{"id":7359,"date":"2016-11-30T07:00:23","date_gmt":"2016-11-30T12:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=7359"},"modified":"2016-11-29T23:09:43","modified_gmt":"2016-11-30T04:09:43","slug":"the-growing-popularity-of-special-elections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=7359","title":{"rendered":"The Growing Popularity of Special Elections"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Adam Pagnucco.<\/em><\/p>\n

With an appointment for the District 20 Senate seat approaching, the time is right to revisit the issue of whether to have special elections for General Assembly vacancies.\u00a0 David Lublin and I have been writing about this for nearly a decade<\/a>, but the issue will not die.<\/p>\n

Under the state\u2019s constitution<\/a>, when vacancies occur for State Senate and Delegate seats, special elections are not held to fill them.\u00a0 Instead, the county Central Committee of the same party as the seat\u2019s former occupant must submit a name of a successor to the Governor within thirty days, after which the Governor appoints the new legislator.\u00a0 If the Central Committee does not meet the thirty day timeline, the Governor has fifteen days to appoint a successor from the same party as the person formerly holding the seat.\u00a0 If the legislative district covers more than one county, each county Central Committee can send a name with the Governor deciding between them if they differ.\u00a0 The bottom line of the process is this: under most circumstances, the county party Central Committees, who themselves are elected in party primaries, have effective appointment power over these vacancies.\u00a0 And they use that power frequently.<\/p>\n

A growing body of evidence shows that Maryland voters prefer special elections over appointments to fill vacancies in elected office.\u00a0 Consider the following:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. In 1998, Montgomery County voters approved a charter amendment providing for special elections for County Council vacancies with 90% of the vote<\/a>. Montgomery was the second county in Maryland to have special elections for Council Members since Prince George\u2019s already had them in its charter<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
      \n
    1. In 2004, Howard County voters approved a charter amendment providing for special elections for County Council vacancies with 88% of the vote<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
        \n
      1. In 2014, Maryland voters approved a statewide constitutional amendment providing for special elections for County Executive vacancies with 81% of the vote<\/a>. The amendment did not require special elections, but it did allow county charters to be amended to allow them upon approval by voters.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
          \n
        1. In 2016, Maryland voters approved another statewide constitutional amendment mandating special elections for Comptroller and Attorney General vacancies. Prior to the amendment, vacancies in those offices were filled by gubernatorial appointment.\u00a0 Seventy-three percent<\/a> of voters supported it.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
            \n
          1. Also in 2016, voters in Montgomery and Wicomico Counties voted in favor of charter amendments allowing special elections for their County Executives, which were made possible by the 2014 state constitutional amendment. The charter amendments<\/a> received 90% of the votes in Montgomery and 75% in Wicomico.\u00a0 Wicomico voters also supported a charter amendment for County Council vacancies with 77% of the vote.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

            With such overwhelming support among voters for special elections, why aren\u2019t they used for state legislator vacancies?\u00a0 Some lawmakers, including Senators Rich Madaleno, Jamie Raskin and Brian Feldman and Delegates David Moon and Christian Miele (a Republican), have tried to pass constitutional amendments providing for them in various forms.\u00a0 Moon\u2019s 2015 bill<\/a> had bi-partisan support from very progressive as well as very conservative legislators.\u00a0 But officials from both parties always oppose these bills because they strip power from Central Committees and they teamed up to help kill Moon\u2019s bill last year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

            Most of the time, appointees serve about as well in the state legislature as those who are elected, but there are exceptions.\u00a0 A glaring example is the District 24 (Prince George\u2019s) appointment in 2013.\u00a0 Incumbent Delegate Tiffany Alston was removed from office and the Prince George\u2019s County Democratic Central Committee recommended Gregory A. Hall to replace her.\u00a0 But Governor O\u2019Malley refused to accept the appointment because Hall participated in a shooting incident resulting in a murder years ago.\u00a0 O\u2019Malley instead appointed former Delegate Darren Swain to the seat<\/a>.\u00a0 A year later, Swain was victimized in a bizarre beating and car-jacking<\/a> in which his assailants accused him of using drugs with them and groping one of them.\u00a0 Alston, Hall and Swain all ran against each other for Delegate in 2014 and all of them lost<\/a>.<\/p>\n

            This issue might not be such a big deal if appointments were rare, but they happen all the time.\u00a0 Ten of MoCo\u2019s 32 state legislators \u2013 four Senators and six Delegates \u2013 were appointed to a seat at some point in their careers.\u00a0 That number will go up to eleven or twelve depending on what happens in District 20.\u00a0 Let\u2019s be clear. \u00a0We do not intend to imply that these appointed lawmakers are bad elected officials.\u00a0 In fact, some\u00a0of them have turned out to be excellent.\u00a0 But when voters don’t get to pick more than one third of the people who represent them, something has gone badly wrong.<\/p>\n

            Gerrymandering is often criticized because it allows politicians to pick their voters.\u00a0 Legislative appointments might be even worse because they allow politicians to pick other politicians.\u00a0 And the power structures of both parties endorse this even though gigantic majorities of their rank-and-file oppose it.\u00a0 The survival of special elections after all these years prompts us to ask a question of all state policy-makers.<\/p>\n

            What\u2019s more important?\u00a0 The prerogatives of party officials?\u00a0 Or the rights of the voters?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

            By Adam Pagnucco. With an appointment for the District 20 Senate seat approaching, the time is right to revisit the issue of whether to have special elections for General Assembly vacancies.\u00a0 David Lublin and I have been writing about this for nearly a decade, but the issue will not die. Under the state\u2019s constitution, when … Continue reading The Growing Popularity of Special Elections<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[151,18],"tags":[1545,1466,1883],"class_list":["post-7359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adam-pagnucco","category-mcdcc","tag-adam-pagnucco","tag-mcdcc","tag-special-elections"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4mKJE-1UH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7359"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7359\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7363,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7359\/revisions\/7363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}