The Center for Public Integrity

When state legislators in Wisconsin began work last year on a plan for redistricting, the once-a-decade process when states draw new district maps for Congress and state legislatures, they found themselves presented with non-disclosure agreements requiring them to keep their deliberations confidential.

In Ohio, the Republican National Committee kicked off a training session on redistricting for state leaders by telling them to “keep it secret.”

Democratic leaders in Illinois held dozens of public hearings after promising a more open process. But all of the meetings came before the congressional redistricting maps were released, and the Democratic majority quickly approved their own proposals with little opportunity for the public, or Republicans, to voice concerns.

In the lead up to the most recent round of redistricting, which began last year with the release of data from the 2010 census, politicians, advocates and “good government” groups nationwide pushed to open the process to citizens and allow for broader debate than in the past. The idea was that a transparent process would lead to maps that made more sense geographically and   better reflected voters’ interests.

But with few exceptions, the political parties in control of statehouses rammed their own partisan proposals through the legislatures as quickly as possible, leaving little more than nominal opportunities for the public to influence the process. In several states, legislatures outsourced the actual work to lawyers and used claims of attorney-client privilege to further exclude the public.

In  South Dakota, the ease with which campaign cash moves around has mostly put power in the hands of those who already had it — the wealthy and the state's top elected officials.

Because of lax regulations regarding how money can flow into and out of political action committees, political party funds and individual candidate funds, the state's top officeholders are able to legally skirt existing fundraising limits and get relatively large sums into campaign coffers with little effort.

The lack of oversight was, in part, responsible for the Rushmore State’s "F" grade for regulation of political finances from the State Integrity Investigation, released earlier this year.

South Dakota is one of 19 states with a system of campaign finance regulation that allows money to effectively move "sideways," says Ed Bender, executive director of the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

South Dakota and 12 other states place no limits on what state parties or political action committees can give individual candidates, according to research done by the National Conference of State Legislatures. Another six states limit PAC contributions but not party contributions.

Bender believes that this regulatory structure essentially makes South Dakota's $4,000 limit on individual contributions to campaigns irrelevant — by allowing individual contributions of up to $10,000 to go to friendly PACs that in turn give large sums — sometimes originating from a single source — to the candidate. South Dakota law allows wealthy donors to create multiple PACs, so even the $10,000 PAC giving limit can effectively  be moot.  PACS and political parties do have to report the source of their contributions.

Deep flaws in Massachusetts laws constructed to keep government honest have sustained a recurring parade of criminal and ethical misconduct charges involving public servants in the past five years, a study by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting shows.

Massachusetts earned a “C” grade earlier this year in a national State Integrity scorecard released by the Center for Public Integrity. Among its lowest scores were an “F” for the transparency of the state budget process and public access to information, a “D+” for legislative accountability and a “C-” for the effectiveness of the state Ethics Commission. Judicial accountability earned a “C+ in Massachusetts.

The anti-corruption weaknesses have been borne out in the litany of public scandals plaguing Massachusetts in recent years.They include federal convictions of two former House Speakers, federal criminal charges lodged against top state Probation officials and the federal bribery sentence imposed on a once-rising female legislator.  

At least 250 public servants in Massachusetts have been charged with crimes or ethics violations in the past five years, the NECIR analysis found. The charges range from the federal criminal cases to helping to hire friends and relatives to drug offenses. While government officials and watchdog groups say a corrupt public servant is going to find a way to break the law no matter what, wide cracks in accountability checks in Massachusetts have made it easier for misconduct to occur.   

Among the state’s biggest cities, several sprawling Dallas-area suburbs tallied the highest rate of requests to Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott last year to keep government information secret, according to a recent examination by the Center for Public Integrity.

The probe examined the number of attempts by the 20 largest Texas cities to block public requests for information in 2011, then looked at how those numbers stacked up for each city, according to the rate of requests per 100,000 population. The “winners” were not the state’s biggest cities. McKinney had the highest rate of requests asking that Abbott allow the withholding of documents sought by citizens under the Texas Public Information Act. Next up were McAllen, Garland, Mesquite, Plano and Arlington. Fort Worth was ranked eighth and Dallas ninth, giving the Fort Worth/Dallas metroplex seven of the top 10 in the rankings.

The investigation also looked at the cities’ batting averages in getting their requests approved by Abbott’s office. McKinney won full or partial approval to withhold information in 95 percent of its cases; most of those requests were partially approved, meaning some information did have to be released.

Not all cities tally their batting averages, nor does Abbott’s office, but San Antonio’s results were especially low, with only 49 percent of requests to withhold information approved, according to its available statistics. Fort Worth reported getting 92 percent of its requests to Abbott approved in full or in part in 2011, and Austin reported an approval rate of 91 percent. (Some cities reported referral numbers that differed slightly from those obtained from the attorney general’s office.)

Abbott is involved because, in most cases, Texas law requires that governmental bodies seeking to withhold information ask the attorney general for permission to do so.

Seniors beware: The Obama and Romney campaigns are making false claims about taxing Social Security benefits:

It’s the oldest form of political communication. Before there was Twitter or Facebook, before there were 30-second television ads, or super PACs, or even radio or newspapers — there was the stump speech. Ancient Greek politicians spoke directly to citizens in the Agora in Athens 2,500 years ago; 19th-century American politicians stood on tree stumps to deliver their direct pitches to voters. And today’s politicians are still at it.

Day after day, sometimes several times a day, President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney make their case directly to voters. Most of what they say doesn’t make the news, because they’ve said it before, over and over, and reporters are seeking whatever is new.

But voters should take a few minutes to pay attention. Each man is making his best case for why he deserves to be elected. Voters, however, should also beware. The claims candidates make don’t always square with the facts.

In this article, part one of a two-part series, we examine examples of Obama’s factually exaggerated or misleading claims from two of his recent campaign speeches. We’ll go through Romney’s stump speech at a later time.

There’s plenty here to criticize. Like any candidate, Obama is not pretending to give a detached or balanced picture to his audience. He’s making a sales pitch, leaving out or glossing over inconvenient facts, twisting others and sometimes stating things that aren’t so. To cite just a few examples:

To the strains of Kid Rock’s “Born Free,” Mitt Romney took to the stage at a minor league baseball park in Nashua, N.H., on Sept. 7 flanked by his wife, Ann, and delivered a standard — albeit slightly longer — version of his stump speech.

But unless you were at Holman Stadium that day, saw it on the local TV news or read about it the next day in the Union Leader, you probably didn’t hear anything about it. That’s true of most stump speeches.

While the Nashua stump speech was very much a local event, presidential candidates tend to deliver very similar versions of the same speech over and over as they make their long-form pitch to audiences around the country. Just as with our previous analysis of Obama’s stump speech, we found numerous instances of candidate spin in what Romney had to say. For example:

AUGUSTA, Maine  — Two of the state’s top political leaders are vowing a bipartisan effort to make government ethics, accountability and transparency key issues in the upcoming legislative session.

Republican Gov. Paul LePage and House Democratic leader Emily Cain are responding to a national report that gave Maine government an “F” for its potential for corruption.

Maine ranked 46th in the “State Integrity Investigation” by three nonpartisan groups that was released in mid-March.

Cain, the Democratic House leader who is running for a Senate seat from Orono, has proposed two linked initiatives that she hopes will lead to government ethics reform.

Cain said Tuesday she will ask her fellow lawmakers to form a bipartisan, joint select committee to consider ethics reform and report out a bill in the legislative session that begins in January, 2013.

“While the report didn’t reveal that Maine is corrupt, we have a lot of things to look at to do better,” Cain said, adding that she believes key areas of concern include nepotism, cronyism, legislative financial disclosure, government transparency and citizen access to information.

Cain on Tuesday submitted a “concept draft” bill, “An Act to Strengthen Maine's Ethics Laws and Improve Public Access to Information,” that she hopes will provide a vehicle for bipartisan reform proposals.

Cain said her reform effort could succeed where others have failed in the past in part because the public is more aware now of the potential for corruption.

“I think the fact that Maine had a public blemish in that report changes a mindset for the public and for legislators,” Cain said.