This is an open thread. Post what you want, when you want it, and don’t let anyone tell you boo, and if they do say boo you tell them from me that I think they’re a big jerkface doodoohead bobucusfussbuss, and I totally mean that, but not in a mean way, because everyone knows I love everyone. Also, self-linking: So cool penguins do it.
- Barack Obama, Pro-Life Hero
- Abstract: Preventing Unintended Pregnancies by Providing No-Cost Contraceptives “Abortion rates in the CHOICE cohort were less than half the regional and national rates…”
- Ashlyn Blocker, the Girl Who Feels No Pain
- So on a budget bus from Seattle to Portland, I was talking to the woman sitting next to me, and it turns out that she’s in a band that performs Klezmer in Yiddish! And they sound great. They’re called Yiddish Republik.
- Anti-Star Trek: A Theory of Posterity :: Peter Frase
- Does Sony Pictures own your art portfolio?
- The Heart of Thomas (aka Thomas no Shinzō) by Moto Hagio – a set on Flickr. What gorgeous layouts! I hope the story is good.
- Tarantula by Mark Kalesniko – an enjoyable short comic book. I think this took me about ten minutes to read, so longer than a strip, but shorter than a graphic novel.
- Blade Realities. Just because you’ve stabbed your opponent through the heart doesn’t mean they’re done swinging their sword at you.
- Raymond Chandler’s Private Dick – Ta-Nehisi Coates Very interesting blog post on male sexuality, misogyny, and expectations of men being invulnerable.
- Related: Fear of Vulnerability and Geek Misogyny
- I’m told this is a Brazilian version of “Candid Camera.” In this piece, the show uses a creepy little girl to try and scare people to death.
- Children, Parents and Mass Incarceration
- Ladies: If You Want to Get Married, Get Back in the Kitchen. Good essay by our old friend Jeff Fecke.
- The Big Feminist BUT: Corinne Mucha’s “Spinster” A fun, well-done essay-comic on spinsterhood. This will appear in “Big Feminist But,” a feminist comics anthology that will feature a nine-page short story by me. Kickstarter here. If you like feminism and comics, please consider tossing in a few bucks.
- Beliefs have consequences! | closetpuritan
- From obese to chubby: How I lost the weight, and why you shouldn’t admire me for it. – Slate Magazine I really liked this piece about losing weight (which the author did mostly through surgery). She also has a blog, called Do fat people have souls?
- The Fat Trap. Really top-notch essay on why it’s incredibly difficult for most fat people to stop being fat. Edited to add: I think that some of the reporting on the studies that have been done is “top-notch.” However, as Meerkat points out in the comments, the author does have some clearly anti-fat attitudes that many “Alas” readers, me included, won’t agree with.
- Whitewashing Jefferson
- Slavery Is A Love Song – Ta-Nehisi Coates
- The Myth Of Jefferson As ‘A Man Of His Times’ – Ta-Nehisi Coates
- The Volokh Conspiracy » Why Don’t People Get It About Jefferson and Slavery? This is the pro-Jefferson essay that most of these other Jefferson links are refuting.
- The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson | Smithsonian Magazine
- America Isn’t as Decadent as Social Conservatives Think It Is – Conor Friedersdorf
- Shortpacked! by David Willis – False Equivalence. The “mainstream comics idealize male bodies too” argument always annoys me as a cartoonist, because it seems to imply that the speaker – who is always a male comic book fan – is not able to understand even obvious, over the top subtext in comic book art.
- Where Masturbation and Homosexuality Do Not Exist.
- How the world’s wealth is distributed – the top two percent own half
- Could competition make Obamacare more expensive?
- Raising Medicare’s age: Saves feds $5.7 billion, costs you $11.4 billion
- No one draws cartoons of impossibly complicated, vaguely 1970s looking machinery better than Mattiasa.
The anti-Star Trek: another feature might be rich people competing on the basis of how many non-rich people they can support.
The hypertrophied male bodies in comic books are a problem, but they’re not the same problem is the exaggerated and distorted female bodies.
The Jefferson stuff is fascinating. I admit that I am not an enormous history buff, and therefore I associate Jefferson primarily with the declaration of independence and modern democracy, rather than the abolition (or preservation) of slavery. I don’t think that the value of his political ideas really are affected by it one way or another, though that’s also because I’m quite happy to disassociate them from any particular person.
“The Fat Trap” is more fat-phobic than I expected from the description of “top notch.”
Hmm, can I not edit my comment? I’m sorry that came off like telling you what to write. I just was not expecting all the “no one is suggesting fatties shouldn’t lose wait just because it’s a full-time job” and “of course it is all my fault for getting fat in the first place” and such, based on the description.
That’s a fair point, Meerkat (and I don’t think any apology is necessary!).
What I liked about the article was the description of the science refuting common claims that weight loss only requires a little bit of willpower, which I thought was good. I’ll edit the post a bit.
Re: the Jefferson controvesy of 19 – 23, I believe that Finkelstein has advanced a false premise:
He’s wrong. Jefferson did place the nation on that road. What Finkelstein fails to recognize is that he placed us on the beginning of that road, not it’s end. Of course the beginning of the road was not where we wanted to be – if it was, there’d be no need to walk the road. Of course there were dangers and conflicts and even some death and destruction. But it was because Jefferson, with all his faults, placed us on the beginning of that road that we have been able to walk it; to encounter, fight and win those conflicts that see us where we are now. If we are not yet where we need to be I think we are certainly far from where we were, and we’re going in the right direction.
I remind Jews and Christians, at least, that while Moses was deemed fit to lead the children of God to the Promised Land, he was still found by Him with sufficient fault to be banned from entering it. The Jews still rightly rever him for what he did, faults and all.
.
The “NO ONE is suggesting we shouldn’t lose weight” (FA and HAES don’t exist?) and especially “It’s my fault for getting fat in the first place” really bothers me, because they are not just full of self-loathing but factually incorrect, although the article as a whole is definitely valuable. (Having a mainstream source sum up all the research about weight maintenance and its ineffectiveness is helpful to be able to point people to.)
In general I’m glad that we seem to be moving towards a recognition that keeping lost weight off doesn’t work well for most people, but when it’s accompanied by no change in the assumptions about why people get fat, I’m worried that it will lead to more panicky DO SOMETHING flailing about children’s BMIs and draconian-but-unproductive interventions. There hasn’t been a lot of study of this, but what evidence we have seems to indicate that getting fat in the first place is NOT a personal responsibility/parental responsibility thing. I wrote about this in more detail on my blog, but perhaps the strongest evidence is that adopted children’s BMIs are more similar to those of their biological parents than those of their adopted parents.
And that Shortpacked! is a favorite of mine. I need to get back to reading Shortpacked!
I think you’re missing something in item 2: “… Abortion rates in the CHOICE cohort were less than half the regional and national rates (P Americans over 65 call themselves gay, lesbian or bisexual, according to the Gallup survey…”
Speaking of public-health interventions, there’s an interesting story about Bangladesh; whenever I see people propose coercive methods of population control, I think about the amazing effects that Bangladesh got simply by ensuring that women could control their own fertility.
Individual choice is generally competitive, at least, with state sanction on most measures. But the comparison for fertility isn’t particularly impressive. Bangladesh had a fertility rate of almost 8 babies per woman, now down to 2.24. India went from 6 to 2.62. China went from 6 to 1.6. So the authoritarian state has actually succeeded in reversing its population growth (although with potentially disastrous demographic consequences.) India, much less thorough in its family-planning-bastardness, is still growing. Bangladesh, leaving it to the people, is also growing.
Now personally, I see human beings as wealth creators and Bangladesh is better off than China. But if you think the Bangladeshi population density is problematic, then you have to acknowledge that it’s getting “worse”.
Robert:
If I recall correctly, replacement birthrate is around 2.3, because of course not everyone survives long enough to be able to reproduce, or can reproduce if they live that long. It’s possible that Bangladesh has started to drop below replacement.
Grace
Good point. It’s 2.1 in the first world, between 2.3 and 2.5 in the third, so you are probably right.
That’s not very helpful. Unless you’re actually interested in charging headlong into the repugnant conclusion, you’re just flashing some applause lights. You’re papering over the idea that, for instance, it’s better for fewer, wanted, children to be born than more, unwanted children. If you see each birth as an unmitigated good, you wind up with the Ceaușescu regime, and hey, they didn’t exactly end up drowning in wealth when they did everything they could to up the birthrate.
Also, what are these “disastrous demographic consequences” you’re worried about? They’re not exactly running out of people there, and they seem to have avoided the actual disaster of the demographic trap.
Wanted vs. unwanted opens interesting philosophical territory, but that isn’t the territory explored by what amount to fascist regimes forcing people not to have children that, in many cases, they desperately want. The superiority of the Bangladeshi approach is not that it produces a better result in terms of family size reduction, it’s that it empowers choice and gives people more control over their destiny. In general, people with more control over their destiny are going to have higher utility, whether they opt for no kids or ten.
I am unimpressed with the Repugnant Conclusion, other than as a cautionary tale as what could happen at one extreme. Examining empirical cases, we see almost no countries or communities following that path. If we did, we could work the equation backward: for some broadly consensus valuations of “social good”, name a country that had higher social good when its population was a tenth of its current size. I can’t think of one, and doubt you can either. (I am not dodging the happiness question, I’m substituting social good as a measurable proxy; there is no way to tell whether our Victorian forebears were happier than we, or sadder.)
Demographic consequences: there are six Chinese boys under 15 for every five Chinese girls. I don’t share the idea that Chinese culture will shatter under this unprecedented imbalance; it will adapt. Some of those adaptations may be ugly. Unpartnered males tend to be antisocial; China already has a problem with males having trouble adopting to modern social norms (as we do here in the US, in different ways). Adding numbers to that fire isn’t likely to make it burn less bright. By 2020 there will be 60 million Chinese and Indian males of marriageable age, for whom there will be no female partner.
I was thinking more specifically, however, of how the family control policies lead to the direct preferential termination of female fetuses (a million a year, maybe more), the direct murder of female infants (hard to quantify, but too many), and the indirect killing of female children who receive fewer resources and less care, because of a tacit hope that they’ll die and free up a space for a boy. Estimates of the latter category are in the 100,000 to 200,000 young girls per year who die in excess of what statistics would predict given equal gender treatment; that’s for China and India combined. (It’s actually worse in India.)
Robert: It’s actually unclear that Chinese gender balance is nearly that skewed. There are a fairly large number of undocumented children in China, the majority of them girls.
Says who?
Sez my demography professor?
I can try to dig through my old class notes and find a reference for you. But it’ll be on the order of months (they’re in a box in the closet.)
OK. While I’m certainly willing to believe there’s fuzz, everyone in the entire world appears to think the gap is real. I googled “does China have a gender imbalance” and came up with a kazillion articles about the gender imbalance, none of which questioned the premise in the slightest.
While that is far from a dispositive proof, I think it fair to say that the general view among demographers – who are the source of the numbers I tossed in, and the numbers at the back of the kazillion articles about the imbalance – is that it’s real and quite large.
The term you will want to Google is “China undocumented children.”
Most English language sources on China are simply wrong. In China undocumented kids are widely acknowledged as a growing social problem. In the US no one every talks about them because it would detract from the “CHINA BABYKILLERS” headlines.
Googling that term doesn’t come up with much to support your point of view. OK, there are some undocumented kids – by some measures half the Chinese population is undocumented. But things like death reports and abortion statistics are not “covering” for this putative swarm of redeemed girls; critiques of the western press for being eager to tag China with ‘babykiller’ may be on point, but by the state’s own numbers, they are killing a lot of babies. So sure, there’s more to the story than the Newsweek blurb…but the Newsweek blurb isn’t wrong, either. OK, the Chinese talk among themselves about the undocumented kids…but they also talk among themselves about the girl shortage and the marriage problem.
Absolutely. I’m saying your 6/5 ratios are wrong. It’s likely more 20/19.
That is a HUGE gender gap. But it’s nowhere near what you were saying.
My back of the envelope calculation is that China would need to have at least an extra 12 million female children, all under the age of 15, to be undocumented (and no males) in order for the ratio to be 1.05 for the youth population. Given that boys are sometimes the “extra” child, it would seem more probable that there are, say, 33 million undocumented children, with about 2/3 of them being female.
It would be roughly 2 million extra births per year, which would mean China’s actual live birth rate is maybe 15, 20 percent higher than the “official” figures. I suppose that is not impossible.
But about the only number I could find kicking around on the Net was 6 million undocumented kids, total, which is just half of what would be needed if the entire cohort is totally Lilith Fair – and realistically, more like a fifth of what’s needed.
So: I grant you it could be true. I also am gonna come down that, since you’re arguing that the Chinese government, the UN, the CIA, World Book, Wikipedia, and Frank’s House of Discount Fabric are all wrong, by large margins, on population measures that all of those entities have a keen interest in getting right (Frank *really needs to know how many yards of denim to order*), that the burden of proof is on your extraordinary claim. I’ve shown that it’s numerically possible (that will be $900) but at the same time I think I’ve also shown that it seems facially unlikely. 12 to 30 to ?? million rug rats is a lot of rug rats.
I am puzzled by your stridency.
You, uh, don’t have to believe me. But for what it’s worth your 6/5 figures aren’t supported by the official census, which is pretty much the king of undercounting girls. You’d have to invent a sizable male-skewed uncounted population to get to 6/5.
Ben,
Robert’s numbers match the official numbers from the CIA and from China (I couldn’t find 0-14 numbers from China, just birth ratios, but there seems to be agreement that Chinese infant and childhood mortality is higher for girls than for boys, so 0-14 numbers would be more extreme than the birth ratio). He is rounding up from 117:100 to 6:5, but he did signal that by saying nearly.
CIA factbook data:
Sex ratio
at birth: 1.13 male(s)/female
under 15 years: 1.17 male(s)/female
15-64 years: 1.06 male(s)/female
China census:
In 2011, national sex ratio at birth was 117.78, decreased 0.16 over the previous year, sex ratio at birth declined for three consecutive years since 2008, which showed that the effectiveness of governance on the sex ratio at birth. Total population sex ratio was 105.18, due to the impact of births and deaths, the sex ratio of total population has been a downward trend since 2005.
These are 2012 and 2011 numbers, and aren’t in exact agreement, but they represent estimates from official sources. The US estimates have a closer ratio than the Chinese official figures (possibly they are attempting to unskew to include estimates of undocumented children).
So from official sources (both US and Chinese), possibly ignoring undocumented girls, the total population ratio is roughly 21:20 and the ratio in the 0-14 age bracket/at birth is nearly 6:5.
There do seem to be two competing unsourced numbers for undocumented Chinese children floating around the internet: 6 million and 50 million. There was also an official 22 million person undercount in the 2000 census, claimed somewhere to be mostly undocumented people. The 50 million number (or something similar) is presumably the one that Ben’s demographics professor supported. But Robert is right that a number of undocumented girls much larger than 6 million is required to close the gap between 117:100 and 105:100.
The only methodology I found – admittedly, I didn’t dig deep – for the 50 million figure was someone saying that there was an estimate of rather more than 1 million children in one of the larger provinces. And then they noted that there were something like 33 provinces, administrative divisions, etc. And 33 * somewhat more than 1 = about 50. So, it must be 50 million or so nationwide.
All of which seemed very silly and – although I do get that hiding five NYCs worth of kids would be easier in China than it would be in my college dorm room – it’s not like the Chinese state apparatus has a whacky, easy-go-lucky perspective on *massive demographic fraud*. I can see them maybe glossing over a couple million kids scattered through the populace; even 6 million is only a smidge more than half a percent of the total. Who needs the hassle and the paperwork. But 50 million? Maybe I’m wrong, but it just seems nuts. That’s one Chinese person in 20. Granted, state security is probably somewhat busy running down Onion articles about how great Kim Jong Il is, but I have to think that at some point they’re going to notice that a third or more of the births every year are mysteriously disappearing into the ether, and that the consumption of nappies (and later, the Chinese equivalent of Froot Loops) is a third again what it ought to be from the basic arithmetic.
So I didn’t give it any consideration or mention. I’ll admit that it’s just wavering on the edge of possibility that it’s true, but I’d bet against it, to the last drop of Amp’s blood.
Ben, I am sorry if I seem strident; the issue isn’t that critical and I’m going out of my way to acknowledge the possibility, however far-fetched, that you’re right. But I think you gotta start slinging some data if you want this idea to be given weight in the larger discussion.
Robert: Wow that’s an amazing pile of assertions.
Do you know anythingabout the Chinese state and its governance or are you just making shit up? Like, seriously, everything your saying is just profoundly ignorant. I get that you don’t know about this. I get that what I am saying maybe seems strange. But, seriously, dude. Kim Jong Il?
Charles: Robert’s observations match the official census data, which is widely acknowledged — including by the government — to undercount a significant number of children and young adults, and undercount women more than men.
China has a demographic imbalance. But the state’s numbers (which are not actually as high as 120/100 [6/5]) should be considered a radical, improbable upward bound. 105/100 [19/20] is quite low, but it’s considerably more likely than 120/100.
yrs–
–Ben
I’m letting this get to me. I’ll stop.
Robert, I’m sorry for the post above this one.
Ben, I was referring to a bona fide news story; Chinese state media mistook an Onion parody article about Kim Jong Il being the “sexiest man alive” and quoted it heavily in a huge “People’s Daily” layout about Kim. (http://news.liveandinvestoverseas.com/Politics/chinese-media-accidently-run-kim-jong-un-sexiest-man-alive-satire-story.html)
I am not going to pull my China dick out and slap it onto the table so that we can measure its length and girth in comparison to yours. I’m secure enough in my China manhood that I think I can safely leave it in my jeans. (Sighs of relief sweep through the Alas reading audience.) But so far in this conversation, you’ve talked a lot about my ignorance and how wrong I am, but I (and Charles) are the only people bringing data to the table. To date, your contribution to the discourse, other than telling me how wrong I must be, has been to say that there is a cite somewhere in your files, which you’ll unpack in a few months. Now you’re telling me that I’m making an amazing pile of assertions.
Which assertions are you disputing? The arithmetic assertions, about how the numbers need to change in order for your belief about the magnitude of the imbalance to be correct? The pragmatic assertions, about how 50 frickin’ million people are not like dustbunnies that can be casually ankled under the couch if company happens to come by? The logical assertions, about how Chinese economic and demographic statistics would have to change in order for two Texas’ worth of Chinese tweens to be floating around somewhere?
Because I gotta tell you, some of those assertions are just right (math, and stuff), some of them could be questioned but I’d like to see some bloody data, and I hedged all of them around with admissions of fallibility and willingness to look at new information. I will consolidate that aw-shucks Columboism with a further admission that no, I am not a global expert on the Chinese state or Chinese government – but so far in this discussion, you have only just now started to get the “official” numbers right (having told me that I was wrong in my cite of them) and have hollered at me for my ignorance, as expressed by me knowing more about what Chinese state media has been doing than you do.
Again – you’re welcome to your contrary take, and I’m not the China police. But I’m not going to grant you a big slug of credibility to say that all these other very smart people are hugely wrong, when your evidence to support the conclusion STILL consists of “my prof said so, I think.”
Apology accepted re: snark, but I am a lot less concerned with your tone than I am concerned with your presumption that your uncited and unsourced knowledge is so vastly superior that the rest of us are fools for doubting you. That’s usually my shtick. Get your own shtick, college boy.
The problem with getting decent data on uncounted people in China is that they are, in fact, uncounted. This is different than in the US, where there are other sorts of data-collection services which might identify uncounted people. In China, you can’t do independent demography — the demographics of the country are considered a state matter. You can go into a single village and — on the sly — count the undocumented kids that you happen to see, and try to extrapolate that to a nationwide figure. That’s where the 6 million and 50 million numbers come from. They’re not good numbers because there aren’t better numbers available.
We don’t know how many uncounted people there are in China. We do know that there are some, and we know that the figures you’re quoting don’t include them. We’re pretty certain that they’re almost all rural, almost all poor, and more female than male.
Your insistence on using absolute numbers — as if they were more important than ratios — is really preventing you from seeing how plausible 50 million is as a number. If I told you that there were 50 million uncounted people in the Americas (North and South) you’d probably be like “oh, yeah, that seems slightly high but not totally unreasonable.” But there are significantly less people in the Americas than in China. It’s because we’re used to thinking of countries as units that China numbers seem so devastatingly large, but when viewed as ratios they’re comparable to other nations. It’s better not to consider China a “country” and more like “2-3 continents” in terms of numerical intuition.
There are somewhere around 12 million undocumented immigrants in the US. China’s population is 4x the US, give or take, which puts that on the same scale as 50 million. If the US — which has a much more stable and effective government than China’s — can’t effectively track or police 12 million people inside its own borders I don’t see why you’d expect China to be able to do it more accurately or efficiently.
Chinese undocumented children (many of whom are now adults, with kids of their own), live in the rural areas of China (along with the bulk of the Chinese population.) They are mostly farmers who eat their own crops or trade at a local level. They don’t buy cereal, or disposable diapers. They have neither education nor health care. Their economic impact, in other words, is minimal. Not something easily detected by looking at purchases.
Rural areas of China are not heavily governed, other than tax extraction, which is levied by household (so doesn’t detect extra members). There will be a local cadre (government official) and a county seat that he reports to. There’s not a lot of policing or a lot of inspections. Generally the central government has little effective influence at the local rural scale, and is loathe to intervene except in cases of uprising and open civil disobedience. It’s not unreasonable that there’s never really a serious head-count, and that the cadre (who is responsible with enforcing the birth control policy) is happy to look the other way when his family (or his friends) have extra kids. In fact, there are some strong career incentives to not strongly enforce birth control policies (don’t report the problem => no problems on your watch => promotion possibilities.) The government has been trying to change this perverse incentive in recent years, with qualified success, but now of course we have undocumented kids have kids which complicates matters.
China is trying to rectify this by splitting their census arm from their enforcement (like we do in the US) but the central government — to understate the case — lacks credibility with respect to privacy and enforcement of policy. And even in America we have serious problems counting tax debtors, undocumented immigrants, and wanted criminals. An undocumented Chinese child (and her parents) are all three.
Here’s the rub: Chinese governance, at a local level, is a mess. Enforcement of laws, particularly population control laws, is capricious and arbitrary. Households merge and split in confusing ways, often to the profit of local officials. 200-300 million people in China are not living where they legally reside. In this mess, could there be 50 million missing kids (and young adults)? Yes, easily. Maybe more.
The thing is that no one knows the details of this, because there isn’t a functional way to learn the details. But that doesn’t mean we can ignore it or pretend it doesn’t exist.
So, in summary, re: China’s gender gap. What we do know.
We know that there is a gender gap in China, for the following reasons. We know that there is fairly widespread sex-selective abortion in China, as well as cases of female infanticide. We also know that until recently there’s been a huge amount of kidnapping female babies in order to feed the American baby market. All of these things will contribute to a gender imbalance. The question now is: how big is it? 118:100 is the extreme upper bound, where we take the census as a given fact (something not even the Chinese government does.) Of course, when you assert that upper bound as a fact, it’s not easy to disprove, but that doesn’t actually mean it’s correct.
I can’t imagine that you’ll be swayed by this. But I feel guilty about getting angry and insulting you so I wrote a little essay. I hope at least you get some use out of it.
Thank you. That was a thoughtful and productive post, and makes a coherent case to support your view of what the ratios actually are.
U.S. Federal Appeals Court strikes down Illinois’ concealed firearms carry ban
Actually, it’s a victory for every law-abiding citizen in the State of Illinois.
Now we’ll see if the State of Illinois, which is essentially bankrupt, will continue this to the Supreme Court or bow to the inevitable and pass a law. We’ll also see if the law is punitive or is actually engineered to enable people to exercise their Constitutional rights.
Charles asked me to explain why I thought less voters was better than more voters. Crushed by deadlines, but the five-cent version:
In general the benefit of democracy is that it puts the people in charge of the government, NOT that democracies make better decisions than other forms of government. With that said, efforts to *have* the government make better decisions are still worthwhile, and the ideal of self-rule is not an absolute: other things being equal, it is better to have a dictator who makes a decision that leads to the survival of the nation, than to have a democracy that votes to blow itself up.
A lot of ink and electrons has been spilled about how to get better decisions out of a democracy. Some people think we get better decisions by maximizing the input – by putting more people into the voter category. I think that as a broad, general principle this is incorrect. At one margin, where only a tiny percentage of the people control, the principle is probably right. The decisions made by the state would probably improve, given a broader base of governance.
But once you leave the realm of oligarchy and have a significant percentage of the populace casting their vote – and, critically, once you reach a stage of civic development in which the *right* to cast a vote is generally accepted – at that point I think that the average decision quality goes up when you begin pruning voters, not seeking out additional ones.
There are methods of pruning that will not lead to this effect. Add a requirement that in order to vote, one must sit through a “Twilight” movie marathon, and the resultant flight of smart people from the electorate will be negative in effect. Add requirements that give local oligarchies effective control of their district’s voting output (like a subjective qualifications test), even in the face of a contrary electoral demographic, and that will be a negative.
But some methods will lead to a net improvement in the quality of the electorate. As a general rule, people who are more invested in politics and more informed about the issues and more motivated to see their preferences put into policy, are better voters than people who don’t know the name of their elected leaders, think that the Law of the Sea Treaty is something to do with the Little Mermaid movies, and who really don’t care who is in office as long as the buses get there on time.
If voting is a little bit inconvenient, something that requires a change in schedule, a conscious effort on the individual’s part, then a larger proportion of the former group will vote than the latter.
As a general and broad rule, people who have managed their own life successfully, who have strong social networks, and who exemplify a vocational ethic that other people have found worthy of valorization in the form of valuation, are better voters than people whose lives are an unending train wreck, who have few or tattered social connections, and who find that few or no people voluntarily endorse their work product by purchasing it.
If voting involves a bit of disruption to the comfort of life, if being part of the registered corpus of the polity creates perceived inconveniences in the form of having to have a fixed address and the police knowing where one lives, if there are minor (key word) expenses involved in the exercise of the vote, then a larger proportion of the first group will vote than the latter.
Are there rich people who are bad citizens, and poor people who are good citizens? Absolutely, and that is one major reason for my above statement about respect for the right to vote being paramount. Amp thinks that the “disenfranchisement” in Florida is monstrous and I think it is trivial, and the reason is that Florida has the provisional ballot, which means that people’s right to vote was not removed, merely made slightly inconvenient. Inconvenience does not arise to removal. Were there no provisional ballot, I would be in Amp’s camp.
But there is, and in the aftermath of the civil rights movement and the voting rights acts and the recalibration of the state towards promoting, rather than restricting, the franchise, the situation on the ground is such that relatively minor increases in friction to the voting process end up discouraging the stupid and the lazy much more than they discourage the bright and hard-working; relatively minor decreases in friction end up encouraging the stupid and the lazy much more than they encourage the bright and the hard-working.
Therefore, within reason, more friction = better voters, and better voters = better outcomes. I do not mean better in a partisan sense; execute every conservative in America so that the entire discussion is about which Democrats are going to be elected, and everything I say above would still be true – and increased friction would mean a better class of Democrat.
I don’t think people should lose the right to vote because they don’t have a fixed address, but there are ways around that. I have no problem with a certain amount of “friction” (as Robert defines it). People who aren’t willing to put up with a certain amount of effort to register to vote and to actually vote probably aren’t going to exert a certain amount of effort to make that vote an informed one.
I’d like to see some changes. For one thing, I don’t understand why in this day and age voting is done on a Tuesday and is done mostly during business hours. It seems to me that more working people have free time on, say, Saturday than they do on Tuesday, so to me it would make a lot more sense to vote from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM on Saturday. Can someone tell me why it makes more sense to vote on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November?
The obvious issue with Saturday voting is Shabbos.
Ruchama: Obviously if Jews won’t vote on Shabbos they don’t want it enough. Just like if black people don’t wait in line 6 hours at the one polling place in their neighborhood they don’t want it as much as white suburbanites who have no lines.
I actually think Ron’s instinct is correct here – we’d be better off if election day wasn’t a workday for most of the working population.
The answer to the Jewish problem is to hold the voting across two days. Or to hold the voting from 7am to 11pm, or something – if there’s a few after-sundown hours for voting, then Orthodox Jews can vote on Saturday.
Alternatively, we could make the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November a holiday.
I like this idea. This year, my students had a midterm on election day. Exams here are done in the evenings, so that meant I had to be on campus from 9 AM, when my first class started, until 8:30 PM, when the exam was over and I had brought all the papers back to my office and sorted through them. So that meant I had to get up pretty early in the morning to vote before work, and so, by the time my day was over, I was just about ready to collapse.
If you make voting more inconvenient for any part of the population, that part of the population will vote less.
What Republicans do is make voting systematically harder for Black people than for White people. As a result, those Black people who are determined to the fifth degree to vote (out of ten) will in some cases not vote, because their determination won’t carry them over the barriers that the GOP has set up. They only have an hour to vote or they’ll lose their job, for instance, and aren’t determined enough to overcome a two-hour line combined with taking five times as long to vote after getting though the line because of the extra bureaucracy of the provisional ballot, even if they’re offered one. (And, contrary to what you’re saying, it’s not guaranteed they will be offered one – it’s commonplace to read reports that voters not on the roll are told that they can’t vote, rather than being offered a provisional ballot even if they don’t know to demand one. But since that happens more often to black people than white people, Republicans are okay with that.)
Meanwhile, the white guy living fifteen miles away has a determination of only the fourth degree out of ten. But his lines are shorter, and no one has scrubbed his name from the rolls. Presto – he gets to vote!
I’d want to lower inconveniences anyway. But my point was, systematically making voting more “inconvenient” for Black people because your party is unpopular with Black people is viciously racist. The GOP doesn’t have an image problem; it has a reality problem, aka a “we’re racist and everyone knows it” problem.
1) Attitudes like this are why the GOP is known as the party of snobs who think they’re better than ordinary people. Mitt “47%” Romney was the perfect representative of current Republican ideals.
2) I disagree. Lots of people who “have managed their own life successfully” are mediocre people who were born with extra safety nets; they had supportive family and ended up taking second and third and forth chances before landing on their feet. Lots of people whose “lives are an unending train wreck” are inherently just as good (or just as mediocre) as the typical “has their life together” person – they just were born into a class and situation where they weren’t given great schools and second chances (let alone third and forth chances), and in some cases were actually pushed down.
If a black person, let’s call him Linus, is stopped and frisked and found to have pot during his young pothead years, which gives him a felony record which hangs like a loadstone around his neck for decades, while an otherwise similar white person (Sally) from the suburbs spends three or four years stoned out of her gourd but is given the freedom to grow out of it and live her life without that loadstone, that doesn’t mean that Sally is a better person than Linus. It means she got dealt a better hand.
I don’t hold it against Sally that she got dealt a better hand. But I don’t think Sally’s life experiences have put her in a good position to protect Linus’ interests when she votes. If we want a government that protects all of the citizens, not just the ones that got dealt good hands, then we need both Linus and Sally to vote.
Are you a more worth voter than I am, Robert, because I’m disabled which can make it difficult for me to get to polls?
I know. You said “in general.” But generalities come down to reality somewhere and realities have skin and bones.
Are people who aren’t disabled better voters than people who are? More worthy voters? More important voters?
I don’t know of any correlation of negative moral/political characteristics and disability, Mandolin. There are a host of characteristics that could make it possible for it to be more difficult for person A to vote than it is for person B…and I didn’t mention those characteristics, because they’re irrelevant to the thesis.
Amp, in terms of political rhetoric your argument is very appealing. In terms of absolute justice, then the shameful history of black disenfranchisement means that we should all indeed be very careful about anything which has the potential to go that way.
In terms of actual electoral participation, where black participation rates for the first time passed that of whites in 2008, it is evident that blacks are not being kept from the polls in any significant way. The cause of that reversal of the historical pattern adds ammunition to the argument that we ought to have candidates from all ethnic groups once in a while, as it seems to encourage those groups to vote. The fact of the reversal means that whatever obstacles you perceive as being huge out there in the world, the voters themselves seem able to overcome.
As I said in the other thread (with links!), the effects of GOP voter-blocking efforts have so far been small in terms of number of voters effected (although rather large in terms of electing George W Bush). It’s only in a freakishly close election that these things could make a difference.
But so what? “We’re trying really hard to prevent minority voters from voting, but it’s okay because we’re not very good at it” doesn’t strike me as a compelling defense of the GOP.
It is also worth noting that many state’s efforts at vote suppression were blocked by the courts. “We tried and failed to enact measures to suppress the vote, but we failed, therefore we obviously aren’t trying to suppress the vote” is not really a convincing position to be in.
“There are a host of characteristics that could make it possible for it to be more difficult for person A to vote than it is for person B…and I didn’t mention those characteristics, because they’re irrelevant to the thesis. “
This is an amazing argument: because there are lots of reasons someone might have a harder time voting that have nothing to do with them being a less legitimate voter, therefore it doesn’t matter if making it harder for them to vote causes them to not vote.
Even if you have decided to abandon the idea that voting is a right (the legitimacy of government issue), you still have the problem that the best decisions will be made by having the voting population reflect the populace as a whole. If you make it harder for people with disabilities to vote, you may not make the voting pool worse or better by some abstract metric of “reasonable and knowledgeable voter” (since pwd are no more or less likely to be reasonable and knowledgeable), but you have decreased the voice of people with a particular body of knowledge and experience.
I mean, I think you lose most people’s support when you abandon the idea of a right to vote (and yes, if you are making it harder for people to vote specifically to prevent some people from voting based on how you think they’ll vote, then you have really abandoned the idea of a right to vote), but even beyond that, when you decide that restricting the voting ability of specific groups is an acceptable side effect of trying to restrict the voting ability of “bad people”, then you are actually degrading the quality of the electorate and failing to achieve your own purpose.
“Vote for us: We’re both racist and incompetent!”
2014 bumper sticker?
therefore it doesn’t matter if making it harder for them to vote causes them to not vote.
If that was the argument Mandolin was making, then I misunderstood.
How do measures like ID requirements and voter-roll purges do anything differentially to people with disabilities, though?
I think there is a distinction between “people for whom voting is hard”, and “making voting a little harder”. Voting is hard for me, sometimes; I have arthritis that makes walking very painful. (One reason I filed absentee up until this year.) I will have arthritis whether or not I have to show ID at the polls.
“you still have the problem that the best decisions will be made by having the voting population reflect the populace as a whole”
Yes, but reflection of the populace as a whole is met at a level of participation far below 50 to 60 percent, assuming reasonably even group distributions. We have reasonably even group distributions; the big gap in the past was black vs white, where the participation rate was about 10 percentage points lower for black folks in the 1960s than for white folks. But it has trended upwards with time, and now it’s about even; in 2008 blacks voted a little more often. We would have a very representative electorate with a 5% random sample, let alone 50%; that’s why polling generally works.
So going from 55% to 65% participation, unless that 10% is representative of groups, ideologies, or factions that have previously been kept from voting, or have declined to vote, is not going to make the vote any more representative; might make it less, if the new voters are disproportionately from one bloc or another.
And, by the way, you are using “best” as a shorthand for “most representative”. But there are issues today where a representative vote on some matters would give a result you would NOT find best, and there have been many issues in the past where the same thing holds true. Even if you gave blacks the vote in 1776, an election to decide slavery up or down, would not come up with a result that any of us would consider best.
when you decide that restricting the voting ability of specific groups is an acceptable side effect of trying to restrict the voting ability of “bad people”
Point of order: I will not attempt to restrict the voting ability of anyone, and “bad people” in quotes is an interesting citation – who are you quoting? Because it isn’t me.
Making things *less convenient* does not significantly restrict ability to do the things, when the inconvenience falls within a certain band of reasonableness. Yes, moving the polling places to the tops of high mountains would seriously restrict many people’s ability to vote. Deciding to require ID, and making the requirement public a year ahead of time, and providing free ID to the indigent, seems unlikely to make it impossible for anyone to vote, any more than requiring college applicants to supply high school transcripts makes it impossible to get an education.
Finally, specific group membership may be correlated to some behavioral characteristic, but that does not make the group membership the cause of the behavior. There are historical and cultural reasons why, for example, some black people are less likely to have ID already than some white people. But there is nothing inscribed in African-American DNA that makes them hate ID cards, and nothing in law or fact which makes the state reluctant to issue them such a card. Setting standards of voter qualification which black people simply can’t achieve but white people could (whatever such a standard would look like) is impermissible, as is setting standards of qualification that are so subjective or manipulatable as to constitute a de factor barrier (like the way the literacy test used to be done).
But setting a standard that a reasonable person of any racial background can achieve, EVEN IF that standard has a detectable racial differentiation at the time of implementation, is perfectly permissible. White and black people alike can get married, happily – but all couples have to be willing to name themselves to the agency of the state that registers their partnership. And in many places, you have to show ID when you get your marriage license, and pay $60. There are black people with no ID and who would have a hard time coming up with $60, and more blacks in that situation than whites.
Are blacks being denied the right to marry? No.
ID requirements are irrelevant. You have already correctly pointed out that ID requirements are not the sort of making voting harder that you are going for. ID requirements don’t decrease the likelihood that poorly informed, uninterested voters will vote (except for the tiny minority of them who don’t have ID). An easily available, free voting ID would not have much effect on anything.
The sort of measures that decrease voting by unmotivated, uninterested, ill-informed voters (the kind you claim to be interested in getting to not vote, and the kind I’m short handing as “bad people”) are things like no early voting, no vote by mail, not enough machines and staff to get people through the lines in 15 minutes. If you want to suppress the vote of the people you think shouldn’t vote, those are the sorts of measures you need (and they are part of the current Republican vote suppression techniques). Those are all measures that decrease the likelihood of voting for people with disabilities and people who work long hours with little flexibility, but they will also have some chance of suppressing the vote of unmotivated, and therefore assumed to be ill-informed, voters.
Making voter registration more difficult might also block uninterested voters from voting and wouldn’t make it more difficult for people with disabilities, but it would make it more difficult for poor people (who are more likely to move more often), another group that is already underrepresented at the ballot.
The current voting population is not representative by income (e.g. voter turnout by income level in 2008– turnout for those above $100k is about double that of those below $20k) and measures designed to inconvenience voters target people who have little job flexibility (many of whom are poor), which is likely to worsen or maintain that non-representativeness. This non-representiveness may well be related to why we have two political classes which pay no attention to the interests of poor people. We would get far more representative results by requiring a random 5% of the population to vote.
Of course, the uninterested marginal voter is not necessarily any less informed than the obsessive voter, they are actually more likely to just not see their own interests or beliefs consistently represented by anyone on the ballot. Additionally, uninterested and uninformed voters are probably likely in aggregate to vote in a relatively random manner, those cancelling each other out, so the entire idea that discouraging uninterested voters has any beneficial effect is probably a baseless claim. Misinformed voters, where it might be beneficial in some sense if they just stayed home, are more likely to be motivated voters, so discouragement techniques won’t keep home the Obama’s-a-muslim-commie or the Romney-will-impose-a-theocracy folks (or the slavery-is-lovely folks in 1776).
The sort of measures that decrease voting by unmotivated, uninterested, ill-informed voters (the kind you claim to be interested in getting to not vote, and the kind I’m short handing as “bad people”) are things like no early voting, no vote by mail, not enough machines and staff to get people through the lines in 15 minutes.
I am puzzled. Are early voting and vote-by-mail (as distinct from absentee balloting) part of the status quo ante of the typical state’s electoral machinery?
If not, it seems slightly odd to characterize wanting to maintain status quo ante as “voter suppression”.
Machines and staff in each precinct – my understanding is that this varies by state, but that the more-or-less default standard is that individual county boards of election (sometimes with oversight or control from the secretary of state of the state) purchase the machinery, hire the staff/coordinate the volunteers, etc. The county boards of election where I have lived have seemed to be remarkably “clean” organizations; when they are partisan, it’s usually seemed to be because the area was thoroughly Democratic or thoroughly Republican.
In any event, the vast majority of minority voters, and a large proportion of poor voters, are located in counties controlled by Democrats. How exactly is it that the Republicans are short-staffing these precincts, and taking away their machines?
Robert,
Your willful ignorance of these matters is not actually the subject under discussion. Ohio’s county board of elections are mandated to have 2 Democrats and 2 Republicans, with the Secretary of State casting the tie breaking vote when necessary, even though this was a big fucking deal this Fall, when in Republican leaning counties the boards voted unanimously to have extra early voting hours (because Democrats don’t treat the franchise as a fucking game), while in Democratic leaning counties the Republicans voted for the minimum early voting hours and the SoC joined them- that you don’t know that merely demonstrates that you really aren’t qualified to pontificate on the subject.
[not going to let myself get distracted reading and writing about the sleazy shenanigans of the Colorado SoC this year, even though it is voter suppression in a vote by mail state.]
Your position is that Republicans should be arguing for making voting harder. If they should be arguing for making voting harder in states like Florida and Kentucky, surely it also means arguing for making it harder in states where voting is unusually easy by US standards. If that means anything, it should mean trying to do away with measures like early voting, vote by mail, and same day registration in those states where they exist.
So if your fantasy Republican efforts to decrease voting ease wouldn’t involve trying to undo vote by mail, same day registration or early voting hours, and wouldn’t involve voter ID laws (since we’ve agreed that those don’t decrease voting ease noticeable when properly executed), and wouldn’t involve funding or regulation tricks to under-staff and under-equip polling stations, what would they involve? Tell me, please, I’m out of ideas.
I don’t have a problem with same-day registration, as long as the voter is doing a provisional ballot.
(Provisional ballots are now a Federally-guaranteed right, by the way, Amp, something I did not know until this morning. They are part of the 2002 “Help America Vote” act, which also lets HHS fund initiatives to make polling places handicap-accessible, and mandates that all precincts have at least one voting machine that is accessible to people with disabilities. So, yay disabled voters.)
I think vote by mail is OK if it isn’t a universal mechanism; you Oregonians are nuts. My reasons for thinking it a bad idea are non-partisan: 1) voting outside the polling place is susceptible to fraud, 2) voting outside the polling place is highly susceptible to peer pressure, coercion, and other forms of intimidation, and unlike (1) that type of abuse will not be discernible to investigators, 3) voting by mail puts the election’s integrity in the hands of the US Postal Service, which is in general a fine organization but which I hesitate to entrust with the entirety of the transmission of the franchise, and whose workers I hesitate to endanger by making it, sometimes, an electoral game changer to go out and mug a mailman, 4) voting in person is one of the last holdouts of the older, in-person political culture of the US; online news sites and bookies and pollsters and 24/7 news cycles all have their merits, but SOMETHING ought to involve going to a special place, picking up a special piece of paper, performing a special ritual; we have far too few sacraments in the civic religion as it is, 5) because there are disabled people who are unable to vote by mail, at least one polling place with a voting machine still has to be open; this means that disabled people have to a) make a longer trip to b) be the only people voting – and that’s not cool, 6) because states have the option of requiring only a *postmark* as of election day, the final vote tally can be delayed by several days, and 7) the scattering of the vote to the four winds means that it is completely and utterly impossible for citizens to monitor the process themselves if they wish, or for outside bodies (like, for example, voting rights commissions) to see the active part of the process. The active part of the process happens at your house; they can make sure the election isn’t being stolen at the counting-house, but they can’t protect you from Amp’s bullying ways and threats that he’ll murder your hamster if you don’t support the Give Amp A Lamborghini initiative.
(Most all of those objections are greatly mitigated if only SOME people are voting by mail, as with the absentee ballot; it’s the all or nothing that makes it problematic, and having the choice of going in to vote – even if you normally file absentee – goes a long way in making it hard for people to coerce or pressure a voter.)
Early voting – depends on what you mean by early voting. Voting ahead of election day, I think, is another terrible idea. The election is on election day. By all means make up your mind ahead of time if you want to; by all means avail yourself of the absentee ballot (which I do think should be universal, but as it stands, is available nearly everywhere) if voting on election day is too burdensome; but let’s not change the meaning of the day itself, and let’s not have the state *enforce* people’s perhaps-hasty decisions to commit ahead of time. It may be rare but people do change their minds…people change their minds on the way to the polls, even, or when they go into the booth.
If by early voting you mean longer hours for the balloting ON election day, I am pretty neutral about it. It’s a local decision; there should be some minimum set of hours (and I bet there is), but beyond that let the counties decide what their budgets call for.
So what would I do to increase friction in the voting process?
Well, despite your belief that an ID requirement does nothing to discourage some voters I can do without, I think it does discourage some of them. Specifically, it discourages members of the criminal class who live ID-less, or who use fake ID to get by, and it discourages people who aren’t active criminals but who have solid reasons for not wanting the state to know their address – people who don’t pay taxes, for example. Many of the criminal class are fine people (and some of my best friends are criminals ), but in general I think they should not exercise the franchise until they go legit. Ditto for people evading the revenue authorities.
Second, vigorous pruning of the voter rolls when voters die, move out of state, drop off the tax rolls, go into prison, or other things that reasonably clue the state in that this person is not going to be pulling a lever this year. I have no problem with putting safeguards on that, so that (for example) a letter goes out six months before the election to your last recorded address letting you know, or (for example) having a website where you can check your registration status and get the phone number for your local election potentate if there’s an issue. And if you show up in person on election day and say “nope, still alive, not in prison, still live here”, then they hand you a provisional ballot with a smile and enter your name back on the roll.
That’s not going to get rid of many slacker layabouts from the Bob Hayes Wishes You Wouldn’t Vote Club, but it helps keep the system honest by removing the TEMPTATION to fraud; if the rolls are tight and clean, it’s gonna be hard for me to invent 200 votes for Kodos in my precinct, so I won’t try.
I would end any publicly-funded campaigns urging people to get out and vote, with voting held out as a good in and of itself. It’s not. If you are an idiot and have no idea whether the Amp Lamborghini Initiative is brilliant or insane, then your participation is not going to make the system work better; stay home. The government doesn’t need to be nagging you to go cast your uninformed bozo vote; if you have the wisdom to see what an ignoramus you are, then you should be left alone in that view. Absolute right to vote; absolutely no obligation to do so.
I would increase the age for the franchise to 25, and require a certification of sound mind at 85, and let those specific numbers be subject to scrutiny and adjustment as lifespans, and adolescences, extend. I would allow waivers starting at 16 (not 18) for any young person who could demonstrate that they were providing their own principal material support, were gainfully employed, and were filing taxes.
I would allow any citizen to monitor the activity at the precinct where they are themselves registered to vote, and would allow them to look at and make notes regarding the ID of anyone presenting themselves to vote. (If there are too many people wanting to do this, then the election staff will allow as many people as will fit, first-come first-served, for one or two hour blocks of time, and will pair (triplex?) registered Ds, registered Rs, and registered independents, for this service for as long as there are representatives of all three registration types.) I do not think this would do much, if anything, to discourage members of my Don’t Vote Club, but it would do a lot to make the conspiracy theorists among us happy, and – if a reasonable number of people actually did it – it would serve as a disincentive to the occasional double-voter or vote-collection-specialist.
I would have posters made, akin to the big OSHA eye-glazers that litter most workplaces, that explain the rights that people have to vote, what the state rules are, what they should do if they aren’t registered, what they aren’t allowed to do inside the polling place (electioneer), who they should call if they think something is fishy, who they should call if they think they got screwed, why voting is important, and – key section – why people should not vote if they do not feel capable or competent to do so, and why they do not have to and should not listen to people who try to pressure them to vote, or not vote, or to vote a particular way.
That’s all offhand, I am sure if I sat down with Karl and Jeb and the gang we could think of some other ways to keep the minorities down.
Actually, they’re very relevant. If your goal is “make it moderately inconvenient to vote, to increase the proportion of knowledgeable and committed voters,” then it’s really important to recognize that “moderately inconvenient” for an able-bodied person might be “totally impossible” for someone with disabilities.
For example, “wait in line for an hour” is moderately inconvenient if you can physically stand in that line (or there’s space in the line for your wheelchair or scooter) and if being in that crowd for an hour is maybe a little irritating. Add mobility issues or mental health issues, and your moderate inconvenience becomes a huge hurdle. And when those “moderate inconveniences” are set up deliberately to discourage voting, then, yes, it’s relevant that they’re much more heavily penalizing disabled people, whether that’s deliberate or not.
That was totally incoherent.
Most of those measures wouldn’t particularly inconvenience lazy voters, and you don’t even have a problem with the measures that most aid lazy voters (or you do have a problem, but you don’t think any thing should be done about them), but you toss in a bunch of fake anti-fraud measures, including voter intimidation measures, even though you think your party should be moving away from the vote fraud nonsense. And extensive use of absentee ballots is fine, but early voting in person is an affront to our civic institution of voting in person on a specified day- how does that even seem like it makes sense? And suddenly everyone under 25 is a poor voter, and suddenly non-representative is not a concern at all. Oh, and quit encouraging civic engagement, because people with low civic engagement shouldn’t engage civically.
If you want to push down voting numbers, get rid of same day registration, vote by mail and early voting. Those are the things that have increased voting recently, and that characterize the states where the most people vote (and therefore must be the places where the most lazy and poor people vote).
I’m sorry, I was just expecting better.
Provisional ballots are often thrown out without being examined or counted. They are not a functional replacement for an actual ballot. Generally, they serve as a lie to make purged voters think that they have voted when their vote will never be counted (they will never be informed of this, of course, making registration problems an issue in the next year.) In this, they make the situation worse, not better.
The upside of raising the age of franchise to 25 is that no one eligible for the draft could ever vote. That’s absolutely a good idea.
Also, this section:
“Well, despite your belief that an ID requirement does nothing to discourage some voters I can do without, I think it does discourage some of them. Specifically, it discourages members of the criminal class who live ID-less, or who use fake ID to get by, and it discourages people who aren’t active criminals but who have solid reasons for not wanting the state to know their address – people who don’t pay taxes, for example. Many of the criminal class are fine people (and some of my best friends are criminals ), but in general I think they should not exercise the franchise until they go legit. Ditto for people evading the revenue authorities.”
Pretty much pure fantasy land.
I apologize that your expectation of what my views on election reform need to be in order to be coherent, does not match with what I just wrote about my views on election reform. I think that strong voter ID, a perception that fraud is diligently guarded against even in its general absence, a termination of early voting, a termination of universal vote-by-mail, a termination of the college student vote, a cessation of propaganda aimed at encouraging additional voters, and the placement at the polls of explicit reminders that voting is optional and voters should not feel pressured to vote, constitutes among itself a reasonably coherent program for discouraging marginal voters.
I don’t think 24-year olds are poor, I think they’re ignorant and have little conception of how societies function and should be disabused of the notion that they get a say, until they finish with school and get a job.
Kelly, I agree that something that might be reasonable for a non-disabled person may be unreasonable for a disabled person, but I don’t see anything in my list of things to do that would be harder on a disabled person, with the exception of getting rid of vote-by-mail in the places where it is universal. And since the places where it is universal are also places where there was easy access to the absentee ballot before they went vote-by-mail, there is a remedy for the disabled person for whom a trip to the polls, however accessible, is simply unmanageable. Looking over my list (reproduced above), which of those items do you see as putting an undue burden on the disabled?
And since this is an open thread and since I’m doing my morning news reading and since the topic is, however indirectly, racism, this right here:
http://newsone.com/2101557/black-weather-woman-fired-for-responding-to-racist-fb-commenters-hair-remark/
is complete bullshit. When I read the headline, I expected to see some kind of fiery rhetoric that, however justifiable, was maybe out of line for a public figure in the notoriously nicey-nice world of local news. But the woman was perfectly gracious, and engaged her interlocutors with good humor and warmth, and did a nice job of raising consciousness a little bit. So: complete bullshit, KTBS. Your callsign is appropriate.
Charles, which part is fantasy land? That there are criminals in society, that many of those criminals avoid entanglement with the authorities in areas such as identification documents, that there are people who evade their taxes, or that some subset of this group of (fantastical?) beings would vote if they could do so without having to be high-profile about it?
Ben, provisional ballots are counted unless the other ballot counts create a lead of such size on the major issues that there is no possible way that provisionals (and absentees, which usually get the same treatment) can make the difference, and the county hasn’t got the funding to do all the counting going forward. The county does not proactively hunt you down to tell you whether or not your ballot got counted, but they do provide you with a mechanism that you can use to check and see if your ballot was approved. In 2004 about 2/3 of provisional ballots were counted; in 2006 about 80% were. Some of the remainder were rejected votes – the vote was considered, and it was decided that the voter was not actually eligible to vote for whatever reason – and some of the remainder was votes that just didn’t get counted.
Although this is not yay-woohoo territory, it is not, in fact, a step backwards. Provisional voting was written into the 2002 voting act because in the 2000 election, some 2 million votes that were cast were not counted because they failed to go through the machines properly; the act mandated new types of machines where that wouldn’t happen, better registration systems and mechanisms, and provisional voting to cover the people who weren’t on the rolls (or who declined to show ID, or who had other issues). About 675,000 provisionals didn’t get counted in 2004, and about 170,000 didn’t get counted in 2006.
There is a critique that election officials fob people off with a provisional to avoid conflict and argument and trouble. This is probably true. And? If the person is eligible to vote, then their provisional vote will count. If they aren’t, it won’t. Either way, standing at the head of the line and arguing about whether a person is on the roll or is spelled right or has a proper ID or whatever, is totally inappropriate; it’s holding up the vote for everybody else. File the provisional ballot with complete information on it, and let the dispute be handled at leisure and in peace without stomping all over everybody else’s schedule.
As the significant majority of provisional votes ARE counted, and a significant proportion of those which are not counted are not counted for valid reasons, the contention that “generally” these ballots serve as a “lie” seems to be false.
Registration and the filing of a provisional ballot are not the same thing, so I do not understand your statement about the ballot not being counted, thus there being a problem in the next election cycle for the same voter. If the voter is filing a provisional ballot because he or she is not registered, then he or she needs to register to get back on the rolls, and that is a separate transaction. If they are filing a provisional ballot for other reasons (not wanting to show ID and someone already having voted under their name are two biggies) then their registration is not at issue.
Oh, and – sorry for the post-stream, I missed the deadline for editing – there would be a lot of people subject to the draft eligible for the franchise – specifically, everybody from 16 to 25 who was primarily working for a living.
But if we want to play with the draft game, I myself am very keen on enacting one of Bob Heinlein’s proposals from when he was a quasi-socialist as a young man:
All declarations of war require a popular majority in a national referendum.
A “yes” vote on the referendum is an automatic, binding, contractual offer to enlist in the military “for the duration” in the event that the war vote passes, which any of the service branches may activate at their convenience and leisure.
I have no problem with college students over the age of 21 voting. I do think that the voting age should be bumped back to 21. Think of the kind of behavior and judgement you see from the average 18 year-old. In my opinion, if your judgement is not sufficiently developed to be trusted with alcohol it’s not sufficiently developed that you can be trusted with a ballot.
However, if a college student is named on their parents’ tax return as a dependent, they should only be able to vote where their parents reside, not where their temporary school-year residence is.
Well, as you may have heard, Michigan passed a right-to-work law. Here’s what passes for the “new civility” from the left:
From the opposition legislators:
From the same source, a labor leader:
And he’s not the only labor boss to talk in this vein:
The rank-and-file certainly understands what their leadership is calling for and is willing to take direct action:
Video at the link.
And even the Governor’s children are not out of bounds:
By any means necessary. From a supposed minister of God. Tell me again about the violence inherent in the Tea Party Movement because someone drew a bull’s eye on a map. Tell me again about the “new civility”. These people are damn dangerous and if I was the Governor I’d get a gun, learn how to use it and carry it wherever I went. The left isn’t kidding.
BTW – the young lady plays softball and volleyball, but not soccer.
Yeah, I think that’s pretty bad, Ron. How many people have been killed already by those union thugs?
Meanwhile, guns continue to be much easier to get in America than mental health care. So thanks for that.
—Myca
From what I can gather from the intertubes, the vast majority – 63.8% – of 18 to 24 year olds are not in school. I also gather that a slighty lesser impressive majority of 16 to 24 year olds of just over 60% are working or looking for work.
At 24 I was out of school for 6 years, married for 3 years, had a job for 6 years and had a pretty good idea about how societies function.
“I’m sorry, only two thirds of your demographic group meet my arbitrary standards therefore none of your demographic gets to vote,” seems unsupportable to me.
I will agree, however, that preventing those under the age of 25 does not keep everyboyd eligible for the draft from voting. Those between the ages of 25 and 26 would be eligible for both the draft and the vote.
Yeah, luckily for me that isn’t the standard I set. Go back and read it again. Anybody past the age of 16 who is working for a living, gets to vote.
Let’s means test you because I don’t believe that you have enough experience to vote knowledgeably based on the way one third of your demographic is living.
That doesn’t seem supportable to me, either.
Your life skills evaluation boards sound like an incredibly invasive step government bureaucracy that you would oppose if someone else proposed it for anything other than denying 18-24 year olds the franchise.
Will people under 25 who lose their job lose the franchise? Will you require 24 year olds to bring proof of current employment to the voting station? If a 24 year old who has held a job for 6 years, been married for 3 years and has a 6 year old child moves to a new state to enroll in university, what proof of life experience would you require to allow them to qualify, or does the fact they are at a university disqualify them until they turn 25? If a 22 year old got married and had a child at 18, and is the primary care giver of a 4 year old and a two year old, supported by their spouse, do they have sufficient life experience for Emperor Robert’s board of evaluation, or does only wage slavery impart the necessary experience?
Anyway, I thought you were claiming you were opposed to restricting anyone’s right to vote. How does that square with denying the franchise to millions of people based on age and employment status?
Dude, you asked. If you’re going to get all snippety and call me emperor because I answered your question about what I thought we oughtta do, I’m not super inclined to burn lifespan working out the details for you. Piss off, commoner.
And it’s ‘King Bob’, not Emperor.
I’m just puzzled by how depriving under 25s of the franchise isn’t restricting anyone’s right to vote (much less ability, which is what you claimed you were opposed to restricting earlier in this thread).
Sorry I got your title wrong. Maybe you should go for a dual monarchy, so you can be King Bob and Emperor Robert at the same time.
Nice deflection, Myca. So you figure that when the right uses imagery it’s fine to whip up everyone about it, but when the left issues actual threats and carries some of them out we should ignore it?
I think the things the union dude said, if they’ve been accurately reported, were thuggish and inexcusable.
Nonetheless, the vast majority of union officials don’t say stuff like that. His comments were not typical or representative, and I don’t feel obliged to own them just because I’m pro-union.
And I think the thing about the target signs, in retrospect, seems like a silly partisan issue-of-the-week, the sort of thing that briefly flares in partisan blogs, but is really news that does not matter, and that most people forget about.
I don’t think that looking at either story tells us much of anything about anything, honestly.
No 2013 open thread? I’ll revive this one:
HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYONE!!!!!!!!
Good point! I’m just really busy, alas, but I’ll start a new open thread. And happy new year!
Well, comments made by people who don’t represent the majority of right-wing views are very often blown up in the media as if they do, and then people of conservative stripe are challenged as if they own them. So I figure this is fair play.
Besides, in this case we see that people acted as if they DID pay attention to them – note the vandalism that took place, including the endangerment of disabled people.
Yes, it was silly. And it was partisan. And it would have and should have died on a partisan blog – but the MSM blew it up into a major story and made sure people didn’t forget about it. Because they are partisan, at least the ones that blew it up. How often have we been told that the Tea Party is a violent movement, or “potentially violent” because of things like someone possessing a gun on private property while the President was a quarter- or half-mile away in a brick building. Yet when there is actual violence by a group representing a particular left-wing viewpoint it’s generally ignored and deemed insignificant.