LOS GATOS — A former California elections official ended her stint on a national agency that polices campaign finance abuse in abrupt and dramatic fashion Sunday, declaring in a public resignation letter that the Federal Election Commission is on a gridlocked road to nowhere.
Former Santa Clara County Counsel Ann Ravel, one of three Democratic members of the six-person board, told this newspaper Sunday she simply couldn’t remain in an atmosphere doomed to fail. Some liberal observers fear her replacement could tilt the commission, created in 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal, further to the right.
“When you’re working to ensure the integrity of the electoral system and can’t do it because of constant stalemates — and because it’s important to me, because I’ve been in government most of my life and we owe (such integrity) to the public — I felt like I couldn’t stay,” said Ravel, a Los Gatos resident.
In her resignation letter to President Donald Trump, which she posted to her Twitter account, Ravel laid out long-held concerns about the hundreds of millions of dollars of mystery money that are pumped into politics.
It's been an honor to serve the @FEC. I'm committed to transparency—here's my resignation letter to @RealDonaldTrump https://t.co/zK1AIBGjtq
— Ann Ravel (@AnnMRavel) February 19, 2017
“Since 2010, well over $800 million in dark money has been spent in competitive races,” she wrote in the letter, giving an effective resignation date of
March 1. “At the same time, elections have become more and more expensive. Most of the funding comes from a tiny, highly unrepresentative part of the population.”
Jessica Levinson, a politics and ethics professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who knows Ravel, said the “dysfunctional” nature of the commission, which features three Democrats and three Republicans, hasn’t always been this stark.
“Right now it’s a total disaster,” she said. “People know that on the federal level they can get away with whatever they want, because they have three Republican commissioners who are going to vote no on anything.”
Ravel pointed to a series of tie votes between the panel’s Democrats and Republicans as the cause of her decision. She wrote an exit report titled “Dysfunction and Deadlock: The Enforcement Crisis at the Federal Election Commission Reveals the Unlikelihood of Draining the Swamp.”
Some of her Republican counterparts say that’s an exaggeration.
Lee E. Goodman, a Republican commissioner, told the New York Times that Ravel’s take is “nonsensical and arbitrary,” and that deadlocks aren’t as commonplace as she claims.
Ravel said she fears the cost of elections will keep rising — especially in light of the 2010 Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court. In its ruling, the court found that political spending is protected free speech and that corporations and unions may spend as much as they want on elections.
“The campaign finance situation has changed radically,” she said. “It’s very hard for most people to run for office now, even locally. For sure it’s harder at the state level, unless a candidate has a lot of money on their own, like Trump did, or has contacts of people who have lots of money.”
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, spending during last year’s presidential and congressional races exceeded $6.9 billion.
While the commission may contain only three members of a particular party, Rick Hasen, an election and campaign finance law expert at the UC Irvine School of Law, said Ravel’s replacement could potentially be “someone who is not a Republican but would vote with them.”
“Then they’d have a majority, and they could make it even easier for there to be undisclosed money,” he said.
Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Fremont, who campaigned on a promise not to take special interest money, said Ravel’s departure is “a loss.”
“My concern is that the president, who ran on a promise to ‘drain the swamp,’ hasn’t shown any move to get money out of politics, or to overturn Citizens United,” he said. “If that’s the case, the litmus test for a new pick would be someone who wants to overturn that and also get PAC money out of politics.”
Ravel began serving on the commission in October 2013, taking over for another commissioner who was in the middle of a six-year term. That term was set to expire in April. All of the remaining commissioners are considered holdovers and have been there longer than their six-year terms, she said.
Ravel, who has commuted between Washington, D.C., and her Los Gatos home, said she will return home and teach a law class at UC Berkeley. Other ideas are percolating.
Contact Eric Kurhi at 408-920-5852 and Rick Hurd at 925-945-4789.
