Election probe dies due to new time limit
Legislative leaders slipped a new and controversial restriction into state statutes in 2017, setting a one-year limit on how long the State Elections Enforcement Commission is allowed to investigate any complaint of wrongdoing by a political candidate or officeholder.
And so, effective Jan. 1, 2018, it became state law that the SEEC had one year (with a few exceptions) to investigate and issue a decision on any complaint about election-related irregularities and improprieties — and, if 12 months go by without a decision, the case has to be dismissed.
Good government advocates criticized the new one-year deadline as self-serving by the legislators who imposed it (because, after all, they are sometimes the ones being investigated) and open to exploitation by savvy lawyers who could contrive maneuvers that would stretch the case out and run out the clock.
Sooner or later, those critics said, an SEEC case would be killed in mid-investigation for no reason other than time ran out — dismissed not on the merits, but only because it didn’t get done by the statutory deadline.
Well, it turns out they were right.
It happened for the first time this past Wednesday — when the SEEC voted at a meeting in Hartford to dismiss a complaint it received on Nov. 1, 2018, from Cynthia Dunne, chair of the Putnam Democratic Town Committee, alleging violations of election law by local Republicans.
Dunne complained that before that year’s Nov. 6 election, the campaign committee of Republican state representative candidate Rick Hayes produced a mailer that included the picture of another Republican candidate, David Coderre, who was running for the state Senate in the 29th District, which overlapped the 51st House District in which Hayes was running. Dunne also named Kathleen Jenkins — the treasurer for the candidate committees of both Hayes and Coderre — as one of the “respondents” in her complaint.
Dunne’s complaint questioned the propriety of Hayes’ campaign benefiting Coderre’s 29th Senate District effort with funds it had collected for his 51st House District candidacy. Such cases generally hinge on matters of degree; if both candidates are featured equally in a campaign mailer that only one of them paid for, it may be a problem under state laws designed to assure the public that campaign funds are being spent properly. On the other hand, it might be OK if the second candidate is only part of a crowd in the background of a photo. (By the way, Hayes won his House race while Coderre lost.)
We’ll never know what the official answer might have been in this case, because time ran out.
“This complaint was received November 1, 2018. Commission staff was negotiating a Consent
Order with respondent Jenkins on this matter” but didn’t complete that process before Oct. 16, the day of the last SEEC meeting at which the case could have been concluded, and so “the complaint timed-out,” the commission said in the formal, written dismissal it approved Wednesday. “Pursuant to Public Act 17-02 … the Commission is required to dismiss a complaint after one year[,] absent certain statutory extensions of time. This complaint is dismissed for this reason.”
The “statutory extensions of time,” mentioned above, include any delays or continuances requested by the accused respondents or their lawyers, or time required to process any subpoenas issued in a case. If a respondent’s lawyer is granted a two-month delay, those two months are added to the 12 months allotted under the new law.
‘I don’t like it’
The new time limit on investigations was buried in the middle of a massive state budget bill that the General Assembly approved in a special session in October 2017, after months of contention with then-Gov. Dannel Malloy. At first it went unnoticed, but when it came to the attention of good government advocates such as Cheri Quickmire, executive director of the citizens’ group Common Cause Connecticut, they criticized it as the latest in a series of moves by legislators to weaken the state’s clean election laws and watchdog agencies such as the SEEC.
“I don’t like it, and I don’t think it should be there,” Quickmire said Thursday of the time limit.
The one-year investigation deadline compounds the enforcement agency’s existing problems of insufficient funds and personnel, which, themselves, are the result of budget decisions by legislators, Quickmire said. She said legislators’ impatience with SEEC investigations has resulted in an arbitrary provision that doesn’t take into account the complexities of some cases.
When Quickmire was told Thursday that a complaint has now been dismissed because the one-year limit had run out, she said: “I think it absolutely demonstrates that this was a problematic decision [by legislators], to suggest that things can be resolved in 12 months without any recognition of the [specific issues and complications of each] case. … I think this definitely will happen more as we move along.”
Top legislative leaders have explained their insertion of the new time limit into the statutes by saying that the SEEC has taken much too long to investigate complaints at times — as, for example, with its still-incomplete investigation of a 2014 complaint against now-former Democratic state Sen. Ted Kennedy Jr. of Branford, a case that is grandfathered and thus exempt from the new time limit. Lingering probes can leave elected officials under a cloud of uncertainty and suspicion, legislative leaders said, adding that 12 months is a reasonable amount of time to decide such cases.
They said imposing the time limit would make the SEEC schedule its investigations in priority order, starting with the most serious allegations or largest amounts of money at issue.
Dunne’s complaint wasn’t an extremely serious one in the overall scheme of things, so it’s hard to argue that democracy will fall apart over this episode. On the other hand, if this keeps happening, it may call attention to a trend in which legislators have not been approving enough budget money for watchdog agencies — such as the SEEC, the Office of State Ethics and the Freedom of Information Commission — to operate as effectively as they once did.
Dunne was asked what she thinks of her complaint being dismissed on account of the new time limit. “Do I like it? No … but it was probably low on the priority list because it didn’t involve huge amounts of money,” she said. “I get why some things jump to the top” and others don’t. … “I do think the complaint was legitimate. … We took a shot at it. … [But] I understand this, because I’ve been involved in politics most of my adult life.”
“They starve these commissions, and they don’t have enough people to handle everything that comes in,” Dunne said.
The SEEC’s executive director, Michael Brandi, said after Wednesday’s dismissal of the Dunne complaint: “We still think that [the one-year time limit] is a very difficult provision for us to manage, and we’re doing the best we can. … Sometimes negotiations in certain cases can continue on, and takes time to resolve cases. In this case, while discussions were ongoing, the time frame ran … and it fell off the docket.
“Again, we do our best to prioritize the most serious cases first. What this one-year provision does is, it forces us to go more sequentially and be mindful of these deadlines. But resources are limited.” He said that the SEEC has asked legislators to modify the time limit provision, so far without success, but “I’m sure we’ll be revisiting those requests again.”