisan label whatsoever. Even after the 1992 lawsuit was won, the Ohio legislature refused to amend the law to authorize labels until 2003, when it grudgingly passed a bill to print either “no-party candidate” or “other-party candidate” on the ballots. In 2004, Michael Badnarik (Libertarian presidential nominee) and Michael Peroutka (Constitution Party presidential nominee) each had “other-party candidate” printed next to their names on the ballot. These are silly labels, but better than no label at all. However, even these labels are missing from the printed election return book.
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“Donald Trump is a true innovator, a man of great personal success, who can surely lead our country.”
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(Citizens For A Better Veterans Home has like Donald Trump/ and Vice President Lou (CNN) Dobbs since mid November 2004…….)
Hi Richard:
Checking in from Ohio. A non-partisan independent Congressional candidate.
My petition to be on the ballot for OH 1 US Congress is due on May 1, 2006, Monday, the day before the Primary election on May 2, 2006, Tuesday.
1,675 valid signatures are required. I am working hard to get the signatures. Have 30 people signed on to get anywhere from 10 to 100 signatures. I am pre-validating to keep up to date on progress on the valid signature count.
The ballot will show “Rich Stevenson No-Party”
Beats a blank, I guess.
Rich Stevenson, http://www.geocites.com/dist1oh/rich
513-251-3155
I corrected my campaign web site address for anyone who would like to see an innovative free template web site available to any and all candidates, at no cost. http://www.geocities.com/dist1oh/rich
Here is the website for an organization fighting for election reform in Ohio: http://www.openelections.org/
NOT MUCH BETTER IN KKKALIFORNIA
x – close Recent Stories By John Hill
CHP policy shifts aided governors
THIS EXACTLY MIRRORS CITIZENS FOR A BETTER VETERANS HOME AND ANYTIME WE APPROACH A STATE FACILITY OR PUBLIC MEETING. CONCERNING US, THE RALPH M. BROWN OPEN MEETINGS ACT AND FEDERAL FIRST AMENDMENT DO NOT EXIST.
Police agency’s rulings on DMV sites coincide with political events.
By John Hill — Bee Capitol Bureau
Published 2:15 am PST Sunday, March 19, 2006
Story appeared on Page A1 of The Bee
As the petition drive to recall Gov. Gray Davis gained steam in the spring of 2003, the California Highway Patrol responded by shutting down signature gathering at Department of Motor Vehicle offices across the state, a Bee investigation has found.
“This decision was made during the recall campaign and was designed to limit political activity at state facilities,” Dennis Lobenberg, a CHP deputy chief who has since retired, wrote in an e-mail last year to CHP divisions across the state.
Sell It Yourself
The move reversed a long-standing CHP practice of allowing local offices to routinely grant permits for activities such as gathering signatures. It ran counter to court precedent that government restrictions on free speech in public places must be narrow and serve a legitimate government interest like crowd control, experts say.
And it occurred on the morning after supporters of Davis, a champion of the CHP, met to discuss how to defuse the growing threat of a recall election.
Only a year ago, as supporters of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger tried to qualify initiatives for the ballot, did the CHP relent. It once again started approving most permits to engage in activities such as signature gathering at DMV offices. The CHP – responsible for issuing permits to people or groups that want to use state facilities, a function it took over from the State Police in the mid-1990s – says its action last year was meant to streamline operations and had nothing to do with the governor’s petition drives.
For two years during and after the recall, the CHP denied more than 100 applications to gather signatures or register voters at DMV offices, considered one of the prime locations for reaching the public. People who wanted to hand out Bibles or health information were likewise turned away.
The CHP said “no” to military recruiters. It told the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder office that its request to register voters at DMV offices would “interfere with the efficient operations of state business.” One San Diego woman was convicted of two misdemeanors – intimidating business customers and resisting a peace officer – when she tried to gather signatures without a permit after the CHP refused to give her one.
Another woman, Susan Rankin, said she had been registering voters for three days at a DMV office in the San Diego area when someone complained to the office manager, who told Rankin she needed to get a CHP permit.
The CHP said no.
“I was speechless,” Rankin said. “I read it, and reread it, and laid it down and read it the next day. … I thought they were brushing me off because I was unimportant and they didn’t want to be bothered. It never occurred to me that I was a casualty of the recall campaign. If I had known that, I would have screamed.”
Manuel Padilla, a CHP assistant commissioner whose office sent out the order in 2003, said in an interview that it was prompted by the recall.
“It just didn’t seem appropriate that we should be allowing a one-sided issue to take place on state facilities,” said Padilla, now retired.
Because the recall was so controversial, he said, “people on both sides could have gotten into arguments” outside DMV offices.
Asked if he made the decision on his own, Padilla responded that he would not help The Bee “point fingers.”
Padilla’s boss, former Commissioner D.O. “Spike” Helmick, said he was aware of the discussion about permits. But he said he didn’t make the decision.
Helmick, an appointee of former Gov. Pete Wilson kept on by Davis, said the discussion started long before the recall. He said the change was meant to bring consistency to the permitting process instead of having local CHP offices interpreting the policy differently, a reason also cited by Padilla.
The idea that the change was made to help Davis politically “is unequivocally not true,” said Helmick, who lost his job after Schwarzenegger won the recall vote and replaced him.
As governor, Davis did much to support the CHP, negotiating raises of 31 percent over six years and boosting CHP pensions.
The California Association of Highway Patrolmen contributed $150,000 to committees fighting the recall, and an additional $24,500 directly to Davis in the months leading up to the election. Davis did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.
“To me, that smells of pure politics,” Dane Waters, chairman of the Initiative and Referendum Institute at the University of Southern California, said when told of the CHP’s actions.
Citizens have a well-established right to petition their government or hand out literature at government facilities, as long as they don’t interfere with business or pose a danger, he said.
“The CHP and the powers-that-be apparently didn’t like the content of the issue, so they decided to impose this bogus rule,” Waters said.
DMV offices are considered among the most desirable spots for reaching the public. The foot traffic flows all day, and visitors have time on their hands. Many have just registered to vote inside the DMV, guaranteeing the validity of their signatures on petitions.
The only place better for gathering signatures is Wal-Mart stores, said Jeanne Nusse, owner of Petition Management in Long Beach, who has been in the business for 27 years.
An experienced worker outside a DMV office could expect to get 500 to 700 signatures in a day, compared with 1,000 at a Wal-Mart, Nusse said.
The CHP’s denial of DMV permits over almost two years almost certainly “impacted on the circulators, the companies and probably the petitions,” Nusse said.
For many years, getting a permit had been routine in most places, according to several signature gatherers interviewed by The Bee.
It was only as the recall drive revved up in the spring of 2003 that the CHP clamped down.
In early May 2003, with the recall drive sputtering, Rep. Darrell Issa, a wealthy Republican from Vista, announced that he would provide “seed money” to pay signature gatherers.
On May 28, a coalition of labor, public safety and other groups met to launch Taxpayers Against the Recall. The next morning, a memo went out to CHP managers that approval of permits would go through the assistant commissioners at Sacramento headquarters, instead of being handled by local CHP divisions and areas.
The effect was immediate and dramatic: The CHP started denying permits at DMV offices.
The CHP gave several different explanations to applicants, according to interviews and a review of the applications. It told many that they would “interfere with” or “disrupt” DMV business. Some were told it had to do with “homeland security,” or that they were unneeded because the DMV was already registering voters. In other cases, the CHP gave no reason at all, simply stamping the application “DENIED.”
“They told me it had to do with post-9/11 security precautions … which at the time seemed very reasonable to me,” said JoAnn Ramirez, who was denied a permit in Santa Ana to gather signatures for a referendum on city approval of a development.
Don Partridge had been handing out Jehovah’s Witnesses literature twice a week at the Culver City DMV for about a year and a half. “Then all of the sudden, we didn’t get a permit,” he said.
“At first, they said it was temporary, and then I tried six or seven times. … Finally, they said it interrupts the procedure at the DMV. To myself, I said, we never interrupted anything.”
Some appealed, asking why they were being turned away after years of working at DMV offices with no problems.
James Marsh, a minister, wrote in his appeal that he and members of his congregation had been handing out Bible literature since the beginning of 2001 at a DMV office in Capitola, where he set up a “small table … off to the side, about 20 feet from the main entrance.”
“I have never called out to anyone, nor waved anyone over. If I do make eye contact with anyone, I simply smile and it is their choice to come out of their way to request Bibles or Bible literature,” Marsh wrote. “It would be a shame to end this arrangement that has proven so effective for so long.” The CHP denied his appeal.
Lillian Laskin was so mad about the CHP’s denial of her application to register voters at the Culver City DMV that she fired off letters to her congresswoman, Jane Harman, and then-Secretary of State Kevin Shelley.
“Since the DMV is a public facility, a place I pay tax dollars for … why is it against the law to practice free speech and assembly?” she wrote Harman. “Since when is a nonpartisan group of citizens not allowed to sit at a table and register voters? Contact whoever is in charge; insist that they stop playing foolish games with a bunch of grandmothers and conscientious neighbors.”
Last March, six days after Schwarzenegger jumped into a Humvee to launch petition drives for his initiatives, then-deputy chief Lobenberg sent out an e-mail to commands throughout the state saying that Arthur Anderson, a new assistant commissioner, was returning the authority for granting permits to the divisions.
The earlier change in 2003 “was made during the recall campaign and was designed to limit political activity at state facilities,” Lobenberg wrote. “Seeing as how things have changed, Comm Anderson is changing the policy to have the permit approval process at your level.”
Three days later, a signature collector in Tustin who specified that he was working on behalf of the Schwarzenegger initiatives, was approved, as were most requests after that.
Anderson said in an interview that he made the decision on his own, without pressure from the administration, because he didn’t see the need for an extra layer of review.
The CHP’s explanations for the 2003 change raise numerous questions, First Amendment experts say.
If it was made to assure smooth functioning at DMV offices, how could the CHP justify returning to the original policy two years later, asked Robert Richards, a professor of journalism and law at Penn State University and author of books and articles about the First Amendment.
“Now the DMV can function efficiently? That doesn’t wash,” he said.
Denials based on specific public safety threats might be defensible, he said, but blanket bans are suspect.
“You’re interfering with the right of the public to petition the government for the redress of grievances, which is exactly what the recall election was,” he said.
The argument that the recall was controversial also doesn’t justify depriving citizens of First Amendment rights, said Waters, chairman of the Initiative and Referendum Institute.
“Gun control, abortion, the death penalty, medical marijuana – you can name a ton of things that were very emotional, and they didn’t shut down the premises,” he said.
Many signature collectors said they had since given up on DMV offices and were surprised to learn that the CHP is again approving permits. They said they were shocked to hear it had to do with the recall.
“It’s heartbreaking, is what it is,” said Rankin, who tried to get signatures for a referendum on the Santa Ana development, “because it’s an abuse of power.”
TO PERMIT – OR NOT TO PERMIT
Here’s a look at key dates in the California Highway Patrol’s handling of requests for permits to gather signatures at Department of Motor Vehicle offices:
May 28, 2003: A consortium of organized labor meets to announce the formation of Taxpayers Against the Recall in a signal that supporters of Gov. Gray Davis are taking the threat seriously. Recall backers say they have collected about 100,000 signatures, a fraction of the more than 900,000 they will need to put the recall before voters.
May 29, 2003: At 7:25 a.m., the CHP’s assistant commissioner for field operations sends out a communication to all commands that permits for activities on state property, such as gathering signatures at Department of Motor Vehicles offices, will now be routed through headquarters instead of local divisions, reversing long-standing policy.
May 2003 to March 2005: The CHP headquarters denies at least 155 permits to those who want to gather signatures, register voters, hand out Bibles or health information, recruit for the military, or conduct other activities.
March 1, 2005: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger jumps into a Humvee at the Capitol and heads to a Natomas restaurant to begin gathering signatures on petitions for redistricting and pensions. He would later support two other initiatives on teacher tenure and union dues used for campaigns.
March 7, 2005: A CHP deputy chief sends an e-mail to divisions across the state announcing that the CHP is going back to its pre-recall practice for granting permits. The 2003 change “was made during the recall campaign and was designed to limit political activity at state facilities,” Dennis Lobenberg wrote. “Seeing as how things have changed, Comm (Art) Anderson is changing the policy to have the permit approval process at your level.”
March 2005 to present: Permits to gather signatures at DMV offices are routinely granted.
About the writer:
* The Bee’s John Hill can be reached at (916) 326-5543 or jhill@sacbee.com.
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