It's an election year, so the topic of civic engagement comes up a lot. It's top of mind for Jennifer Waymack Standerfer, too. She's an attorney in Arkansas and recently penned a report for Arkansas Appleseed titled "Regnat Populus: A roadmap to healthier democracy in Arkansas." She was born in Pine Bluff and raised in Rogers. She says she remembers that growing up, politics with her family was normal.
Jennifer Waymack Standerfer: I remember my grandmother showing me a Christmas card that Governor Clinton had signed himself, and she was just shocked that he had taken the time to sign it himself, with his own hand, when she had only donated $20. It was all she had. But giving was important to my family. It was never much. We didn't have a lot. We didn't have funds and foundations, but we gave at church and we gave at school fundraisers and we gave small amounts to politicians when they listened to us and they stood up for us.
And so they were still very engaged in politics. And this was a time when I remember asking my grandmother what GOP meant, right? What does that mean? And she said, well, that's Republican. And I was like, but what does it stand for? What does it mean? And she said, well, I don't know. Let's call the Arkansas Gazette. But she called the Arkansas Gazette and got the newsroom. And I'm probably 10 years old at the time, talking to someone in the newsroom and listening to the hustle and bustle in the background and all of them yelling back and forth to each other about what does GOP mean? And they finally figured out it's Grand Old Party. And that's how I learned this. But those sorts of interactions with politics are really sort of nostalgic and formative for me. It's really about family and government and how they support each other and interact together.
Matthew Moore: You suggest in the report that civic engagement is more than just voter turnout. We know that voter turnout in Arkansas is the worst in the nation. Not only do we have bad voter turnout, but we have bad voter registration in the state of Arkansas, too. Can you elaborate on what civic engagement means to you, more than just turning out to vote?
Standerfer: So I think there are two limitations when smart people talk about voter engagement, right? They talk about people who show up at elections and register to vote, but they also talk about direct democracy. That's a term we hear a lot about right now, and that is citizens legislating for themselves through the ballot initiative process.
What they forget to talk about are all these really formative pieces of Arkansas law that have a rich history here, like our Freedom of Information Act. And through Regnat Populus and through this approach of preserving citizens' rights, we have a history of giving citizens access to government. But we are pulling back from that now, both as a matter of policy and legislation. We are seeing it become harder by law for people to engage directly. And it's also becoming harder as a matter of societal norms, with the influence of money and speech and social media and technology advancements that we're seeing. We're finding it harder to engage directly and we're becoming more isolated from our government. And that's really dangerous because it's serving to empower political professionals who are not in it for our best interests. They're in it for their own.
Moore: We see time and time again, the most influential elections in Arkansas are happening during the primaries. The primaries are run by the parties — the Republican Party and the Democratic Party — in conjunction with the secretary of state's office. But the rules are set up by the political parties. And as you point out, the political parties who are involved are private membership organizations. That's the language you use in the report. Why does that sort of language matter?
Standerfer: It's really critical. And I'll tell you, even more than the primaries, when you think about parties and party control, in Arkansas your county elections are managed and run by the county Board of Election Commissioners. That board decides which absentee ballots get counted and which absentee ballots don't. And that board is made up of two members of the majority party and one member of the minority party. So the folks who are voting to put them in the position of running our elections and deciding whose votes get counted are the parties. And these parties are terrible now, right? I mean, both of them. I'm not giving one a free pass over the other. The nationalization of our parties has pushed us to a place where all of our policies are being written in Washington, D.C. We are seeing a policy platform that is completely divorced of any connection to our communities and our home and our state, and what we need here.
Moore: Your report also touches on the impact of local reporting. Talk more about what your report gets at there, the idea of the importance of local reporting, and how we've seen that shrinking over the last decade or so.
Standerfer: This is another sort of formative piece of my childhood. I remember local radio stations and local papers having essay contests and inviting students and kids from our community to engage publicly. And usually it was about civic service, right? Usually it was a great topic about something like loving your country or how to help your city move forward, and those sorts of things really formatively created who I am and how I think about politics.
Most folks don't go to city council meetings. You don't have time to keep up with the calendar of every other Tuesday and show up, or the school board meeting, or the county meeting. There are so many of these and they're available and they're open. But the reality is you're busy taking care of your family. And we depend on the reporter who shows up at every one of those meetings and sits through those to come back and tell us what happened. And what we're seeing nationwide with the devaluing of the press in general, but also the defunding of local press, is we're seeing less access to that. If we lose reporters, we lose access to information. I need that connection. I'm pretty involved. I'm pretty aware. I've been working in elections and in the law and with the legislature for almost 20 years now, and I still don't know everything I know when I pick up the paper.
Moore: There's this idea that profitability takes precedence over information. A reporter going every other week to a city council meeting to write a report might be hard to sell to an underwriter or a sponsor. How should news organizations think about whether that reporter's time is valuable to the community in a way that it may not be in a dollar-and-cents way?
Standerfer: I'll tell you right now, as a member of the community talking to you, a member of the media, it is valuable. I depend on you. I depend on your reporting to get this information to me. It's not something that I have the time to go to. Now, do I adequately reward it? Absolutely not. Am I donating enough? Am I paying to get past every single paywall of a news article that I read? Not a chance. So I do think it is important for government, not necessarily to subsidize, but to incentivize good reporting and to incentivize neutral, non-biased reporting.
News media have a system of professional standards and ethics that they've developed over decades that are geared around neutrality and staying out of the news themselves, and just reporting factual-based information and verifying that information. How do we incentivize and reward that? And I do think that there's a lot of room in our legislation and through the law, for instance, to create tax incentives for retention of journalists, especially when they've been working for a very long time. I think there is a great need right now for us to, by law, recognize with some sort of stamp or moniker or checkmark or whatever, hey, these are the people in this industry, judged by a board made up of their industry, to meet our professional standards. And it's not a rating system, right? It's not A through F. I don't want to give people grades. But I would love for us to have that bar and just say, hey, they check all the boxes and so they get a checkmark. And so when I watch something on social media that pops up and I see that checkmark, I know these are folks who are recognized by their industry to be meeting that bar.
And then it carries over to legislation because if you meet that bar, you deserve to be incentivized with tax relief, not necessarily subsidized. Again, I realize how politically controversial that is right now, but we incentivize the private market all the time. Why are we not incentivizing good work from smart people that serves the public? That's good for taxpayers.
Moore: You close by saying, essentially, the theory of the case is that when Arkansas feels like state government is designed for them, then civic health improves in the state. What are some concrete examples of ways we can see that start to improve here in Arkansas?
Standerfer: When you're talking about civic engagement, it across the board affects every single policy out there. I think you're watching what civic engagement can do when you're seeing the back and forth in Franklin County right now over the last couple of years. I mean, it started with, we want a prison, we don't want a prison, and sort of the push back and forth from that. What has slowed that down and made better tax policy, better spending policy, stronger planning going into making sure they're doing the right thing in the right place, it has not come from a free government willing to do what it wants, when it wants. It's come from the pushback from the people. And so I think that's a great sort of microcosm that we're able to see anecdotally right now.
That being said, it's every big contract, right? Every time your school wants to build a giant football field and a huge scoreboard, and they want it to be the biggest and fanciest in the country, and they're spending your tax dollars to do it, it's your ability to slow that down and step in and maybe not stop it. Maybe you want that football field. Maybe you need that football field, but you can find a cheaper scoreboard, right? Government just doesn't do that on its own. It only does that when the people show up and hold them accountable.
So I think that's a critical piece of how we engage in government. And it's really necessary for us both to instill in our children. I have two boys, Witt and Woody, who are 10 and 11 years old, and we talk about being good citizens and their school talks about being good citizens. And so it's important to me that I expose them to this and remind them how important these sorts of ideals are. But it's also important to us as adults. It's our job now, right? This is part of citizenship. This is one of your duties and responsibilities to show up, to stand up for yourself, to stand up for your neighbors and to tell politicians no, to tell the government no. And so few people are doing that right now.
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