News Clips

A candidate paying himself a salary is “highly irregular,” said Kathay Feng, executive director of California Common Cause, who thinks the vast majority of candidates would refrain from doing it for fear it would look bad to voters and potential campaign donors.

Kati Phillips, spokeswoman for California Common Cause, which supports campaign finance reform, predicted the measure is not going away. “We will see this again,” she said.

California Common Cause, a nonpartisan good-government group, reported an unusually high number of calls from people experiencing problems voting, which could indicate higher turnout and confusion over changes in polling places, said spokeswoman Kati Phillips.

Isolated incidents were reported in California. The nonpartisan voting monitoring group California Common Cause said its volunteers received 2,000 calls to its voting hotline, many with questions about changes to polling places. In one unusual interruption in Bakersfield, a driver crashed into a elementary school and ran away, leading police to lock down the polling place. In North Hollywood and Canoga Park, a jammed ballot box and a broken voting machine led to problems. At the Los Angeles County registrar’s office in Norwalk, hundreds lined up for more than two hours to iron out registration issues, including new voter registrations.

“There’s a lot of money to be made off of sick people.”—Kati Phillips of California Common Cause, as dialysis company spending hit $111 million to defeat Proposition 8, which would regulate their profits.

When corporate profits are at stake, campaign spending often balloons, said Kati Phillips of California Common Cause, which advocates campaign finance reform. “Health care measures are expensive,” she said. “There’s a lot of money to be made off of sick people.”