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 Election
Exposé
It seems as if politicians can noiselessly sway
the lives of many—intentionally. “We
have some measure of control in our tiny personal
lives but the larger reality is manipulated by
far greater forces,” writes Spencer Overton
in Stealing Democracy: The New Politics of
Voter Suppression (W.W. Norton and Company,
2006).
According to Overton, an associate professor
of law, election guidelines are often crafted
by consultants who are usually unknown to the
public. Advisers, counselors, and professionals
are brought together matter-of-factly, and charged
with the task of funneling charm, influence, and
savvy to lasso election and re-election victories
for a roster of candidates. Politicians can then
“group voters so that incumbents will almost
always beat challenger candidates, or so that
candidates from one party … are almost guaranteed
to win in most of the districts,” Overton
writes.
This is possible because all states are required
to redraw—or gerrymander—their U.S.
House boundaries during a once-in-a-decade procedure,
following the U.S. Census. This is done, Overton
explains, “so that each district within
the state has the same number of people and meets
one person/one vote requirements.” But these
negotiations can only be endorsed if two-thirds
of the state legislators agree to the terms; otherwise,
the issue goes to referendum, which rarely happens.
Overton describes career moves of Michael Berman
of BAD Campaigns, who is well-known for creating
“hard-hitting television spots and direct
mail for many of California’s most powerful
Democrats.” According to Overton, Loretta
Sanchez (D-Calif.) told the Orange County
Register: “I spend $2 million [campaigning]
every election. If my colleagues are smart, they’ll
pay their $20,000, and Michael [Berman] will draw
the district they can win in. Those who have refused
to pay? God help them.”
It is neither uncommon for the at-the-moment
dominant party to “strengthen[s] its grip
by manipulating district lines,” Overton
writes. Tom DeLay, for example, maneuvered an
unprecedented, mid-decade gerrymander in Texas;
in 2002, the Republicans had a 47 percent leverage
of the congressional seats. Just after the 2004
election it was 66.
Overton believes certain reforms—minimizing
political conflicts of interest, gift restrictions
to lawmakers and candidates, and mandatory, universal
voter registration—could ameliorate the
disparities associated with suffrage. In addition:
“We should employ a program of regular and
unannounced independent audits of polling places,
county election boards, secretary of state offices,
and private vendors that provide voting machines,”
Overton writes. “Such audits would examine
voter-registration … voting machines, vote-tabulation
systems, software, purge processes … Regular
audits of large corporations protect shareholders
… voters deserve no less.”
But, according to Overton, Anne Henderson, legislative
director for the League of Women Voters of California,
disagrees. When she viewed—and objected
to—the state’s re-districted 2002
California map, Henderson concluded that its very
architecture revealed “that voter participation
doesn’t matter much.”
A Definitive Decade
 A
book with a terrifically tentacled texture, Edward
D. Berkowitz’s Something Happened: A
Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies
(Columbia University Press, 2006) outlines how
social advancements redolent of the 1960s—riots
to end the Vietnam War, Civil Rights legislation,
The Voting Rights Act, and the introduction of
Medicare—were truncated by the disillusionment
of the 1970s.
Writer Tom Wolfe referred to the ’70s
as the “me decade,” but that label
might prove inaccurate, as Berkowitz shows. Though
there was much self-absorption and self-examination
in those days, these qualities did not preclude
enormous and successful social shifts including
women’s rights in the workplace and increased
acceptance of homosexuality.
Some of these social responses were reactionary
because the post-war faith that the public held
for its government was rejected. Events such as
the Nixon/Agnew resignations and the Vietnam War
“ended the self-confident period that had
prevailed after the Second World War and marked
the start of something new. In this new era, a
wide range of Americans—Democrats and Republicans,
conservatives and liberals, blacks and whites,
men and women—questioned the commonly held
assumptions of the postwar era,” Berkowitz
writes.
These episodes divided the country and burdened
the citizenry with anger, feelings of betrayal,
and a new demand: accountability. The heretofore
protected private lives of politicians went public,
as did the posses of paternalistic journalists.
The counterpoint to America’s unquiet
mind was entertainment. People continued to go
to the movies—Jaws, The Godfather,
Rocky and Saturday Night Fever—but
television, in many instances, was more soothing.
Television, in fact, “was unavoidable,”
Berkowitz writes, pointing out that “97.1
percent of American households contained a TV
set in 1975.” And because television was
so popular, television “contributed to the
ways in which Americans experienced the seventies…The
fact that so many people watched the same shows
heightened television’s role as a source
of common images and sounds,” Berkowitz
writes.
And big audiences stayed faithful because there
was a genre-show that suited nearly everyone.
Besides the regular news broadcasts and sports,
what remained were the variegated situation comedies
such as the more serious, issue-oriented All
in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore
Show; the nostalgic Happy Days,
and Laverne and Shirley, plus the escapist
Charlie’s Angels and The Beverly
Hillbillies, all of which were hits.
The scarcity of television channels was also
an advantage to viewer “retainage.”
Remembered sitcom images were identifiable and
widely discussed.
It was a kind of graduated familiarity that—in
part—guided the country back
to unity.
—David Bruce Smith
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