links for 2008-10-08
Posted by Thomas Nephew on October 9th, 2008
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Brokaw: “The Gallup Organization chose 80 uncommitted voters from the Nashville area to be here with us tonight. And earlier today, each of them gave me a copy of their question for the candidates. From all of these questions — and from tens of thousands submitted online — I have selected a long list of excellent questions on domestic and foreign policy.”
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“The theft of this next race is only possible because the Democratic Party and the media, and principled Republicans, have shut their eyes to this regime’s crusade against American democracy. And now the only way to stop it–or, if it does happen yet again, resist it– is to face it at long last, and talk about it openly. “
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October 9th, 2008 at 4:17 am
Re the Mark Crispin Miller piece: I’m not impressed. Lots of assertion, not much evidence.
This in particular is just wrong:
Certainly the ground has been prepared for yet another stolen race, Bush/Cheney’s party having made enormous strides in sabotaging our election system (while the Democrats just sat there, whistling). Now, from coast to coast, it’s far more difficult (for Democrats) to register to vote, and far more difficult (for Democrats) to cast their votes, while countless (Democratic) voters have been stricken from the rolls, through purges carried out by the Department of Justice.
It is in fact easier now than it was in 2004 to register to vote in a number of states. Where has it become more difficult? States like Georgia and Indiana, where intended-to-suppress voter ID laws were passed, have experienced huge increases in registration.
Admittedly, it remains to be seen whether these new voters are allowed to cast counted ballots, but the scale of new registration and enthusiasm for the vote means that efforts at suppression are not going to be quietly accepted.
Purges of voter rolls, unlike purges of insufficiently Bush-y U.S. Attorneys, are not carried out by the DoJ but by state and local registrars. The numbers are not ‘countless’, but known. What’s not made public, but should be required to be, is the identities of voters purged from the rolls.
It’s true that “values voters” did not make the difference in 2004, and that there was vote suppression and outright fraud in Ohio.
But Democrats and activists have not sat around moping or whistling since 2004. First there was that little business in the fall of 2006 of mobilizing in sufficient numbers to retake the House and Senate, while shutting out Republicans so completely that they didn’t gain a single seat in Congress or any Governors’ offices. Since then, we have registered a huge number of new voters, who support the Democratic presidential candidate by margins from 2:1 to 6:1. In several swing states, notably including Ohio, there is vastly improved support for early voting. Democratic governors and gains in state legislatures have made it more difficult for Republicans to pull off intimidation and suppression campaigns. E.g., Minnesota law now requires that volunteers who challenge voters at polling places must themselves be voters from the locality, and must state in writing the reason for each challenge. This is a direct result of the 2004 Republican national deployment of vote-disrupting challengers.
There are still a lot of serious problems. Republicans will use every vote suppressing and count-altering trick available to them. But it’s just not going to be close enough for them to pull it off.
October 9th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Good points, thanks! I’m glad I’ve got the delicious-to-blog hookup going so you and others can comment on those items more easily. (Wish the bullet-pointing was less squashed, but whatever, maybe I’ll finally figure out how to fix that.)
I mainly linked to this piece (which I noticed on “Sideshow”) as a reminder about the ongoing voting problems, and for its “2004 values voters” rebuttal. That last was addressed to myself; I thought the values voters effect was real at the time, but I’m willing to back off on that. But re his thesis, I think the Palin choice may boil down to a simpler one than Miller does: he needs a base to work with, not a “deus ex palin” to explain a surprising win. I’m still somewhat surprised he didn’t go with Huckabee if that was his thinking, but I’m not familiar enough with GOP inside baseball to know the story there.
To me, a lot of these kinds of things are less planned malevolence and more in the blurry region between conspiracy and neglect, malign or simple; the levees were underbuilt and undermaintained, so to speak. For example, a problem Miller doesn’t mention much, that I think may be significant, is that voting machine numbers and allocations may not have kept pace with voter registration increases. I heard about that on the radio yesterday in an NPR (Fresh Air, maybe) interview with a Common Cause person. Here’s a press release with a link to that study, Voting in 2008: A close look at voting preparedness in 10 swing states — now also linked via “delicious.” I don’t know whether the record makes it clear that kind of thing is a conscious election-stealing strategy or not — or whether the distinction matters much to would-be voters who give up on Election Day.
October 9th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
While not changing my criticism of the MCM article for the lack of evidence cited for its assertions about this year’s voter suppression activities, this unsettling story from the NY Times about purges by state registrars does make the picture bleaker.
October 9th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Assuming we struggle through to an Obama win and a pickup of 4-7 Senators, there has to be a serious revisiting of HAVA and more reforms governing federal elections.
One item for the list: in addition to not allowing purges within 90 days of the election, registrars should be required to publish the names and addresses of purged voters as they occur. That kind of transparency would improve the situation in a bunch of ways: discourage/expose the use of tainted databases for the purges, enable people purged wrongly to get re-registered promptly, and and make it possible for vote-protecting organizations to help.
Also, purges shouldn’t be allowed for non-voting unless there’s been no show for two consecutive presidential elections (Florida, among other places, is purging some voters who voted in 2004 but not since). That’s insane and wrong; there’s a big slice of voters who only vote in presidential elections.
October 9th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
“Values voters” (i.e., right-winger mobilized through fundamentalist Protestant churches) were a real phenomenon, but mostly in places where they served to pad an already-near-certain win for Bush. His popular vote margin was piled up in the south, period. I heard and saw enough in Rockbridge County in 2004 to know that the fundie church mobilization was real.
Religious right voters didn’t make the difference in Ohio. But they did come out, particularly in the southeast corner of the state. Those voters kept the statewide margin close enough for the fraud and vote suppression in bigger population centers to take Rove’s operation over the top.
The Schiavo episode is not the killer disproof of religious right turnout that MCM imagines, either: the politics of that situation are just very different than abortion or gay marriage, even within conservative church populations — much less out in the wider public.
Schiavo was just pure overreaching, like Social Security privatization. The Republicans could have avoided all but modest Dem gains if they’d played it differently in 2005. But then, having run the kind of permanent campaign that they had for the previous four years, it was just not going to happen that they’d develop an actual interest in governance.
October 10th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Thanks for all these comments as well; they’re practically posts in their own right. I second your motions, of course, to revisit HAVA, and reform voter registration and purge processes.
Re Schiavo/stealth Christianist turnout, I think it’s an interesting poli-sci question that might be analyzed using election and survey data — indeed, one that may have been analyzed by someone already. I think your instincts are right that Schiavo isn’t the “killer disproof” MCM thinks it is, though maybe for different reasons: fundamentalist ’stealth’ voters (if they existed) only needed to tip a couple of states in ‘04, they didn’t need to win every state. By contrast, the outrage over Schiavo was widespread, but spontaneous and not particularly well-organized, if I recall. It was powerful for that reason, but it didn’t disprove the existence of well-organized fundamentalist Christian political groupings in key places.