City's top political watchdog to step down
After nearly 30 years of advocating good government, Chestnut Hill's Fred Voigt will step down as executive director of the 100-year-old Committee of Seventy
by MICHAEL J. MISHAK
One hundred years after muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens famously declared Philadelphia "corrupt and contented," Chestnut Hill resident Fred Voigt is poised to step down as executive director of the Committee of Seventy, the city's esteemed political watchdog group.
After nearly 30 years of advocating for good government, Voigt, 61, expects to shift positions early next year, but will assist his as-yet-unnamed successor in the transition and continue to serve the committee in an emeritus role. He is widely acknowledged as an expert on election law and has been at the center of every campaign since June 1976, joining the committee just four days before the petitions to recall Mayor Frank Rizzo were filed.
Founded in 1904 in response to the pervasive corruption that defined the worst governed city in the country, the Committee of Seventy has been an instrumental force for reform with a focus on ensuring free and fair elections.
Its name hails from a passage in the Book of Exodus where Moses appoints 70 judges to rule on disputes while traveling through the desert.
Voigt's stepping down comes at a time when the nonpartisan, nonprofit organization is reexamining its mission and its future, said committee chairman William Schorling. While the committee has trained its eye on Philadelphia for the last century, Schorling said the group has shifted its focus to the five-county region as well as Camden in the last few years. Still, Voigt, who Schorling refers to as "the most knowledgeable person on election law in the United States," remains an irreplaceable asset whose legacy looms large in the world of Philadelphia politics.
"Philadelphia has never had a Columbus, Ohio or a Dade County, Florida," Schorling said. "That's due in large measure to Fred's work for the committee."
Appointed by then-Mayor Rendell to a task force investigating electronic voting systems in 1994, Voigt played a major role in selecting the Danaher machine, which has been used in Philadelphia since the 2002 primary without incident.
In the business of constant coercion, the committee succeeded in convincing the city to eliminate paper ballots after a 50-year fight and compelled it to switch to electronic voting after more than a decade of petitioning, Voigt said.
"It's really difficult to get [government] to do anything," Voigt said. "Sometimes you wonder if the talk is all show, not go."
"Nothing in government changes overnight," he continued. "Sometimes we're like a toothache, grinding, grinding, grinding until you go to the dentist."
No stranger to corruption
Voigt, who says he's always been fascinated by turn-of-the-century reformers like Chestnut Hill's Dr. George Woodward (who was among the seven members of the committee's inaugural executive board), got his first taste of politics growing up in Longport, NJ, where many Philadelphia politicians summered.
He graduated from Valley Force Military Academy, and later earned degrees from the University of Denver and the Dickinson School of Law in Carlisle, Pa. After law school, Voigt joined the Philadelphia City Solicitor's Office in the late 1960s where he enforced pollution laws and prosecuted one of the first asbestos cases in the country.
Later, Voigt investigated municipal corruption under then-District Attorney Arlen Specter, indicting Councilman Isadore Bellis for shaking down contractors at Philadelphia International Airport. The office was also home to Ed Rendell, whom Voigt first met through a college roommate.
Before joining the Committee of Seventy in 1976, he worked for the Department of Environmental Protection, again focusing on pollution litigation.
He has lived in Chestnut Hill with his wife Pat for the last 28 years, raising two daughters, Carey -- a public relations professional who has run campaigns for Arlen Specter and worked for Newt Gingrich, and Sarah, a Teamster who worked on the set of the film Being John Malkovich.
At the center of it all
In his time as the committee's executive director, Voigt has seen five mayors, and while each administration posed new challenges, the mayor from Chestnut Hill kept him the most occupied. "Frank Rizzo kept everyone busy," Voigt quipped.
Seated at the head of a conference table in the Committee of Seventy's seventh-floor Center City suite, Voigt rattles off a flurry of intense elections: the Rizzo recall campaign of 1976, the Rizzo Charter change of 1978, the bitterly fought Bowser-Green primary of 1979, Rizzo-Goode 1983. He speaks with the unwavering been-there, done-that confidence of a seasoned vet. City Hall and the rough-and-tumble world of its politics hold little surprises for a man who has spent the last 28 years on the front lines.
Still, when talk turns to this year's presidential election Voigt is clearly encouraged. "It was a barnburner," he says. On the Philadelphia intensity scale, he places it on the level with the 1983 mayoral contest between Wilson Goode and Frank Rizzo. Voigt arrived at his polling place, St. Martin-in-the-Fields Episcopal Church, at 6:30 a.m. on Nov. 2. Though he says he "saw it coming," he didn't expect to see a line of 15 people a half hour before the polls opened. By the time he had finished voting, 150 voters were waiting their turn.
He arrived to the committee's office where phone banks were already up and running. About 400 volunteers, trained by the Committee of Seventy, had hit the streets to monitor the city's 1,681 polling places.
Voigt doesn't pull punches when it comes to both candidates' campaigns. "There was so much money on both sides they didn't know what to do with it," he says. "Out-of-state lawyers were clogging the pipeline." He pauses, and then finishes the thought. "Well-intentioned idiots."
He's still sore about the Kerry campaign's move for a court order, which mandated the re-stickering of the city's 3,500 voting machines because campaign officials said they could read independent candidate Ralph Nader's name through one layer of tape.
Never at a loss for words, Voigt says he still draws the ire of some City Council representatives for his criticism of that body's decision to place seven questions on the 2003 mayoral ballot. Those questions, he says, resulted in long lines for Chestnut Hill and Mt. Airy voters who insisted on translating each one.
"There is no perfect system," he says. "What we try to do is make sure the process works as best as it can. People like to talk about paper trails and they think in terms of conspiracies, but usually it's the 'duh' factor." He points to those who voted with provisional ballots, but were either ineligible to vote or in the wrong polling place. As for those who didn't receive absentee ballots in time, Voigt said he's seen the U.S. Postal Service deliver the forms a year after an election.
"The day after Election Day, we're the people who have the brooms," Voigt says. "We're the ones sweeping up after the circus goes by."
Thinking in terms of cycles, Voigt and the committee's small staff spend years prepping for the next big event, and are reliably deluged with calls after an election.
Recently testifying on the two competing ethics bills before City Council, Voigt insists that the committee can only try to influence, not dictate policy.
He dismisses current campaign finance reforms being advocated on the city level, saying that state law would preempt any local measure.
When asked about the federal probe into municipal corruption, Voigt cracks a smile. "For those who still think this city is corrupt and content, they have no idea what it was like back then," he said.
The Republican machine dominated all aspects of city life, routinely filling the voting rolls with the names of dead people, children and even family pets. Before the creation of the 1951 Home Rule Charter, which instituted a civil service system, Philadelphia was "total patronage all the time," Voigt said.
Since its founding, the Committee of Seventy has ensured the integrity of the electoral process and brought about sweeping reforms not just in government, but in the city's school district and police department.
The committee is finishing work on a comparative analysis of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, and plans to release its governance study on the city's trial division early next year.
"Most importantly, we're not a one-issue, one-month or one-year organization," Voigt said. "The Committee of Seventy is always going to be there."
