The View from Right Field

Vote By Mail Is Easy. Just Do It Early.

According to Democrats and some of the media, Donald Trump is going to use the Postal Service to mess up vote-by-mail this year.  In fact, last month the House Democrats tried to give the Postal Service $25 billion to make sure they had enough money for the election.  Of course, that was pretty much political optics, as opposed to really trying to help, and fix, the Postal Service.  But throwing money at the bureaucracy (or at least phony attempts to do so) is one way to make yourself feel good – and maybe look good.

But, in any case, if President Trump is trying to get the Postal Service to mess up voting by mail this year, it looks like he is about as good on that as he has been at lots of other things he does – or doesn’t do.  Just this past weekend I received this notice from the Postal Service giving me suggestions on getting my vote-by-mail ballot back in on time (and including a link to find out what the rules are in my state):

I’m Hoping for a Landslide Come November

I hope the election in November is a landslide.  In saying that, I’m not saying who I want to win (you can find that elsewhere).  I’m just saying I just hope it’s not close because I’m not sure we, as a nation, can handle another close election.

I am especially worried because the pandemic means voting is going to be very different this year.  There’s going to be a lot more vote-by-mail.  In person voting will probably be different, too (who knows how many polling places we’ll have open).  I’m afraid there will be a lot of confusion, among voters and among election workers.  Plus who knows if the election authorities are ready for an election as different as this one will be.

Where Did All This Partisanship Come From?

I will assume most people will not say that it started with Donald Trump.  He certainly is bad, partisanship-wise,¹ but it didn’t start with him.  Some people might go back to Joe McCarthy or Richard Nixon,² but I’m thinking of something more recent.  Republicans might point to Ted Kennedy’s attacks on Robert Bork in 1986, when President Reagan nominated him to the Supreme Court.³  Democrats might point to attacks on Bill and Hillary Clinton in the 1990s (the “vast right-wing conspiracy”).  And so on.  But I am going to suggest something else.

Sometimes it is hard to remember how you felt about a particular event at the time because things that happened afterwards color your recollection of how you felt then.  Even reading contemporaneous news articles about something in the past will sometimes surprise you because you know what has happened since and the article doesn’t. 

Now Is the Time to Get Ready for the Election in November

Last weekend The Wall Street Journal had an article by Nicholas Persily, “It’s Not Too Late to Save the 2020 Election,” on things we need to do to avoid (minimize-?) problems next November.  Professor Persily listed nine things:

1. Provide more federal funding and support.
2. Ensure that schools remain open as polling places.
3. Keep voters from having to wait in line.
4. Bolster confidence in voting by mail.
5. Encourage election and postal officials to coordinate their efforts as soon as possible.
6. Insist that the big tech companies do their part.
7. Deploy tools to help predict voter turnout.
8. Anticipate problems with disinformation and cybersecurity.
9. Refrain from declaring a winner on election night.

Here are the key things I got from the article, with an Illinois perspective.

George Marshall on Character

In a speech on “Marshall and His Generals” at the George Marshall Foundation on July 20, 2017, Dr. Stephen Taaffe talked about the four criteria that Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall used to pick the high-ranking officers¹ for the U.S. Army during World War II.²  Let me mention them, in reverse order:

1. General Marshall wanted to know them personally or know somebody who knew them personally.

2. Age.  (Sorry.  I realize it is politically incorrect today, but General Marshall didn’t want older generals.)

Three Cheers for Virginia: They’re Dumping Touch-Screen Voting Machines

Three cheers for Virginia because the Virginia Board of Elections has ordered that electronic, touch-screen voting machines cannot be used in the statewide elections coming up in November.¹  Earlier this year, in a demonstration at DEF CON in Las Vegas, a touch-screen voting machine previously used in Virginia was hacked in less than two hours.  Instead of touch-screen voting, Virginia will use paper ballots counted by scanning machines in November.

This seems so logical, even before the reports of Russian hacking attempts in last year’s election, that the decision is an obvious one.  Touch-screen electronic voting has no paper backup.  You touch the screen, your vote is counted, and poof, any evidence of how you voted disappears.²  There is no way to recount the votes.  There is no way to know for sure that when you touch Candidate A, your vote wasn’t counted for Candidate B.

Oops, I Was Wrong On That One – And Electing the President By Popular Vote

Back on November 6, I made this comment about the election:

"According to CNN, as of this morning, approximately 120,558,000 votes had been cast for either Obama or McCain. In 2004 Bush and Kerry got slightly over 121,068,000 votes between them. While there are more votes to be counted, and the final vote total in 2008 will probably be more than the 2004 total, it looks like the percentage of the total eligible voters who actually voted will be down.(See Update below.)
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Update (11/06/08 8:35 a.m.): Stories in the media have indicated that the turnout was the highest in generations.  Maybe the count is going more slowly than I would have thought.  We will see."

Well, I was wrong – because the counting was going more slowly than I thought. As of this morning, CNN shows 125,016,000 votes for President. That number of votes is 3.3% higher than 2004, and the total could wind up being about 4% more than 2004 by the time they are done counting. That is a sizable increase, though it is just a little bit more than the increase in the overall population of the United States from 2004 to 2008. The population of the U.S. as of July 1, 2004, was estimated to be 294,655,000. As of October 22, 2008, it was estimated to be 305,468,000. Lowering the 2008 estimate to 304,500,000 so you have comparable numbers (i.e., July 1 to July 1) shows a 3.7% increase in population from 2004 to 2008. Obviously, these numbers are not eligible voters, but I think the increase would be about the same. So, there was a small increase in the percentage of voters participating, but not a big one. What probably happened was that Obama wound up increasing the percentage of people voting in certain categories (for example, maybe Blacks and young people), while unhappiness with the Republican candidates and/or unhappiness with the Bush Administration and the Republicans in Congress from 2001 through 2006, decreased participation among other groups.

One more comment: The slowness of the counting of the last 3% or 4% of the popular vote perhaps provides another reason why electing the President by a straight popular vote is not be a good idea. Think about he possibility of a really close contest in the popular vote – and then consider additional votes coming in over days and weeks after election day. It would be Florida 2000 (or the gubernatorial election in Washington state in 2004) writ large. They couldn’t recount the votes in just Florida on a timely basis in 2000. How could we recount all of the votes in the whole country? And what about ballot security and standards for counting the votes? Appalling as it is to say, those things don’t matter if the election isn’t close. If it’s 60-40 (or even 53-46), it doesn’t matter. When it’s Florida in 2000, it does matter. If it was that close nationally, every vote everywhere would matter. In the governor’s race in Washington state in 2004, the election authorities in Seattle were discovering additional uncounted ballots days and weeks after the election. That was a big problem, but it was just one state. A close popular vote, and a President elected by popular vote, would make that a national problem – and could de-legitimatize the election in a way that would make Florida 2000 look like the proverbial Sunday School picnic.

Electing the President by popular vote. I don’t think I want to go there.

Secret Ballot? What Secret Ballot?

One of the first posts I ever made on this blog was on the problem of ensuring secrecy in voting with the optical scan ballot they have been using recently in suburban Cook County, Illinois. (See here.)

Well, they had a couple of video screen voting machines at the polling place today, and it was amazing. There was absolutely no secrecy at all when you used one of them to vote. The voting booth, if that is what you want to call it, had three really low sides. The video screen was situated so it was above any of the sides. And there was nothing behind the voter. It would have been no problem at all to see how any person using one of these machines was voting. You had no more secrecy than if you had shouted out your choices in a public meeting.

Oh well, at least it is Cook County. It’s not like we have ever had any problems with fraud in voting in Cook County. We’re all honest people, and we only elect honest politicians.

Exit Polls

I don’t know if there will be any big controversies with exit polls this year. If Obama sweeps the election, then we won’t need to worry about them. It will be unlike 2004 when some of the early exit polls indicated John Kerry was going to win. Some Kerry staffers even took to calling Senator Kerry "Mr. President". But that only lasted for a couple of hours – until the voting ended and results from the real polls started coming in.

And then the controversy started. How could this have happened? The exit polls showed Kerry leading. What went wrong? Jesse Jackson (Sr.) called for an investigation to find out what the problem was – with the real polls. There must have been fraud in the counting. The Republicans were cheating again.

In case that happens this year, or at least for the next time it does happen, I wanted to relate my experience with exit polls. It was in 1988. I was a Republican precinct captain in Oak Park, Illinois. My precinct was 64. On election day precinct 64 voted in the same polling place as the neighboring precinct, precinct 66. Precinct 66 leaned Republican and had more Republican voters than precinct 64. (This will be important later.)

The people running the exit poll project in Illinois that year picked precinct 66 as one of the precincts they would sample. Precinct 66 and a number of other precincts across Illinois were carefully picked to accurately reflect the voting patterns in Illinois.

So, throughout election day, there was a person in the polling place asking people, as they left, to vote in her exit poll. And some of them did. The problem was that it was almost impossible for the person collecting the votes to only get people from precinct 66 to vote in her exit poll. It was hard for her to tell, as people left the polling place, who voted in which precinct. And she didn’t do a good job of asking people which precinct they were in before letting them vote.

Eventually, she was able to get the number of votes that they wanted for the exit poll. But among the votes in her mini-ballot box were a large number of ballots cast by people from precinct 64. And this was a problem because, as I said, precinct 64 was more Democratic than precinct 66.

That meant that the results from what was supposed to precinct 66 were really from a combination of precincts 64 and 66. Since precinct 64 was more Democratic than precinct 66, the results were more Democratic than they would have been if the exit poll had only included voters from precinct 66, like it was supposed to.

I didn’t think much about it during the day. But then, after I got home and turned on the TV, I saw the networks were calling Illinois for Michael Dukakis – based on the exit polls. Illinois Governor Jim Thompson, a Republican and a big supporter of soon-to-be-President George H.W. Bush, was upset. He kept saying Illinois was going to go for Bush, but the exit polls said it was Dukakis.

Illinois did eventually go for Bush. (In 1988 Illinois was still a two-party state.) As the argument was going on, I thought of that exit poll in precinct 66. Those results were off, and they would have moved the state average off a little. By themselves, they would not have made a difference. But how many more precincts like that were there? I would imagine normally those kinds of things average out, but maybe they didn’t in Illinois in 1988. Maybe there was a statistical blip and most of the mistakes went one way. If so, that could have made the difference.

And so, when the media talks about exit polls, especially on election night, I always think back on the exit poll that day in precinct 66 – and precinct 64.

It's Not Vote Fraud; It's Just Voter Registration Fraud

Unbelievable as it may seem, this is basically the reason one person gave as why we shouldn’t be too worried about reports from across the country about problems with fraudulent voter registration forms being submitted to local election authorities by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn, as it is called for short).

Here is a short list of just some of what has come up in the last couple of weeks:

On October 7 a Nevada voter-fraud task raided Acorn’s state headquarters in Las Vegas. According to the Associated Press, "Secretary of State Ross Miller said the raid was part of a monthslong voter fraud investigation of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which he said submitted fraudulent registrations, including forms for the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboy football team." (Miller is a Democrat.)

According to CNN, "in Lake County [Indiana], home to the long-depressed steel town of Gary, the bipartisan Elections Broad has stopped processing a stack of about 5,000 applications delivered just before the October 6 registration deadline after the first 2,100 turned out to be phony. … The forms included registrations submitted in the names of the dead – and in one case, the name of a fast-food restaurant, Jimmy Johns. Sally LaSota, a Democrat on the board, called the forms fraudulent and said whoever filed them broke the law."

An editorial in today’s San Diego Herald-Tribune talked about the problems with Acorn’s efforts there.

And it is not just this year. As the Washington Times noted, in 2006 Acorn entered into "a consent decree in Washington state to refrain from improper voter registration activities or else fact criminal prosecution."

While election officials are complaining, some people are not concerned. This isn’t vote fraud, they say. There is no real problem unless somebody tries to use one of those phony registrations to actually vote. So "Tony Romo" registered in Nevada. So what? It’s not fraud unless "Tony Romo" tries to vote, and nobody is going to let anybody do that, so there is no problem.

Acorn officials have even claimed these charges are just an attempt by Republicans to hold down voting, to keep people disenfranchised.

That is, of course, hooey. This has nothing to do with disenfranchising people. It has to do with having an honest voter list so we can have an honest election. Clearly, people aren’t going to be able to claim they are Tony Romo and vote. But what about other names on the list, names that aren’t famous. Is somebody going to try to vote for them? I don’t know.

Actually, we have no idea what anybody was planning on doing with these registrations. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was just a matter of Acorn employees trying to meet some kind of quota so they could get paid. Maybe they get paid piece-rate, so many cents per registration. It doesn’t matter. Fraud is fraud, and this is a fraud on the election system. Even if those people never vote, it takes time for the officials to go through these forms and throw out the bad ones, time that could be spent doing something more important, like getting ready for the election coming up. And maybe it was part of something bigger; we don’t know.

But we do know this: If we want honest elections, the whole process needs to be honest, from registering to voting to counting. If people cannot trust the process, the whole process, will they accept the result? We don’t want to find out. We need to protect our whole election process. It may finish with the counting, but it starts with voter registration. We need to keep our voter registration process honest, and if groups like Acorn can’t do it that way, maybe they shouldn’t be doing it at all.