Charlie Gallo's Conversation with John Bonifaz, Candidate for Sec of Comm.

[paineinthearse]

John's campaign website is www.johnbonifaz.com

John is founder of the NATIONAL VOTING RIGHTS INSTITUTE - www.nvri.org & co-founder of After Downinging Street - www.afterdowningstreet.org

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Mods, printed in full by permission of the author.

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http://theprogressiveblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/charlie-gallos-conversation-with-john.html

Monday, January 02, 2006
Charlie Gallo's Conversation with John Bonifaz, Candidate for Secretary of the Commonwealth

John Bonifaz, candidate for Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, granted a sit down interview to Charlie Gallo of the Progressive Blog on 28 December 2005. The full transcript is below.

John Bonifaz is the first ever, and so far only, candidate to be endorsed by the Progressive Blog (http://theprogressiveblog.blogspot.com/2005/12/john-bonifaz-for-secretary-of.html). The Progressive Blog encourages you to check out his website (http://www.johnbonifaz.com/) and his blog (http://www.johnbonifaz.com/blog). The Progressive Blog further encourages you get involved in the campaign, and to make a contribution to help demonstrate the early viability of John's candidacy through https://secure.johnbonifaz.com/contribute/direct/1

We thank the candidate, and his campaign, for the following interview.

Charlie Gallo: John, I would like to first thank you for agreeing to be interviewed for the Progressive Blog and I will start by asking, given that you have never held an elected position in government, how you made the decision to run for Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and why you are running?

John Bonifaz: I’ve been working on voting rights and electoral reform issues for a dozen years as the founder of the National Voting Rights Institute. The most important responsibility of the Secretary of the Commonwealth is to stand up for our elections process and to stand up for the right to vote, and to protect it. What we have today is a Secretary of the Commonwealth who has failed to live up to those responsibilities and who has remained silent in the face of serious voting rights violations that have occurred in this state. Scandal after scandal has emerged in our state and he has resisted meaningful electoral reform which needs to be enacted, such as Election Day voter registration. He worked to kill a pilot project to create Election Day registration for towns in the 2006 elections. We don’t need a Secretary of the Commonwealth who will be silent in the face of voting rights violations and who is resistant to basic, meaningful electoral reform. Massachusetts needs a Secretary of State, and deserves a Secretary of State, who is going to stand up for our right to vote.
I’ve been fighting all over this country to preserve and protect the right to vote, and fighting to create a model for free and fair elections and that’s what I would bring to the Secretary’s office and its completely connected to all of the work I’ve been doing throughout my professional career.

CG: Besides being the chief elections officer, the Secretary of the Commonwealth is also responsible for the Corporations Division. That part of the job description hasn’t been, or at least hasn’t been portrayed as being, a focus of your campaign. Is there a reason why?

JB: Well, I will say that there is a section on our homepage with respect to our welcome letter which discusses this, and we will have more to say about it as the campaign moves forward. I think there are two angles to focus on. First, with respect to small business owners, we must make government more accessible and that includes making the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s office more accessible to small business owners. I met someone on the campaign trail this fall who is a small business owner and who had to hire a lawyer to fill out basic forms to get incorporated. We ought to make it easy for people who want to set up a small business. They ought to be able to download forms themselves, they ought not to have to spend money to hire a lawyer to get papers filed. That’s something the Secretary of the Commonwealth should and can do. Second, with respect to the larger corporations in our state, we need to ensure that they are accountable to the people and to the workers of the commonwealth. I think that includes not only corporations who are incorporated in Massachusetts, but those that are principally based in, those that are principally doing business, in Massachusetts. The Delaware court systems presumes to control much in the way of how corporations act in this country because that is where corporations choose to incorporate since they have had favorable rulings in the Delaware courts. I think that we ought to take another look at that, and decide that when it comes to businesses that are principally based in Massachusetts they ought to be responsible to the people and the workers of our state. And that is something that the Secretary of the Commonwealth can evoke as a standard to push beyond solely the corporations that are incorporated here. Issues around combined reporting to ensure that a corporation that is in more than one state is paying its appropriate tax revenue to the state of Massachusetts is an important question which needs to be looked at. And certainly making sure the corporations are abiding by the state’s securities act and making sure that the shareholders rights are being protected.

CG: Your answer certainly goes above and beyond what would normally be considered the job description of the Secretary of the Commonwealth. You mentioned corporate accountability. Would you be open to teaming up with the Attorney General in that respect, or would it be an advocating position for you?

JB: I think definitely if the Attorney General is willing to also deal with issues around corporate accountability I’m open to that.
My history on this is not solely as a voting rights attorney and leader on elections issues. I have maintained a private law practice that’s involved with international law issues, particularly with major corporations that have violated people’s rights in the developing world -Texaco, Unical – so I’m well aware of how important it is to reign in corporations when they are going beyond basic human decency standards and when they are violating the law. With respect to Massachusetts, we need to put the people first and the corporations second. We have grown too willing in this society to allow corporations to essentially rule and govern and we need to really fight to being our democracy back, ensuring that the people of the Commonwealth and the workers of the Commonwealth come first, not the corporations.

CG: Before I get into the issues which you have specifically set forth as part of your platform so far, I’d like to get your opinion on the big four issues of the day: abortion, the death penalty, universal health care and gay marriage.

JB: With respect to abortion, I am pro-choice. This is a basic question of how we view women in our society and women have to choose what they want to do with their own bodies. I recognize that this is a charged issue for some perhaps due to religious views that look down on abortion, but the bottom line is that these are private choices that ought to be made by individuals themselves and are not for the government to impose. With respect to the death penalty, I’m against the death penalty. The death penalty is not a deterrent in any what whatsoever. It has been shown to be applied unfairly to people of color and to the poor people of the community, and it has been shown not to be able to be upheld to a standard where innocent people would not be killed. In fact, it is my firm belief that innocent people have been killed in this country with our tax payer dollars and with our government involved in that killing. The death penalty is abhorrent to any basic human society. Countries around the world have banned the death penalty and it is high time that we not have it in this country. I am proud that Massachusetts doesn’t have it, but I would certainly be someone who speaks out as an elected official against bringing it here.
With respect to universal health care, I’m for it. I think that health care is a human right, and that insurance companies and the health care industry should not be engaged in making the kind of profits they make off of people being sick. The fact that millions of people in this country go without health care – it is an absolute disgrace where we would let people not have the basic care for their health that they deserve. We as a society need to take ownership of this problem, and not farm it out the private industries to decide who can get health care and who cannot. The fourth part of the question?

CG: Gay marriage.

JB: Gay marriage is a human right! Who people choose to marry is not the business of the government and this idea that we are going to discriminate against people on the basis of the partners they choose is abhorrent to our fundamental democratic standards and our constitutional standards. I’m proud that our state supreme court ruled the way it did in finding that gay marriage is constitutional in this state and I think that we need to recognize that this is going to be the law of the land in the future, and that people in this state and in the rest of the country ought to be able to choose who they want to marry whether they are straight or gay.

CG: Going again to the issue of gay marriage, Secretary Galvin recently decided to certify signatures for a proposed ballot initiative which could ban gay marriage. You wrote an op-ed recently in the Boston Globe criticizing that decision, and so I wondered if you could explain why Secretary Galvin should not have certified those signatures and what you would have done if you were in his shoes.

JB: Sure. There were serious allegations that had arisen early on in the signature gathering process in which there was essentially fraud going on in terms of getting people to sign. People were being duped according to these allegations. It was a bait and switch method which was reportedly used in many places. People were asked outside grocery stores to sign a petition to allow the sale of wine and beer at grocery stores. They said, “sure, I’ll sign it,” but then were given the anti-gay marriage form to sign. This is a question that goes to the heart of the integrity of the electoral process. If people are being manipulated and deceived into sign a petition which they would otherwise not even believe in signing, then we need to seriously investigate that. But there was no serious investigation here. All the signatures that were presented by the proponents of the petition were certified by Secretary Galvin. He now says after the fact, in response to my op-ed, that he indeed did a comparison with the petition for the sale of wine and the petition dealing with banning gay marriage, and he says he found fourteen thousand some signatures which were the same. He made no announcement with respect to this finding. He didn’t say “I suspect fraud” with these fourteen thousand signatures and furthermore he certified these signatures as well. If he thought that those fourteen thousand signatures were questionable, then why did he certify them?
This goes to the kind of accountability we need in our elections. Elections are not coronations, they are a contest of ideas. People need to be held accountable for their record. This is the kind of record that this incumbent has. He rubber stamped the one hundred and twenty five thousand signatures that were provided to him. He didn’t investigate it in any kind of serious way. What would I have done? I would have, in light of these kinds of allegations, taken a random sampling of those who had signed and contacted each one of those individuals and found out, percentage wise, did they intend to sign it. If I had found that the percentage was more than minimal, I would then continue the investigation. I received an e-mail from a voter in this state, after that op-ed, and she described this very kind of bait and switch as happening to her. Then she asked me how to find out whether her name was on that petition. I went ahead, went to knowthyneighbor.org, and there she was – listed as having signed this petition. This is not solely a question of whether or not the petition should move forward in the face of these kinds of allegations. This is a question of protecting the voters. People who signed this petition unknowingly were manipulated into doing so and it is not solely up to the voters themselves to figure out that they were deceived. It’s up to the Secretary of the Commonwealth to protect the voters and to ensure that they not be associated with something that they never intended to associate with.

CG: Another issue with regard to that signature gathering process was that a number of those people who gathered the signatures were paid signature gatherers who perhaps did not necessarily deceived intentionally the signers of the petition, but did deceive them due to unfamiliarity with the process or under the direction of their employer. What are your thoughts on paid signature gathering?

JB: I think that paid signature gathering should be allowed in the state. I don’t think that the result of this situation is to ban paid signature gathering. The reason why is that it is extremely difficult to get one of these petitions on the ballot and it shouldn’t be a cakewalk, but it also should be accessible to organized people who want to come together to try to put something on the ballot, and if that means that some people are engaged in doing it for pay then that’s OK. We have paid campaign staffers, we have paid people in government – it’s not wrong that people get paid to gather signatures. What’s wrong is that if there is fraud in the signature gathering process, it is left uninvestigated and that signatures are rubber stamped and sent off to the legislature for the legislature to deal with the issue of whether or not it goes on the ballot.

CG: I’d like to switch gears a little bit and talk about clean elections. You have obviously been a great advocate for clean elections and I’d like you to explain your position first, for those who don’t know, on public financing of elections, and then perhaps share your experience about how you’ve worked and advocated in that area and what you might do in the future if you are elected.

JB: The state of our campaign finance system in this country is one of the critical issues of our time – critical to nearly every issue that we care about in this society, from the environment to education to economic justice to healthcare. How we finance our elections too often determines our politics. It restricts debate, limits the number of candidates who can participate, discourages people from running. We have to deal, head on, with this question of how we finance elections and the best way to deal with it is public funding of elections, coupled with mandatory spending limits. Now, public financing of elections on a voluntary basis is in place right now in Maine and in Arizona and in certain races in Vermont. And in all three of those states, we’ve seen more people engaged in this process who otherwise would never have dreamed of running and those who have previously opted into the private fundraising process but who are now opting into the public funding process. This is a far cheaper system than the system that we have today in which we pay, on the tail end, in terms of subsidies to moneyed interests, to big money forces, and in terms of a government that is unresponsive to our basic human needs. This is a very, very inexpensive system alternative to what we have today. But it means that we have to own this process which is publicly done, and we’d own it in full. Just like we own the precincts and the poll workers are not publicly run, we need to own our elections in full and that means public elections need to be publicly financed. Public schools are something I believe in, public parks – I believe in them. There is no public institution in our society more important than our public elections and that means we need to own it in full by having them publicly financed. Now we tried that in Massachusetts via the ballot initiative. Sixty seven percent of the voters voted for it, but the legislature refused to find the law. We took the legislature to court and I was honored to serve as lead counsel to a coalition of candidates – Warren Tolman and others - as well as individual voters and organizations and political parties who took the legislature to court in essence and the legislature refused to comply with the victory that we won. The state supreme court ruled that the legislature was violating the Constitution and the legislature, in its entrenched power, refused to respond. So then we were forced to go down the road that the state supreme court provided us, which was the remedy of executing on state property – the first time in our nations history that we could find that a state supreme court had, in order to uphold a constitutional mandate, had allowed to sale of state property.
Would I have liked it to turn out differently? Of course I would. I would have liked for the legislature to have complied with the law and to have followed the court’s order. But when it didn’t, in the face of its defiance of the rule of law, it was critical to demonstrate that the state supreme court’s ruling be respected, and that’s why that sale of state property had to occur. I think we ought to bring back public funding here in Massachusetts just like it now is in Maine and Arizona. Connecticut just passed it via general assembly. It is a model reform and it will open up the process and it will take big money out of our elections.

CG: What about those who say that the Commonwealth can not afford public financing of elections?

JB: We can’t afford the current system. The current system is what is too expensive. It is too expensive in terms of the tax breaks that go to wealthy interests and to corporations. It is too expensive in terms of people on the higher end of the income bracket not paying their fair share of taxes. It is too expensive in terms of the unresponsiveness to basic human needs, to the lack of health care for our citizens, to the lack of adequate education for all of our citizens. These are crises that we have in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and much of it is directly connected to who controls our politics. We save, enormously, on the front end by investing in this process up front rather than paying on the tail end by getting the kind of unresponsiveness that we would get from our government as a result of these big money forces controlling our elections.

CG: Now in that response, you’ve just spoke to the idea of who controls our politics. A big part of your platform having to do with that idea is the Voters Bill of Rights. Would you explain the Voters Bill of Rights?
JB: Well, I think that we do need to advance the notion that Massachusetts can lead the way in creating a model for free and fair elections in this country. Post-Florida, Post-Ohio, it is clear that we need a Secretary of State in this country who is going to lead the way, and show us that there is a way to conduct elections differently than how we’ve seen out of Florida and Ohio and also, frankly, out of this state as well. The Voters Bill of Rights is a way of providing ten new rights – new guarantees – that would reinvigorate our democracy, strengthen it for all of us, and really reengage the citizenry in the state. Count every vote. We must ensure that people’s votes are being properly counted. There is no purpose to voting if we don’t have our votes properly counted, and so that is a critical right that must be guaranteed. And we’ve seen, with respect to the past two presidential cycles, the people don’t fully trust that their votes are being counted. This question of counting every vote includes the issue of verifiable voting machines when voting machines are being used. This means a paper trail but it also means that we own the machines, we own the data, we own the source codes. We should not be outsourcing to private voting machine companies the process of tabulating our votes. That is a standard that the Secretary of the Commonwealth can set for the country, the standard being that we will not contract with voting machine companies that do not provide us with the access to the source codes, access to the data, ability to own the machine and a paper trail, and we will set a standard for the country by doing so. Second, make voting easier. Election Day registration exists in six states. It decreases evidence of fraud, it increases voter turnout, it makes voting easier for people when they can come and vote on the same day they are registering. And that’s what we should have in Massachusetts. We should be part of that model reform. We should also look at election holidays or weekend voting so that people who are working one, two, three jobs are able to participate in this process so people do not have to sacrifice their work schedules. We should look at absentee ballots for all, we should look at early voting. All of these things, I think, are designed so that more people are able to vote. Third, is public funding of elections - ending the big money dominance of our political process, and mandatory spending limits. We at the National Voting Rights Institute have been working for years in leading a legal movement to revisit the U.S. Supreme Court ruling Buckley v. Valeo (1976) which equated money to speech and struck down congressional campaign spending limits. We now have a case coming out of Vermont which is pending before the Supreme Court – a landmark opportunity for the court, after thirty years to revisit this question of mandatory spending limits. I think what we are going to find, is that this now will be a renewed focus on the potential for mandatory limits as another part in the overall reform package in campaign financing. The other reforms are on our website. They include redistricting reform, instant run off voting, fusion – which will be the subject of a ballot initiative – and I think that all of this is designed to broaden the process and to bring more people into the process and to really make everyone feel that this is our democracy, not just a democracy for the wealthy few.

CG: As you are aware as a PDA board member, the Progressive Democrats of America passed “A Resolution to End the U.S. Occupation of Iraq” by consensus at the 2005 Massachusetts Democratic Party’s Convention which called for a timetable for withdrawal and which acknowledged the illegality and unconstitutionality of the war. Your campaign platform is extremely anti-war, but what could you do as Secretary of the Commonwealth to operationalize this national agenda item at the state level?

JB: I think the war in Iraq is exhibit A on how our democracy is in crisis today. This is a broken system. I have been very engaged, as a private lawyer, in standing up against this war. I represented a coalition of U.S. soldiers, parents of soldiers, and members of Congress in suing President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld on the eve of the war for lacking the Constitutional authority to wage war against Iraq absent a Congressional declaration of war or equivalent action.
That really gets to the democracy question, because we never really have a full debate prior to the invasion, we never really had any deliberation via our members of Congress, and we now know the dangers when we allow the Executive Branch, which does not have these powers under the Constitution, to make a decision for all of us as to whether or not we go to war. In my view, what the Secretary of the Commonwealth can do about this is to fight for free and fair elections, to lift up a model of democracy which says that all of us need to be engaged in the critical issues of our time, need to be engaged in deciding what our policies will be. Government is supposed to be us, it is not supposed to be something else. If this campaign is going to be anything, it is going to speak for all of us. It’s not going to be just about one candidate, it will be about a larger group of people, people all across this state, who want to believe again, who want to believe in the process and have ownership in the process. The Secretary of the Commonwealth ought to be the leading voice on that question, and as the chief elections officer ought to be able to say that this is all of our democracy not just democracy of those in power or of those who have large sums of money or large war chests.

CG: Beyond your views on his actions with respect to the war, you have been so highly critical of the president that you have even advocated possible impeachment. Would you expand on that?

JB: Well, I authored a book called Warrior King: The Case for Impeaching George Bush. It came out in January 2004, and now we seem nearly two years later, the extend to which this president has trampled on the Constitution, has violated his basic oath of office, has violated the people’s trust, and ought to be held accountable for potentially impeachable offenses which he has committed. I think at a minimum we need a serious investigation in Congress as to whether or nor he has committed high crimes. And I’ll continue, as a citizen, to speak out on this. Again, I think that the question for a Secretary of the Commonwealth, is to ensure that we are a vibrant democracy and one in which all of our citizens are engaged, that we are not delegating to others, who hold power, to defy the rule of law and defy the Constitution. This is our Constitution, our document, and it is a promise between We the People and our government and we need to stand up for the Constitution and for our democracy every day.

CG: I’d like to now step back from the questions on specific issues and talk about your potential as a candidate. How has your work, perhaps with the Progressive Democrats of America or on Senator Ted Kennedy’s campaign, prepared you for public office?

JB: I think that all of the work that I’ve been doing prepares me to serve in public office. I have essentially been serving in the public interest for my entire professional career. Frankly, since I was a high school student, I have been involved in public interest work. I have witnessed, up front, the political process at work both as a lawyer and as an advocate for election changes, as someone who has stood up for the Constitution with respect to the war. I have seen the good and the bad with respect to the process. I’ve seen how people can come together at a grassroots level and really create change with reform minded leaders, and how that kind of change can be further advanced. I’ve also seen how people in government can resist reform, can stand in the way of reform, can trample on the Constitution, can hold onto their power over basic democratic ideals. So I’ve seen both and I think all that has prepared me very well for being the best Secretary of the Commonwealth Massachusetts can have. There will be those who want to resist any reform and hold onto power at all costs, but there will also be those who dream of a better democracy and provide people with the kind of hope and leadership that is necessary for our time. I think we ought to go that other road and give people a sense that it is our democracy and that we can fight for it together.

CG: To finish up, we’ll step away from the political talk and I’d like to throw a few questions which I’ve referred to in past interviews as softballs. The first is do you have a favorite musician or album?

JB: (Laughs.) You know, I guess I have a number of favorite musicians and have a variety of interests on the musical front from folk to classical to rock. It varies from time to time, but I like Cesaria Eora from Cape Verde, I like Andean music from my father’s home country of Ecudor. So a variety, I’ll leave it at that.

CG: How about a favorite philosopher?

JB: Well, I grew up inspired by Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King. I grew up in a household that taught me a lot about those two movements, both with the nonviolent movement in India and about the civil rights movement. My father came to this country from Ecuador when he was sixteen. He became a chemical engineer and we lived in Southeastern Pennsylvania and he discovered right where we lived, in the mushroom capital of the world, that undocumented workers were working in depolorable condition and he took me to those camps as a young child and showed me how people were living right next to where we were. He went on the night law school as a result of that and became a lawyer as a second profession to further fight for the rights of farm workers and do other public interest work. My mother started a non-profit cooperative that supported low income artisans around the country, and as a result I met incredible people from the deep South and Appilacia who came to our home or who were on the board of this organization, and two of them had an influence which taught me so much more about the civil rights movemenr: Estelle Witherspoon and Nettie Young, the cofounders of the Freedom Quilting Bee, an all-black women’s quilting cooperative in Wilcox County, Alabama, one of the poorest counties in the counry. And I’ll never forget Nettie Young who is still with us today, Estelle has since passed on, who told me a story about the first time she went to register to vote in the middle of the Sixties during the civil rights movement in Thelma, Alabama. She walked up those court house steps and dogs were breathing up her heels and guards were standing on the steps, and then she looked in the eyes of one of the guards and realized that he was more scared than she was and that gave her the confidence to go in and register to vote for the first time in her life. You know, I look at those stories and realize that there are a lot of heroes and heroines who are unknown to many of us. I had an opportunity to get to know Nettie Young and Estelle Witherspoon, but there are many others.
So for me, Martin Luther King and Mahatma Ghandi represent that larger movement where there were so many unsung heroes and heroines.

CG: As a final question, is there a certain politcian, past or present, that you look up to and admire?

JB: If I were to define a politician as someone who stood up against entrenched power and created change in the United States, it would be Dr. King. If I were to define politician as someone who actually held elected office then, for my lifetime, I would choose Paul Wellstone.

CG: Well, that's all. Again, thank you.

JB: And thank you.