Sunday, June 5, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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For generations of Americans, civil servants working in state and local government offices provided nonpartisan services delivered for the good of society. Today, those independent offices are under siege, the targets of Republican efforts to open a new front in the war for ideological supremacy in the United States. This is important because despite receiving little to no coverage from national media outlets, state and local officials have real power.
In Nevada, the secretary of state has significant power to obstruct election results he or she doesn’t like.
State legislators can pass laws to limit and restrict voting rights and access to certain government services, creating the opportunity to disenfranchise voters, just like they did in North Carolina.
School Board members can determine whether history curriculum includes slavery and the civil rights movement or ignores them, as though they never happened.
State and local elections matter, and they are usually decided by a very small number of votes, so every vote counts.
At the purely local level, cities have always faced some risk of cronyism and political bias, but it has historically been centered around the corrupting power of a single family’s wealth — think Ben Gazzara’s portrayal of Brad Wesley in the 1989 film Road House or the real-life Daley family of Chicago, or the Calderon family of Los Angeles.
However, not since Teddy Roosevelt’s war on the corrupt police and ward bosses of Tammany Hall in New York has the United States witnessed such blatant and pervasive attempts at instilling cronyism, corruption and bias into everyday civil service.
We know where this road leads because we’ve seen it before — recently.
In 2015, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker replaced the state’s nonpartisan Government Accountability Board, which is responsible for election oversight and enforcing ethics codes, with two partisan commissions appointed by him.
Less than a year later, he pushed a bill through the Wisconsin Legislature that replaced the anonymous exams used to assess the skills of potential civil service employees with non-anonymous résumés evaluated by — you guessed it — a Walker appointee.
Personnel files are not subject to Wisconsin’s open records laws, meaning that bias or discrimination in hiring is nearly impossible to detect.
In 2018, North Carolina Republicans coupled a voter ID law with the targeted closure of DMV’s in predominantly Black communities that tended to vote for Democrats. They openly admitted that their specific intent was to disenfranchise Black Democratic voters so they could win more elections. Their strategy wasn’t a secret.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis went even further this year, passing laws that effectively grant partisan politicians the authority to police the speech and interactions of everyone from government officials to teachers. Realizing that he couldn’t exercise the same level of control over private corporations, DeSantis is now trying to use the tax code as a weapon for enforcing his brand of conservative ideology.
Even voters in Florida have found themselves the targets of the GOP’s efforts to silence the opposition. DeSantis and his cronies created a special law enforcement division to police elections, polling locations and voters.
Apparently, while Republicans are busy trying to keep us distracted with criticisms of Biden’s “Disinformation Board,” they have quietly assembled their own 1984-esque thought-police force.
That’s what’s at stake here — the corruption and weaponization of state and local government to serve a single partisan ideology. Destruction of independent government oversight and accountability. Manipulation of the polls. Book bans to control and indoctrinate children with conservative propaganda. It’s the GOP version of Soviet-style use of bureaucracy to ensure ideological control of people.
Fortunately, we have the power to break the siege of civil service. But only if we make the choice to pay attention to state and local elections.
We know that being informed on state and local elections isn’t a simple, easy or cost-free task. Gaining reliable information about candidates at any level of public office requires time, energy and patience – resources few of us have in abundance. And while the internet can make searching for some information easier, it can also add a lot of noise to the conversation.
We hope that our endorsements help clear some of that noise. But civil service and democracy needs your help and your vote. It also needs the help and support of your friends, family and neighbors. The future of our neighborhoods, schools, communities, Nevada and even the country is relying on you, and all of us, to do our part to keep civil service alive, independent, nonpartisan and working for everyone, not just one political party.
