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The Disconnect Between Voter ID Laws and Voter Fraud |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=31108"><span class="small">Philip Bump, The Washington Post</span></a>
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Tuesday, 14 October 2014 12:54 |
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Bump writes: "Almost no one shows up at the polls pretending to be someone else in an effort to throw an election. Almost no one acts as a poll worker on Election Day to try to cast illegal votes for a candidate. And almost no general election race in recent history has been close enough to have been thrown by the largest example of in-person voter fraud on record."
A Milwaukee early voter in 2010. (photo: Morry Gash/AP)
The Disconnect Between Voter ID Laws and Voter Fraud
By Philip Bump, The Washington Post
14 October 14
 lmost no one shows up at the polls pretending to be someone else in an effort to throw an election. Almost no one acts as a poll worker on Election Day to try to cast illegal votes for a candidate. And almost no general election race in recent history has been close enough to have been thrown by the largest example of in-person voter fraud on record.
That said, there have been examples of fraud, including fraud perpetrated through the use of absentee ballots severe enough to force new elections at the state level. But the slew of new laws passed over the past few years meant to address voter fraud have overwhelmingly focused on the virtually non-existent/unproven type of voter fraud, and not the still-not-common-but-not-non-existent abuse of absentee voting.
In August, Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola University Law School, detailed for Wonkblog 31 instances of documented, in-person voter fraud that would have been prevented by stricter rules around identification at the polling place. The most severe instance Levitt outlined involved as many as 24 voters in Brooklyn who tried to vote under assumed names.
There are almost no elections in which 24 votes makes a significant difference, particularly at the federal level. The graph below compares the vote total and the margin of victory for every race with less than a million votes in general elections since 2006.
Most elections, understandably, have margins of victory well into the thousands. So here are all of the House races with a margin of victory under 20,000 since 2006. The five solid-colored dots are those in which the margin of victory was 500 or less. No race was within a 24-vote margin.
Senate races generally have a much larger total vote count. There were nine Senate races in that time period that had a margin of under 20,000 votes, including one — the 2008 Senate race in Minnesota — that was settled by about 300 votes. It's marked in blue on the graph, and we'll come back to it.
Despite how rarely in-person fraud could determine an election, even if it were common, Republican politicians and conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation have put an emphasis on new voter restrictions. After the Supreme Court blocked Wisconsin's law late last week, Gov. Scott Walker (R) defended the law by saying, in essence, that its effect on outcomes didn't matter. "It doesn’t matter if there’s one, 100 or 1,000," he said during a gubernatorial debate. "Amongst us, who would be that one person who would like to have our vote canceled out by a vote that was cast illegally?"
Last week, we reported on a Government Accountability Office report indicating that some 100,000 fewer people voted in Kansas and Tennessee due to the introduction of voter ID laws in those states. The decline was weighted more heavily toward younger voters and black voters — or, to be clear, more-Democratic voters (the kind Democrats accuse the laws of targeting). In an editorial Monday, the New York Times attacked the "big lie" central to voting restrictions, that "there is virtually no in-person voter fraud; the purpose of these laws is to suppress voting."
Levitt, author of the Wonkblog piece, also prepared a lengthy report on voter fraud in 2007 for the Brennan Center for Justice. It whittles down common stories about thousands of fraudulent votes into the reality that those reports usually stem from haphazard comparisons of voter rolls with population data. Levitt's report also emphasizes the role historical allegations of fraud play in coloring the current debate; indeed, the Heritage Foundation's Web site uses examples from 1844 and 1948 to demonstrate that fraud exists. Many proponents of voter ID laws also cite absentee ballot fraud, despite the fact that these more-plentiful examples wouldn't be affected by voter ID laws.
John Fund of the National Review focused on absentee ballot fraud in an editorial Monday. After the 2012 election, the state legislature in Colorado passed new laws aimed at making it easier to register and vote with as much eagerness as Republican initiatives aimed at things like voter ID. Voters in Colorado this year can register and vote on the same day, and the state moved to an all-mail ballot system, similar to ones used in Washington and Oregon. This, Fund worries, could lead to an election thrown for the Democrats. Fund has argued for new voting restrictions like voter ID laws for years, and his column includes a contested figure for fraud in the 2008 Minnesota election that focuses on felons who voted before being legally allowed to do so. Is Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), the winner of that 2008 race, a senator thanks to voter fraud? It's unlikely.
In an e-mail to The Post, Levitt made clear that absentee ballots can be a threat to the integrity of elections. He pointed to instances in a Pennsylvania state Senate race in 1994 and the Miami mayor's race in 1998 as examples. Fraud in absentee balloting is "unfortunately quite real," he said.
That doesn't mean it's widespread, though. In 2013, an election worker in Oregon was sentenced to jail for fraud — becoming the 13th person in the state to be convicted since it went to all-mail balloting in 2000.
And it's worth re-emphasizing here that most voter ID laws don't specifically target absentee ballots. And, in fact, the laws largely wouldn't do anything to curtail absentee voter fraud even incidentally if passed — a key point in Levitt's Wonkblog essay.
"The thing about voter fraud isn't that it doesn't exist," Levitt told The Post on Monday. "It does exist, and all responsible observers both know and say that. The question is whether the proposed policy solution (invariably tighter ID requirements at the polls) is tailored to the problem that actually exists, and at the same time not sufficiently severe that it creates more trouble than it solves."
That's a subtlety that is often lost.
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FOCUS | The Age of Vulnerability |
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Tuesday, 14 October 2014 11:11 |
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Stiglitz writes: "It used to be thought that America's greatest strength was not its military power, but an economic system that was the envy of the world. But why would others seek to emulate an economic model by which a large proportion - even a majority - of the population has seen their income stagnate while incomes at the top have soared?"
Economist Joseph Stiglitz. (photo: Roosevelt Institute)
The Age of Vulnerability
By Joseph E. Stiglitz, Reader Supported News
14 October 14
 wo new studies show, once again, the magnitude of the inequality problem plaguing the United States. The first, the U.S. Census Bureau's annual income and poverty report, shows that, despite the economy's supposed recovery from the Great Recession, ordinary Americans' incomes continue to stagnate. Median household income, adjusted for inflation, remains below its level a quarter century ago.
It used to be thought that America's greatest strength was not its military power, but an economic system that was the envy of the world. But why would others seek to emulate an economic model by which a large proportion -- even a majority -- of the population has seen their income stagnate while incomes at the top have soared?
A second study, the United Nations Development Program's Human Development Report 2014, corroborates these findings. Every year, the UNDP publishes a ranking of countries by their Human Development Index HDI, which incorporates other dimensions of well-being besides income, including health and education.
America ranks fifth according to HDI, below Norway, Australia, Switzerland and the Netherlands. But when its score is adjusted for inequality, it drops 23 spots -- among the largest such declines for any highly developed country. Indeed, the U.S. falls below Greece and Slovakia, countries that people do not typically regard as role models or as competitors with the U.S. at the top of the league tables.
The UNDP report emphasizes another aspect of societal performance: vulnerability. It points out that while many countries succeeded in moving people out of poverty, the lives of many are still precarious. A small event -- say, an illness in the family -- can push them back into destitution. Downward mobility is a real threat, while upward mobility is limited.
In the U.S., upward mobility is more myth than reality, whereas downward mobility and vulnerability is a widely shared experience. This is partly because of America's healthcare system, which still leaves poor Americans in a precarious position, despite President Barack Obama's reforms.
Those at the bottom are only a short step away from bankruptcy with all that that entails. Illness, divorce, or the loss of a job often is enough to push them over the brink.
The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (or "Obamacare") was intended to ameliorate these threats -- and there are strong indications that it is on its way to significantly reducing the number of uninsured Americans. But, partly owing to a Supreme Court decision and the obduracy of Republican governors and legislators, who in two dozen U.S. states have refused to expand Medicaid (insurance for the poor) -- even though the federal government pays almost the entire tab -- 41 million Americans remain uninsured. When economic inequality translates into political inequality -- as it has in large parts of the U.S. -- governments pay little attention to the needs of those at the bottom.
Neither GDP nor HDI reflects changes over time or differences across countries in vulnerability. But in America and elsewhere, there has been a marked decrease in security. Those with jobs worry whether they will be able to keep them; those without jobs worry whether they will get one.
The recent economic downturn eviscerated the wealth of many. In the U.S., even after the stock market recovery, median wealth fell more than 40 percent from 2007 to 2013. That means that many of the elderly and those approaching retirement worry about their standards of living. Millions of Americans have lost their homes; millions more face the insecurity of knowing that they may lose theirs in the future.
These insecurities are in addition to those that have long confronted Americans. In the country's inner cities, millions of young Hispanics and African Americans face the insecurity of a dysfunctional and unfair police and judicial system; crossing the path of a policeman who has had a bad night may lead to an unwarranted prison sentence -- or worse.
Europe has traditionally understood the importance of addressing vulnerability by providing a system of social protection. Europeans have recognized that good systems of social protection can even lead to improved overall economic performance, as individuals are more willing to take the risks that lead to higher economic growth.
But in many parts of Europe today, high unemployment (12 percent on average, 25 percent in the worst affected countries), combined with austerity-induced cutbacks in social protection, has resulted in unprecedented increases in vulnerability. The implication is that the decrease in societal well-being may be far larger than that indicated by conventional GDP measures -- numbers that already are bleak enough, with most countries showing that real (inflation-adjusted) per capita income is lower today than before the crisis -- a lost half-decade.
The report by the International Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (which I chaired) emphasized that GDP is not a good measure of how well an economy is performing. The U.S. Census and UNDP reports remind us of the importance of this insight. Too much has already been sacrificed on the altar of GDP fetishism.
Regardless of how fast GDP grows, an economic system that fails to deliver gains for most of its citizens, and in which a rising share of the population faces increasing insecurity, is, in a fundamental sense, a failed economic system. And policies, like austerity, that increase insecurity and lead to lower incomes and standards of living for large proportions of the population are, in a fundamental sense, flawed policies.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, has pioneered pathbreaking theories in the fields of economic information, taxation, development, trade, and technical change. He is currently a professor at Columbia University, and is the author of "The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future."
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FOCUS | Government Spends More at Elite Private Universities Than at Public Universities |
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Tuesday, 14 October 2014 09:33 |
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Reich writes: "Imagine a system of college education supported by high and growing government spending on elite private universities that mainly educate children of the wealthy and upper-middle class, and low and declining government spending on public universities that educate large numbers of children from the working class and the poor."
Economist, professor, author and political commentator Robert Reich. (photo: Richard Morgenstein)
Government Spends More at Elite Private Universities Than at Public Universities
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
14 October 14
 magine a system of college education supported by high and growing government spending on elite private universities that mainly educate children of the wealthy and upper-middle class, and low and declining government spending on public universities that educate large numbers of children from the working class and the poor.
You can stop imagining. That’s the American system right now.
Government subsidies to elite private universities take the form of tax deductions for people who make charitable contributions to them. In economic terms a tax deduction is the same as government spending. It has to be made up by other taxpayers.
These tax subsidies are on the rise because in recent years a relatively few very rich people have had far more money than they can possibly spend or even give away to their children. So they’re donating it to causes they believe in, such as the elite private universities that educated them or that they want their children to attend.
Private university endowments are now around $550 billion, centered in a handful of prestigious institutions. Harvard’s endowment is over $32 billion, followed by Yale at $20.8 billion, Stanford at $18.6 billion, and Princeton at $18.2 billion.
Each of these endowments increased last year by more than $1 billion, and these universities are actively seeking additional support. Last year Harvard launched a capital campaign for another $6.5 billion.
Because of the charitable tax deduction, the amount of government subsidy to these institutions in the form of tax deductions is about one out of every three dollars contributed.
A few years back, Meg Whitman, now CEO of Hewlett-Packard, contributed $30 million to Princeton. In return she received a tax break estimated to be around $10 million.
In effect, Princeton received $20 million from Whitman and $10 million from the U.S. Treasury – that is, from you and me and other taxpayers who made up the difference.
Add in these endowments’ exemptions from taxes on capital gains and on income they earn, and the total government expenditures is even larger.
Divide by the relatively small number of students attending these institutions, and the amount of subsidy per student is huge.
The annual government subsidy to Princeton University, for example, is about $54,000 per student, according to an estimate by economist Richard Vedder. Other elite privates aren’t far behind.
Public universities, by contrast, have little or no endowment income. They get almost all their funding from state governments. But these subsidies have been shrinking.
State and local financing for public higher education came to about $76 billion last year, nearly 10 percent less than a decade before.
Since more students attend public universities now than ten years ago, that decline represents a 30 percent drop per student.
That means the average annual government subsidy per student at a public university comes to less than $4,000, about one-tenth the per student government subsidy at the elite privates.
What justifies so much government spending per student in private elite universities relative to public ones?
It’s not that the private elites educate more children from poor families. One way to know is to look at the percentage of their students receiving Pell Grants, which are available only to children from poor families. (The grants themselves are relatively modest, paying a maximum of $5,645.)
In fact, the elite privates with large endowments educate a smaller percentage of poor students than universities with little or no endowment income.
According to a survey by the National Association of College and University Business Officers, only 16 percent of students in highly-endowed private universities receive Pell Grants, on average, compared with 59 percent at the lowest-endowed institutions.
At Harvard, 11 percent of students receive Pell Grants; at Yale, it’s 14 percent; Princeton, 12 percent; Stanford, 17 percent.
By contrast, 59 percent of students at the University of Texas in El Paso receive Pell grants, 53 percent at the University of California at Riverside, and 33 percent at the University of California at Berkeley.
Moreover, because public universities have many more students than elite private universities, their larger percentages of Pell students represent far greater numbers of students from poor families.
For example, the University of California at Berkeley has more Pell eligible students than the entire Ivy League put together.
But perhaps the far higher per-student subsidies received by elite private universities are justified because they’re training more future leaders who will be in a position to reduce the nation’s widening inequality.
Unfortunately, there’s not much evidence for that proposition. According to a study by sociologist Lauren Rivera, 70 percent of Harvard’s senior class submits résumés to Wall Street and consulting firms. In 2007, before the global financial meltdown, almost 50 percent of Harvard seniors (58 percent of the men, 43 percent of the women) took jobs on Wall Street.
Among Harvard seniors who got jobs last spring, 3.5 percent were headed to government and politics, 5 percent to health-related fields, and 8.8 percent to any form of public service. The percentages at the other Ivies are not much larger.
So what justifies the high per-student government subsidies at the elite private universities, and the low per-student subsidies in public universities?
There is no justification.
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Columbus's Real Legacy: The Brutal Disparities Suffered by Native Americans |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=25409"><span class="small">Bryce Covert, ThinkProgress</span></a>
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Tuesday, 14 October 2014 07:29 |
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Covert writes: "Columbus, while remembered as a hero by many, was brutal to the native people. In his quest to find gold, he enslaved them, working thousands to death; brutalized them; and murdered them."
Students mark Indigenous People Day. (photo: unknown)
Columbus's Real Legacy: The Brutal Disparities Suffered by Native Americans
By Bryce Covert, ThinkProgress
14 October 14
 very year, many schools and businesses across the country close on the second Monday in October to celebrate the Italian Christopher Columbus’s arrival in what are now called the Americas on October 12, 1942, or the “discovery” of America. Of course, Native Americans were already here. And Columbus, while remembered as a hero by many, was brutal to the native people. In his quest to find gold, he enslaved them, working thousands to death; brutalized them; and murdered them.
The native population was nearly wiped out. In A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn writes, “In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.” Columbus’s efforts amounted to genocide. Native people “were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands,” Zinn writes. “By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks [on the Bahamas] or their descendants left on the island.”
Native Americans in what is now the United States would continue to be killed by later settlers in enormous numbers, have their land stolen by the government, and see their rights trampled on. This is Columbus’s legacy, and the effects of his violent campaign and the decades of oppression afterward can still be seen today in the huge disparities between the Native American population and the population in general.
Poverty and employment
In 2012, one in four American Indians and Alaska Natives lived in poverty, compared to a national rate of 14.5 percent. For those who identify these groups as their only race, their poverty rate was just over 29 percent. Poverty rates are even higher on big Indian reservations: Among the top ten largest, rates range from 20.2 percent for individuals to as much as 53.5 percent. And extreme poverty on these reservations is, on average, four times as high as the national rate.
On top of these high poverty rates, Native Americans experience far higher unemployment rates. The unemployment situation right now is four times worse among the Native American population than it was for the entire country during the recession. The employment rate for the native population in its prime working ages was less than 65 percent between 2009 and 2011, 13.4 points lower than for white workers. During the same time, the Native American unemployment rate averaged 14.6 percent, nearly 7 points higher than the 7.7 percent rate for white workers. Things have been bad for a while: Native Americans have suffered double-digit unemployment rates ever since 2008, with a current rate around 11 percent, compared to a national rate under 6 percent.
Education
The achievement gap between students of color and white students has been steadily closing, but not for Native students. Native Americans, including American Indians and Alaska Natives, have seen their gaps widen. In 2011, 18 percent of Native fourth graders were proficient or advanced in reading on the National Assessment of Education Progress, compared to 42 percent of white fourth grades, a gap that has stayed flat since 2005. Just 17 percent of Native eighth graders scored at those levels in math, compared to 43 percent of white ones. Other racial groups saw improvements during that time that far outpaced Native students.
Beyond middle school, less than 70 percent of Native students graduate high school in four years, compared to 83 percent of white students. Only a quarter score at a college-ready level on the ACT math and a third on reading, compared to half and two-thirds of white students, respectively. Just half of Native students enroll in college, compared to three-quarters of white students, and once there less than 40 percent of Native students will compete a four-year college degree in four years, compared to 62 percent of whites.
Part of what’s going on is that schools on or near Indian reservations rely on federal Impact Aid for their budgets, since they don’t collect the same property taxes that fund other public schools. But that aid has been cut. Last year, sequestration reduced funding by $60 million, leading hundreds of schools to lay off support staff and teachers and increase class sizes, some to eliminate academic programs and extracurricular activities, and a few to close outright.
Health
Life expectancy for American Indians and Alaska Natives is 4.2 years less than for the American population as a whole; they die at 368 percent higher rate of chronic liver disease and cirrhosis and a 177 percent higher rate from diabetes. They also have an 82 percent higher rate of dying from assault or homicide and 65 percent higher rate of dying from suicide. Over 13 percent of Native Americans report being in fair or poor health, much higher than for other groups.
An important cause of these gaps is that they have less access to high-quality health care. More than a third of Native Americans lack health insurance, compared to the national rate of 17.2 percent. The government has contractual obligations to provide for the health of Native Americans, but, according to a 2006 report from the American Journal of Public Health, it “is consistently funded at a dramatically lower level than other government health programs.” The Indian Health Service was funded at just 54 percent of what was needed in 1999. The report concludes that it’s likely that the disparities in Native American health outcomes “are related to the inadequate funding of [American Indian/Alaska Native] health programs.”
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