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“People who have more money should be free to buy more cars, more homes, more vacations, and more gizmos than the rest of us. They should not be able to buy more democracy." -Bill Moyers |
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January 24, 2005
A political watchdog organization called today on the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to pursue a special audit into the spending of California’s Help America Vote Act (HAVA) funds by Secretary of State Kevin Shelley. Mounting evidence that the state’s HAVA funds were spent on voter outreach at exclusively Democratic Party events and to bolster Shelley’s political career demands a full investigation by the Commission, according to nonpartisan group TheRestofUs.org.
“The federal government sent HAVA funds to California to help make our elections more accurate and our democracy more accessible,” said Ned Wigglesworth, analyst for TheRestofUs.org. “Instead, some of that money was spent under the guidance of our state’s top elections official on sweetheart deals for his political allies and on purely partisan events.” He continued, “An investigation is necessary to hold Secretary Shelley accountable for his actions in office.”
In addition to a recent report by the State Auditor which described shortcomings with the Secretary of State’s handling of HAVA funds, a Shelley aide involved with the oversight of the funds testified at a Joint Legislative Audit Committee hearing that there were insufficient controls by the Secretary of State’s office over how the money was spent.
The group said that the EAC should still investigate in the event that Shelley’s woes, which include at least eight separate federal and state investigations into the laundering of campaign contributions, violations of ethics rules, the use of state employees on campaign matters, and claims of a hostile work environment among others, lead him to resign.
“The interest that Americans and Californians have in knowing whether taxpayer funds were improperly used to advance the political agenda and career of one man does not stop even if that man resigns from office,” said Derek Cressman, Director of TheRestofUs.org. “The rest of us deserve to know what happened to money that was supposed to be used to improve our democracy,” he continued. “The Election Assistance Commission should get to the bottom of that.”
The EAC is scheduled to consider whether to order
an expedited audit of California’s HAVA funds at its meeting
this Thursday, January 27. #-#-# TheRestofUs.org is a nonpartisan political watchdog dedicated to alerting citizens to the problems of big money in politics.
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