Friday, December 16, 2005

John Bonifaz Conference Call

On Tuesday night Joe Trippi hosted a blog call with John Bonifaz, who is running in the Democratic primary for Secretary of the Commonwealth against incumbent Bill Galvin. Bonifaz came to last weekend's BlogLeft conference, but unfortunately I didn't get a chance to talk to him there, nor was I able to make the conference call. Luckily for all of us, there is a podcast of the event. During the call, Bonifaz focused on his ideas for reforming our voting system. Simply, he wants to make sure that every vote is counted, that it's easy to vote, and that big money influence is removed from our elections.

Bonifaz also argued that Secretary Galvin has dropped the ball on his election monitoring responsibilities, siting election problems in Lawrence and Boston that happened under his watch, saying that Massachusetts deserves to have a leader in that office. He also mentioned how Galvin killed a pilot program for same-day voter registration that cities and towns could participate in, if they chose to do so. Bonifaz does have a point that Galvin has not been particularly focused on elections, but in fairness Galvin has been aggressively fighting corporate malfeasance through the Securities and Corporation Divisions of his office.