I won the local election, but my township ignored the results and state law

> The primary duties and functions of the Board of Auditors include:

>

> - Acting as a fiscal watchdog for the citizens of the township

> - Auditing, settling, and adjusting the accounts of all elected or appointed officials who received or disbursed funds during the immediate preceding calendar year

> - Setting salaries for supervisors who are employed by the township

> - Auditing records of the local district justice, if deemed appropriate

> - Filing the annual report for the township, unless the Board of Supervisors contracts an outside accounting firm per the code. (Nevertheless, in some townships auditors work together very closely with the township staff to insure that all township funds are properly expended and accounted for.)

> - Hearing cases involving financial loss to the township as caused by any elected or appointed official, who have acted in a violation of law or beyond the scope of their office

There are a few things here the supervisors might not want an outsider to look into.

I didn't go look up the rule listed there, it might be pretty narrow.

"Not knowing how things work" is only an excuse up until someone explains to they, "I was elected, here is the law," and they deliberately refuse to acknowledge it

(The reason people run for these obscure, low-paying jobs is so they can get rich on the taxpayers' dime - so they can rezone and procure and otherwise redirect money and influence to their own interests. No one does it as a fun hobby.)

The city of Santa Monica broadcasts city council meetings. And both the items being adjudicated and the members from the public stepping up to the mic, are every bit as colorful as the brightest Hollywood blockbusters. I listened for years after leaving LA… KCRW Thursday evenings, grab some popcorn and enjoy!!

Of course I can. Off the top of my head:

City Council:

Lisa Herbold - neighborhood

Teresa Mosqueda - at large

Sara Nelson - at large, newly elected

Mayor:

Bruce Harrell - newly elected, replaced Jenny Durkan after one term. Was previously on the city council for 13 (?) years.

City Attorney:

Ann Davison - newly elected, replaced Pete Holmes who failed to advance through the primary after 12 years.

County Executive:

Dow Constantine - narrowly re-elected. Recently granted additional power to appoint the county sheriff.

These are the elected positions I vote on. I am also aware of appointed positions like parks, police, and city transit. I’m aware of the the parts of the council I don’t vote for.

I’m also aware of policy. Hazard pay for grocery workers. Attempting to stop catalytic converter theft. Fixing the bridge. Mask mandates. Public transit expansion. Defunding police.

I get a lot of my coverage of these events from the hyperlocal blog that covers my neighborhood. I have their number saved to text reports when I see them. They publish coverage of most local government meetings. I visit that site as often as HN.

My city council recently spent until 1am debating zoning regulations for California's new ADU law instead of doing the sane thing and just letting people build ADUs.

It's quite easy to end up having a 1:1 conversation with a serious candidates for local office. Just 2 weeks ago I donated $500 to a candidate for CA state assembly and the next day I got a call from the candidate thanking me for the donation.

And it's pretty easy to volunteer for various organizations involved in local politics and get access to the current supervisor or state assembly member who is aligned with that organization.

And public comment is actually just like it's portrayed on Parks and Recreation.

A few years earlier something similar happened to me when crossing a rural border station near Organ Pipe National Park in Arizona--the officer demanded I pay an "import tax" for the stuff in my car. (I was moving from DC back to SF, taking the more scenic routes wherever I could. The American border guards were sitting in lawn chairs a mile up the road.) I think I talked him down to $10 after 5 minutes of haggling, at which point his supervisor walks over, smiling, and tells him to leave me alone just as the money was about to exchange hands. The supervisor had been peeling an orange while enjoying the spectacle. I guess he must've been bored that day.

Now that's open corruption. And where there's any amount of open corruption, it's a good guess that hidden corruption is extremely pervasive. But if there's not such open corruption (and it's exceedingly rare if not non-existent in the U.S.), we can't make any wild assumptions about hidden corruption.

If you look at the data, actual corruption is quite rare in the U.S., relatively speaking. As mentioned elsethread, in global terms we're near the tippy top. It didn't used to be this way. Even open corruption was once not uncommon in the U.S. At the turn of the 20th century, as civil service reforms gained momentum across the country--municipal, state, and Federal--some elected politicians openly defended kick-back schemes as being democratic. But they lost. This removed much of the opportunity and incentive except when privately and discretely dealing with elected officials or public-facing servants (e.g. cops, inspectors, etc). Later, private rights of action that permitted people to sue municipalities, and the creation of FBI criminal units to proactively investigate corruption schemes even among high-level elected officials, helped to dramatically reduce remaining corruption by creating very real costs at all levels of government. Your example is literally an example of why the U.S. doesn't see much corruption--it comes with very real risks. The FBI and DoJ are still beyond repute when it comes to corruption, even if state-based enforcement officials still too often look the other way. Every politician sweats even the prospect of drawing attention from the Feds.

Instead, Americans now call "corruption" whatever policies and decisions they disagree with if they don't understand the motivations behind them. It's pure cynicism and, ultimately, fatalistic. (And being illegal doesn't ipso facto make something corruption either; no more than violating copyright turns you into a willful criminal.)

That doesn't mean things couldn't be better. Or that real corruption of the type normally implied by the term doesn't actually exist--the cited conspiracy among some LA councilmen is classic corruption, albeit not open. But like with the term "racism", in order to sustain the same prevalence of accusations people have had to dramatically expand the scope of the term when forced to defend themselves. That doesn't mean what's now being referred to isn't unfair, wrong, or otherwise illegitimate, but we've long since descended into word games. Which is unproductive as within this expanded set of problems, there are no common ways to address and resolve them (e.g. simple, across-the-board reforms or related measures); by equivocating we're hurting our ability to identify causation and meaningfully mitigate and remediate actual, substantive issues.

For this and other reasons, after my dad's single term as selectman, he vowed never to be involved in politics again.

That's largely because "pilfering of the public good" is much more precisely defined in such systems. There is plenty of corruption in anglo systems too. In fact, having moved to England, I've become accustomed to a degree of impropriety I honestly did not expect. It's just that a series of behaviors that would be explicitly considered illegal where I come from, here belong to a grey area that may or may not ever be illuminated by lawsuits. Because oversight is extremely weak, one can get away very easily with administrative murder. It's easy to look honest when bad behavior is not considered dishonest.

If there is something in the laws that requires the Board of Supervisors to cooperate in the swearing-in or otherwise, then you can ask a court to force them to do it. This is called an application for a writ of mandamus, which is a special court order for a public official to perform a duty that they are required by law to do. You'd think that'd be pointless, but it converts a violation of a random state law (with no specific penalties attached) into a potential violation of a court order, which attaches various coercive powers controlled by the judiciary. One of those powers is imprisonment, for example. To the untrained ear that does sound a bit like criminal punishment, and it really is pretty close. The overall scheme is that public officials must do their duty, lest they be told again by the judiciary, in which case they really must do it.

If you mean report the police for not citing/arresting, then FBI/DOJ are not interested in prosecuting. Those actions fall under law enforcement discretion. The police have the power to decide not to arrest or cite someone, even if they plainly broke the law.

On a side note, I did file a DOJ civil rights complaint (results in injunctive relief instead of criminal charges like the FBI color of law) against the state police practices. It sounds like the DOJ gets too many complaints to handle and isn't interested in, or doesn't have the resources for, small rights violations.

So my experience is that literally nobody in the system is interested in investigating and upholding the integrity of out system. Our system is built on sweeping the dirt under the rug, as evidenced in the court rulings that releasing judicial complaints, even ones containing exculpatory evidence, would be too injurious to the system (the only way they would be injurious is if they were incompetent or corrupt with nothing being done about it).

I'd assume it eventually comes down to a real estate broker who literally doesn't know how to run an audit but none-the-less ran for auditor, being sworn in by people who NEVER INTENDED TO NOT SWEAR HIM IN, sitting in front of an excel spreadsheet, and either finding nothing or making shit up. Since the town is already audited by an external CPA firm that is fairly large and doesn't have any incentive to run cover-up for a tiny township.

He doesn't have the power to conduct audits when the township hires a CPA for that.

Nepotism is one way of protecting your children then.

Why would Philo be particularly bad as nonrevenue humanities go? I'm shocked they grant tenure in humanities anymore, colleges are so morally bankrupt. I assume that is going to change very soon.

Note: that's just conjecture, i have no idea what Kevin's specific type of Libertarian is, maybe he's a sensible one, even though i can't see how that would work.

PS with my favourite quote on libertarians - "They are like house cats. They are convinced of their fierce independence while utterly dependent on a system they don't appreciate or understand." By John Spaulding

Beyond that the vastly expanded definition of felon has eroded the ability for at least 5.1 million Americans to vote. Immigration is almost more a question of voting than anything else. Add in various forms of voter suppression and frankly Americans politics has almost completely been separated from the “will of the people.”