Stromata Blog

A Week After the Day After

We now know that the Republican Party has emerged from the 2022 midterm elections with what may be the narrowest House majority in history and that the party’s best hope in the Senate is a continuation of the 50-50 de facto minority of the past two years. The Internet is naturally awash in analysis and recriminations sparked by this unexpected outcome. Far it be from me to add to the clutter, but I do have some observations.

First, although we don’t yet have final vote totals (California will, it seems, be counting until Christmas), it is clear that Democrats targeted their votes much more “efficiently” than Republicans. GOP House candidates drew three or four million more votes than Democrats yet won only a scintilla over half the seats. That is a reversal from 2020, when a Democratic edge of nearly five million votes yielded a similarly bare majority. (House election statistics for 1920 through 2020 are available here.) The explanation of that result is intuitively obvious: Democrats congregate disproportionately in a small number of urban area and “waste” votes on candidates who face no serious opposition.

Explaining the 2022 result is more difficult. Republican voters didn’t suddenly become more concentrated. The map still colors the vast majority of the land area of the United States red. Somehow, though, this year saw Republican candidates in close contests consistently stumble inches short of victory. This is a conundrum for which I have no solution. 

Second, there is general agreement that Democratic candidates benefited markedly from the vast expansion of mail-in voting, a “temporary” Covid-motivated expedient that now shows signs of becoming permanent, perhaps all but universal. Mail-in balloting is an abomination. It turns secrecy into a figment (anyone who bribes or intimidates a voter can watch him fill out his ballot) and offers tempting opportunities for fraud. A small experiment by a Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist illustrates how easy it is to cast a ballot in someone else’s name:

For the past two elections, Nevada sent mail ballots to all registered voters, unless they opted out. That means around 1.8 million ballots went out. Well more than 1 million won’t be returned. Previously, a voter could request an absentee ballot for any reason. That’s more secure because ballots went only to those wanting to vote by mail.

With that many ballots floating around, there are obvious security concerns – it’s much easier to get ahold of someone else’s ballot. Someone could vote for their spouse or child who doesn’t care about politics, but was automatically registered at the DMV. In apartment complexes, ballots of previous residents have ended up in the trash. A postal worker could pocket ballots. There’s not exactly an airtight chain of custody.

Election officials, however, claim there is no need to worry. They have asserted signature verification helps prevent someone from successfully casting a ballot that doesn’t belong to them.

As I did two years ago, I tested that theory this election. I had 11 people send me a picture of their ballot envelope. I then wrote their name in my handwriting. Each voter than copied my version of their signature onto their ballot return envelope. They sent me a picture to ensure it wasn’t their normal handwriting. This simulated signing someone else’s ballot.

It’s also legal because each voter signed his or her own ballot.

If signature verification worked, all 11 of those ballots should have been set aside for mismatched signatures. Instead, six were accepted. That’s a greater than 50 percent chance of being accepted. When I did this experiment in 2020 with nine voters, eight had their ballots accepted. That was an almost 90 percent acceptance rate.

The writer suggests a fix: “To verify absentee ballots, Georgia requires a unique identifier, such as the last four digits of a driver’s license number.” That would be an improvement, though it offers no protection against bribery and intimidation – or against computer hackers or corrupt officeholders who are able to gain access to the DMV database.

The only real cure for the infirmities of vote-by-mail is to limit the practice to circumstances in which there is no feasible alternative, such as military personnel stationed abroad and individuals who cannot get to the polls for medical reasons. It’s obvious, though, that, so long as mail voting is perceived by one of the major parties as a trump (or perhaps I should say “anti-trump”) card, reform will be impossible.

Therefore, the Republican Party should work vigorously to change that perception. There’s no reason why GOP candidates can’t encourage their supporters to vote by mail, go from door to door in “red” neighborhoods “harvesting” ballots (where legal) and publicize the locations of ballot drop boxes. Once the playing field is less tilted, people who still pay attention to good government may be able to spur a consensus in favor of the real, physical ballot box.

Third, the evidence that Donald Trump is a dead weight on the political party of which he claims to be the leader continues to grow. Dan McLaughlin has delved into exit poll data, which has limitations but strongly supports Trump-skeptical conclusions:

[Trump] is viewed unfavorably by a solid majority of the midterm voters nationally (by a 19-point margin of 58 percent to 39 percent), and in every state polled, even places such as Texas (52 percent disapproval to 45 percent approval), Ohio (53 percent to 44 percent), and North Carolina (53 percent to 43 percent) that he won two years ago. . . . And across the board, the voters who viewed Trump unfavorably voted in vast margins for the Democratic candidates. Outside of Florida and New Hampshire, Mike DeWine in Ohio was the only one of these candidates to get more than 20 percent of the vote from people with an unfavorable view of Trump (DeWine still lost those voters 69 percent to 31 percent). . . .

Twenty-eight percent of voters said they were casting their ballots to oppose Trump, while only 16 percent said they were casting votes to support Trump. Thus, the anti-Trump voters outnumbered the pro-Trump voters by 75 percent. If you run the numbers, Democrats won 59.3 percent of the combined vote of the two groups. If both groups had stayed home, by contrast, the remaining 58 percent of voters who said that Trump was not a factor in their vote broke 58 percent to 40 percent for Republicans – a whopping 18-point win that would have satisfied even the wildest fantasies of the Big Red Tsunami.

The same story appears in race after race. In 16 of the 19 races polled, voters who cast their ballots without reference to Trump made up a majority, between 51 and 56 percent of the vote. In the other three (the North Carolina Senate race and the two Arizona races), they were just under half. In 18 out of 19 races, those voters supported the Republican candidate, frequently by wide margins. Among voters who didn’t cast a ballot with Trump in mind, Kari Lake won by 36 points, Blake Masters by 28, Adam Laxalt by 22, Don Bolduc by 19, Tim Michels by 17, Tudor Dixon and Dr. Oz by seven apiece, and Herschel Walker by six. Only Doug Mastriano was a bad enough candidate to lose on his own merits. But in each of those races, the anti-Trump voters swamped the pro-Trump voters by a wide enough margin to cancel that out.

The moral? So long as Donald Trump is a figure whom voters care about, Republicans will be running steeply uphill.

Fourth and finally, much of the doom and gloom currently circulating is wildly exaggerated. Pace Senator Hawley, a party that holds half of each house of Congress isn’t ready for a funeral shroud. A disappointment is not a debacle.

Addendum: Sean Trende, who knows as much about matters psephological as anyone, offers some answers (albeit not complete) to the riddle of why the GOP gained far fewer House seats than would have been predicted on the basis of its share of the popular vote.

Democracy’s Fake Defenders

Do true defenders of the right of the people to choose who will govern them consistently oppose measures designed to ensure that ballots are cast only by legally qualified voters, that no one votes more than once, that how individuals vote is secret from everyone but themselves, and that ballots are secured against tampering after they are cast? The absence of those precautions is the hallmark of pseudo-democratic regimes – and the gospel of an array of Democratic office holders and seekers who profess to be defending “our democracy” against the menace of “election deniers” and “mega-MAGA Republicans”.

Nothing undermines the legitimacy of an ostensible democracy more swiftly and thoroughly than a widespread belief that “what counts isn’t who votes, but who counts the votes”. What gives heft to conspiratorial claims about the 2020 Presidential election is the sloppy way that it was conducted. If it weren’t for the ease with which non-citizens and ineligible felons can register to vote, the failure of many states to keep registration lists up to date, the widespread absence of ID requirements at the polls, the “black box” nature of electronic voting machines, and mail-in ballots’ inherent lack of secrecy and security, “stop the steal” would resonate only in the most paranoidly partisan corners of Internet.

The “our democracy” crowd’s premises aren’t hard to discern:

• It is better for ten fraudulent or illegal votes to be cast than for safeguards against them to deprive one legitimate voter of his ability to cast a ballot.
• The people who conduct elections are so pure in heart that they can be counted on not to condone cheating.
• Accurate voter registration lists are of no real importance. No one would dishonestly vote in more than one place or pretend to be a voter who had died or moved away.
• No one who wants to pressure, bribe or intimidate voters would ever go so far as to fill out or even look at their ballots before they were mailed.

My own home state of Washington provides interesting evidence of this “see no evil” mentality. All voting is by mail, and ballots are mailed to everyone on the voter rolls. They are returned in envelopes that show the voter’s name and address on the outside. Ballots are not placed in a second, sealed envelope void of identifying markings. Instead, there is an “optional [emphasize optional] security sleeve”, which voters are warned not to tape or seal:

Votes thus are not shielded from any poll worker who feels an impulse to look at them after the outer envelope is opened. If one believes in the purity of election officials, that isn’t a problem. Why should we care who knows how we voted? In fact, why have secret ballots at all? Elections aren’t all that important, are they?

They won’t be, if democracy’s fake defenders get their way.

The Joy of Mail-In Voting

In my home state of Washington, where all votes must be cast by mail (with no assurance of secrecy), ballots began arriving in mailboxes yesterday. Well, not always in mailboxes. Here are a couple of new posts on my neighborhood’s NextDoor site:

There are a bunch of ballots on the ground wet off 152nd and 9th Ave Ct E right when your turn the corner. Not sure why or what happened?

Someone broke into our mailboxes and stole mail. I lost 3 ballots among other stuff.

To the Democratic Party, such events are simply part of “our democracy”.

The Times’ Anti-Democratic “Democracy”

This morning, the executive editor of the New York Times declares, “Representative government faces its most serious threats in decades.” You won’t be surprised to learn that, in the paper’s view, all threats come from the Right. You also won’t be surprised to learn that the Times’s definition of “representative government” doesn’t bear much resemblance to James Madison’s.

Identified as “the two biggest threats to American democracy” are “first, a movement within the Republican Party that refuses to accept election defeat; and, second, a growing disconnect between public opinion and government power”.

Claims that the 2020 Presidential election was “stolen” aren’t based on any large body of evidence – no more than were the same Democratic claims about the elections of 2016, 2004 and 2000 (i. e., every Presidential election that Democrats have recently lost). The Times hypothesizes that GOP office holders who “falsely claim that the 2020 election was rigged . . . may be willing to overturn a future election”. How they would or could do that is left obscure, nor is it obvious that people who decry what they perceive as election rigging are merely disappointed that they couldn’t do the rigging themselves.

There is, in fact, an easy way to shut up “election deniers”: Conduct elections under transparent rules that (i) ensure that only eligible voters will cast ballots, (ii) guarantee ballot secrecy and (iii) are not subject to partisan change at the last minute. The 2020 election satisfied none of those criteria. It was our country’s good luck that the Electoral College vote wasn’t close enough to sow much wider suspicion that the wrong candidate was declared the winner.

The Biden Administration’s ideas for election reform go in the opposite direction: toward forcing every state to make elections less secure. The proposed “For the People Act” and “John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act” would, among other assaults on election integrity, mandate universal voting by mail and forbid requiring would-be voters to prove that they are whom they claim to be. Elections would be conducted entirely on the honor system. American history suggests that honor isn’t the leading characteristic of those who oversee the polls.

The adoption of the Biden proposals would cast a pall of suspicion over every election that wasn’t a landslide, even if politicians forswore opportunities for fraud and the effective repeal of the secret ballot didn’t alter any outcomes. That is a graver peril to democracy than Donald Trump’s or Stacey Abrams’s sore-loser tweets. Republican efforts to reform slovenly state election procedures buttress democracy rather than undermine it.

The second “threat to democracy” perceived by the Times is a defining feature of the American Constitution: It is very, very hard to enact fundamental changes to the nation’s laws without first obtaining a wide consensus in their favor. That is what the Times calls “a chronic threat: The power to set government policy is becoming increasingly disconnected from public opinion.”

Naturally the Times does not mean that laws are increasingly made by an unelected, rarely accountable Administrative State. Rather –

Two of the past four presidents have taken office despite losing the popular vote. Senators representing a majority of Americans are often unable to pass bills, partly because of the increasing use of the filibuster. And the Supreme Court is dominated by an ambitious Republican-appointed bloc even though Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections – an unprecedented run of popular-vote success in U.S. history.

If one measures “popular vote success” purely by Presidential elections, that sounds superficially plausible. What it overlooks is that one can’t infer a great deal about public opinion “across the fruited plain” from the results of an election held every four years in which two atypical and not seriously contested states (California and New York) account for the Democratic Presidential majority. As a further, contemporary complication, Joe Biden didn’t run on the agenda that he is now trying to enact, and there isn’t much evidence that public opinion is thrilled with it. One might ask why, if Biden policies are overwhelmingly popular, he and his appointees are so zealous to stifle criticism.

One item in the Times’s litany of laments deserves special attention: “Senators representing a majority of Americans are often unable to pass bills.” Equal state representation in the Senate has that effect. It is one of the ways in which the Constitution hinders sweeping, non-consensus upheavals. Eliminating it through Constitutional means would be extraordinarily difficult, requiring not just an amendment but the unanimous consent of the states: “no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.” As a practical matter, “democratizing” the Senate is possible only by overthrowing the Constitution. That doesn’t sound like the most democratic of ideas, but it is the only road ahead if the Times regards the Senate as a genuine menace to democracy.

Taken all in all, the Times harbors a concept of democracy that is seriously at odds with our present form of government. Could its professed fear of “insurrection” be an instance of projection?

A Natural and Foreseeable Consequence of January 6th Hysteria

An old legal maxim holds that one is presumed to intend the natural and foreseeable consequences of his acts. The presumption isn’t always accurate; some people are short on foresight. Still, it is a good starting point for looking behind the hysteria that is being whipped up over the riot in the Capitol Building a year ago, an incident being compared, with every sign of seriousness, to Pearl Harbor, 9/11 or even the Civil War.

Some consequences that the hysteriacs may hope for impress me as outside the “natural and foreseeable” range. Every day I get half a dozen or so e-mails from Democrat-connected organizations calling for Donald Trump to be banned from running for office again and for Congressmen who allegedly “plotted” the “insurrection” to be expelled from the Legislature. The dean of the Democrats’ election lawyers has suggested lawsuits to that end. Unless the universe takes a most improbable turn, none of that will happen.

Nor is it very likely that the great mass of voters will become convinced that January 6th really was like 9/11 and that they therefore should forget about inflation, crime, foreign policy debacles, inept and authoritarian Covid policies, shortages in stores and the sad fact that President Biden patently lacks physical and mental faculties on the level needed to carry out the duties of the world’s most demanding office.

On the other hand, the President and his Congressional supporters have set in motion a train of events whose end point is plain to see. Their rhetoric about January 6th is inextricably linked to demands that Congress enact legislation “protecting” voting rights by outlawing mandatory photo ID for voters, expanding mail-in balloting, legalizing ballot harvesting and otherwise opening the door wider to intimidation and fraud.

These proposals have virtually no prospect of becoming law. Passage will be possible only if the Senate creates a new exception to the 60-vote threshold for advancing legislation, and all indications are that a majority of the Senate opposes that step. There are also grave questions concerning the Constitutionality of federal intrusion into the manner of conducting Presidential elections. Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution provides that each state’s Presidential electors shall be appointed “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct”. Congress’s only power is to “determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes”.

Nevertheless, proposals don’t have to become law in order to have effects. Progressive jeremiads insist that state legislation to reform slovenly election procedures is a continuation of the “insurrection”. According to the New York Times editorial board, “The Capitol riot continues in statehouses across the country, in a bloodless, legalized form that no police officer can arrest and that no prosecutor can try in court.” Vice President Harris has gone a bit further, declaring that, without the Democrat-sponsored “reforms”, the United States will cease to be a “role model” for opponents of autocracy.

It is natural and foreseeable that a very large segment of the Democratic Party rank-and-file will believe the Vice President and the other party spokesmen who intone the same line, just as a large segment of Republican voters believe that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen thanks to insecure voting procedures that were in many instances altered without legislative approval in ways that made them even less reliable.

What reaction, then, is natural and foreseeable if, as a great many observers anticipate, the 2022 elections go very badly for the Democrats? Not so long ago, the nation saw the ferocity of riots – far more violent than the January 6th outburst – to which many Democratic leaders reacted with indifference, if not approval. It is almost as if the party’s leaders are priming their followers for – might one call it an “insurrection”?

Further Reading: John Lott, Jr., “Is ensuring election integrity anti-democratic? Facts say no”. In 2005, a bipartisan commission co-chaired by Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker recommended a series of election reforms along the lines that Republican-controlled state legislatures are mulling, including universal photo ID requirements, severe restrictions on mail-in voting and ensuring the accuracy of voter registration rolls. If those recommendations had been adopted, Donald Trump would have found it far harder to raise questions about the accuracy of the election returns.

N.B. Not all liberals buy the equation of an aimless riot with genuine insurrection: Glenn Greenwald, “The Histrionics and Melodrama Around 1/6 Are Laughable, but They Serve Several Key Purposes”; Matt Taibbi, “A Tale of Two Authoritarians”; Jonathan Turley, “‘Preserve the Narrative’: The Public Rejects the ‘Insurrection’ Claim in New Polling”.

The Democracy Panic

All at once, progressives are wailing that an “anti-democratic” movement poses a serious threat to the United States. David Leonhardt of the New York Times averred last Monday that, “An anti-democratic movement, inspired by Donald Trump but much larger than him, is making significant progress” and “has encountered surprisingly little opposition”. A writer in The Atlantic informs his readers that “Trump has built the first American mass political movement in the past century that is ready to fight by any means necessary, including bloodshed, for its cause.” Hillary Clinton has chimed in with her own deep thoughts about the threat posed by Donald Trump’s possible candidacy for President in 2024:

“If I were a betting person right now, I’d say Trump is going to run again,” she told NBC Sunday Today host Willie Geist. “He seems to be setting himself up to do that, and if he’s not held accountable, he gets to do it again.”

“I think that could be the end of our democracy,” she said. “Not too be too pointed about it, but I want people to understand that this could be a make-or-break point. If he or someone of his ilk were once again to be elected president, especially if he had a Congress that would do his bidding, you will not recognize our country.”

The proofs that this peril is upon us consist of (i) Donald Trump’s persistence in his belief (which he is assumed to hold insincerely rather than mistakenly) that the 2020 Presidential election was fraudulent, (ii) the January 6th “insurrection”, (iii) proposals, some enacted and others going nowhere, in Republican-controlled legislatures to alter state election laws in ways that Democrats assert are likely to benefit Republicans and (iv) Republican candidacies for offices that oversee the election process.

The first two points are intertwined. The rioters who invaded the Capitol shared Trump’s anger at the “theft” of the election. The Atlantic writer describes this as “the bitter grievance of Republican voters that they lost the White House, and are losing their country, to alien forces with no legitimate claim to power”. That is imprecise. The rioters held that “bitter grievance” because it appeared to them that crooked election authorities in several states had rigged the outcome so that the candidate with fewer votes was declared the victor. If they thought that was true, of course they were bitter, just as citizens in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Iran, Russia and numerous other fake democracies have been embittered by electoral fraud.

It’s worth asking why the American rioters believed such a thing. The explanation at the Times and Atlantic is, so far as I can tell, they were moved by pure malignity, probably imbued with white racism. There is, however, an alternative hypothesis: In the months before the 2020 election, Democratic governors and liberal-leaning courts wrought huge changes in election laws, almost entirely without legislative consent and often in clear defiance of the laws that the legislatures had enacted. After the election was over, Time published a laudatory account of “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election”. Time ascribed only the most high-minded motives to what it characterized as a “well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information”. Is it astonishing that people who were less eager to see Joe Biden in the White House perceived a “an anti-democratic movement” and responded wrathfully when it prevailed?

Points three and four are the rational reaction to the “cabal”. Since no angels have volunteered to run our elections, they fall inevitably into the hands of ordinary mortals who must be selected somehow. It is no more sinister for Republicans to seek those positions than it was for progressives, after the 2000 and 2004 elections, which many of them insisted had been stolen, to set up a “Secretary of State Project” whose goal was to elect Democrats to that electorally influential post in battleground states.

Moreover, one must bear in mind that there are two ways to be “anti-democratic”. One way is to tamper with elections. The other is to make elections irrelevant by concentrating political decision making power in the hands of men who are not elected or otherwise subject to the popular will. Michael Lind, by no means a right-winger, has just published an essay limning the progressive Left’s embrace of the second form of anti-democracy.

In the early 20th century, Progressive reformers – based, like today’s progressives, in the white, Northeastern upper middle class – hoped to insulate government from ignorant voters and corrupt machine politicians and lobbies by creating a powerful national civil service like those of continental Europe. Congress, however, repeatedly killed proposals for executive branch reorganization that would have created an American mandarinate of Ivy League graduates comparable to the powerful enarques of France (graduates of prestigious schools of public administration).

The technocratic progressive dream of the 1900s is alive in the 2000s. The technocratic – dare we say French? – turn in American progressive thought is evident by looking at the heroes of many American progressives. The icons of today’s center left – literal icons, with their own posters, statuettes, and votive candles – are not politicians like FDR and LBJ but wise bureaucratic or judicial technocrats who were uncorrupted by the need to win elections: Dr. Anthony Fauci and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

If it is “anti-democratic”, as David Leonhardt asserts in all seriousness, to propose making the Secretary of State of Pennsylvania an elected rather than appointed office, how much more so is it for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to dictate that employers must fire workers who refuse to be vaccinated against Covid-19? If – Mr. Leonhardt again – democracy forbids adherence to the Constitutional directive that states are to choose Presidential electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct”, with no role for governors or judges (Art. II, §1), is it more amenable to President Obama’s decrees revamping the nation’s immigration laws without a scintilla of Congressional assent?

Democracy may face serious threats in contemporary America. I don’t think that the chief danger comes from the direction toward which commentators like Mr. Leonhardt wish to direct our view.

A Not-So-Secret Ballot

Yesterday I filled out and mailed my ballot in some upcoming local elections. Washington State, where I live, doesn’t allow in-person voting, so I had no choice.

As I’ve said before, mail-in voting is a bad idea, because it effectively abolishes the secret ballot. Anybody who bribes or intimidates voters can check ballots before they’re dispatched, thus verifying that orders were obeyed.

Here in Washington, the attack on the secret ballot goes further. The envelope shows the voter’s name and address, and there isn’t a second, anonymous envelope into which the ballot is inserted. Instead, it can be put into a “sleeve”, which isn’t sealed and can’t be. The instructions emphasize, too, that hiding the ballot inside it is optional.

Hence, whoever opens voters’ envelopes can easily remove ballots, read them and put them back without any possibility of detection. The only preventive is the presence of watchers from the other party – not very effective in areas like Seattle, where there aren’t a lot of Republicans (or, for that matter, in the solidly GOP parts of the state where Democrats are thin on the ground).

Even for a well-crafted mail-in ballot, secrecy is optional, but at least the option is the voter’s. Whether ballots are secret in Washington depends on the honesty and good will of the political operatives who count the votes.

N.B.: The secretary of state who is responsible for this ballot design (a Republican, I regret to say) just resigned her office “to take a key election-security position in President Joe Biden’s administration”.

“Security” – You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Does Anybody Care About the Secret Ballot Any More?

Among the changes brought about by the CCP virus epidemic was a vast expansion of voting by mail. According to Ballotpedia, six states (Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, Hawaii) now conduct elections entirely by mail (sometimes with a few polling places to accommodate incorrigibles). Another 27 states have “no excuse absentee voting”, meaning that anyone who wants to can cast a mail-in ballot.

Resistance is waning. At one point, as part of its “Jim Crow on steroids” project, the Georgia legislature considered requiring would-be absentee voters to proffer a reason for being unable to go to the polls in person, but that provision (a rule that every state had until quite recent times and that 17 still retain) didn’t make it into the law.

Such arguments as are commonly advanced against mail-in voting center on how it facilitates election fraud, makes vote counts less reliable or may diminish rather than increase voter turnout. Those all strike me as pretty obviously correct, but I have a more fundamental objection, one that I’ve seen raised from time to time but that is largely absent from the debate: Voting by mail makes the secret ballot voluntary, and a voluntary secret ballot isn’t really secret.

Let’s consult an expert on how elections are lost:

Democrats “do not do well with white men and we don’t do well with married white women and part of that is an identification with the Republican party and an ongoing pressure to vote the way your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should,” [Hillary] Clinton argued at the conference in Mumbai, India.

The objective of the secret ballot is to protect voters from “ongoing pressure” to vote the way someone else tells them to, and the way in which it protects them is by making it feasible and easy to lie. If Jill says, “Of course, I voted for Trump, dear” after casting her ballot in a voting booth, how is Jack to know otherwise? If the ballot has to be filled out at home, Jack can ask to see it, and if Jill refuses, you know what conclusion he will draw.

The same is true if the person who wants to know is Jill’s boss, her union shop steward or a guy offering her money in return for her vote.

In an era of ever escalating political drama, in which party identification is for many citizens a form of religious affiliation, voting secrecy is an important aspect of privacy. Even if uncompleted ballots aren’t stolen from mailboxes, ballot harvesters honestly transmit every completed ballot given to them, the Post Office delivers all ballots on time, signatures or other verifying data are checked accurately, caches of ballots aren’t mysteriously “discovered” during recounts, and mail-in elections proceed properly in every other way, there is no prophylactic against “voluntary” disclosure of how one voted.

It wasn’t so long ago that everybody agreed that secret ballots are essential to a well-functioning democracy. Today, hardly anybody seems to care.

Further reading: John C. Fortier & Norman J. Ornstein, “The Absentee Ballot and the Secret Ballot: Challenges for Election Reform” (a history of the secret ballot and the absentee ballot in America, how they have clashed, and how the convenience of mailing in votes has undermined the secret ballot’s goals)

Voting: The Conventional Silliness

Last week, British voters rejected the “Alternative Vote”, much beloved of academic theorists and the Liberal Democratic Party, by a margin resembling one of Saddam Hussein’s elections. Needless to say, the cranks who support it – or one of the other fanciful replacements for “first-past-the-post” – are undeterred. This weekend, the Wall Street Journal’s statistics columnist devoted his inches to them, along with a follow-up on-line post, replaying themes familiar to anybody who pays attention to this controversy.

The pieces are informative, with the particular virtue of paying attention to rivals to the Alternative Vote (dubbed “Instant Runoff” this side of the Pond and actually employed in Oakland, California – doesn’t that tell you all you need to know?), such as “Approval Voting” and “Range Voting”. In the former, you can vote for as many candidates as you want, and the one with the most “approvals” wins. Range voting lets voters give “scores” to candidates, with the highest average winning. There are plenty of other ideas. I even invented my own (see “Addendum”), which was used for Guest of Honor selection by the Chicon 2000 committee.

What the Ivory Tower likes is unsurprising:

Before the recent U.K. referendum, the London School of Economics and Political Science organized a workshop on voting systems where 22 specialists cast a ballot, using approval voting to register their opinion on it, instant runoff and other systems. None chose the plurality system; ten chose instant runoff and 15 chose approval voting.

What’s wrong with the arguments recorded by the “Numbers Guy” is that they pay no attention to what a voting system is for. We vote on a plethora of different matters. In many cases – the Hugo Awards, for instance, or the presidency of the Garden Club – all that we care about is pleasing the largest proportion of the electorate on this particular occasion. No system can guarantee that. (I’m told there’s a rigorous mathematical proof of that proposition, and it certainly seems intuitively obvious.) Still, if that is the only objective, there’s much to be said for first-past-the-post’s competitors.

Governments, however, are more than the method used to select their leadership, and they have to continue year after year. A voting system that gums up the rest of the machinery is a bad idea and will be detrimental to the country’s health, even if every single election results in maximum voter satisfaction.

The reason is that how voting is conducted affects how politics is organized. First-past-the-post tends toward two broad-based, more or less permanent parties. Other systems encourage small parties, extreme parties, party splits and coalition rule. The tendency doesn’t always prevail perfectly. There are non-FPTP countries with coalitions that almost never separate, leading to a close simulacrum of a two-party system (Liberals-Nationals vs. Labor-Greens in Australia, CDU-CSU-FDP vs. SDP-Greens in Germany), while both Britain and Canada, with FPTP, have gone through multi-party periods (albeit that hasn’t been the norm in either and may be coming to an end in both). In general, though, two strong parties result from FPTP, a multitude of weak ones from everything else.

The argument for other ways of voting is, then, an implicit argument against political parties. For the Hugos or the Garden Club, parties (er, political parties) don’t add anything, but the high-minded notion that governments can dispense with them is – even though some of our Founding Fathers believed it – a fine example of nonsense tottering on its stilts.

Addendum: In the Veal Ballot, voters rank the candidates, as in Alternative Voting. Each candidate is then compared against each of the other candidates one-on-one. The one who is ranked higher by more voters wins that matchup. The one who wins every individual contest is the winner of the whole.

There is one case in which this system won’t work. As I said, no conceivable system infallibly picks a candidate whom most voters would prefer to any other. This one falls apart if the voters’ preferences are transitive, that is, if they prefer A to B, B to C and C to A. For an individual voter, that’s an irrational outcome (not that some voters aren’t irrational). It’s easy to demonstrate, though, that a transitive result can be generated by a group of voters with nontransitive preferences (proof left as an exercise for the reader). The possibility isn’t huge – at least, it didn’t happen with any of the Chicon GoH slots – but is definitely greater than zero.

Correction: As Mark Olson points out in his comment, “transitive” should read “intransitive” supra, and vice versa. And I should be heartily embarrassed. Or can I claim that I’m just trying to emulate the President? No, I’d rather be embarrassed.

The State of the Union: A Query and a Comment

The President relegated foreign affairs to a secondary position, as if we were living happily at peace. What little he did say was on the lines of, “Every day in every way, things are getting better and better”. My question: What foreign country or leader that wishes ill for America is in a worse position today than one year ago?

I even have the answer: Manuel Zelaya. If there’s another, he or it doesn’t come to mind.

That the President dislikes the outcome of the Citizens United case is his right, but he has no right to stoop to the blatant falsehood that the decision will –

open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections. Well I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities.

The Court did not hold have foreigners have a First Amendment right to influence American electoral campaigns. As former Federal Election Commission chairman Bradley A. Smith points out, the law prohibits foreign nationals, specifically including foreign corporations, from making campaign contributions or engaging in independent expenditures in behalf of candidates. Citizens United didn’t overturn those prohibitions.

Ironically, it is the Obama Administration that has shown an affinity for extending Constitutional rights to foreigners, at least if they are enemy terrorists. And the Obama Presidential campaign’s Web site disabled routine security measures, making it possible for foreign nationals to contribute without detection, if they were so inclined.

Professor Smith says that the President’s statement is “either blithering ignorance of the law, or demogoguery of the worst kind”. I don’t see that those explanations are mutually exclusive.

(Painfully Naïve) Quote of the Day

Jennifer Rubin asks,

USA Today blasts Big Labor’s Employee Free Choice Act. Shouldn’t every candidate be asked why their election warrants a secret ballot but a vote to unionize a workplace doesn’t?

C’mon, Jen. What makes you think that liberal politicians believe that “their election warrants a secret ballot”? For years, liberals have been working to expand mail-in balloting, which is not secret in any meaningful sense. Someone who bribes or browbeats voters can check their ballots before mailing to make sure that they are being cast the right way. He can even take them to the post office himself. That’s exactly the assurance that political bosses have always wanted – and find hard to obtain when voting is done in the privacy of a booth.

Here in Cook County, one of the epicenters of liberalism, the inroads on ballot secrecy go further. In fact, the secret ballot has been completely abolished. In this enlightened city, the ballot is an oversized sheet with the candidates’ names in large, readable type. After it has been marked, it must be inserted face up into a device that checks for under- and overvoting. A cover sheet is available to block third party scrutiny, but its use is optional. Naturally, the recipient of a bribe or a threat, seeing a Democratic Party operative looking his way, won’t be so foolish as to hide his vote.

Many conservatives are worried this year about spurious votes. They’re right to worry. Cleaning up the election process and limiting opportunities for dishonest shenanigans is important. But, just as with union organizing elections, once the secret ballot is taken away, democracy becomes a farce, whether or not it is also vitiated by fraud.

Democrats Discover Vote Fraud

For years, Democratic politicians have insisted that worries over fraudulent ballots are a right-wing myth and that the only purpose of security measures is to “suppress voter turnout”. Now it looks increasingly likely that Florida or Michigan will restage their Democratic primaries. The only affordable way to do that, since the states are unlikely to pay for the process, is an all-mail election. Suddenly, the Wall Street Journal’s Political Diary (free this week, normally a mere $3.95/month) notes, some Dems sound a lot like worrywart, vote-suppressing Republicans:

Senator Carl Levin of Michigan told ABC News that there is a “security issue” with a mail-in ballot. “How do you make sure that hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million or more ballots can be properly counted and that duplicate ballots can be avoided?” Mr. Levin has vivid memories of how absentee ballots have routinely been abused in Detroit and other cities by unscrupulous candidates.

In Florida, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Miami has her own issues with a mail-in ballot. “It’s fraught with problems and now is not the time to be experimenting when we’re talking about stakes this high,” she says. “We still have very raw nerves from the 2000 recount.”

Senator Levin and Rep. Schultz might also wish to ponder how easy it will be, in a race that has been marked by feverish emotions and a soupçon of violence, for over-the-top backers of either candidate to threaten or bribe. The insoluble “security issue” is the absence of any way to guarantee that ballots will be secret.

Let me confess that I’ll come near to bursting with glee if the Florida Supreme Court has to resolve Clinton v. Obama. Even if that never happens, it is enlightening to hear about Senator Levin’s “vivid memories of how absentee ballots have routinely been abused in Detroit and other cities by unscrupulous candidates”. Perhaps those memories will stick with him the next time a bill to crack down on vote fraud appears on the Congressional agenda?

The Smooth Path to Vote Fraud

Last week the Milwaukee Police Department released its Report of the Investigation into the November 2, 2004 General Election in the City of Milwaukee. The impetus for this inquiry was the discovery that the number of votes counted in the city exceeded the number of recorded voters by more than 5,000. John Kerry’s margin of victory in the state as a whole was only about 11,000, so suspicions arose that the election in Wisconsin might have been stolen. Certainly, that was far more plausible than the paranoid theory that Karl Rove conjured up over 100,000 spurious votes in Ohio.

Jim Geraghty’s reaction was, “Wisconsin’s Voter Fraud Report Ought To Be National News”. It wasn’t, of course. According to Nexis and Google News searches, the New York Sun was the only non-Wisconsin newspaper to take notice. (An Associated Press wire was used on-line by a couple of publications but seems never to have appeared in print.)

This lack of interest reflects, sadly, the media’s habit of turning its eyes away from evidence of the slovenly conduct of U.S. elections. The Milwaukee report spells out how simple it is to cast illegal votes – and how inadequate procedures and incompetent recordkeeping make it virtually impossible either to catch fraud as it occurs or to prosecute it afterward.

The police investigators were never able to track down where the 5,000-plus ghost votes came from, much less determine whether they were legitimate. Along the way, they found that –

• The city has no effective safeguards against casting multiple ballots or impersonating other voters, nor against voting by felons, illegal aliens or nonresidents of Wisconsin;

• Illegal voting can rarely be uncovered until after the fact, when it is too late to prevent the malefactor’s ballot from being counted;

• In any event, the Election Commission’s records and procedures are in such shambles that violations are generally found only through blind luck; and

• For the same reason, prosecutions are generally futile, as the official deficiencies render almost any charge subject to reasonable doubt.

How much fraud actually occurred in 2004? The investigators cannot tell. That the will to defraud existed is shown by the clearest possible evidence: At least 16 out-of-state campaign workers, ten employed by “a major political party”, six by a section 527 organization, themselves voted illegally. I doubt that a man who cheats with his own ballot will resist the temptation to aid and abet cheating by others.

At least as disturbing as the prospect of malfeasance by parties or activist groups are the opportunities for “distributed vote fraud” by highly motivated but uncoordinated partisans. An organized effort to generate a few thousand extra votes runs a modicum of risk; an operative may squeal. If, however, a couple of thousand unconnected individuals cast one or two illegal ballots apiece, there is only a minimal chance that they will be either found out or successfully prosecuted. If you believed that electoral defeat would be tantamount to the second coming of the Third Reich, wouldn’t you feel the urge to perform that small, unethical action in pursuit of the Greater Good?

Democrats and liberals – Barack Obama is typical – scoff at the notion of election fraud and urge measures to make it easier to commit. No doubt that is due to innocent naivete, and they will change course after reading the findings from Milwaukee.

The Folly of Mail-In Voting: Another Demonstration

A couple of days ago, two weeks after its primary, New Mexico finished counting Democratic ballots and awarded the Tin Lady a narrow victory over the Obamamessiah. Less publicized is the fact, noted by OpinionJournal Political Diary (a $3.95/month bargain) that –

California still has almost one million votes uncounted from its Feb. 5 Super Tuesday primary.

What is taking so long? In California, almost half the state now votes by absentee ballot – a form of voting that requires far more processing than regular ballots. . . .

Imagine the nightmare if a vast ocean of uncounted absentee ballots in several key states delays the resolution of a close presidential contest. Florida’s disastrous 2000 vote recount could appear trivial by comparison. There’s a lesson here. Perhaps the “convenience” of casting absentee ballots ought to be weighed against the inconvenience of having to count them by laborious means, creating delays and uncertainty and distrust in the outcome of elections.

The principal objection to voting by mail is, of course, that it makes ballot secrecy optional. The privacy of the voting booth is a check on bribery and intimidation, for there is no way to be sure that bought or browbeaten votes will be cast as directed. It’s hard to believe that Americans are willing to dispense casually with that bulwark of democracy, but if it really doesn’t matter any more, shouldn’t we at least pause before running the risk that a Presidential election may someday turn on votes that aren’t counted until weeks after the fact?

The Exile-and-Return Strategy

While many conservatives are rallying behind John McCain, others would rather the country elected an unabashed leftist than a self-identified, but not wholly reliable, conservative. Their strategy is reculer pour mieux sauter, pull back in order to leap farther. In the words of its blondest proponent, “If Hillary is elected president, we’ll have a four-year disaster, with Republicans ferociously opposing her, followed by Republicans zooming back into power, as we did in 1980 and 1994, and 2000.” A couple of years of exile will be followed by a glorious return.

I don’t see how anyone who looks forward gleefully to “a four-year disaster” for her country can be regarded as either patriotic or honorable. Isn’t that the mirror image of the Krazy Kossack Kidz’ lust for defeat in Iraq? But let’s waive that point and descend to the level of practicalities. That Bill Clinton’s wife or Tony Rezko’s dear friend would perform poorly as President seems to me highly likely, yet we should keep in mind that a Democratic President and Congress can do a great deal to cement partisan hegemony without governing well. Here are three simple ways in which victorious Democrats could raise huge obstacles to a GOP comeback:

First, they could enhance the strength of labor unions. Organized labor long ago lost out in the marketplace; it now represents less than a tenth of private sector workers. In response, unions have, quite rationally, looked for a different product, and their choice has fallen on left-wing activism. The shrunken remnant of the labor movement is still able to extract large sums of money and large numbers of political foot soldiers from its diminished ranks, all deployed for the benefit of the Democratic Party. The Democrats have returned the favor by cutting the budget of the Department of Labor unit that examines union finances (openness about money is anathema to many unions) and, more boldly, trying to abolish secret ballots in organizing elections. The latter effort failed. It might not in a more favorable environment the next time around.

Second, election laws can be “reformed” to facilitate fraud and intimidation. Nobody favors those openly, of course, but Bill Clinton was indifferent to them when he pushed the “motor voter” law through Congress. The Democratic Party vigorously opposes requiring identification at polling places and just as vigorously supports mail-in ballots, which, lacking any assurance of secrecy, make it easy to bribe, browbeat or impersonate voters.

I might note that here in Cook County, where the Democratic Party has untrammeled control, the secret ballot has become optional even at polling places. The ballot is now the size of a pillow case, and how it is marked can be seen easily by any attentive observer. Voters who take the effort can cover theirs up; those who have been paid for their votes or warned of the consequences of voting wrongly have an easy way to demonstrate that they’ve kept their bargains.

Third, plenty of liberals loudly favor stifling talk radio, Fox News and other perceived right-wing outlets through a revival of the Fairness Doctrine. We can anticipate a big push to turn words into laws when and if Democrats control all three branches of the government.

At least the first two of these three measures are near certainties if Senator Clinton or Obama wins a sweeping victory. Any of them will make the path back from exile more arduous than optimistic Republicans currently envision.

A Sidelight on the U.S. Attorney Uproar

That the President dismissed political appointees for political reasons is a pretty lame scandal. Of course, the political reasons could themselves raise questions. For instance, suppose that he had fired the U.S. attorney in his home town and appointed a personal friend to fill the slot at a time when he himself was a potential target of investigation for financial corruption. Oh, wait! That was not a scandal. Just ask any Democrat.

The supposedly scandalous subtext of the President’s now controversial decision to fire eight U.S. attorneys (all his own appointees) is that they were punished for failure to pursue vote fraud allegations aggressively. Note the unspoken assumption behind the accusation: that investigating fraud at the polls is a partisan, anti-Democrat course of action – which makes sense only if Democrats are fraud’s willing beneficiaries. I wouldn’t have thought them eager to trumpet that distinction.

Pushing prosecutors to ferret out real crimes is scandalous only in the make-believe world of the Left. It’s not quite the same as (link above) –

Jay Stephens, then U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia, was investigating then Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, and was “within 30 days” of making a decision on an indictment [when he was fired by President Clinton]. Mr. Rostenkowski, who was shepherding the Clinton's economic program through Congress, eventually went to jail on mail fraud charges and was later pardoned by Mr. Clinton.

The troublesome aspect of this affair is the ineptitude on display at the Justice Department. The attorney-general certainly looks like a bungler or a liar. OTOH, it’s not easy for an outsider to evaluate his management skills on the basis of what is probably a very partial, and perhaps a grotesquely distorted, picture of events. From my own days as a federal bureaucrat, I have an idea of how far press accounts can stray from any version of reality.

Addendum: OpinionJournal Political Diary (worth a lot more than Times Select and cheaper, too) offers this insight into one of the victims of the “massacre”:

Take the case of John McKay, a Seattle lawyer and Democrat who parlayed his connections with GOP Rep. Jennifer Dunn to follow his older brother’s footsteps and become the U.S. Attorney in Washington State. During the contentious recounts surrounding the razor-thin 2004 governor’s race there, Mr. McKay stood on the sidelines and adamantly refused to investigate evidence that King County election officials were breaking the law in how they chose to conduct the recount. Clear evidence had surfaced, for instance, that ballots from 170 unregistered voters were unlawfully counted and that King County officials may have covered up that fact. The race was eventually decided in favor of Democrat Christine Gregoire after the third recount gave her a 139-vote lead over Republican Dino Rossi.

Tom McCabe, head of the Building Industry Association of Washington, wrote to GOP Rep. Doc Hastings calling for the White House to replace Mr. McKay. I [John Fund, author of the invaluable Stealing Elections] was copied on Mr. McCabe’s letter, and spent some time reviewing the evidence he had accumulated. While it’s true Mr. McKay had a full docket of cases at the time, his complete lack of interest in voting irregularities during the recall battle certainly was odd.

That’s also the judgment of Michael McDonald, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who authored a liberal Brennan Center report last year that debunked vote fraud allegations by the New Jersey Republican Party. While Mr. McDonald believes that Washington State’s 2004 election did not turn up evidence of significant voter fraud, he says he finds it “curious that McKay decided not to prosecute the 40 (some) felons who provided sworn affidavits of casting fraudulent votes that the Republicans offered as evidence in the gubernatorial recount trial.” Mr. McKay himself told the Seattle Times this week: “We never found any evidence of criminal conduct.” That is clearly belied by the facts.

Stealing votes is a far bigger threat to our country than anything that Scooter Libby ever did. If getting rid of eight Presidential appointees was part of a White House effort to address it, the only valid criticism is that much more ought to have been done.

One Illinois Election That the Dems May Actually Have to Steal

OpinionJournal Political Diary (which you, too, can receive in your own e-inbox for a paltry $3.95 a month) today paints a picture of the utter hopelessness of the Thompson-Edgar-Kjellander-Topinka simulacrum of a political party:

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich may be the luckiest governor in the country. The Democrat’s approval ratings are in the low 40s. He's been raked over the coals in recent weeks by the Chicago media for handing a state job to a woman two weeks after her husband slipped him a $1,500 check at his daughter’s birthday party. And last week a top fundraiser and advisor to the governor, Antoine “Tony” Rezko, was indicted on 24 counts of corruption in what U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald called a “pay-for-play scheme on steroids.” Mr. Rezko promptly skipped town, missing a court appearance on Friday, and is now thought to be somewhere in the Middle East.

But so far, Mr. Blagojevich’s Republican challenger, Judy Baar Topinka, hasn’t been able to exploit any of this to her advantage. Her support among registered voters has recently been clocked at the high 20s. And as the current State Treasurer, she’s having trouble getting out from under the shadow of former GOP Gov. George Ryan, who is scheduled to shuffle off to the federal pen in January after being convicted on corruption charges earlier this year.

Twelve years ago, Republicans swept the statewide elective offices and both houses of the legislature. Unhappily, that triumph elevated a real confederacy of dunces to positions of power. After a decade-long parade of corruption and ineptitude, the shadow of the Illini GOP is in no position to call the Blagojevich kettle dirty gray. It has also managed to fritter away the party’s base by pandering to an imaginary cohort of pro-abortion, pro-gun control, anti-death penalty, pro-same-sex marriage metric football fans in the Chicago suburbs.

Nonetheless, the same day that brought OpinionJournal’s gloomy recap produced a startling bit of good news. A Tribure/WGN poll found that Republican Tony Peraica is in a neck-and-neck race for Cook Country Board President, with a big chunk of the Democratic vote in his camp and a huge proportion of voters undecided.

[Todd] Stroger leads Peraica 39 percent to 36 percent in the survey, which has an error margin of 5 percentage points. The poll of 481 likely Cook County voters was conducted Oct. 8-11.

The number of undecided voters – 22 percent – shows the race is still very fluid as the Nov. 7 election nears.

The poll found Stroger, the son of former board President John Stroger, has nearly universal name recognition. But it also showed Peraica has had some success chipping away at Stroger’s Democratic base.

It’s been 40 years since a Republican won the County Board presidency. But Stroger may be weakened by the campaign Forrest Claypool waged against his father in the March primary and by misgivings over the way Democratic leaders selected Stroger for the November ballot after his father retired.

The new poll found that 21 percent of self-described Democrats said they would vote for the Republican.

Stroger père suffered a stroke a week before the primary, but the party bosses concealed the extent of his disability until he had defeated a strong challenge from an “outsider” Democrat, then handed the nomination to the undistinguished Stroger fils.

I can’t be immensely optimistic about the outcome. The Democratic machine has historically been able to turn out 101 percent of the vote when it needs to, and Cook County this year made the secret ballot optional – I kid you not – thus making party discipline easier to enforce. Still, it is pleasant to think that the Dems may be put to the trouble of having to steal at least one election in Deep Blue Illinois.

Quote of the Day

Cliff May:

I was at Disney World last week. Why am I sharing this with you? Because to get into the park I had not only to use an identification card – I also was required to insert two fingers into a little machine. The machine read my finger prints — instantly confirming that I was who I claimed to be, ensuring that I wasn’t using grandma’s card.

Interesting, is it not, that we have such biometric indicators at Disney World but not yet at airports?

It’s even more interesting that we don’t use devices like these to protect against vote fraud. Or is it worse to cheat the Disney conglomerate out of a few dollars than legitimate voters out of the candidate they elected?

The Friends of Fraud at the Polls

Senator Mitch McConnell’s amendment to require voters to present photo identification in all federal elections made it into the immigration bill by a 49–48 vote. Why was such an obviously benign anti-fraud measure so hotly contested? Here is the account from OpinionJournal Political Diary (a mere $3.95 a month):

The eyebrow-raising news is that every Democratic senator opposed what would appear to be a no-brainer of an idea.

Mr. McConnell noted that in modern life it’s almost impossible for someone not to have a photo ID – it’s required for everything from boarding a plane to entering a federal building. His proposal would have included a grant to ensure that states could afford to provide a free ID to anyone who needed one. [That isn’t a budget buster. In Illinois, for instance, the charge for a state photo ID, valid for five years, is five dollars.] Requiring someone to show a photo ID would cut down on potential fraud and misrepresentation at the polls, especially in states such as Wisconsin where voters can register to vote and cast a ballot on Election Day with no waiting period. . . .

The debate over photo ID was revealing. Democratic Senator Barack Obama of Illinois inexplicably claimed the proposal was a solution without a problem because there was no voter fraud in the country. Coming from a man who grew up in and represents Chicago, his statement left some colleagues in slackjawed amazement. . . .

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll last month found that 80% of Americans favored a requirement that photo ID be shown at the polls, with only 7% opposed. Nonetheless, every Democratic senator lined up in opposition – a clear a sign that the interest groups that support Democrats must feel threatened by the idea of ballot security.

Republicans took note of the fact that even vulnerable Democratic incumbents up for re-election this year such as Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Maria Cantwell of Washington state, both of whom live in states where there have been allegations of voter fraud in recent elections, turned thumbs-down on the idea. You can bet that television ads highlighting their stand will be part of this fall’s political mix.

Senator Obama, I note, continues his trajectory from fresh voice of moderation to tired party hack and moonbat fellow traveler. Or perhaps he reasons that, since Cook County has effectively abolished the secret ballot, safeguards against fraud are rather beside the point.

If the Democrats’ prospects are rosy in November – and I don’t doubt that they are – couldn’t they at least have the grace to give up the advantages gained by bringing phony voters to the polls? They still have absentee ballot fraud as a backup. Besides, the McConnell Amendment won’t take effect until the 2008 election, so there will be plenty of opportunity to create a huge Dem majority in Congress this year. After that, surely the party’s commitment to dealing with pressing national issues, that is, to a foreign policy aligned with France, expanded domestic spending, higher taxes and a determined blind eye to the long-term problems of Social Security and Medicare, will secure a permanent place in the affection of American voters, making stuffed ballot boxes superfluous.

Balm in the Nativist Gilead

Is it possible that something good will come out of the immigration bill? My post below blames it for recent plunges in the Dow and calls it a sad sign of creeping idiotarianism on the Right. Nonetheless, just as something good (health savings accounts) accompanied the politically useless and financially disastrous Medicare prescription drug benefit, there is a chance that immigration restrictionism will yield a first step toward urgently needed electoral reform. The National Journal Hotline reports that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) has introduced an amendment to add a new section to the Help America Vote Act of 2002, one that ought to have been there from the beginning:

SEC. 304. IDENTIFICATION OF VOTERS AT THE POLLS.

(a) IN GENERAL.– Notwithstanding the requirements of section 303(b), each State shall require individuals casting ballots in an election for Federal office in person to present before voting a current valid photo identification which is issued by a governmental entity and which meets the requirements of section 7212 of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (49 U.S.C. 30301 note).

(b) EFFECTIVE DATE.– Each State shall be required to comply with the requirements of subsection (a) on and after January 1, 2008.

Ideally, Congress would also outlaw promiscuous voting by mail, which both facilitates fraud and makes a mockery of the secret ballot, but a safeguard against cheating at the polls is at least a start.

Well worth noting is this comment on the Hotline post:

I was an international observer for the 1997 Mexican Federal Elections and in Mexico, every registered voter has a Voter ID card that includes their picture, fingerprint, and signature in addition to a magnetic strip, hologram and other security measures to prevent fraud. . . .

McConnell’s amendment doesn't go as far as issuing a Voter ID card, but it isn’t a bad idea and it won’t deter anyone from lawfully voting who is entitled to do so.

Of course, our Angry Right nativists may refuse to go along with something that Mexico has been doing for ten years, so my confidence that the McConnell Amendment will pass isn’t unbounded.

Further reading: John Fund, “Jimmy Carter is Right”:

The photo ID issue is being joined with the immigration debate because there is growing anecdotal evidence that voter registration by noncitizens is a problem. All that it takes to register is for someone to fill out a postcard, and I have interviewed people who were still allowed to register without checking the box that indicated they were a citizen. Several California counties report that an increasing number of registered voters called up for jury duty write back saying they are ineligible because they aren’t citizens.

The man who in 1994 assassinated Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio in Tijuana had registered to vote at least twice in the U.S. although he was not a citizen. An investigation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service into alleged fraud in a 1996 Orange County, Calif., congressional race revealed that “4,023 illegal voters possibly cast ballots in the disputed election between Republican Robert Dornan and Democrat Loretta Sanchez.”

It’s certainly true that new ID rules alone wouldn’t eliminate all the potential for fraud. Much of the voter fraud taking place today occurs not at polling places but through absentee ballots. In some states party officials are allowed to pick up absentee ballots, deliver them to voters and return them, creating opportunities for all manner of illegal behavior. Other states allow organizations to pay “bounties” for each absentee ballot they deliver, which provides an economic incentive for fraud. The Carter-Baker commission recommended that states eliminate both practices.

In a politically polarized country, photo ID for voting is a rare issue that enjoys across-the-board support among the general public. A Wall Street Journal/NBC poll last month found that 80% of voters favored a photo ID requirement, with 62% favoring it strongly. Only 7% were opposed. Numbers that high indicate the notion has overwhelming support among all demographic and racial groups.

Unfortunately, the recalcitrant seven percent are overrepresented among politicians whose careers increasingly depend on fraud for their continuance.

While Conservatives Fiddle

Does anybody really and truly believe that the number one problem facing the United States of America right now is illegal immigration, closely followed by unnecessary public works projects? That’s certainly the impression that a reader of the right-of-center blogosphere would have gotten over the past few weeks. The elite media and the Demented Left screech that every action taken by the Bush Administration is a “scandal” – from declassifying information that the Left would prefer be kept secret to spreading vicious truths (as Walter Winchell would have called them) about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to ignoring a minority opinion about Iraq’s pre-war bioweapons research to inviting wounded soldiers to accompany the Vice President in throwing out the first pitch at a baseball game. In reply, conservatives glare at each other.

The Right is engaging in politics as usual, with a multiplicity of issues jockeying for priority, while much of the Left – certainly its most energetic segment – has embarked on the nonviolent (so far) equivalent of civil war. Conservatives with differing ideas about immigration policy revile each other; leftists are willing to ally de facto with friends of Islamic extremism, whose ideology they would ordinarily abhor, for the higher purpose of winning their “war”. I don’t doubt that they see themselves as doing nothing worse than what Roosevelt and Churchill did when they joined with Stalin against Hitler.

It should be no surprise that, when one side of a conflict isn’t really engaged in it, the other has a tremendous advantage. Thence comes President Bush’s low standing in public opinion polls and the general perception that the Democrats could gain control of one or both Houses of Congress.

Yet, as last weekend’s election in Italy reminds us, voters’ minds concentrate as the day of decision nears. Silvio Berlusconi had all of the current Bush/GOP problems, – too much government spending, too little economic reform and a full quota of media-driven sourness toward the liberation of Iraq – with the additional burden of an economy that has barely grown over the past five years. Polls two weeks ago showed his Casa delle Libertà coalition hopelessly behind. Yet, once Italians thought about the choice between the current government and an assortment of leftists headed by one of Europe’s dullest America-haters, they came within a whisker of choosing Berlusconi again. In fact, voters who actually reside in the country gave the CDL majorities in both chambers; expatriate votes tipped the scale, an unexpected happenstance that may or may not be suspicious.

The lesson from Italy is that gloom about the November elections in America is premature. Nonetheless, the Left’s dominance of newspapers and television is a powerful weapon, as evidenced by its success in molding public opinion through sheer force of slanders regularly repeated. Republicans and conservatives can’t ignore the fact that we start as a serious disadvantage.

Unfortunately, while Karl Rove is more of a political genius than I, there are occasions when geniuses in a field can go badly wrong. Many signs suggest that the GOP intends to avoid a “national” campaign this year, counting instead on the magic of incumbency and the mantra that “All politics is local” (which Democrats chanted right up to November 8, 1994). As Abraham Lincoln might have said, “All politics is local some of the time, and some politics is local all of the time, but all politics isn’t local all of the time.” This is one of those times, unless I misread the portents badly, when the local aspect will be secondary. Here, then, are my suggestions, which the Roves of the world can doubtless improve, for national themes:

1. The economy, stupid. Conservatives have been lamenting, not unreasonably, the misguided parts of the White House’s economic agenda, particularly ever higher levels of spending and the President’s unwillingness to veto anything. Isn’t it time to attend to the fact that, less than ideal though they are, the policies of the Administration and Congress have been highly successful at producing growth and jobs while keeping inflation at a relatively low level. If Bill Clinton got credit for the 1994–2000 economic expansion, and George W. Bush was pilloried for the effects of the end-of-term Clinton recession (which began before Bush took office and was cut short by his tax cuts), aren’t Republicans entitled to credit for the current expansion? Shouldn’t they at least talk about it as loudly as Dems did about the dotcom boom?

2. Contrasting opinions on dealing with terrorism. The Democrats’ strategy for defeating Islamofascism amounts to wishing problems away, bugging out if they don’t vanish, and objecting to existing anti-terrorist measures (e. g.,, eavesdropping on al-Qa’eda’s telephone and computer communications) in favor of imaginary ones (like inspecting every cargo container that enters U.S. ports, which would be a quick way to bring economic growth to a halt). The President and his allies need to say more about what is actually happening in Iraq (e. g., declining violence and major economic progress, neither of which gets a lot of attention even on the right, and what the world would look like if Saddam Hussein were still in power. Correcting the media’s instant misdraft of history may be a hopeless challenge, but its biased picture of the present is less fixed in the public mind.

3. Tax cuts, health savings accounts and anti-Kelo legislation. All are popular as well as intelligent, and we can promise more far-reaching reforms after Democratic obstructionism has been rebuked at the polls.

4. Judges. Winning a pair of Supreme Court fights was heartening but not the end of the contest between Rule by Judges and the Rule of Law. The electorate should be reminded that two of the best qualified nominees ever did not get a majority of Democratic Senators’ votes and that the Dems are still blocking important appellate appointments. It also wouldn’t hurt to compare and contrast the two parties’ ideal judges: The Democrats’ favorites gave us Kelo and Grutter on the federal level and same-sex marriage by judicial fiat in Massachusetts.

5. Honest elections. Conservatives were outraged by the slovenliness and outright fraud in the 2004 elections, but memories seem to be fading. In the long run, democracy will not survive if phony voters can cancel legitimate ones. I modestly reiterate my own package of electoral reforms.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t elevate earmarks, immigration, cloning, abortion, rights/privileges for homosexuals or other issues beloved of certain elements of the Right and loathed by others to the national level. I don’t say this in hopes that they’ll go away. All will have to be settled someday, and they may be important in particular races this year. But a good political campaign plan, like a good plan of battle, is clear and simple, not cluttered with multiple objectives and opportunities for debilitating friction. Clarity and simplicity demand the application mutatis mutandis of Dr. Johnson’s advice to writers, “Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”

Conservatives have been fiddling all winter while matches are lit beneath our country. The first goal this year must be to keep the Demented Left out of power. Next year will be time enough to deal with border crossings and bridges to nowhere.

Voting in Chicago: New Style, Old Substance

This morning I made the futile gesture of casting a vote in the Illinois Republican primary. The State GOP has spent years destroying itself and has as much chance of winning an honest election as the opposition in Belarus does of winning a dishonest one. Not that we’re going to have to worry about an honest election, if my impressions of the new ballot system are at all correct.

I knew when I entered the polling place that a new, “high-tech” method of voting was waiting for me, but I hadn’t bothered to learn any details. I was presented with a sheet the size of, if not a bedspread, at least a large pillow: very big type and lots of white space, very disproportionate to the two contested Republican races in my precinct. I lugged it to an uncurtained stand, where, using a “special marker” that looked like it had been bought at Office Depot, I marked “X” next to my choices. I may as well tell you that they were Bill Brady for governor and Steve Rauschenberger for lieutenant governor. Any possibility of secrecy vanished when I started toward the vote-checking apparatus and was informed that an election judge had to initial my ballot first. Given its layout, there was no way that she could avoid seeing how it was marked. In fact, I noticed her eyes glancing over it (probably wondering how such a rarity as a Republican in the lavender Lakeview neighborhood would vote). That doesn’t matter in this case, but it would matter if I were a bribed elector and she a party functionary checking to make sure that I’d kept my promises.

The paper was then fed through the apparatus to ensure that I hadn’t under- or over-voted. Optionally, I could place another sheet on top so that my choices wouldn’t be visible to bystanders. Optionally. Here was the third opportunity, after the unshielded booth and the election judge’s roving eye, for my vote to be disclosed to whoever might have an interest.

Once upon a time, the secret ballot was regarded as both a foundation stone of democracy and a prophylactic against fraud. Now it isn’t even a consideration. Given that the new system is to be used in Cook County, I don’t think it cynical to suggest that the omission was not accidental, though I do wonder why, in view of the decrepit state of their opposition, the Democrats are going to the trouble to fix a sure thing.

Life Imitates Scrappleface

Is it real –

To eradicate “corruption,” leading theorists of campaign-finance reform, such as Ohio State University law professor (and former Ohio state solicitor) Edward Foley, Loyola law prof Richard Hasen, and radical redistributionist philosopher Ronald Dworkin, want to replace privately financed campaigns with a system in which government would guarantee “equal dollars per voter,” as Foley puts it, perhaps by giving all Americans the same number of political “coupons,” which they could then redeem on the political activities of their choice. This superpowerful government would ban all other political expenditures and require all political groups to get operating licenses from it, with stiff criminal penalties for violators. The experts have even started calling for draconian media restrictions to achieve their egalitarian aims. In Foley’s view, the chilling of speech is “the necessary price we must pay in order to have an electoral system that guarantees equal opportunity for all.”

Or is it Scrappleface?

(2006-01-18) — Democrat National Committee Chairman Howard Dean today unveiled a four-point plan to rid Congress of the “Republican culture of corruption” by creating a “level playing field” for all citizens regardless of economic class. . . .

Mr. Dean said the measure, dubbed the Honest Open Government act includes the following provisions:

– Establishment of a $12 billion political influence fund, financed through a progressive usage tax on heat, light, oxygen and friction.

– Means testing to determine which citizens cannot already afford to make influential political contributions

– Regular distribution of Influence Stamps to all entitled citizens.

– Redemption of Influence Stamps at any Congressional office in exchange for personal or political favors.

I prefer the Scrappleface version myself.

Vote Fraud: No Cure from the Courts

Today’s court ruling on the challenge to last year’s Washington State gubernatorial election was almost certainly wrong in a factual sense: There can be little doubt that illegal ballots gave Christine Gregoire her tainted victory. The massive malfeasance of King County’s election officials (along with lesser malfeasance in other counties) is indisputable (nor did Judge Bridges deny its existence), and its impact was clearly not random, as anyone who has followed the tortuous contest (best covered by Sound Politics) is aware.

What was wrong in fact may nonetheless be correct in law. Because the ballots cast by ineligible voters or added by zealous election workers (hundreds more votes were counted in King County than the number of people recorded as voting there) can’t be segregated from the mass of legal votes, the plaintiffs faced an insurmountable burden of proof. And maybe that burden should be insurmountable. One can readily imagine that a contrary decision in this case encouraging court battles over every close election and leading judges to find “creative” reasons to toss out results that they dislike.

The central problem with the Washington State election process – and with elections all around the country – is that fraud is easy to commit, difficult to detect, hard to punish and, as Judge Bridges’ ruling demonstrates, nearly impossible to reverse. That is especially true of the phenomenon to which Jim Miller has given the name “distributed vote fraud”: fraud committed by individual citizens on their own initiative, as opposed to the centralized ballot box stuffing of old-fashioned political machines. It is easy to buy or extort votes, because mail-in voting makes ballot secrecy optional. It is easy to register a non-existent “voter” or to keep on the rolls one who has died or moved out of state. It is easy for felons, aliens, nonresidents and other ineligibles to vote. It is easy to cast someone else’s ballot, either by mail or at the polling place (where identification standards are lower than for getting onto an airplane). In Mr. Miller’s words,

An analogy may illuminate what has happened. Suppose that a manager in a retail chain wanted, for whatever reason, to encourage theft by employees. It would be easy to think of ways for the manager to do that, from getting rid of cash registers to keeping poorer inventories. Anything that made it easier to steal would increase theft, since there are always some who will be tempted. But the manager would have no direct connection to the theft. He would have facilitated it, but there would be no way to prosecute him for the theft.

Similarly, increasingly lax election laws have facilitated fraud while diminishing the likelihood that anybody will be held accountable. When one adds the Manichaean conviction of many leftists that conservatives are latter-day Nazis who must be kept out of power by any means necessary, debacles like that in Washington State – or in Wisconsin, where the Presidential election may well have been stolen for John Kerry – are foreseeable and unsurprising.

In the long run, distributed vote fraud is in no one’s best interests. Right now, the game seems to be mostly a left-wing sport, but conservatives can play too if it becomes evident that there is no honest way to win elections. Rather than have that happen, we should stop this downward spiral now. Let me repeat my suggested package of modest reforms:

1. All votes should have to be cast in person, unless the voter was absent from his home county on election day for a good reason. Casting an absentee ballot without good cause should be a criminal offense. (That may sound drastic, but the practice needs to be reined in, and only criminal penalties will persuade voters and election officials to take a prohibition seriously.) To ease any burden that these restrictions may impose, states should be allowed to set up pre-election day polling stations, as Florida plans to do in future elections. Also needed are stringent standards to make sure that legitimate absentees, such as soldiers serving abroad, receive ballots in time to return them.

2. Every voter should have to present photographic identification at the polling place. Every state issues photo ID’s, so this requirement is no hardship.

3. Voters should have to register at least 30 days before the election, and in federal elections states should be required to verify that new registrants are eligible voters who are not registered anywhere else. Congress should appropriate money – even if it means cutting a farm subsidy here or federally funded museum there – to pay for this process. We will need to figure out what to do about people who move within 30 days of an election, who of course should not be disenfranchised, but that is a detail.

4. Hand recounts, which are prone to unintentional or deliberate human error, should be permitted only under extraordinary circumstances.

Alternatively, we can let democracy degenerate into competitive theft. The choice is that stark. Our children will not thank us for getting it wrong.

Obama’s Moderation, Wisconsin Vote Fraud, Etc.

■ Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.), an African-American (his father is from Kenya) whom the Jim Crow section of the press refers to as “black” (he has as much white as black ancestry, so shouldn’t he be “gray”?), has been a media darling ever since he lucked into a Senate nomination last year. On the strength of a Fourth of July oration at the Democratic National Convention, he has a reputation as only a moderate liberal. That label is rather belied by the news (caveat: from Daily Kos and therefore not necessarily trustworthy) that Loony Left Moveon.org has raised $3 million for him and that he has asked that his name be removed from the Web site of the genuinely moderate liberal Democratic Leadership Conference. According to the Kossacks, “We know where Obama’s loyalties lie, and it’s wiith [sic] the netroots. He’s one of ours.” I wonder whether Senator Obama wants to be one with those whose reaction to the murder of four Americans in Iraq was “Screw ’em.”

■ Orlando Sentinel columnist Peter Brown (via OpinionJournal Political Diary, a $3.95/month bargain):

Since the disputed 2000 election, increased turnout, especially among minorities, has been deemed so desirable that suggestions that some tools to increase access might also make it easier to vote illegally have been dismissed as politically incorrect. . . . [But] federal prosecutors began investigating [abuses of Wisconsin's liberal same-day registration rules] after the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel found 7,000 more ballots tabulated in that city than people counted as voting, and an additional 1,200 votes from invalid addresses. Officially, Kerry carried Wisconsin by only 11,000 votes, and Milwaukee has less than 10 percent of the state's voters. The same rules were in effect statewide, but no other jurisdiction’s numbers were reviewed by the news media. It is quite possible President Bush actually won Wisconsin. Had Kerry won Ohio, he would have become president, but not if Bush won Wisconsin.

I know nothing about Peter Brown in particular, but the Sentinel is in general a very liberal paper. (One Mother’s Day it ran a flattering profile of an abortionist.) This may be a sign that even parts of the Left are beginning to worry about vote fraud in America.

■ IMHO, it is much too early to think seriously about the 2008 Presidential election. For unserious thinkers, however. . . .

■ Have you heard about born-again stars? (No, not a link to a story about religion in Hollywood.)

■ Kofi Annan is 67 years old today. Would it be excessively ungracious to suggest that he give himself and the world the birthday present of prompt retirement?