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Advisory Board
    Advisory board members
    Biographies

Advisory Board Members

Ed Bender
Executive Director
National Institute on Money in State Politics

 

Robert Biersack
Deputy Press Officer
Federal Election Commission

Bruce Cain
Professor of Political Science
University of California, Berkeley

 

Anthony Corrado
Professor of Government
Colby College

Jim Drinkard
Director of Accountability Journalism Associated Press Washington Bureau

 

Kenneth A. Gross
Partner
Skadden, Arps

Brooks Jackson
Director
Annenberg Political Fact Check

 

Gary C. Jacobson
Professor of Political Science
University of California, San Diego

David Jefferson
Computer Scientist
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

 

Michael Malbin
Executive Director
Campaign Finance Institute

Colleen C. McAndrews
Partner
Bell, McAndrews & Hiltachk

 

Ronald D. Michaelson
Former Executive Director
Illinois State Board of Elections

Lawrence Noble
Counsel
Skadden, Arps

 

Norman Ornstein
Resident Scholar
American Enterprise Institute

Michael Schudson
Distinguished Professor of Communication
University of California, San Diego,
Professor, Graduate School of Journalism,
Columbia University

 

 

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Biographies

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).



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