Be sure to read through this whole newsletter to learn about the new election and voting equipment and deadlines for the 2018 election cycle.

The League of Women Voters of Southern Nevada is offering a demonstration of the new voting machines on October 21st!

Join the League of Women Voters of Southern Nevada for our fall 2017 kickoff meeting! Get the skinny about public transportation and education funding on Sept. 16th.  This is a public meeting open to the community, all are welcome!

We’ll have details on the planned light-rail system for Maryland Parkway and changes made to the K12 funding formula in the 2017 legislative session.

Community Law Day Offers Guardianship Workshop Aug. 26th RSVP: https://t.co/fs9avcK6in

Efforts to adopt annual legislative sessions have stalled again.  The reason has less to do with iron-clad resistance, however, and more to do with flaws in how we manage our current legislative system.  On this topic, we are stuck in a loop where the volume of voices in favor increase when an important bill fails or we endure another special session and then equally strong voices rise in opposition and point to real inefficiencies in our legislative processes.  The opposition argument boils down to: We don’t like the current system because of inefficiencies, so we don’t want to adopt a new system because it will just amplify those inefficiencies.

But what if we addressed the inefficiencies first and then talked about annual sessions later?

During the 2015-16 interim, the League of Women Voters of Nevada promoted the role of civility in elections and governance as well as the necessity for respectful dialog in passing beneficial legislation.

In the 2017-18 legislative interim, we are turning our focus to effective and efficient governance to produce better outcomes and bolster support for annual legislative sessions.

Our support for annual sessions derives from mounting evidence that, with each passing year, the biennial budgeting process is falling short and regularly requires special intervention to address growing deficiencies. This is not a criticism of any person or branch of government; it merely recognizes that the world moves so quickly now that anyone managing even a company’s strategic plan will find goals and strategies can easily go stale after just six months.  

Managing our dynamic economic and social systems in two-year legislative bites has resulted in legislative practices that ignore our Open Meeting Law and a growing transfer of power to the executive branch, the courts, and interim-institutions that exercise quasi-legislative authority.  And when power moves away from the “people’s” branch of government, we lose the public’s voice in the process.

This amounts to poor governance. League of Women Voters of Nevada, therefore, argues that Nevada will never be the cutting-edge state we hope to be if we fail to adopt cutting-edge governing systems that align with our democratic traditions.

We would like to propose ways to make our legislative processes more efficient and effective, so we can one day soon have a thoughtful discussion about adopting modified, annual legislative sessions. It is clear to us that, only after we can agree that our current system is running as effectively and efficiently as possible, can we hopefully reach consensus on a solution to remaining problems.  

Following League’s standards of research, the first step we took in gathering information for this report was to run a public survey, open to anyone, on personal experiences during the just completed legislative session.  Our survey reached hundreds through our large email list and it posted repeatedly on our social media accounts.  All questions allowed participants to submit written comments.  The survey was open for two weeks.

Comments ranged from an appreciation for the hard work of our elected representatives and legislative staff to frustration with the sometimes-chaotic scheduling of hearings and floor sessions.  

Some respondents asked to move to annual sessions and to rescind term limits as well as the 2/3 majority rule to pass taxes.  As these recommendations require a constitutional amendment, we cannot include them in this list.  At this time, we are strictly focusing on practices that can be changed without legislation or a ballot question, not laws or constitutional mandates.

In the survey feedback related to practices, respondents pointed to the legislature not abiding by the Open Meeting Law and suspending operating rules during the final two weeks of the session as a barrier to community members providing public comment on pending legislation.  This is compounded by the fact that much of the real business of the legislature occurs during those final weeks. Related to this was a frustration with lobbyists having undue influence over the legislative process.

League of Women Voters of Nevada would like to emphasize one particular point of frustration: the number of duplicate bills introduced each session is a waste of valuable time; they all receive multiple-hour hearings in both the senate and assembly, and often lack prior planning, such as communicating before a hearing with agencies and other groups impacted by these proposed bills.

Based on our survey feedback and our view of Nevada’s legislative processes, the League of Women Voters of Nevada offers the following recommendations for improving legislative efficiency and effectiveness:

1. Each political party should create a mentorship program to pair veteran legislators, current or past, with freshman legislators to provide guidance.
2. Each political party should work to reduce the number of duplicate bills by encouraging legislators to co-sponsor one or two bills on any given topic. Constituents will respect a legislator more for a co-sponsored bill that passes than for a bill singly sponsored that fails.
3. During the drafting phase, if a bill will affect an agency or organization, legislators should reach out to agency heads or other organization leaders for feedback and/or collaboration.
4. Bills should be as limited in scope as possible, unless an agency requires a “clean-up” omnibus bill.
5. Committee chairs and party leadership should strive to follow posted agendas as closely as possible to facilitate as much public input as possible. Working people cannot wait for hours to provide public comment.

The League of Women Voters of Nevada is happy to work with anyone interested in making our legislative sessions more efficient and effective. If you would like to engage with us on these recommendations or if you have others to suggest, please contact us at: info@lwvsn.org

About League of Women Voters:

Carrie Chapman Catt founded the League of Women Voters on February 14, 1920, just months before the 19th amendment’s ratification.  She understood newly enfranchised women would need support registering to vote, maintaining access to a fair ballot, and advocating for legislation supporting healthy families and strong communities.  Today, League continues to assist voters, protect civic engagement, and much more. In everything we do, however, we strictly maintain our nonpartisan status; so, while League does encourage women to seek public office, we do not endorse candidates nor do we work directly with any political party.

An argument for annual sessions https://t.co/mqSr9RDwZP

The Election Integrity Commission co-chaired by Vice President Pence and Kansas Sec. of State Kris Kobach met for the first time today.  This is the commission President Trump convened based on his belief that he lost the popular vote due to fraudulent voting.

You can read more about the commission here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2017/07/13/presidential-advisory-commission-election-integrity

The League of Women Voters opposes the mission of the Commission.  You can read LWVUS President Chris Carson’s statement about the Commission here: http://lwv.org/press-releases/league-women-voters-reacts-pence-kobach-election-commission

If you would like to review what those of us in opposition to the Commission’s mission posted on Twitter during the meeting, we used #RespectMyVote.

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23RespectMyVote&src=typd

Join with us to protect every eligible voter’s right to vote!

Join in Northern Nevada here: http://lwvnn.org/joinorpayannualdues.html

Join in Southern Nevada here:  http://lwvsn.org/membership.html

League Supporters:

We have lots of exciting news!

In June, I attended the League of Women Voters Council 2017 with Northern Nevada League Co-President Jean Laird in Washington D.C. 

During Council, we discussed how important it is for LWV to transform itself into the 21^st century’s premier grassroots Voting and Civil Rights organization.  We left determined, as we approach our 100-year anniversary, to boldly chart a course for the next hundred years that makes us stronger and more relevant.

Everything you know and love about League of Women Voters will stay intact, but how we achieve our goals will now have more breadth and depth.  I have included a summary presentation from Council at the end of this message and you can view a short video introduction to this metamorphosis here: https://youtu.be/iWXf90WieHs

We are already undergoing some exciting changes in Nevada.   As of July 1^st, the League of Women Voters of Las Vegas Valley became the League of Women Voters of Southern Nevada.  And on July 15^th, the League of Women Voters of Nevada held its state convention in Tonopah, NV, to elect a new board.  The new LWV NV board is:

President: Sondra Cosgrove

Vice President Beverly Abderrahman

Treasurer: Ann Smith

Secretary: Kathleen Bienenstein

Directors: Denise Gerdes, Mary Liveratti, Jean Laird, Donald Rust, Nancy Scott, and Vicki Lambert.

I will continue as the LWV Southern Nevada President during my term as LWV NV President. 

I have been working closely with our Northern Nevada League Board members for the past year and we believe the LWV NV board provides us an opportunity to meld the two halves of the state into a cohesive whole. 

There is no reason for League to perpetuate the north v. south acrimony that seems to seep into just about every other part of Nevada politics.

Coming out of the LWV NV Convention we have many great ideas for increasing our membership.  One area of discussion is how to not only build our membership in the more urban counties, but also out in our rural cities and towns.  Every member makes us stronger and every Nevadan should be one of our members.

In this light, please consider speaking to your family and friends about joining either the LWV of Northern Nevada if you live in the north http://lwvnn.org/joinorpayannualdues.html or, if you live in southern Nevada, joining the LWV SN http://lwvsn.org/membership.html .

Lastly, the LWV SN is holding our annual planning meeting on August 5^th, 10am to 1pm.  The meeting is open to all members state-wide, so if you’d like to attend, please RSVP at info@lwvsn.org .  Once the agenda is set, you’ll receive a follow-up email.  If you cannot attend in person, we’ll have a teleconference option.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me directly at Sondra.cosgrove@lwvsn.org,

LWV 2017 Council Summary

Sondra

Sondra Cosgrove

President League of Women Voters of Nevada

President League of Women Voters of Southern Nevada

Washington, DC – League of Women Voters president Chris Carson issued the following statement in response to the White House openly admitting the Election ‘Integrity’ Commission is seeking to find potential fraudulent registrations on the voter rolls:

“We knew from the start that the so-called Election ‘Integrity’ Commission was created to justify President Trumps’ false claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2016 elections. Mr. Kobach’s request for voter records is consistent with his tactics of voter suppression and today the White House openly admitted the Commission intends to find fraudulent voters, even where there are none.

“Obviously, this Commission is fishing for fraud where there isn’t any.

“Secretary Kobach has a history of suppressing voters and removing thousands of eligible voters from the rolls. Mr. Kobach has been brought to court — and lost — several times for suppressing the constitutional rights of citizens to vote in his home state of Kansas. He has also been sanctioned for ‘deceptive conduct’ and was fined by a federal magistrate judge for misleading the court.

“We’ve said it before: this Commission is not interested in facts, but rather false accusations in order to implement dangerous election policy.”

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From the Nevada Independent: Here’s the final update to our bill tracker w/all bills Sandoval signed or vetoed during the 2017 #nvleg session.
https://t.co/z6wf3pXTEY