Tag: Ellen Kaplan

Nonpartisan elections: the take by Sam Katz, John Street, and others

Last week I got the opportunity to sit down with former Republican contender for mayor, Sam Katz.

We spoke on a number of subjects, more notably his view of nonpartisan elections in Philadelphia. He told me that he hadn’t given it much thought, not thinking it was worth pursuing.

Today, he followed up on our conversation with more thoughts on the subject.

As a practical matter, election law is controlled by the state—i.e. the legislature. Those laws are made by incumbents. The state has very few legislative and senate districts that are generally considered to be “in play”. So getting members of the House and Senate to vote for a system that would put their renomination at greater risk by enabling people outside of the party that nominated them to have a voice, isn’t something we’re likely to see anytime soon. Pursuing it as a political agenda item, would, in my view, be a waste of time and energy.

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Interview: Ellen Kaplan, Committee of Seventy policy director

Ellen Mattleman Kaplan was a worthy interview for a number of reasons.

Ellen Kaplan

Since April 2005 she has been the vice president and policy director of the Committee of Seventy, the country’s premiere urban political oversight group since 1904. In 1999, she was the issues director for Republican Sam Katz’s mayoral campaign, despite being a Democrat herself. (I am interviewing Sam Katz this afternoon).

For most of the 1990s she was the associate director for Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts, a Pennsylvania nonpartisan, nonprofit group working to improve the commonwealth’s judicial system. After her work with Katz, she worked as the managing director of public policy and communications and then acting CEO of Greater Philadelphia First, a business and civic leadership group.

Oh, and she is a lifelong Philly girl.

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The Committee of Seventy: a century-old political watchdog

Tomorrow I am interviewing Ellen Kaplan, vice president and policy director for the Committee of Seventy, and it occurred to me that it is worth posting just on the organization.

Seventy, a nonpartisan, nonprofit political group, has been a self-proclaimed political watchdog for Philadelphia since 1904. For every election, the group trains and organizes hundreds of volunteers to inspect voting machines and patrol polling places, acting as mediators in thousands of disputes.

I should know. I worked as a policy intern there for nearly a year and have worked with each of their election campaigns since the November 2004 general election. Perhaps the excitement of Pennsylvania’s swing-state status in a battle between eventual Presidential victor George W. Bush and his Democratic challenger John Kerry got me hooked.

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