 The State Bar’s recent “election” for its board of
governors was, as usual, a fake and a fraud. This year, like last year, three of the five
attorneys “elected” to the board enjoyed one-candidate races. And where there
was a real race, in District 3 (Alameda County, etc.), with four candidates, the bar kept
it so quiet that only 22 percent of eligible members voted (and a bar critic lost, 38-28
percent).
The pitifully low rates of running, voting and speaking in bar
elections are not due just to members’ widespread disaffection with the bar. The
elections are designed that way.
The entire election this year was jammed into three months:
nominating petitions available May 19 and due back (with 20 signatures) June 16; ballots mailed July 7 and due back Aug. 18. Under
the bar’s rules, the petitions could have been available a month earlier, April 17.
By cutting a month off the election, the bar deters members from running and hobbles the
few who do.
Next came the remarkable ballots. The candidates’ “Biographical
Statements” on the back were printed in a tiny type and faint ink, making them all
but unreadable. And anyway, they were fussy c.v.’s, irrelevant to any election issue.
The bar’s rules limit the statements to biographical details. Asked if a candidate
could say something about the election, the bar’s Billie Sivanov says that is “not
allowed.”
Then, the place to which the ballots had to be returned by Aug. 18
was not “the San Francisco office of the State Bar,” as provided in the bar’s
rules. It was, amazingly, a Post Office Box in Garden City, N.Y. And while the rule says a ballot is timely if
postmarked by the last day for voting, the ballot said to “allow one week for
delivery” — thus warning, falsely, that it had better be mailed by Aug. 11, not
Aug. 18.
The New York address hit even harder at members wanting a replacement
ballot — as because they had tossed the first ballot on reading (or trying to read)
the obfuscating “biographical statements,” and then had discovered a candidate’s
actual position on bar issues. Such members were told to write to Garden City — which
could take a week for the letter to get there, a week to get the ballot back, then a week
to return the ballot to New York.
The Aug. 18 cut-off was itself early. The bar’s rules set the
end of voting as “not less than five days” before the annual meeting (held Sept.
14). So voting could have been allowed at least until Sept. 9.
Why the hurry? That becomes clear when the bar’s stunted
schedule is compared with the candidates’ slim chances to make their views known to
voters. The California Bar Journal’s only coverage of the candidates was in its
August issue (mine arrived Aug. 8). This was a month after the ballots had been sent out.
Most members thus would either have returned the ballots or, more likely, tossed them
before getting an inkling of what the candidates stood for.
Meanwhile, the bar blocks the candidates’ own efforts to reach
members. It refused to provide a members’ mailing list (for a fee) until June 30, so
candidates were unlikely to reach voters before the ballots mailed on July 7 had been
either returned or chucked.
The bar’s “election” thus is designed at every step to
keep the bar undemocratic. And it succeeds.
 Stephen R. Barnett, a Boalt
Hall professor, may be reached at barnetts@law.berkeley.edu.
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