Isaac Laquedem

We should start calling them passenger licenses

It occurred to me today to compare these three situations:

1.  The government cannot require Americans to buy health insurance (so saith two federal judges out of four, so far) because the government is not extending any privilege in return.

2.    The government can require people who want to enjoy the privilege of driving on the public streets to obtain and pay for a government-issued driver's license, because it is a privilege and not a right to drive a car on a public street.

3.    The government requires people who want to fly on a commercial airplane to obtain and pay for a government-issued driver's license, passport, or identity card, and can prevent commercial airlines from offering their services to people who don't pay for a government-issued identification card, even though the right to travel, in the abstract, is a right and not a privilege.

I haven't drawn a conclusion -- yet.

Roger Ash (1918-2011) and the American dream

In 1918, when Roger Ash was born in Elk City, Oklahoma,  his native state was still a place where people went to, rather than from.  The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl changed that when his father's oil distribution business failed.  By 1930 they were living on a farm in Washita County.  A few years later his parents packed the family and headed west to California, where they settled in Pomona.

The Ash family arrived to California's rich mix of agriculture in its valleys, technology in its airplane factories, and diversion in its motion pictures, a heady combination for the people who came there in search of the American dream.

Roger Ash's older brother went to work in a Los Angeles aircraft factory.  Roger himself, who died in Portland last week, found his particular slice of the American dream as an auctioneer, starting as an employee of Milton Wershow (1910-1980), who had married Roger's sister.  Mr. Wershow (who deserves a post of his own for his connections to one of the Beach Boys, the Sportsways brand of diving gear, a famous gold mine, and Bob Hope) had come from Michigan to California, where he established his auctioneering firm, Milton J. Wershow & Co. (later Wershow-Ash-Lewis Auctioneers), becoming prominent in industrial auctions first in California, then along the west coast, then then eastward as far as South Carolina.

Mr. Ash also developed a special expertise in auctioning sawmills, for which he traveled to so many small towns that he bought an airplane (he had learned to fly in college).  He gave up his license in his mid-sixties, telling friends that he didn't want to discover the hard way that he'd lost his flying touch.

On one of his trips to Oregon nearly fifty years ago he came across a struggling mobile home park in Wilsonville that the developer needed to sell.  He bought the park, upgraded it,and made it a sort of gem in the mobile home park industry, with so many trees that it was one of the few for which the word "park" was an accurate description.  The park, called Thunderbird, was rural when it opened, but the city has grown up around it. A few years ago the demand for industrial land was so high that Mr. Ash announced that he would close the park and offer the land for sale for redevelopment.  A court battle between Mr. Ash and the City of Wilsonville ensued (and is still going on), the residents left, the land became vacant, and the market for industrial land evaporated.  Today the park looks as if the residents abandoned it for greener pastures, rather like the farms that Oklahomans abandoned eighty years ago when they went to California to search for their pieces of the American dream.

Five million reasons for Oregonians to eat whole-grain foods

Eleven months ago when Bob Moore (pictured here, the founder of Bob's Red Mill Natural Foods, the Milwaukie purveyor of stone-ground whole grain products) announced that he and the other shareholders were transferring their stock to an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan) so that his employees would all have the chance to become owners of the company, a few skeptics (see the comments here)  pointed out that he and his wife Charlee weren't making a gift to the employees; the ESOP would be paying the Moores for their shares over time.

Last week the Clackamas Review reported on what Mr. and Mrs. Moore are doing with a large chunk of their proceeds: they're giving $5 million to Oregon State University to establish a program on nutrition and encourage healthy eating.  (Bob, who turns 82 next month, is himself the best advertisement for the diet he encourages.  Don't ask him what he thinks of the Atkins diet if children are present.)

Bob and Charlee Moore are a class act.  We're lucky to have them in our community.

More on ORS 254.483 and the blank ballot blowup

A few days ago I wrote about an obscure bit of Oregon's election law that requires county clerks to destroy unused ballots promptly after 8:00 p.m. on election day.  Professor Bogdanski picked up on the story, here, as did Benjamin Kerensa at Beaver Journal, here.  According to Mr. Kerensa, Tim Scott, the head of Multnomah County's elections department, stated that a different state law required the county to keep the unused ballots, and made ORS 254.483 moot.  The citation given was to ORS 254.535.  I've written to Mr. Scott to ask about this, but haven't heard back yet.

There is an ORS 254.535, which reads as follows:

      254.535 Preservation of certain materials; retention of records. (1) Except as provided in subsection (3) of this section, each tally sheet, return sheet and ballot return identification envelope shall be preserved for two years after the election to which it relates.

      (2) Except as provided in subsection (3) of this section, the county clerk shall destroy the ballots and written challenge statements not sooner than the 90th day after the final day permitted for a contest of the election, unless otherwise ordered by the court.

      (3) In accordance with 42 U.S.C. 1974, any ballot, voter registration records and any other materials relating to any election at which a candidate is nominated or elected to federal office shall be retained for not less than 22 months following the date of the election. [1979 c.190 §275; 1999 c.410 §62; 2007 c.154 §48]

The codes at the end mean that this section of the law was adopted in 1979 and then amended in 1999 and 2007.  For example, the 2007 code means that this provision was amended by Section 48 of the 154th bill to become law in 2007, called "Chapter 154, Oregon Laws 2007."  (The chapter number given to an adopted bill isn't related to the chapter numbers of Oregon Revised Statutes, where our state's laws are sorted into chapters by subject.)

The county's position has two flaws.  The first is in its suggestion that this section controls over ORS 254.483.  The same bill that amended ORS 254.535 also amended ORS 254.483, striking out five or six requirements for how counties must treat ballots, but leaving in the requirement that counties promptly destroy unused ballots.  The legislature is presumed to have had both provisions in mind at the same time, and must have expected counties to abide by both provisions.  The way to give both provisions effect is to require counties to keep used ballots and destroy unused ballots.

The second flaw is that ORS 254.535 says that it's implementing 42 U.S.C. 1974, a federal statute (in this context, "U.S.C." means not the prominent southern football school, but "United States Code") that is part of the Voting Rights Act of 1971.  That statute (here) requires elections officers to retain for 22 months records of voter applications and registrations, but not the ballots themselves.  So what we have is the federal government requiring states and counties to keep their records of voter registrations (so that the federal government can check if states are unlawfully refusing to register qualified voters), the state legislature adding a requirement that county clerks keep cast ballots, and the county clerks adding their own requirement to keep the unused ballots.  Someone in Salem's been implementing the Voting Rights Act without reading it first.

The things I learn about myself from the newspaper

I'm a conservative blogger, according to Jeff Mapes at the Oregonian.  Who knew?

Multnomah County flouts ORS 254.483, and Kate Brown steps in to get the county off the hook

ORS 254.483 is an obscure bit of Oregon's elections law.  It requires county clerks to destroy all unused ballots promptly after 8:00 p.m. on election day, to provide for the security of unused ballots, and to account for all unused ballots.  The purpose for destroying unused ballots promptly when voting closes is straightforward:  if all the unused ballots are destroyed, then they can't be used by fraudulent voters after the election closes.

Multnomah County, apparently, doesn't obey this portion of the law -- stacks of unused ballots were filmed in the county's election headquarters two weeks after election day -- and that may be the reason for introducing House Bill 2256 in this session of the Oregon legislature.

House Bill 2256 was introduced at the request of Secretary of State Kate Brown.  Section 4 of the bill, not referred to in the bill's summary, would amend ORS 254.483 to remove the requirement that county clerks destroy unused ballots promptly after 8:00 p.m. on election day, or at all.  Clerks would still have to account for unused ballots, but would not have to destroy the unused ballots.  It's an interesting bill, because it mostly deals with other elections issues that don't have anything to do with the security of unused ballots.  Curiously, it's also been referred to was introduced by the House Committee on Health Care instead of the more appropriate Committee on General Government.  The bill doesn't have anything to do with health care.

This isn't the first attempt to remove the requirement that unused ballots be destroyed; the 2008 special session considered HB 3634, which for part of its life included provisions that would have required county clerks to count unused ballots and mark them as void promptly after 8:00 on election day, instead of destroying them entirely.  It's worth keeping an eye on HB 2256 this session, both to see what the Health Care committee makes of the strange task it's been assigned, and to see if Multnomah County (or any other county) steps forward to explain why it's been ignoring state law.