Electioneering Accountability

There's an article about the Ohio Elections Commission in the Dispatch today, highlighting their total lack of power to do anything about the complaints they receive. It's a companion piece to the story of the six years it took to find the Ohio Chamber of Commerce and it's advocacy arm Citizens for a Strong Ohio guilty of violating election law, resulting in a $1,100 fine. While I'm not really surprised that campaigns can often get away with lying, I am surprised that they can steal with impunity.

What I mean by this is that the Ohio Channel owns the copyright to the footage it provides of government activities. It maintains this copyright so that the footage isn't used in campaign ads. Supposedly.

See, as I summed up here, the Republican party distributed a web ad featuring a context-free statement by Barbara Sykes that made it appear that she was supporting a tax-hike. Forget the fact that the ad was intentionally misleading, it was a copyright violation, and the Ohio Channel told them to stop distributing it.

The ad was removed from YouTube, then mass-mailed, then the GOP said that they had capitulated and pulled the ad. By the time the article appeared in the Dispatch with the quotes confirming that Republicans had agreed to stop stealing copyrighted footage, they had already gone back on this statement, and put the ad up on their website.

Shortly thereafter, Progress Ohio made a video combining the song "The Way we Were" with footage of Tom Noe personally praising almost every Republican on the 2006 ballot during a swearing-in ceremony.

The Ohio Channel cried foul and asserted their ownership of the footage, causing Progress Ohio to pull the clip.

I made a web ad featuring a speech by David Goodman, in which he argued that candidates should be able to take unlimited contributions, because politicians aren't really influenced by campaign money.

It lasted a few hours on YouTube before the OhioChannel informed YouTube that they owned the copyright to the video footage and wanted the clip pulled, which YouTube did.

As The Ohio Channel was busy shutting down any and all liberal web clips using their footage, the Republican Party continued to host the anti-Sykes ad that had brought the copyright issue into the news in the first place. The GOP maintained that they had the right to do so, and refused to recognize the copyright protections claimed by the Ohio Channel.

The Ohio Channel hinted that they might pursue legal action. That was the last mention of the issue in the Dispatch. If legal action has been pursued, it hasn't made the papers.

And the Ohio Republican Party continues to have the ad hosted on their website ('Tax Hike Sykes...'). So it would at least appear that either the GOP was right, and the footage is in the public domain (in at least some situations), or they are wrong, but the Ohio Channel isn't actually interested in protecting their copyright.

What good are election laws if nobody actually follows them? Why would anyone follow them if their opponents don't do so, and they aren't enforced? Copyright law is of course far broader than the realm of political ads, but in this context, are election-related copyright laws being selectively enforced, or does our side just comply with requests to respect property rights? The most recent Dispatch article mentions a ruling against a Democratic candidate, but also mentions that the offending language was voluntarily removed from the ad during its run before the election. I'm starting to feel like conservatives believe that campaign laws are for suckers. Worse yet, I'm starting to fear that they've got a point.

Have a Holly Jolly 12/25

Whatever holidays you celebrate, you probably have Monday off. Enjoy it. If you dont't have Monday off, you are probably providing an indispensible service, so accept my gratitude along with my pity.

I'll be celebrating Christmas. My Mom will be visiting. She recently told me that she finally felt that someone truly understood her political point of view after reading O'Reilly's 'Culture Warrior.' I have to admit that part of me wants to put up a banner saying "Support Our Troops in the War on Christmas"

But I won't. Some things are bigger than politics, even bigger than my snarcissism. It's my daughter's first Christmas, and the family is gathering here. May your days be merry and bright. I'll be back after the weekend.

OH-12 Questions and Speculation

So with a little distance and some time to kill waiting on an update from Bev Campbell (she was meeting with folks yesterday to determine options), my thoughts are drifting to 2008. When most folks think of 2008, they're thinking about the White House. Me, I'm wondering about OH-12.

We had a good candidate with a good staff and a bunch of cash (although not as much as the incumbent). We had one of the most consistent supporters of the President as an opponent when the President's approval rating was lower than Nixon's. We were fighting against a Republican in Ohio in a year where Republicans were associated with all manners of corruption, especially in Ohio. We had all of these things working for us in a district that saw John Kerry take 48% of the Presidential vote in '04.

Bob Shamansky lost to Pat Tiberi by 14%.
Edward S. Brown, spending about 1/10th of one percent of what the Shamansky Campaign spent, got 38% of the district vote in '04, compared to Shamansky's 43%.

So, I'm looking for some opinions. Is Tiberi beatable? If not, why were/are so many of us so mistaken about that fact? If so, what went wrong in this election, when we were running downhill? Can those things be fixed? Given the amount of time and effort Tiberi expended this go-round, is anyone interested in the partial victory of tying down resources (e.g., no Shamansky would have meant fat contributions to people like Deb Pryce)?

After answering any or all of those questions, who would you like to see run in '08?

'08 seems like it's a long way off, especially because here in the 20th State House district, the lights have not been extinguished in the 2006 election. But in 2008 the top of the ballot will be Prez, and then... Senator, gov, SOS/Treas/AG/Aud,... U.S. House.

So, these 18 races will be the #2 race on their ballots, and as such I expect them to start drawing attention early. And if it is decided that it's worth another run at PT, it might well take an 18-month effort.

So to recap: let me know if it's possible to win, if so how, and given how, who?

And if anyone knows an email address for Drew Tappan, if you could drop me a line at bluebexley AT gmail DOT com, I'd appreciate it.

Woodland Meadows one step closer to being razed.

A judge has declared Woodland Meadows a 'Public Nuisance,' and given the owners two months to bring the complex within code standards. That basically means securing the buildings and picking up trash, something the current caretakers view as a Sisyphean task.

Jorge Newbery, the owner of the complex, was a blogger for three days. He used his blog to lay out his side of the story. To paraphrase/summarize Newbery: I did my best, which was better than past owners, and would have been successful if not for repeated misfortune and the withdrawal of counted-on support. I'm willing to work with the city to salvage the situation as much as possible.

The person who wrote that letter was intelligent, perceptive, and told a plausible story. Perhaps he is not really the callous slumlord he's portrayed as being.

Y'know what? I don't really care.

Everyone, from me to the mayor, from neighbors to Newbery's own attorney, seems to agree: those 122 buildings are beyond salvaging. So I don't see the point in bringing them up to code. Knock them down. Worry about what to do with the vacant land later.

This is my best (uneducated) guess as to the overall situation: Mr. Newbery is facing financial devastation, and is holding on to every bit of negotiating power he has to wring something out of the property before he has to give it up and face his creditors. The city doesn't want to bail out someone else's failed investment to the tune of several million dollars. The city wants to take over the decision making process, without laying out $10M+, so they're making the case that Newbery can't or won't take on the responsibility. All the while, everyone waiting for Newbery to pay back loans or reimburse for services wants to be assured that they aren't going to end up eating the entire loss.

Meanwhile a 52 acre chunk of the Eastside festers.

I'm willing to listen to reasonable opinions on this, but the one I'm offering up is this: Taking on Woodland Meadows was a high-risk investment. Sometimes, high-risk investments don't work out. Actually, in the vast majority of cases, high-risk investments don't work out. That's why they're called high-risk.

Woodland Meadows didn't work out.

So, Mr. Newbery is going to have to deal with the loss. His creditors, likewise. Maybe it's a shame that this happened to a modern-day saint, or maybe it was only a matter of time before a smooth-talking slumlord's schemes caught up with him. Perhaps the Mayor and the media have been more than fair in propping things up for three years. Perhaps they are engaging in a petty personal attack.

I couldn't tell you, and let me repeat, I don't care.

Perhaps Mr. Newbery will emerge miracuously unscathed from the situation, perhaps he will be broken. It's not for me to have a preference there.

It is, as the judge declared, a Public Nuisance. Knock it down. Clean it up. Negotiate later.

Provisional Ballots

The Dispatch ran an article on the Voter ID law and provisional ballots yesterday. BSB called it a terrible article (and it was pretty bad, although in my random off-topic opinion the prize for awful article full of unexamined contradictions goes here).

Anyway, the first additional point that I think should be brought up is that the people who warned that the new law would cause a voting disaster didn't just complain, they actually did something about it.

The second is that the problems occured at the electoral pressure points:

...Franklin County election officials are concerned that the county led the state in the increase of provisional ballots this fall from 2004 — a jump from 2.7 percent to 5.1 percent.

(Franklin Co. BOE Director Matthew)Damschroder said it’s not clear why, but he speculated that one reason might be confusion about the ID requirement. For example, some voters who had a valid driver’s license with an old address were mistakenly given a provisional ballot when they should have received a regular ballot.

We've had several races in Franklin Co. that were close enough to recount, from the Campbell-McGregor race to the COTA levy, not to mention the nationally publicized OH-15. When we don't know why there were so many provisionals in Franklin Co., and we think that it may be because there was a difficulty in following the law, one loses a bit of confidence regarding whether or not the law was properly followed in counting the provisionals.

I've said it before, and I'll continue to say it - Matthew Damschroder has done a much better job this cycle than last in terms of keeping the public informed as to what's going on with the vote. I'd still like to see some stats, however, on how many provisionals were accepted and rejected by precinct, and the reasons for rejection. The info I have at this point doesn't add up, and these current statements only further pique my curiosity. While I can wish that this information would have been released when it was most useful for candidates, and hope that it is released before it is of absolutely no use to candidates (e.g. the Campbell Campaign's), I would maintain it is critical information in the ongoing process of making elections as transparent, fair and accurate as possible, so I do hope it will be released at some point in time, regardless.