Ed
Bender
Ed Bender is the
Executive Director of the National Institute on Money in State
Politics, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to accurate, comprehensive
and unbiased documentation and research on campaign finance at
the state level. Mr.
Bender had previously served as the Institute's research director
since its creation in 1999. In that role, he led the research functions
of the Institute, directing both the development of campaign finance
databases and analyses of those databases.
A former journalist,
Edwin also worked for seven years as Research Director for the
Money in Western Politics Project of the Western States Center.
While there, he helped develop many techniques for researching
state campaign-finance data.
Robert Biersack
Robert Biersack
is Deputy Press Officer at the Federal Election Commission, where
he has served in the Data Systems Development Division (DSDD) since April
1983, specializing in electronic filing of campaign finance reports and
dissemination of campaign finance data.
For the past several years, he
has been instrumental in defining, planning, implementing, and
executing statistical studies related to campaign finance information
filed at the FEC. He is also a key participant in the design and implementation
of the FEC's electronic filing program and Internet-accessible database.
A graduate of Marquette University
and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Mr. Biersack has written extensively
on campaign finance, political parties, and interest groups, and is co-editor
of After the Revolution:
PACs Lobbies, and the Republican Congress, and Risky Business?:
PAC Decision-making in Congressional Elections.
He has been recognized
by media, academic, and campaign-finance communities for his analyses
and presentations of complex data, and has been an adjunct lecturer
for the departments of politics at numerous universities in
the Washington, D.C. area.
Bruce E. Cain
Bruce
E. Cain, Heller Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley and
Executive Director of the UC Washington Center, came to Berkeley
in 1989 from the California Institute of Technology, where he taught
from 1976 to 1989. A summa cum laude graduate
of Bowdoin College (1970), he studied as a Rhodes Scholar (1970-1972)
at Trinity College, Oxford. In 1976 he received his Ph.D. in political
science from Harvard University.
His writings include The Reapportionment
Puzzle (1984), The
Personal Vote (1987), written with John Forejohn and Morris Fiorina,
and Congressional Redistricting (1991), with David Butler. He
has also co-edited numerous books, including Developments in American
Politics, Volume I - IV, with Gillian Peele, Constitutional Reform
in California, with Roger Noll, Racial and Ethnic Politics
in California, Vol. II, with Michael Preston and Sandra Bass,
and Voting
at the Political Fault Line: California's Experiment with
the Blanket Primary with Elisabeth R. Gerber (2002).
Professor
Cain has served as a polling consultant for state and senate
races to Fairbank, Canapary and Maulin (1985-86); as a redistricting
consultant to numerous government agencies and commissions since
1989; as a consultant to the Los
Angeles Times (1986-89)
and as a political commentator for radio and television stations
in Los Angeles and the Bay Area
.He received the Zale
Award for Outstanding Achievement in Policy Research and Public Service
in March 2000, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences in April 2000.
Anthony
Corrado
Anthony Corrado is Charles A.
Dana Professor of Government at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and
a leading authority on campaign finance issues. He currently serves as
a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and as a member
of the American Bar Association's Advisory Commission on Election Law.
He is also the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Campaign Finance
Institute, a nonpartisan research organization located in Washington,
D.C.
Dr. Corrado is the author or
editor of a number of books on campaign finance and elections, including Financing
the 2004 Election, Paying
for Presidents, The New Campaign Finance Sourcebook, and Campaign
Finance Reform: Beyond the Basics. He is also a frequent commentator
on national politics, and has appeared regularly on National Public
Radio, as well as on the NBC Nightly News, CBS Sunday Morning,
CNN, C-SPAN and The News Hour with Jim Lehrer.
Jim Drinkard
Jim
Drinkard directs accountability journalism in the Washington Bureau
of the Associated
Press. He has covered Washington politics and policy since 1981,
when he arrived in the capital as a Midwestern regional reporter
for AP. He has covered agriculture policy, the Iran-Contra scandal,
congressional ethics, foreign policy, intelligence matters and
the congressional leadership.
In 1993 he pioneered
a beat focusing on lobbyists, interest groups, money and politics -- coverage
that twice won reporting awards. From
1998-2006 he covered similar issues for USA Today, chronicling
the record-breaking fundraising of the 2000 elections and the push
to revamp the campaign finance system.
He is a graduate of Davidson
College in North Carolina, and earned an M.A. degree in journalism
at the University of Missouri. He is married and has two children.
Kenneth
A. Gross
Kenneth
A. Gross is a Partner at the law firm of Skadden, Arps where he
advises clients on matters relating to the regulation of political
activity. A noted authority on campaign law compliance, gift and
gratuity rules, lobby registration provisions and securities laws
regulating political activity and municipal securities transactions,
Mr. Gross counsels numerous Fortune 500 corporations and political
candidates at the state and federal level. As former Associate
General Counsel of the Federal Election Commission (FEC), Mr. Gross
headed the General Counsel's Enforcement Division and supervised
the legal staff charged with the review of the FEC's Audit Division.
Mr.
Gross is well known for his experience regarding the Ethics in
Government Act and U.S. House of Representatives and Senate ethics
rules. He has also worked extensively with federal and state lobby
registration laws, in particular compliance with the Federal Lobby
Registration Act and the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Additionally,
he advises corporations on internal ethics guidelines.
Mr. Gross
co-chairs the Practicing Law Institute's annual seminar on "Corporate
Political Activities." He has served as a member of the American Bar
Association's Standing Committee on Election Law and chaired the
Election Law Committee for the Federal Bar Association.
In addition,
he is the co-author of the Ethics Handbook for Entertaining and
Lobbying Public Officials. His published articles on campaign finance
have appeared in the Stanford Law and Policy Review; the Yale Law & Policy
Review; Federal Bar Journal; Corporate Political Activity; Money,
Elections and Democracy; and several other publications. He is
also the author of supplements to a treatise entitled "Federal Regulation
of Campaign Finance and Political Activity."
Mr. Gross serves on the
board of trustees of the Campaign Finance Institute and is a member
of the Executive Committee and counsel to the American Council
of Young Political Leaders.
Mr. Gross serves on the faculty
of George Washington University and has also served on the faculty of
New York University. He received a J.D. from the Emory University School
of Law and a B.A. from the University of Bridgeport where he graduated cum laude.
Brooks
Jackson
Brooks Jackson is the
Director of Annenberg Political Fact Check. Mr. Jackson has covered Washington
and national politics for over 35 years, reporting for The Associated
Press, the Wall Street Journal and CNN. Mr. Jackson joined CNN
in March 1990 as a special assignment correspondent. His first series
of reports on the Savings and Loan scandal in 1991 won a CableACE Award
for CNN. During the 1992 elections, Jackson's "Ad Police" reports
pioneered the TV adwatch medium and gained critical acclaim.
During
the 1996 campaigns, Jackson helped viewers sift through the political
advertising and campaign rhetoric with his regular "Spin Patrol" reports.
In May 1997, his reporting made him the first winner on the now-annual
Jerald F. terHorst Award for Excellence in Political Reporting,
given by George Washington University's Graduate School of Political
Management and School of Media and Public Affairs.
Prior to joining
CNN, he worked as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal based
in Washington, D.C., from 1980-1990. From 1970-1980, Jackson was
a reporter for the Associated Press in Washington, D.C. He began his reporting
career in the AP's New York City Bureau.
During his tenure with
the AP, Jackson won the 1974 Raymond Clapper Award and the Associated
Press Managing Editors Association Award for his report on the "Milk Fund" scandal.
In 1985, he won the Worth Bingham Award for his Wall Street Journal
stories on 1984 campaign funding. He is the author of Honest Graft:
Big Money and the American Political Process (1988),
which chronicled the rise and fall of political fund-raiser Tony
Coelho. More recently, Jackson authored unSpun: Finding Facts in a World
of Disinformation in 2007 with Kathleen Hall Jamieson.
Jackson earned
a bachelor's degree from Northwestern University's Medill School
of Journalism, and a master's degree in broadcast journalism from
Syracuse University.
Gary Jacobson
Gary C. Jacobson
is Professor of Political Science at the University of California,
San Diego, where he has taught since 1979. He received his A.B. from Stanford
in 1966 and his Ph.D. from Yale in 1972. From 1970 to 1979 he taught
at Trinity College, Hartford. He has also taught at U.C. Riverside
(1968), Yale (1973) and Stanford (1986-87). During 1990-91 he was
a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
Jacobson specializes
in the study of U.S. elections, parties, interest groups, public opinion,
campaign finance, and Congress. He is the author of Money in Congressional Elections (1980), The Politics
of Congressional Elections (7th ed., 2009), The Electoral Origins
of Divided Government (1990), and coauthor of Strategy and
Choice in Congressional Elections (2nd ed., 1983) and The Logic
of American Politics (3rd ed., 2006). His most recent
book is A Divider,
Not A Uniter: George W. Bush and the American People (2008).
He
has served on the Board of Overseers of National Elections Studies
(1985-93), the Council of the American Political Science Association
(1993-94) and as Treasurer of the APSA (1996-97). He is a Fellow
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
David Jefferson
David
Jefferson is a widely-known expert in the technology and security
of public elections. He day job is conducting research in advanced
supercomputing technologies at the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory.
Prior to working at the Lawrence
Livermore Labs, Dr. Jefferson was a computer scientist for Compaq
Labs (previously Digital Equipment Labs) in Palo Alto. At Digital, he
led the team that built the 1994 California Election Server in cooperation
with the Secretary of State -- the first comprehensive voter information
site ever to appear on the Web.
In 1995, Dr. Jefferson led the
Digital team that, in cooperation with California Voter Foundation
and SDR Technologies, constructed the San Francisco Campaign Finance Database.
The database was the first complete and timely Internet publication
of campaign finance data ever available to voters for any election. Later
at Compaq he helped build the 1998 California Campaign Finance
Database (a joint project with the California Voter Foundation). David
later served on the Secretary of State's Advisory Panel on Electronic
Filing. For all of this work he was named a winner of the James
Madison Freedom of Information Award in 1996.
In 1999-2001 he was
one of the leading experts on Internet voting technology and security.
He was the chair of the technical committee of the California Secretary
of State's task force on Internet Voting, and served on the NSF
Panel on Internet Voting. He wrote, testified, consulted, and
lectured widely on technical and security issues related to Internet voting.
In
2003 he was a member of the California Secretary of State's Task
Force on Touchscreen Voting, whose report set in motion the move
toward voter verified paper audit trails in California.
And from 2004 he
has served as chair of the California Secretary of State's Voting
Systems Technology Assessment and Advisory Board (VSTAAB). Most
recently, in 2007, he served as the Chair of Secretary of State
Bowen's Post Election Audit Standards Working Group whose report
was issued in coordination with that of the Top to Bottom Review.
He
has been a member of the CVF Board of Directors since 1996 and
also serves on the Board of Verified Voting.
Michael Malbin
Michael
J. Malbin, is a founder and the Executive Director of the Campaign
Finance Institute. He is also a Professor of Political Science
at the State University of New York at Albany. One of the country's
leading scholars in this field, Malbin has been writing extensively
about money and politics for more than three decades. Some of his
co-authored books include: The
Election After Reform: Money, Politics and the Bipartisan Campaign
Reform Act; The Day After Reform: Sobering Campaign Finance Lessons
from the American States and Vital Statistics on Congress.
He
has also been a reporter for National Journal, resident fellow
at the American Enterprise Institute, guest scholar at The Brookings
Institution, Associate Director of the House Republican Conference,
Speechwriter to the Secretary of Defense, and a member of the National
Humanities Council.
Colleen C. McAndrews
Ms. McAndrews
has practiced political and election law in Southern California
since 1989, initially with Simmons & McAndrews, which merged with Bell & Hiltachk
in 1993. She served as a Commissioner on the Fair Political Practices
Commission for six years following her appointment to the position
by Governor Brown in 1977.
Ms. McAndrews has served as legal
counsel and treasurer to state and local political action committees,
ballot measure committees, and candidates/officeholders across the political
sprectrum including former LA Mayors Richard Riordan and James
Hahn, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, District Attorney Gil Garcetti,
City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. She advises
corporate clients regarding local campaign, lobbying, and conflict of
interest ordinances prevalent in Southern California, including the complex
Los Angeles City Ethics Ordinance.
Ms. McAndrews served
as a member of the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired
by former Presidents Carter and Ford, which reported to the Congress
and President Bush on election reform following the 2000 election and
resulted in the Help America Vote Act of 2002. She also served
as a member of California Assembly Speaker Robert Hertzberg's 2001 Commission
on Initiative Reform and was Co-Chair of Secretary of State Bruce McPherson’s
2006 Task Force on Online Disclosure of Campaign Finance Statements.
Ms.
McAndrews served as an official U.S. observer of the Russian constitutional
and parliamentary elections in Moscow and Archangel in 1993. She
also trained emerging political parties in the former Soviet republics
of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan after independence.
Ms. McAndrews is
a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and received
her law degree from the University of California at Los Angeles.
She served as President of the California Political Attorneys Association,
1995-1996.
Ronald D. Michaelson
Dr. Ronald
D. Michaelson is the former Executive Director of the Illinois
State Board of Elections and serves on the faculty of the University of
Illinois at Springfield's Institute for Legal, Legislative and Policy
Studies.
Dr. Michaelson is the author
of numerous articles on government that have been published in leading
state and national journals. He currently holds an appointment to the
Advisory Committee of the Federal Election Commission, is past national
chairman of the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws, acts as a consultant
in the area of election administration, and is a frequent speaker at national
conferences in the areas of election administration and campaign finance.
Dr. Michaelson holds the following
degrees: Bachelor of Arts, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL 1963; M.A. in
Political Science, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL 1965; and a Ph.D.
in Government, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL 1970.
Lawrence
Noble
Lawrence M. Noble is
a nationally recognized authority on campaign finance, ethics and lobbying
issues. He advises Skadden, Arps clients on matters relating to the regulation
of political activity. Immediately prior to joining Skadden,
Mr. Noble was the executive director and general counsel of the Center
for Responsive Politics, a non–partisan
research organization.
He served as General Counsel
of the Federal Election Commission from October 1987 through December
2000. He joined the FEC in 1977 as a litigation attorney and also served
as Assistant General Counsel for Litigation and Deputy General
Counsel. He was president of the Council on Governmental Ethics
Laws from 1997 to 1998 and, in December 2000, received the COGEL
Award for his outstanding contribution to the field of campaign finance
and ethics.
He has written and spoken extensively
on campaign finance issues. Mr. Noble has argued before the Supreme Court
of the United States and testified before Congress on problems with the
existing campaign finance laws.
He has also served as an official
observer and consultant with respect to elections held in the former Soviet
Union, Benin, Senegal, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Cambodia and Bangladesh.
Mr. Noble also currently teaches Campaign Finance Law at George
Washington University Law School.
Norman Ornstein
Norman Ornstein
is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He
also serves as an election analyst for CBS News. In addition,
Mr. Ornstein writes a column called "Congress Inside Out" for
Roll Call newspaper. He is co-directing the AEI/Brookings Election
Reform Project, working to make our election system work better.
Mr.
Ornstein frequently appears on news programs such as Nightline,
Today, Face the Nation, and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. At the
NewsHour's thirtieth anniversary celebration, he was recognized
as the most frequent guest on the show since its inception.
Mr.
Ornstein writes frequently for the New York Times, Washington Post,
and other major newspapers and magazines. His books include Debt and
Taxes: How America Got Into Its Budget Mess, and What to Do about
It,
with John H. Makin; Intensive Care: How Congress Shapes Health Policy,
with Thomas E. Mann, and The Broken Branch: How Congress is Failing
America and How to Get it Back on Track, which was named one of the
best books of 2006 by both The Washington Post and the St Louis
Post-Dispatch.
Michael Schudson
Since 1980 Michael
Schudson has taught communication at the University of California,
San Diego and since 2005 has also been Professor of Communication
at the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University. Schudson received
a B.A. from Swarthmore College and M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard
in sociology. He taught at the University of Chicago before joining the
faculty in San Diego.
He is the author of six books
concerning the history and sociology of the American news media,
advertising, popular culture, Watergate, and cultural memory. Most recently,
he has written a re-interpretation of the development of public life and
civic participation in the United States from colonial days to
the present, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (1998
Free Press) and a brief introduction to the study of news, The Sociology
of News (W W Norton, 2003).
