Eternal Sunshine of the Conservative Mind

When was “wine” tout court last a low-status drink in the US? 1949?

When was “wine” tout court last a low-status drink in the US?

Does Mad Dog 20/20 not count?

Let’s just remember the words of National Review’s great departed leader:

In some parts of the South, the White community merely intends to prevail — that is all. It means to prevail on any issue on which there is corporate disagreement between Negro and White. The White community will take whatever
measures are necessary to make certain that it has its way.

Besides, everyone should have a photo ID from the Government. At all times. With a chip in it. To assure good governing.

(call them “community organizers”)

Oops, NR’s dog whistle is just dipping into audible territory…

And isn’t it just fantastic that to counter the claim that voter fraud is “so rare as to be practically exotic” they pull out… two anecdotes. And two examples of felons voting which have nothing to do with ID, because the problem wasn’t that the voters weren’t who they said they were.

Why would there ever be voter fraud anyway? Sure, the anecdotes prove that if someone really wants to vote twice or under a false name, they probably can. But why would they want to? Public choice theory has a explaining why anybody would ever vote once, let alone twice… Although I guess the conservative can say that those winos aren’t rational agents anyway – after all, “good sense is bad news for Democrats”!

Sigh.

Regarding the felon voting thing – I get that it doesn’t touch on the case for voter ID requirements, but does anyone know how to get the actual scoop on what happened there.

Here is the Washington Examiner (linked in the NR piece):
“And so far, Fund and von Spakovsky report, 177 people have been convicted — not just accused, but convicted — of voting fraudulently in the Senate race. Another 66 are awaiting trial.”

I tried googling Fund and von Spakovsky, but it looks like it might be from a book of theirs.

It seems to be contradicted by Wikipedia.

One theory that comes to my mind is that the 177 is a nationwide count (maybe even a nationwide for all time count), which would make the account in NR astoundingly misleading – they wouldn’t do that now would they?

Fergus @7
Not to mention that it is not obvious why it would be considered correct that (ex)Felons should lose the right vote. You might think that anti-government fanatics might be concerned about the possibility of a politically biased police and court system.

#12. Proof, no. How could one disprove it, the onus is on the accusers.

However consider how difficult it is for Democrats to get legal voters to the polls. They send people door to door, sign them up, provide transportation. Now imagine what it would take to organize people to vote illegally, as well as the numbers (and presumably resources) that you’d require to make enough of a difference to a race to matter. Oh, and you’d have to do it in such a way that it never leaked out. The thing fails the laugh test.

Another great bit from the New Yorker:
[von Spakovsky] cited a 2000 investigation, by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, of voting records in Georgia over the previous two decades; the paper reported that it had turned up fifty-four hundred instances of dead people being recorded as having voted. “That seems pretty substantial to me,” he said.

He did not mention that the article’s findings were later revised. The Journal-Constitution ran a follow-up article after the Georgia Secretary of State’s office indicated that the vast majority of the cases appeared to reflect clerical errors. Upon closer inspection, the paper admitted, its only specific example of a deceased voter casting a ballot didn’t hold up. The ballot of a living voter had been attributed to a dead man whose name was nearly identical.

“You might think that anti-government fanatics might be concerned about the possibility of a politically biased police and court system.”

They are more concerned about possible non-bias in the system.

” they make the case that Franken was probably elected due to voter fraud.”

There is a 0% chance that Franken was elected due to fraud. . . but technically 0% is a percent. QED, ipso facto, et cetera.

An interesting question to discuss might be: why is there no significant voter fraud?

If elections are consequential, there certainly should be.

21: because the expense and risk of discovery outweigh the benefit. If you have $1000 to spend on getting elected, it’s always going to give a greater expected return to spend it on something other than fraud.

It’s just a return to the ideas of our founders. Those people didn’t have the vote when the country was founded, you know.

@21 Even if there is voter fraud why would you see it through something as inefficient as rustling up ineligible voters or getting eligible voters to vote multiple times?

3) Voter suppression is way more efficient, has a long history of effectiveness, and the risks far outweigh the rewards. In fact, you can even do it legally these days, whether through the legislature or via Republicans on NC county boards of elections establishing explicit suppression policies.

Voter impersonation fraud is so rare as to be negligible.The few cases where you do see fraud are generally in small municipal/county elections where Sheriff Possumpoop’s cousin runs the board of elections and makes sure at the end of the day that the people who didn’t show up don’t have their votes “wasted”.

Hmmm. The only case of voter fraud I heard about last election in Oregon (Clackamas CO) was a Republican ballot counter filling in votes for Republican candidates on ballots where voters had left blanks. I wonder why the NRO didn’t use that example?

Von Spakovsky sounds like quite the piece of work. I was particularly struck by the way, when he was asked for academic backup, he nominated two experts who don’t back him up at all. I call bullshit (Frankfurt definition) – the great thing about sending the interviewer away to check up is that it sends the interviewer away.

I was also rather struck by Von S.’s profession of idealism and invocation of his noble ancestors:

Von Spakovsky is the son of a German mother and a Russian father who met in Bavaria, just after the Second World War, at an American-run camp for displaced persons. They immigrated to the United States in 1951. His father, Anatol, was a White Russian who fought Communism twice: first against the Bolsheviks, in Russia, and later against Tito, in Yugoslavia, where he lived before heading to Bavaria.

He did what? Or rather, he did that when? I suppose if he’d got to Yugoslavia early enough he could just about have been a Chetnik and fought Tito that way, but the “before heading to Bavaria” wording suggests that the whole thing was post-war. Not a lot of fighting against Tito going on after about the middle of 1944. But the part about fighting the Bolsheviks in Russia is the real boggler – when would this have been? The only way it can all work is if von Spakovsky (senior) was a veteran of the Civil War, who fled to Royalist Yugoslavia, stayed there for a couple of decades before putting his boots on again for a barney with the Partisans, then fled West when that war went the wrong way. He would also need to have married in his 50s and fathered young Hans (born 1959) at the age of 60-something.

But who knows – I’ve heard stranger stories.

Electoral fraud by individual candidates is not interesting. A party effort is. As I understand, parties do control the process. And they do gerrymandering, which is just another form of it. I would imagine, the incumbent party (since it’s in charge of the process) should mess with ballot counting, and the other party should try stuffing, submitting illegitimate ballots.

But the part about fighting the Bolsheviks in Russia is the real boggler – when would this have been?

I assume his father – like many other White Russians – fought the Bolsheviks as part of the Russian Liberation Army, the Cossack Cavalry Corps, or similar. That would also explain how he later wound up fighting communism in Yugoslavia, and why he was so keen to get to Bavaria once it was done, to avoid situations such as Keelhaul.

The other common type (which we had a bit of in the UK) is abusing the postal voting process.

Yep. That’s a false friend for Oregonians who think that statewide vote-by-mail leads to clean(er) elections and thus should be a model for the nation.

What leads to cleaner elections is a long tradition of clean elections, and an equally long tradition of harsh penalties for dirtying elections. Minnesota has it. Oregon has it. The Clackamas County ballot-tampering case ended with a guilty plea and a 90-day prison sentence.

Large parts of the US don’t, whether it’s the political machine states of the north or the segregationist south.

I was also rather struck by Von S.’s profession of idealism and invocation of his noble ancestors:

He grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, alongside another famous von. Curious, that.

Apparently he then lived in Novi Slad, Yugoslavia until either 1942 or 1945, before moving to Germany.

Hopefully the latter.

After the botch of the 2000 election, there was a certain amount of interest in the computer science community concerning the process of voting and particularly the requirements for voting machines. Peter Neumann wrote extensively on the topic, and Rebecca Mercuri thoroughly worked out the issues involved. I’m happy to say that the voting machines I use in Southern California conform to her standards, providing an auditable, voter-readable printed record. It’s perhaps another case of solving the wrong problem, but it was done very well.

Universal voting by mail, the preference of the historically progressive Northwest, does not meet those high standards, since it permits the sale or coercion of votes, but it seems to work well enough.

The most scandalous problem of the American electorate is that so few vote in most elections. Instead of worrying about nonexistent voter fraud, we ought to follow the Australian example and make voting compulsory, and also as convenient as possible. Voters shouldn’t have to hunt down the elusive single precinct site where their vote will be counted; in the third millennium any polling place ought to be capable of sorting out the details.

I’d just like to say that Chait’s article is worthwhile, but marred by some of the dumbest “Look! I’m being even-handed!” throat-clearing ever.

A pervasive sense of racial victimization has afflicted conservatives

… since the early Sixties…

during the Obama years — the feeling that they are beset by a combination of false accusations of racism and actual anti-white racial animus that they dare not denounce lest they trigger still more false accusations of racism.

It’s hard to care that people feel beset by “false accusations of racism” when so many of them are actually racist — in ways that constantly boil to the surface and which are why dog-whistle politics exist at all — and therefore must either know perfectly well they’re lying or be engaged in epic levels of doublethink, or both. As for the “anti-white racial animus,” it’s a totally meaningless claim from people who are constantly wielding it to defend their own actual racism.

Cast once again as the heirs to the political tradition of the segregated South,

Which is exactly what they are…

conservatives have lashed back. It is certainly true that modern Republican vote suppression pales in comparison with the pre-1965 version, in method and scale, to the point where equating the two is absurd.

Chait never does say who’s supposed to be “equating the two,” of course. Clinton, maybe? Trying to portray the mention of racism as “equating the two” sounds like a rather conservative sort of rhetorical slipperiness…

Good thing the article improves from there, but man, I wish people like Chait would have the wit to figure out how worthless all the “even-handed” posturing is. It leads them into stating falsehoods and garners not one whit of appreciation from wingnuts who will loathe and revile them regardless. Why bother?

I wish people like Chait would have the wit to figure out how worthless all the “even-handed” posturing is. […] Why bother?

We’re talking about the New Republic here. There’s probably a “False Equivalence Hand-Wringing” clause in Chait’s contract.

ezra abrams 08.21.13 at 1:07 pm

” I didn’t read all the words – do either you or chait address the claim that in at least N Carolina, the new IDs are free ?
Did eithr of you bother to findout how many offices issue the IDs, what their hours are, etc ?
I mean, if you can get a gov’t issued ID for free in N Carolina, and the burden of prooving who you are is low, I suspect that the amount of money spent on white liberal lawyers to challenge the law is greater then the amount of money needed to create a phone bank and car volunteers to get all the people without a car to the gov’t office for an ID”

Considering that NC has made student ID’s not accepted for voting, I’m sure that they’ve covered a lot of bases on this. I came across an article yesterday where they merged three voting sites into one, near a college – the site has thirty parking spaces. And NC law limits the ability of people to vote, even if they are in line well before the voting places close.

This is from Wisconsin, but ALEC is ALEC, and Tea Party is Tea Part: Walker selectively closed DMV’s, primarily in neighborhoods expecting to vote Democratic.

do either you or chait address the claim that in at least N Carolina, the new IDs are free ?
Did eithr of you bother to findout how many offices issue the IDs, what their hours are, etc ?

Slightly irrelevant, because the point is that, if no ID is required to vote, that’s always going to be better, because you can definitely get a no-ID for free at any time of the day or night, at any government office, or any corner shop, or even in the privacy of your own home. You’ll never have to worry about someone stealing your no-ID, or about losing it, or forgetting to bring it to the polling station, and your no-ID will never need to be renewed.

I suspect that the amount of money spent on white liberal lawyers to challenge the law is greater then the amount of money needed to create a phone bank and car volunteers to get all the people without a car to the gov’t office for an ID

I am a bit puzzled by this as well. Do black or Latino liberal lawyers work more cheaply? Is this a kind of “Get me William Kunstler!” “He’s unavailable, sir.” “Then get me his non-union Mexican equivalent!” situation?

Even EBT abusers have to show ID… but anyone w/ a heartbeat should be allowed to vote – no questions asked.

Yeah, that makes sense.

mpower69@53 Well, voting is a constitutionally protected activity without, at least at the federal level, any constitutionally requirement for ID.

You mention EBT “abusers.” Is it your opinion that everyone with an EBT card is an abuser? In any case, your comment ignores the eligible voters who don’t have EBT cards or ID and still wish to vote. Your comment reflects the continuing effort to equate voters who might have trouble getting state-approved picture ID with moochers taking something from you and the other good people. All in the service of a non-existent problem.

Amen, Meredith, Amen.

There seems to be two different arguments here. One is that there is no electoral fraud, and therefore IDs are not necessary. And then a much more radical one: down with the IDs (for ballot access) no matter what.

The first one is already not very strong: the fact that there aren’t a lot of procequtions/convictionis does indicate that there isn’t much fraud, but it doesn’t prove it. Election fraud could, in fact, be rampant, and we just don’t know about it. And the second argument is a crazy libertarian argument, isn’t it.

Election fraud could, in fact, be rampant, and we just don’t know about it.

And there could be an invisible dragon living in your bathroom.

You’d think that after over a decade of riding the VoTR FRUAD! bandwagon hard, the wingnuts would have more to show for it. Alternatively, you could note that it kicked off around the shenanigans in Florida in 2000, involves institutional disenfranchisers like von Spakovsky and encompasses things like the NH phone jamming case, and conclude that it’s actually a smokescreen for vote suppression.

The first one is already not very strong: the fact that there aren’t a lot of procequtions/convictionis does indicate that there isn’t much fraud, but it doesn’t prove it. Election fraud could, in fact, be rampant, and we just don’t know about it.

But that raises the question of : if we just don’t – and can’t – know about it, why are you so convinced that it is happening? There’s no way for me to tell whether there is an invisible dragon in my bathroom, but if you tell me there is, then “how do you know” is the first question I am going to ask.

Dragon in the bathroom is not a good metaphor, and you don’t have to be paranoid to be concerned about electoral fraud. Because it’s a common thing in the world.

Observers come from your own country to other countries, to check for a dragon in their bathroom: what are they, idiots?

Also, I have to tell you that you look like a mirror image of wingnuts: seeing the threat of voter suppression everywhere and voter fraud nowhere. Not a good sign.

I just gave it to you: voter fraud is not uncommon in the world (that’s a fact), therefore the concern is not entirely frivolous. Does it make sense?

As far as I’ve seen, poll data on this indicates this issue is a winner for the GOP. Lots of moderate voters (typically middle class folks who have photo ID, of course) are totally fine with this stuff.

The response cannot just be to scream about it and file lawsuits. The Dems need to actually invest money in helping people get the documents they need so they can have their ID squared away and vote.

Mao Cheng Ji, I think we do need proof that voter fraud occurs to any significant degree before committing public resources to, and, more important, suppressing the legitimate vote through, new “anti-fraud” measures. The US certainly has its own history of voter fraud (“Vote early and vote often!”), which is what led to our establishing very effective safeguards against it. While absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (of course), because of these safeguards significant voter fraud is simply not the kind of thing that can remain well hidden in US systems of registration and voting.
I think we also need to be specific about what kind of fraud we are imagining and recent legislation in many states claims to be countering. Non-citizens or others not eligible registering to vote (and then voting)? Voter rolls padded with names of non-existent or dead people (so minions can go vote in their names)? The same person voting more than once under the same name in the same place? The same person voting, under the same name or using different names, in two different places in the same election? Election officials stuffing the ballot boxes or fiddling with the read-outs or reports of vote counts?
The specific “anti-fraud” legislation being proposed and too often passed in many states right now is so clearly designed to suppress the vote of people of color and of young voters, rather than to address any real fraud, that it’s scandalous.

Mao Cheng Ji 08.23.13 at 12:18 pm

” I just gave it to you: voter fraud is not uncommon in the world (that’s a fact), therefore the concern is not entirely frivolous. Does it make sense?”

No.

Mao, how about some fresh arguments?

Mao Cheng Ji, it’s been a long time since anyone asked to see my ID before they’d sell me alcohol! (Though when I was still being asked, you just showed your license, which had no photo on it, only information about eye and hair color, height….) A photo ID requirement wouldn’t provide any difficulty for me, either. But so much has been written about the difficulty many Americans would/will have in getting a photo ID — most of them black, brown, and old or poor or both, and most of them likely to vote Democratic — that I suggest you just google the topic for references. I do not believe that “We the people” should be read as “We the comfortable middle class and the wealthy.”

In any case, the photo ID is just one element in a larger war of attrition, since states where ID laws have been passed or are being proposed have also, e.g., reduced the number of voting places available to people likely to vote Democratic (space), reduced the number of days on which you can vote (time), and/or limited the use of voting-by-mail (time and space). There’s nothing innocent about any element of this program.

I’m also old enough (just 62, so not doddering, yet) to remember when many black people, in the south especially, were effectively barred from voting because of “harmless” requirements attached to registering and voting. All this is all too familiar.

Mao: you don’t know what you’re talking about and there are endless resources at your fingertips to enlighten you. Why make others do the work?

I guess I’m just used to prompting my daughter to move on to another question when she gets stuck. Carry on.

No. It’s just that I made the mistake of reading the comments, and they seemed a bit tendentious and sanctimonious. As it’s often the case with wingnut-denunciation threads. But I guess it’s natural. I’ll shut up now.

The Dems need to actually invest money in helping people get the documents they need so they can have their ID squared away and vote.

And when the GOP tweaks things so that IDs need to be renewed more frequently or closes down renewal locations in Dem-leaning areas, or comes up with another bureaucratic obstacle course, should the Dems invest in that as well? Because it’s pretty clear that it’s not a slippery slope argument, and GOP-run states would very much like to create as many impediments for those least likely to vote for them.

In that case, let’s make it a federal voter database, with a federal ID, and the states can choose to sign on or not. And let’s put the feds in charge of chasing down all the details for those people who were originally excluded from the vital records system, or dropped out because of bureaucratic incompetence or blazing courthouses, with taxes funding their work. Require ID up the wazoo that places a burden on Whitey McGoperson.

And if the voter suppression brigade complain about “number of the beast” and black helicopters, they’re not really serious.

Dragon in the bathroom is not a good metaphor

Says you, but you’re just worried that we’ll report you to your landlord.

voter fraud is not uncommon in the world (that’s a fact), therefore the concern is not entirely frivolous.

Should we be talking about the invisible giant panda in your bathroom then, who argues about toothbrushes with the dragon? Go away.

Norwegian Guy, of course it’s not enough just to denounce them and do nothing more. And many people are indeed very busy doing more, including (in states where it will be necessary) arranging for people now lacking photo ID’s to obtain them (these ID’s aren’t free, btw — a significant cost, in fact, to poor people). But it’s very hard to organize this sort of effort, especially since each of the 50 states operates by its own laws and regulations about registering and voting (Europeans usually have little idea of how many, disparate legal frameworks govern American life), and since many of the people affected live in rural areas (this is a very big country! I think Norway is a little more than half the size of the second largest of just one of our 50 states, Texas) or in poor sections of cities (reaching people in large, depressed areas is often difficult). Not to mention that many of the people for whom voting is being made so difficult already feel alienated from and cynical about “the system.” Voter suppression measures (by design, I believe) often just increase their sense of alienation and their cynicism.

Sometimes it can actually be more efficient and effective to mount broad legal challenges to things like voter ID laws, especially when these laws are enacted shortly before they are to take effect. (No time to get photo-ID’s for everyone. Courts expedite election-related cases.) And just getting people angry can be effective: people who might otherwise not bother to register or to vote may get motivated when they realize somebody is trying to take away their ability to exercise their right of franchise. (Seems to have happened last fall — but that was a presidential election, when everybody gets more worked up.)

All this is not about enlisting more Americans into the digital bureaucracy of the 21st century, and I still stand by what I said @56. In the back of my mind when I wrote that comment was an observation I think Joseph Brodsky made years and years ago (maybe it was Nureyev, but I think Brodsky), after he’d settled in the U.S. That Americans have no idea what it’s NOT like to be looking over your shoulder constantly and self-censoring your speech, even with family and friends, to be unable to trust one another. (Compare Solzhenitsen, for all his profounder love of his Russian home, on the wonders of life in rural Vermont.)

Thanks to NSA, more and more Americans are having to learn, of course, to trust one another less. But it’s interesting that the Guardian and Snowden have entered into some sort of arrangement with the NYT because the US constitution’s first amendment provides protections that the British Guardian people do not enjoy….

(American v. Australian footnote here: as an American, I’ll defend to the death anyone’s right NOT to vote!)

Mao, your arguments have come down to ‘I don’t mind, so why should anybody else?’

treating this as a race issue seems unpleasantly patronizing.

Yeah, people who care about voter suppression are the real racists!

Mandatory voting does not require that anyone actually vote. It just requires that you show up at the polls. You can submit a blank ballot.

Matt w, logic is not your friend, clearly. Stick with sarcasm and righteous indignation, like the others.