Secretary of State Wants Post Nonpartisan

Secretary of State Bill Jones wants his office to be a nonpartisan one to assure voters that California elections are free of the taint of politics.

On Wednesday, Jones, the state’s top elections official, announced his support for a proposed constitutional amendment that would accomplish that goal.

The amendment by state Sen. Bruce McPherson (R-Santa Cruz) must be approved by a two-thirds vote in the Legislature. It then would go before the voters, probably in 2001.

Only one state office, superintendent of public instruction, is nonpartisan now in California. The incumbent, Delaine Eastin, is a Democrat.

Jones, a Republican, believes that the secretary of state should be a nonpartisan post to prevent “any public perceptions that the officeholder is favoring one party or the other.”

“From a management standpoint, elections should be perceived as nonpolitical--even though they’re about politics,” Jones said. He added that the secretary of state is sometimes required to investigate or mediate local election disputes, a role in which a party label can easily arouse suspicion.

“When you’re wading into a local election process and trying to sort things out,” a Republican or Democratic affiliation makes some people wonder if the secretary of state is fully impartial, he said.

Analysts had a mixed reaction to the proposal, saying that although it sounds like a good idea in principle, they see little evidence that a change is needed.

Bruce Cain, a UC Berkeley political scientist, said the secretary of state’s office already has “a kind of bipartisan/nonpartisan aura to it, a kind of above-the-fray perception.”

Cain added that sometimes the absence of a party designation on the ballot confuses voters, who often have little to go on other than whether a given candidate is a Republican, Democrat or, say, Green party member.

“One advantage of a party label is it gives people an intellectual cognitive shortcut that suggests where a candidate” might stand on certain issues, said Cain, noting that there are differences in how secretaries of state of different parties might approach some aspects of the job.

Many Democrats favor tools such as same-day registration to increase the ranks of voters, while many Republicans have opposed those ideas.

A spokesman for Jones said that party labels are becoming a less important tool for voters, who now can use the Internet to research candidates’ backgrounds.

If the secretary of state becomes a nonpartisan office, candidates would appear on the primary election ballot without a party designation after their names. If no candidate received a majority of the vote, a runoff between the two top vote-getters would be held in November.