King Edward of Wayne

Wayne county voters should take a moment to appreciate the range of candidates on the August 4th primary ballot before exercising their franchise. In the overwhelming majority of county-wide races it is the last opportunity they will have this year to see the names of candidates who have not been pre-approved by County Executive, Ed McNamara.

How is it that the County Executive can have such control over the ballot?

In order to be elected to public office major party candidates must first win their party's primary election in August (for which taxpayers, incidentally, have thoughtfully picked up the tab.) Indeed, in what the major parties call "safe" districts -- for example, Democrats in Detroit -- winning the primary amounts to winning the office.

Now a primary is quite different from a general election in terms of voter "demographics."

Primary voters tend to be both older and more attuned to all things political. Given that, what can we infer about these folks? Most significantly for the McNamara machine, they are in relatively larger proportion "absentee" voters. That is, they receive their ballots in the mail, mark and return them, all a month or so before the polls ever even open for everyone else.

Now comes the crucial point: this means that for absentee voters the entire process is completed well before the deluge of campaign advertising inundates the rest of us. In fact, even as you are reading these words, for about one in four of those who will participate, the August 4th primary election is already over. The die (or in this case, the ballot) is cast.

Because the absentee vote is so large a fraction of the total, as a practical matter, one cannot win the primary election without specifically campaigning for it. Add to this one other thing we can say for certain about absentee voters -- that they are necessarily reachable by mail -- and the obvious solution is to send literature to everyone (or, more efficiently, every household) who will be receiving an absentee ballot. One cannot cost-effectively advertise to these people by any other means.

Obviously, candidates cannot send literature to this enormous segment of the electorate without first acquiring in some useful form a mailing list of these voters. While each of the communities that comprise Wayne county, of course, has its own such list in order to mail out the ballots, obtaining this information from all 43 would be a herculean task. Further, even if accomplished, the resulting uncoordinated and unfiltered mass would be virtually useless since there is no way to eliminate the duplication of "multiple-voter households," distinguish the Democrats from the Republicans, the frequent voters from the occasional, and so forth. Making sense of this chaotic universe of absentee voters would be like trying to separate out the defensemen from a complete and totally undifferentiated NHL roster. Multiplied by about 1,000. Finally, even if some organization of the data could be accomplished, these would still need to be standardized from the various sources and formats and consolidated into a single list in order to make the postage affordable.

One obscure little company in Lansing has eliminated this entire problem by continuously tracking, updating and organizing all of this information into a useful database. Very few voters would have ever heard of this company or its owner. However, every elected official in Wayne county is painfully familiar with both. Necessarily so. Those who do not go on bended knee are, almost by definition, not elected officials in Wayne county. Indeed, everyone from politicians seeking Metro airport service contracts for their friends to sitting Wayne county judges go all atremble at the mere mention of his name for the company unabashedly proclaims that it serves Democratic and independent (read: judicial) candidates, if and only if they have been approved by...guess who? Wayne County Executive, Ed McNamara.

These critical mailing lists are simply unavailable to anyone who isn't a friend of Ed. Supplicants must, in fact, have written permission from the County Executive to be permitted this sine qua non of electoral success. Going to a different mailing house will avail the unfavored candidate naught since all the rest rely on the same, single source for any particular, county-wide voter list.

Now, many less politically connected citizens will no doubt wonder how it is that in the age of the fairness doctrine and equal time, not to mention incessant blathering about "campaign reform," one company has come to have such a stranglehold on the Wayne county electoral process.

It has, for instance, long been illegal for the broadcast media -- radio and television stations -- to discriminate among candidates for any particular office. It is standard operating procedure for newspaper, magazine, billboard and lawnsign companies to be scrupulously even-handed in dealing with political candidates.

Yet, by having veto-power control over the critical direct mail advertising medium at this vital step in the election process, one person has, thereby, come to have effectively gained near dictatorial control over all of Wayne county elected officialdom.

Now, Libertarians are strong proponents of the free market system. And there is a company based in Washington DC that is laboriously compiling a voter database of the whole country. Though they still have a long way to go, with the phenomenon of the exploding Information Age and the burgeoning Internet and World Wide Web, the whole process could easily be accelerated to the speed of light.

Nevertheless, amidst all the hype and hyperbole surrounding various campaign reform proposals, voters should not lose sight of the fact that, ultimately, so long as there is political power to grab, there will always be power brokers who will always find ways to build political fiefdoms. In this era of political correctness the smoke itself may be gone, but make no mistake about it, the metaphorical "smoke-filled room" is alive and well.

Tim O'Brien is the Executive Director of the Libertarian Party of Michigan.