In Portland, Oregon, campaign reform has taken root so firmly that city contests are termed “voter-owned elections.”

Portland was the first city in the country to offer full voluntary public financing of election campaigns. Janice Thompson says Brennan’s “incredibly valued” help in reviewing a proposed ordinance, providing legislative counsel and testifying on its legality in hearings contributed to the legislation’s passage in 2005.

Pointing to such efforts, those who work in the field say the center is seen as the “go-to” organization for state and local groups active in campaign reform. “The Brennan Center folks are really the national experts,” says Thompson. State and local laws “can be vulnerable to federal legal challenges and that’s where the Brennan Center can help make sure you minimized a state law’s vulnerability.”

This also aids in bringing together activist coalitions around an issue. “Being able to say, ‘I’ve been able to run this idea by the Brennan Center and they think it’s legally sound,’” notes Thompson, “really holds a lot of weight when I’m talking to allied groups.”

In fact, she says Brennan could do better in spreading the word about its range of services. “One way they could improve is letting local groups know more about how they can help with legal questions on election and voting reforms, beyond just campaign reform.”

Expanding the Voter Pool

Another area where Brennan is active is in increasing the number of eligible voters. These efforts range from a focus on those who lost their votes by committing a crime, others who simply don’t have photo identification to individuals accidentally or wrongfully purged from the rolls in an attempt to clean up voter lists.

Demonstrating the effort’s impact, Kimberly Haven “cried like a baby” out of happiness—and on television—after she and other Maryland convicted felons aided by the Brennan Center had their right to vote restored last year. The ability to vote has special meaning for her. “It wasn’t important to me until I lost it,” says Haven, who served three years in prison for a white-collar crime and is now executive director of Justice Maryland, a statewide criminal justice organization based in Baltimore.

Carnegie Corporation funding was used in supporting the “Right To Vote” coalition, which, in addition to Brennan, included the American Civil Liberties Union and the Sentencing Project, among other groups, and was designed to place felon re-enfranchisement on the national agenda. This was followed by other Brennan efforts to change or challenge state laws barring felons from voting.

In Maryland, Brennan testimony “carried a lot of weight during legislative hearings. The center’s argument was ‘other states are doing this. This is the right thing to do,’” recalls Haven. “That’s what led to our allies being really vocal when it came down to fighting on the floor.”

Another technique center experts employ to spur change is piggybacking on the experiences of the groups it works with in disparate states.

Brennan “made the introduction” of advocates in Maryland to other felony voting restoration groups, “saying this is what happened in Kentucky…in Rhode Island. There were a lot of lessons learned,” says Haven. She would now return the favor “if others were to call and say Brennan referred me to them. That helped us immensely. We’ll do whatever we can to help other states.”

While aiding the civic rehabilitation of those who served their sentence after wronging society, the center has also made a point of helping those wrongfully dropped from voter rolls by overzealous state election officials. Brennan estimates it’s helped 300,000 to 700,000 individuals purged in attempts to clean up the rolls. Some are quite legitimate cases of voters who have moved, etc., but others can be victims of typographical errors.

Florida in late 2007 still hadn’t shucked the mantle of its notorious 2000 election problems. So Brennan won a preliminary federal court injunction in Florida that specifically restored 14,000 people it says were mistakenly kept from the voter rolls.

Brennan’s legal maneuvers, in coordination with other lawyers, were on behalf of the NAACP’s Florida branch, the Haitian-American Grassroots Coalition, and the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. Because of confusion over hyphenated or compound names for Haitian-Americans and Latinos, “proportionally enormous numbers were getting rejected” from voting lists, Levitt says. In addition to the 14,000 cases covered in court, the effort also “allowed more voters to get onto the rolls” while the December 2007 injunction remained under appeal.

Justin Levitt believes “that’s precisely what Andrew Carnegie intended. It certainly fulfills his wish that eligible citizens become engaged in democracy.”

Fighting to Prevent Special Interest Money From Buying Justice

Brennan’s Fair Courts effort is designed to combat the spiraling influence of money on judges’ campaigns. Judicial elections are an area of campaign reform largely outside of the public spotlight. But the Brennan Center is quite prominent in efforts to reform and publicize the issue.

Brennan is, “in my view, preeminent…in matters involving the financing of judicial election campaigns,” comments Roger Warren, former president of the National Center for State Courts (NCSC). “They are a particularly formidable agent for positive change.”

A former California judge, Warren found the judicial fundraising experience simply “awful.” Holding elections “pressures judges to kind of rule in ways that are politically popular, whereas they took an oath to rule solely in accordance with the law and constitution.”

Fueling the problem is the skyrocketing cost of judicial elections. “Increasingly, in this country, there is a wave of special interests [willing] to pour millions of dollars into judicial campaigns to elect judges they think will rule in their favor,” Warren says. Campaign ads for judges are “just as nasty and misleading as negative TV advertising in political races.”

Brennan is working with the NCSC to seek more judicial appointments, public financing and better reporting of campaign donations. “[The Brennan Center is] a terrific organization to collaborate with,” says Warren. “They listen. …They’re not dogmatic. They don’t just tell you what you want to hear.”

As in other areas, Brennan serves as a clearinghouse for news of nationwide reform. Particularly effective is Brennan’s E-lert online newsletter, a compilation of developments relating to impartial courts. “It is the principal centralized source of information from around the country in this field,” Warren states.

But there have also been tangible results from the center’s efforts. North Carolina and New Mexico have adopted public financing reforms for judicial elections “based in large part on their work,” Warren says.

In May 2008, the Brennan Center celebrated what it termed “a major victory” after a federal appeals court ruling upheld public funding in North Carolina’s Judicial Campaign Reform Act. The Brennan Center was the lead counsel in the case.

“This ruling preserves a campaign finance system that protects appellate judicial candidates in North Carolina from going hat in hand to the very parties and lawyers who appear before them in court,” observed outgoing Brennan Democracy Program director Deborah Goldberg.

Though it can be appealed up to the Supreme Court, Brennan Center supporters see the ruling as an important precedent in nationwide efforts for public financing of judicial elections.