Voter Fraud, p.II

Yes, this does not make it right; but it also suggests that it is not a practical problem:

Furthermore, the areas where vote fraud is most likely to occur are also those where it is least likely to end in prosecution. Vote fraud is most prevalent in big cities with large populations — which are almost uniformly represented by Democratic district attorneys. There likely aren’t a lot of Democratic DA’s who wake up every morning and say, “Gee, I wonder if I can demonstrate to the public that my party is engaging in vote fraud, and in the process, cost myself votes.”

If vote fraud is most prevalent in big cities[1], and these are "almost uniformly represented by Democratic district attorneys," and--following the entirely un-grounded assumption of  Schneider's-- it is only or very disproportionately Democrats who engage in vote fraud, then what's the practical problem? Democrats win the city by 75% versus 74%?

Again, when voter fraud does take place, this is wrong. But supporting measures that practically disfranchise a sizeable (approximately 10%) portion of the population presumably should require some justification based upon considerations of harm and consequence. We could disfranchise 100% of the population and totally wipe out voter fraud, but this would be excessive.

[1] The whole point of Schneider's post is that "There may be very little vote fraud; there may be a great deal. In the absence of a photo-ID requirement, we just didn’t know." If we don't know, how the hell is he so certain that (1) it happens disproportionately in big cities, and (2) it is done disproportionately by Democrats.

Voter Fraud

Explain this to me please:

The [Milwaukee Police Department] found one property where 128 individuals were registered to vote — all of whom signed up for the 2004 election. Twenty-nine voters were registered at a county office building that featured no residential living. The MPD report found instances of double-voting, unopened absentee ballots appearing after the election, and deceased people voting. None of these are counted in the Brennan Center report, which has an extremely narrow definition of “fraud” — people voting who know they are ineligible to vote (felons, for instance).

How is it the case that double-voting and deceased people voting are not included by the definition "people voting who know they are ineligible to vote." Presumably the deceased person is not actually voting, and so someone must be doing it who (presumably) probably is aware that they are not the person voting. Likewise, the person voting twice presumably knows that they are not supposed to vote twice (although I can see some instances where someone might vote by early voting and then forget, and show up at the polls and slip through the check; this is error, not fraud).

"Unopened absentee ballots appearing after the election" is a different thing entirely, but not obviously voting fraud.

iChildLabor

The NYTimes has been running an excellent series of articles on the outsourcing of Apple manufacturing jobs. The previous installment looked at how the outsourcing of low-end jobs also brought with it an entire manufacturing ecology, including the production of sophisticated technologies by higher skilled workers.

Today's offering looks at this from another angle, that of human suffering and the exploitation of labor.

The explosion ripped through Building A5 on a Friday evening last May, an eruption of fire and noise that twisted metal pipes as if they were discarded straws. When workers in the cafeteria ran outside, they saw black smoke pouring from shattered windows. It came from the area where employees polished thousands of iPad cases a day. Two people were killed immediately, and over a dozen others hurt. As the injured were rushed into ambulances, one in particular stood out. His features had been smeared by the blast, scrubbed by heat and violence until a mat of red and black had replaced his mouth and nose....

In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology peers — as well as dozens of other American industries — have achieved a pace of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history.

However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.

More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning....

“Apple never cared about anything other than increasing product quality and decreasing production cost,” said Li Mingqi, who until April worked in management at Foxconn Technology, one of Apple’s most important manufacturing partners. Mr. Li, who is suing Foxconn over his dismissal, helped manage the Chengdu factory where the explosion occurred.“Workers’ welfare has nothing to do with their interests,” he said.

More generally, increased independent labor organizing in China has got to be, along with the massive leveling and rise in living standards--which, to be clear, are not paradoxical, nor is it hypocritical to see rising living standards alongside increased exploitation--one of the major stories of the decade, and one of the most important potential transformations in human history.

Nocera's banging on...

... it's good to see a j'accuse series; we get so little of that these days from the press.

As I chronicled on Saturday, it was her acceptance of plane tickets a year or so ago that had caused his first suspension. The N.C.A.A. had ruled the tickets an “improper benefit,” and had ordered him to sit out six games and pay a $100-per-month fine to repay the tickets. What more, she wondered, could the N.C.A.A. want?

A lot, it turned out. Tanesha is a single mother raising four children on a small salary. The N.C.A.A. investigators viewed her circumstances as a cause for suspicion, not sympathy. For instance, she owns a car. Where did she get the money to pay for it, they asked? How did she pay for her home? And so on.

Concluding that she had no choice but to cooperate — otherwise, her son would surely pay a severe price — Tanesha turned over her bank statements, as the N.C.A.A. demanded. Four N.C.A.A. investigators pored through her financial records and conducted interrogations in Aurora, seeking “evidence” that she was getting money from “improper” sources. (Tanesha declined to comment.)

When the investigators saw a series of cash deposits in her bank account, they demanded to know the source of the money. She told them: Friends had given her money so that she and her children could have a joyful Christmas. The investigators said they didn’t believe her; they felt sure that she must have gotten the money from an unscrupulous sports agent or some other party outlawed by the N.C.A.A.

Cartels in Everything

Joe Nocera, with whom I find myself in as frequent agreement as disagreement, is on a mission. It is a worthwhile effort, and hopefully his significant bully pulpit will help bring about some change.

When the N.C.A.A. investigates an athlete for breaking its rules, not only is he presumed guilty but his punishment begins before he knows what he’s accused of. He is not told who his accuser is. The N.C.A.A. will delve into the personal relationships of his relatives and demand their bank statements and other private records. And it will hand down its verdict without so much as a hearing. Reputations have been ruined on accusations so flimsy that they would be laughed out of any court in the land. Then again, the N.C.A.A. isn’t a court of law. It’s more powerful....

Boatright must have done something awful to merit that kind of punishment, right? In fact, he did nothing at all. It was his mother who had violated N.C.A.A. rules. Her crime was looking out for her son.

Like any parent would, she wanted to visit the schools her son was considering. But under N.C.A.A. rules, the universities recruiting Ryan are only allowed to pay his way, not hers. So she got the money from an old friend, Reggie Rose, an A.A.U. coach in Aurora and the older brother of Derrick Rose, the Chicago Bulls star. Boatright played for Rose during his last two years of high school, but his mother had known Rose well before then. That airfare is the “impermissible benefit."....

Instead, the N.C.A.A. told [Boatright's mother] that she should “stay away” from Rose — thus claiming yet another absurd power: the power to dictate who an athlete’s parents can befriend.

And how did the N.C.A.A. find out about [her] airfare? Get this: The N.C.A.A. heard about it from her ex-boyfriend, a convicted felon who, according to Ryan’s cousin, Jaeh Thomas, had once seen Ryan as “his big ticket.” When the relationship turned ugly, he vowed to exact revenge on Tanesha by calling in the N.C.A.A., according to Thomas and Mike McAllister, Ryan’s father. If this were a court proceeding, the ex-boyfriend’s credibility could be challenged and his motives questioned. Instead, in its crazed obsession with its extra-legal rules, the N.C.A.A. is willing to serve the interests of an angry ex-boyfriend who wants to ruin an athlete’s career to get back at his mother. It almost defies belief.

Yes, the exploitation of college athletes is not the most pressing issue in the labor world; but they are workers, and they are not-paid, and they are abused and their potentials ruined by arbitrary decisions against which they have little recourse. Solidarity extends. The N.C.A.A. is a shameless cartel. Bring it down.

Changed sentiment

This is entirely for my own recollection. The signs of a changed faith in suffrage and democracy are evident throughout writings in the late 19th century. I am trying to document some of these, to show the change in attitudes of the time. Here is John Goadby Gregory, writing in defense of Wisconsin's early enfranchisement of black men through a referendum (and court case).


In John G. Gregory, "Negro Suffrage in Wisconsin," Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Art and Letters, XI (1898), p.101

The day has gone by when suffrage was glowingly regarded as an end. We recognize it now as merely a means toward an end. There are among us intelligent people who grumble at the results - or what they conceive to be the results - of universal manhood suffrage in the United States. Did our fathers blunder when by extending the franchise they sought to expand the limits of human freedom? My purpose in this paper has been to present fact, not to blossom into theory. It is a fact, I take it, that the liberal suffrage provisions of our law are a noble monument to a glorious faith in the approximate perfectibility of humanity. As a native and a citizen of Wisconsin, I am proud that at an early stage of her career, and in advance of nearly all of her sister commonwealths, she turned into the broad path in which they have seen fit to follow.

Good for him.

stenography

There was a blow up of sorts today about the NYTimes public editor asking whether the Times should correct inaccurate facts (known politely as falsehoods) asserted by interviewees in their articles. Of course, they already do. They just don't do it for the American powerful.

Hajji Ahmad Fareed, a former member of Parliament, said the images confirmed to him that America was against Islam. The Americans "will never be friends with us and never bring peace," he said. Americans have urinated "on our holy Koran," he said, and have now done so "on the bodies of our Muslims." Mr. Fareed was referring to an erroneous report in Newsweek in 2005 that American soldiers at the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had thrown a Koran into a toilet. The report prompted protests and riots in many parts of the Muslim world. The worst was in Afghanistan, where at least 17 people were killed.

 This point, I see, has been made, better, and time-lier, by Greenwald.

Should be a big fight

... so it probably won't be. This is the subject of my next phase of research, one that I have been working on a bit and which I hope to tie to 19th century concerns with fraud in American elections. Hopefully will be presenting this work at a conference sooner rather than later.

In any event, photo ID is not about illegal immigrants. It’s about people with a clear right to vote, one they have perhaps exercised for many years. The federal government has never suggested that photo ID is desirable. Under the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA), a bank check, paycheck, or the last four digits of a Social Security number can suffice under various circumstances. The new brand of state laws requires an unexpired driver’s license of passport, military photo ID, or a state-issued non-driver photo ID. The South Carolina law also provides that a voter registration card with a photograph is acceptable, but the state does not actually issue such a card.

While no photo ID requirements existed before Indiana’s, bills were introduced last year to require them in 34 states, according to New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks the issue comprehensively. The bills were signed into law in seven states, including South Carolina and Kansas. The others were Alabama, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin. (Alabama and Texas also require preclearance under the Voting Rights Act.) Governors vetoed bills in Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, and North Carolina.

Unintended

Seriously? They named the event encouraging people to vote in the Iowa caucuses, Rock the Caucus?

Did no one say it aloud?

I would love to be that small.

From Eschaton, we are led here:

Apparently, Kashya Hildebrand bought ~$500,000 when she shorted the CHF. This relatively small transaction netted the Hildebrand family only ~$50,000 in less than one month. Being that the amount is so small, the conclusion is that nothing nefarious has taken place.

They will watch over and protect each other, because only they truly understand their problems. If I embezzled $50,000 from a company in a month, I'm pretty sure they would conclude something nefarious had taken place.[1]

Ms. Hildebrand is the wife of the head of the Swiss National Bank. He is paid $950,000 a year. Let's assume, implausibly, that that is the extent of their yearly income. So she increased by 63% the family's monthly income based on these trades. Not bad.

[1] Yes I realize embezzlement and insider trading are not equivalent.