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Letter
of the Law
It’s
Albany, what do you want? It’s a common enough line, given
Albany’s long and storied history of machine politics, retribution,
mutual back-scratching, and. . . . There are even those who,
while they’d never condone the practice in the present, are
perversely proud of the ugliness, or should we say messiness,
of Albany’s political history. William Kennedy is certainly
one. At times, I find myself being one as well. It makes for
good stories to tell to people who don’t know anything about
your city except that it’s cold in the winter. (“42 years?!”
“Yep, 42 years. Amazing, isn’t it? And we’ve only had two
mayors since then.”)
It’s even become popular, ironically, among Albany city Republicans
to speak longingly of the days of Dan O’Connell.
But then there’s the present. And anyone who’s had a run-in
with a vindictive or controlling political administration
while trying to run for office, do their job, or organize
for some sort of betterment in the community is not likely
to be nostalgic for a time when the party in power wielded
its power in an even more overwhelming way.
One longtime political observer told me going into this Albany
municipal election season that it was going to be about process
and attitude more than about issues. That seems to be the
case—and the question is, is that a good thing or not?
There are absolutely issues facing the city about which there
are differing positions among the candidates—convention center,
school performance, historic preservation, gangs, police accountability,
parking. These are all crucial questions for the city. But
the lines in the sand aren’t all that clearly drawn on most
of them, and it’s rare that any of them gets politically active
Albanians as worked up as questions of process, power, attitude,
style, accountability, and integrity.
So far the headlines of the election season have been emblematic
of this latter focus: Mayor Jennings making a big deal over
possibly invalid signatures on Archie Goodbee’s petitions
(though Jennings never claimed there were enough to actually
disqualify Goodbee, making his claim that he wasn’t pursuing
it because he wanted to focus on issues disingenuous). Charter-reform
petitions, and the responding commission. The campaigns of
Ward 4 candidate Barbara Smith and Ward 2 Councilwoman Carolyn
McLaughlin challenging the petitions of their opponents for
violating an agreement in last year’s county special-election
lawsuit. And on.
In this vein, there’s been some lively discussion in the Albany
political blogosphere recently about the propriety of obsessing
over the minutiae of election rules. Matt Glassman at his
blog O, SmAlbany makes a strong argument for differentiating
between the grand crime of actual voter fraud—tampering with
someone’s ballot, buying votes, etc.—and technical violations
of election rules, like having a Housing Authority worker
(or board chair) possibly ask for petition signatures on housing
authority grounds.
The latter is not a good thing, Glassman argues, but it’s
surely not as important as actual issues. He adds that anything
that has the net effect of having fewer people on the ballot—i.e.,
challenging the validity of petition signatures—is counter
to the spirit of democracy. This latter, at least, makes sense
to me. I’d rather someone gets mistakenly put on the ballot
than mistakenly left off.
But some of the commenters over at political hotspot Democracy
in Albany counter that after what happened in the special
election last year, fair elections have become the central
issue. Similar arguments were made on a national level after
the past two presidential elections, and I find them compelling,
though I don’t think making fair elections the issue requires
conflating voter fraud (like last year’s case) and smaller
election-law violations (like petition-gathering problems).
Still, the petition-gathering problems that Smith’s and McLaughlin’s
campaigns were alleging had to do with violating a court agreement
that was put in place in response to what is alleged to be
much bigger violations. Pushing the very envelope that you’re
being sued for having pushed way too hard last year implies
something very different—a sort of willful disregard for the
justice system as a whole—than does having gathered signatures
from people who aren’t actually qualified to sign for one
reason or another (which happens to every campaign to a greater
or lesser extent).
When people lose faith in the political system, not to mention
when they are explicitly excluded from it by cronyism or fear
of retribution, issue discussions mean a lot less: They will
be followed by a tiny fraction of people, joined by a tinier
fraction, and influenced by even fewer.
Not only that, but process—not just fair elections, but how
a city is run on a day-to-day basis—is a pretty important
thing for an electorate to consider in municipal officials.
City officials deal with minutiae, with the relationship of
government to its citizens, as least as much as “issues.”
We want to know how they are going to respond to crises, whether
they will try to cover it up when they screw up, how they
will react when one of their employees breaks the law, how
they will respond when faced with a citizen outcry over an
issue, how well they keep their personal interests and the
interests of the city separate, how much energy they will
put into involving citizens in planning processes for major
city projects.
These are hard things to measure or quantify, but behavior
with respect to election rules, and attitude toward the spirit
of democracy they are supposed to protect, is at least one
window in. We should be at least taking a peek.
—Miriam
Axel-Lute
maxel-lute@metroland.net
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Columns
& Opinions
