Tag Archives: elections

Poll Averagers Are Having the Wonk Version of a Knife Fight. Choose Your Side!

by Terry9514k Posted on November 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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With 2 days left until our long national nightmare ends, we are now arguing about the statistical models underlying poll averaging. Seriously. Last night, Nate Silver got into a massive war with Huffington Post writer Ryan Grim after Grim published an article headlined “Nate Silver Is Unskewing Polls — All Of Them — In Trump’s Direction.” Grim basically accused Silver of applying an ad hoc correction to his polling model so that it would show a tighter race. Silver responded pithily: “This article is so fucking idiotic and irresponsible….The article made clear you have **no fucking idea** what you’re talking about.”

Well. I guess it’s not surprising that a historically nasty presidential race has also produced a historically nasty wonk war. This morning, however, Silver was on This Week, where he defended himself in more family-friendly terms:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Another variability that we’ve seen here right now. There have been a lot of other forecasts out there, Princeton Election Consortium, Huffington Post, several others — and The New York Times. Yours is much more bullish for Donald Trump and more cautious on Hillary Clinton than theirs are. Why?

SILVER: Because we think we have a good process and, presumably, the other guys have lousy processes. –ed….Look, you have some forecasts that show Clinton with a 98 or 99 percent chance of winning. That doesn’t pass a commonsense test, which is we’ve seen lots of elections where there’s about a three-point polling error. In 2012, in fact, Obama beat his polls in many states by about three points. If Clinton were to beat her polls by three points and you see something we call a borderline landslide, but if it goes the other way, and all of a sudden Trump could very easily win the electoral college.

I have a couple of comments. First, I don’t get the point of making a prediction about the percentage chance that a candidate will win. It’s useless. If Hillary Clinton wins, every pollster will be able to say they called it, because every pollster has her with more than a 50 percent chance. What’s the point of this? Better to just tell us the national and state averages, and leave it at that. I think everyone is smart enough to tell a tight race from a blowout.

Second, Silver is being a little disingenuous here. Have we really seen a “lot” of elections where there’s a three-point polling error in the poll averages? Sure, in some state contests, where there aren’t very many polls. But in a presidential election, where there are dozens? In the case of Obama 2012, Silver had Obama ahead of Romney by 2.1 points a couple of days before the election. Obama won by 3.9 points. Pollster was farther off, showing Obama ahead by 1.5 points. But even that’s still an error of only 2.4 points.

Silver’s point about a 99 percent chance of winning defying common sense is well taken. Stuff happens. Maybe all the polls are missing something. Even if Clinton were five points ahead, I’d probably still operate under the assumption that Trump had a one in twenty chance of winning. That said, a three-point lead with two days left really is pretty overwhelming. You can make a case that maybe Clinton will only win the popular vote by one point, but will then lose all the swing states and lose the Electoral College. But even that strikes me as a one-in-twenty kind of deal. If Al Gore had won the popular vote by 1 percent in 2000, he would have won the Electoral College handily.

Anyway, Hillary Clinton has been ahead of Trump by a steady 3-4 points for the past year, and I’ve come to believe that most of the variability in the polling averages is fictitious. On Tuesday, I’ll bet she wins by a solid 3-4 points, maybe a bit more because Trump’s ground game is so amateurish. That’s my prediction.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, the latest ABC and NBC polls have Clinton up by 5 points.

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Poll Averagers Are Having the Wonk Version of a Knife Fight. Choose Your Side!

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The Supreme Court Just Reinstated a Controversial Voting Law in Arizona

by MerissaHague8 Posted on November 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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Update Saturday, Nov. 5: The Supreme Court stayed the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision, so the ballot-collection ban will be effect during the election.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals blocked Arizona’s law against so-called “ballot harvesting” on Friday, clearing the way for community activists to go door to door collecting completed ballots as part of their get-out-the-vote efforts. The state of Arizona has asked US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy to issue an immediate stay on the ruling.

The law, Arizona House Bill 2023, made it a felony for people to submit ballots that weren’t theirs. (Election officials, family members, and caregivers were exempt.) State Republicans fought for three years to enact the law, arguing that the practice created an opportunity for people to destroy others’ ballots or tamper with them in some way. Arizona Democrats and community activists said ballot collection was common in the state’s minority areas and that the law was designed to decrease minority voting. In September, a federal judge denied a Democratic challenge to the law, finding that it didn’t disproportionately affect minority voters.

Friday’s ruling opens the door for community activists to collect ballots and turn them in, a factor that could be key in a state with a number of close races, including Democrats’ quest to oust controversial Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The presidential race has recently become competitive in Arizona, a state that hasn’t voted for the Democratic presidential nominee since 1996. Clinton spoke to a crowd of more than 10,000 supporters at Arizona State University on Wednesday.

The ruling doesn’t eliminate the law entirely; it just puts it on hold for Tuesday’s election. A full hearing will take place in January, according to the Associated Press.

This story has been updated.

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The Supreme Court Just Reinstated a Controversial Voting Law in Arizona

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Donald Trump’s Favorite Anti-Immigrant Sheriff May Finally Lose an Election

by Freddie9132 Posted on September 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, walked onto the stage at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, a few hours before Donald Trump was supposed to deliver his acceptance speech. Arpaio, a tough-on-illegal-immigration crusader, flashed a peace sign as the crowd roared its approval. Wearing an oversize black suit and a tie pin in the shape of a pistol, the 84-year-old sheriff said he’s spent 55 years in law enforcement, but his “most important mission has just begun: to help elect Donald Trump president of the United States.”

Trump is the only candidate strong enough to defend the nation from “terrorists coming over our border, infiltrating our communities and causing massive destruction and mayhem,” he said, adding that “criminals are penetrating our weak border security system and committing serious crime.”

Arpaio earned his spot on the RNC stage by styling himself as “America’s Toughest Sheriff,” who famously stops immigrants for no reason, dresses jail inmates in pink underwear, and houses the inmates in Korean War tents in the desert heat. He’s ridden his fame to six four-year terms as sheriff of the country’s fourth-biggest county.

Now running for his seventh term, he’s facing an opponent with better poll numbers whose message is getting a signal boost with $300,000 from liberal billionaire George Soros. He’s also having his own trouble with the law, with a looming criminal contempt referral for disobeying the orders of a federal judge who sought to restrain some of his anti-immigrant excesses. He’s saddled Maricopa County taxpayers with more than $140 million in settlement fees and court costs—the results of his sometimes overzealous approach to law enforcement.

Arpaio has been a national figure for years, but this year’s race underscores the wider political fight playing out across the country: Donald Trump’s xenophobic brand of populist bigotry has propelled the once-taboo and semi-fringe identity politics of white racists back into the mainstream conversation. For years Arpaio has been a leading national figure for fighting and criminalizing undocumented immigrants, and this race is drawing a lot of attention. Millions of dollars in out-of-state donations have poured in for Arpaio, but his challenger—retired Phoenix Police Sergeant Paul Penzone—has also drawn outside support, chiefly in the form of an independent expenditure committee funded solely by liberal financier George Soros.

Trump’s nomination could push the red state blue for the first time in a generation and motivate the state’s Hispanic voters to vote in greater numbers than ever before. A proposal to legalize recreational marijuana, and a minimum-wage ballot question could also drive younger Democratic-leaning voters to the polls. Republican Sen. John McCain’s tough challenge from Democratic Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick has enhanced on-the-ground Democratic organization across the state and won’t help Arpaio, nor will the sheriff’s ongoing “investigation” into President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

On the other hand, Trump’s intense anti-immigrant rhetoric has galvanized many voters, and Arpaio has been that crowd’s hero for years. “He’s somewhat like me,” Arpaio told the Guardian, referring to Trump. “Or I’m like him. I don’t know which way it goes.” Whichever way it is, Arpaio is still incredibly popular among Republicans in Maricopa County. He easily won the Republican primary in August, defeating three other candidates. (The second-place finisher came in nearly 40 points behind Arpaio.)

So will this be Arpaio’s last election?

“If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen now,” says David Berman, a professor emeritus of political science at Arizona State University and a senior research fellow at Arizona’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy. “It’s going to be the toughest election he’s ever had.”

Arpaio’s challenger is Paul Penzone, a retired Phoenix police sergeant who came within six points of beating the sheriff (50.66 to 44.65) in 2012. That year, a third-party candidate named Mike Stauffer siphoned off crucial votes. Some Arizona Democrats assumed Stauffer had been recruited by Arpaio’s campaign to thwart a Penzone victory. They wondered again this year when third-party candidate Chad Lisk threw his hat into the ring, only to be blocked after failing to garner the requisite number of petition signatures.

“It’s apparent that the voters are tired of the nonsense they’ve seen from the sheriff the last several terms, and we feel confident with our chances,” said Penzone.

He says the 2012 race was closer than it looked because the percentage of the vote Arpaio received was “barely above the median.” He rattles off the problems: Arpaio has cost county taxpayers at least $72 million, and that’s from only one case related to profiling and harassing Latinos; he’s facing a referral from a federal judge for criminal contempt of court related to a racial profiling case filed in 2007; his lawyers hired an investigator to look into the wife of the judge who issued that order. Penzone is announced that he filed a defamation lawsuit against Arpaio after the sheriff ran an ad recycling overstated and exaggerated claims that Penzone assaulted his ex wife in 2003. “It’s all just a complete abuse of his authority,” Penzone says. “The voters are tired of it, and I’m tired of it.”

Chad Willems, Arpaio’s campaign manager, did not respond to several requests for comment. After the contempt referral, Willems told the Associated Press that the exorbitant legal fees were the fault of the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the case, because the organization refused to settle, costing taxpayers millions in legal fees. “If Penzone wants to side with the ACLU on this issue, he can be our guest,” he said. He told reporters with Cronkite News at Arizona State University that polling casting doubt on Arpaio’s popularity is dead wrong, and that the Arpaio campaign’s internal polling suggests the incumbent will “heavily” defeat Penzone.

But Penzone’s political challenge isn’t Arpaio’s only problem. The sheriff could face criminal charges after US District Court Judge Murray Snow, appointed by George W. Bush, ruled August 19 that Arpaio and another senior sheriff’s deputy ignored court orders, lied to the court, and withheld information in a racial profiling case dating back to 2007. The case, Melendres v. Arpaio, was filed by a group of Latinos in Maricopa County targeted by sheriff’s deputies for illegal-immigration sweeps during traffic stops. In 2011, Snow ordered Arpaio and his deputies to quit detaining suspected undocumented immigrants who had not broken any state laws. In 2013, Snow ruled that Arpaio and his deputies had discriminated against Latinos and also that Arpaio had violated the 2011 order in part to bolster his popularity during the 2012 election.

In May this year, Snow ruled that Arpaio had continued to arbitrarily detain Latinos based solely on immigration suspicions and held him in civil contempt, which left the door open for a criminal contempt referral that took place on August 19. Now the US Department of Justice will determine whether to criminally charge Arpaio with contempt of court, a crime punishable with up to six months in prison. In the middle of all this, Arpaio’s attorneys hired a private investigator to investigate the judge’s wife after a tipster told Arpaio that Snow’s wife said that Snow wanted to get Arpaio out of office.

“This is really almost completely uncharted territory,” says Mel McDonald, a former US attorney who is representing Arpaio privately in the criminal case. McDonald says there isn’t a lot of precedent for Arpaio’s case, and he’s meeting with DOJ officials October 11 to figure out what the next steps will be. He says the DOJ can choose to pursue criminal charges, or it can decline to do so. Snow can then choose to appoint a special prosecutor to pursue the case.

Although Arpaio is paying for his legal defense in the criminal contempt case, the rest falls on the taxpayers of Maricopa County to the tune of $72 million, according to the Arizona Republic, which notes that in all, Arpaio has cost taxpayers $142 million in legal fees, settlements and court awards since 1993. Arpaio does have a massive war chest that dwarfs the approximately $540,000 Penzone has raised thus far. According to filings published by the county on Thursday, Arpaio has raised just more than $12 million, roughly three-fourths of which came from small donors in other states, according to the Associated Press’ August analysis.

Penzone also has support from out of state: Liberal financier George Soros has stepped in to help. Soros has pumped $3 million into local district attorney races in a half-dozen states over the last year with an eye toward reforming the criminal justice system, according to Politico, with millions of dollars going toward radio and television ads. In Arizona he donated $300,000, the total budget of Maricopa Strong, an independent expenditure committee not affiliated with the Penzone campaign, according to records filed with the county. “We’re looking to persuade voters who have some doubts about Arpaio because of his record of wasting taxpayer money on lawsuits and legal fees, and losing sight of his primary mission of enforcing the law and keeping the people of Maricopa County safe,” said a source close to Maricopa Strong.

Despite all this baggage, Arpaio still has a strong chance of extending his 23-year reign over Maricopa County. Berman, the political scientist, says pundits have been predicting a surge of Hispanic voter turnout for years—a prospect that could cripple state Republicans up and down the ballot—only for it to never materialize. He concedes that the marijuana initiative, the minimum-wage question, an organized Democratic effort in the Kirkpatrick race against McCain, and Donald Trump—let alone all of Arpaio’s legal issues and history of racial profiling and harassment—could put Penzone over the top.

But there are still many more Republican voters in Maricopa County than Democrats and independents (737,439 active Republicans, 577,885 Democrats, 743,456 others). Besides, he said, it’s Arpaio’s true believers who have kept him in office this long.

“Arpaio has got the Trump supporter type—he has the same kind of true believer behind him,” says Berman. “If he went to jail, they’d still elect him. He just has this following that thinks he can do no wrong, just like Trump.”

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Donald Trump’s Favorite Anti-Immigrant Sheriff May Finally Lose an Election

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Hackers Stole Voter Registration Data in at Least Two States

by AnnmarieStapleto Posted on August 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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The FBI believes hackers tried to get data from the State Board of Elections in at least two states in July and August, according to a notice sent to elections officials around the country and published by Yahoo News Monday morning. It’s unclear what data the hackers were able to get, but the information suggests they scanned the state elections boards’ websites looking for vulnerabilities. They found several and attempted to enter the systems, and some “exfiltration”—which refers to theft of data—occurred.

On August 18, state elections officials received a “Flash,” a notice sent by the FBI to various relevant parties, titled “Targeting Activity Against State Board of Election Systems.” The FBI reported that it had received reports of an additional IP address—a unique series of numbers that identifies every device that connects to the internet—within the logs of one state’s board of election’s system in July, and then another attempt at breaking into a separate state’s system in August. The IP address numbers can be easily masked to hide an attacker’s true origin, but the flash included detailed information about the methods used by the hackers. The FBI asked state election officials to scan their own network logs for similar activities.

The FBI didn’t identify the states involved, but Yahoo News, citing “sources familiar with” the FBI flash, reports that the attacks likely targeted voter registration databases in Arizona and Illinois. In Illinois, state election officials shut down the state’s voter registration system for 10 days in late July, Yahoo News reports, while the attack in Arizona was more limited.

The FBI flash does not attribute the attacks to anyone specifically, but the revelation comes following recent hacks of the Democratic National Committee and other major Democratic Party organizations and officials that, the US government says, implicated hackers working with or on behalf of Russia. The hacker who has claimed responsibility for the DNC hacks, Guccifer 2.0, has told Mother Jones and others that he was born in Eastern Europe and is not at all connected to Russia, a claim doubted by outside security officials. Russian officials have repeatedly denied that the Russian government had anything to do with the hacks.

The IP addresses provided by the FBI in the flash point to computer systems in the Netherlands and Delaware, according to online IP tracking tools, but Wired says further analysis shows at least one of the IP addresses appears to be linked to a website linked with the Turkish AKP political party. The Yahoo News report cites a cybersecurity expert saying one of the IP addresses has “surfaced before in Russian criminal underground hacker forums,” and the attack methods resemble a hack of the World Anti-Doping Agency earlier this month. Others have blamed that hack on Russia as well. But the types of attacks, methods, and tools detailed by the FBI flash are quite common in the hacking world. That means blaming Russia or anybody else at this point is only speculative.

The hack, combined with other vulnerabilities in the American election infrastructure, including voting machines that produce no verifiable paper audit trail, reinforces the notion that the US election system is vulnerable to disruption.

“This is a big deal,” Rich Barger, the head of cybersecurity firm ThreatConnect, told Yahoo News. “Two state election boards have been popped and data has been taken. This certainly should be concerning to the common American voter.”

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Hackers Stole Voter Registration Data in at Least Two States

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Soda Companies Have a New, Evil Language Trick to Keep You Hooked on Sugar

by JuliaBuley Posted on August 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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I live in Oakland, California, and lately I’ve been getting flyers at my house with images like this:

No Oakland Grocery Tax

Have you ever heard of a “grocery tax?” If not, that’s probably because most people know it by another name: soda tax.

I’ll get back to the brilliant rebranding in a second, but first, a little background: Once considered a radical idea, soda taxes are gaining momentum. Philly passed one in June. In November, soda taxes will be on the ballots in San Francisco, Oakland, and possibly Boulder, Colorado.

In all of these places, the basic idea is essentially the same: Drinking sugary beverages leads to obesity, diabetes, and a host of other health problems. Since soda companies target residents of poor neighborhoods, particularly people of color, those people end up disproportionately getting sick from drinking too much soda. The tax makes sugary drinks (not just soda, but any drink—juices, iced tea, etc.—with added sugar) more expensive, which in theory discourages people from buying them. The money the cities raise from the tax goes toward programs, like free preschool, that help the people that sodas hurt.

Of course, soda companies are not big fans of these taxes. And they’re dipping into their deep pockets to fight them: The last time a soda tax was on the ballot in San Francisco, the American Beverage Association, the soda industry’s lobbying group, spent $9.1 million to defeat it. And it worked.

That’s partially because ABA employs some marketing geniuses—which brings us back to the phrase “grocery tax.” ABA argues that’s an accurate description because of the way soda taxes are structured. The tax doesn’t actually apply directly to the sugary drinks that you buy at the store. Instead, they’re a tax on the distributors who sell sugary drinks to store owners. The distributor usually passes the tax on to the store owner, in the form of higher wholesale prices. Store owners can then decide to make up for that cost however they want. If they want to hike the price of soda, that’s cool. But if they want to keep the price of soda the same and instead raise the price on, say, a bottle of water or a bunch of kale, that’s totally fair game.

“That means whether you purchase soda or not, you could be seeing a big impact on your grocery bill,” says the No Oakland Grocery Tax website.

Not everyone agrees. Three members of the Oakland City Council have accused the No Oakland Grocery Tax campaign of misleading citizens. Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan told me over the phone that the campaign has “been lying to the voters of Oakland by trying to scare them into thinking that someone is going to tax their groceries.”

So who’s right? The question is whether store owners will apply the tax just to sugary beverages or spread it out to other groceries as well. Joe Arellano, spokesman for the No Oakland Grocery Tax campaign (which is funded by ABA), says his group has done spot checks on stores in Berkeley and found that store owners aren’t raising the prices on soda. When I asked for evidence, he sent me a bunch of photos showing diet and regular sodas priced the same (diet sodas are exempt from the tax because they’re sugar free), though he didn’t provide the kind of before-and-after documentation that showed that prices stayed the same after the tax went into effect.

Meanwhile, that team of University of California-Berkeley public health researchers studying the tax has found exactly the opposite: Most store owners in Berkeley actually have raised the prices on sugary drinks, the group reported. Two other groups of researchers had similar findings. (And it’s worth pointing out that those three studies were all peer reviewed, unlike the spot checks that No Oakland Grocery Tax has conducted.)

I talked to a few store owners in Berkeley this past weekend. Some said they had raised soda prices since the tax went into effect, some said they hadn’t. Among those who hadn’t, a few reported raising prices on other goods to make up for the difference. None of them were wild about the tax. Adel Gergess, the owner of a convenience store called Alex Market, told me that beverages make up a whopping 40 percent of his sales. He did the math, and he figured out that he couldn’t raise the prices on sodas or any other groceries, or he’d lose too much business. So he ate the cost himself. But it’s been really tough.

“We’ve been in the business like 19 months and we lost a lot of money,” he said. “Ninety percent of the beverages we have—even the organic or natural ones—have sugar.”

Soda tax proponents hope that the demand for sugary drinks will continue to fall, and that store owners will eventually ditch soda in favor of more popular items.

There’s some evidence that the plan is working. In a just-published study by a team at the University of California-Berkeley, researchers found that since the city of Berkeley enacted the nation’s first-ever citywide soda tax last year, soda consumption in poor neighborhoods has declined by 21 percent. A lead researcher called the findings “very encouraging.” It also showed that people were drinking 63 percent more water. (A caveat: Other factors may have contributed to the switch from soda to water—most notably, a public awareness campaign in Berkeley about the unhealthiness of soda.) Another hopeful sign: After Mexico passed a nationwide soda tax, soda sales decreased 12 percent, while bottled water sales rose by 4 percent.

The bottom line: The “grocery tax” argument has some truth to it—and so far, it’s certainly put owners of markets and restaurants in a bind. On the other hand, preliminary research on soda taxes—which shows that they actually might actually discourage people from drinking sugary beverages—is promising.

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Soda Companies Have a New, Evil Language Trick to Keep You Hooked on Sugar

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Here’s How Ferguson Has Kept Blacks off the Local School Board

by FrancisChungGon Posted on August 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Black students make up more than 75 percent of students in the Ferguson-Florissant School District in Missouri, but only three of the seven school board members are black. On Monday, a federal district judge in the state ruled that the at-large election system used to choose the school board representatives violated the Voting Rights Act.

“It is my finding that the cumulative effects of historical discrimination, current political practices, and the socioeconomic conditions present in the District impact the ability of African Americans in Ferguson-Florissant School District to participate equally in Board elections,” District Judge Rodney Sippel wrote in an opinion. He added that the process “deprives African American voters of an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice” and that no elections could be conducted until a new system was put in place.

Voters in Ferguson had elected school board representatives every year in two or three at-large races, instead of voting for candidates representing specific subdistricts. The case, filed in December 2014 by the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri and the Missouri chapter of the NAACP, alleged that this practice diluted black voter strength, leaving them “all but locked out of the political process.”

ACLU attorney Julie Ebenstein explained in April 2015 that since black voters in the district as a whole made up less than half the voting-age population, they were “systematically unable to elect” board members of their choice when casting ballots across all board seats. In 12 elections that took place between 2000 and 2015, five black candidates won school board seats out of 24 potential candidates, the judge noted in his opinion. Over that period, 22 white candidates won seats out of 37 potential contenders.

Cindy Ormsby, the school district’s attorney, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the district was “very disappointed in the court’s decision.”

You can read the opinion below:

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NAACP vs Fegurson Florissant Voting Rights Decision (PDF)

NAACP vs Fegurson Florissant Voting Rights Decision (Text)

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Here’s How Ferguson Has Kept Blacks off the Local School Board

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Voter Fraud Is Still a Myth, and 11 Other Stats on the State of Voting Rights in America

by RandolphBeaureg Posted on August 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Three years ago, the Supreme Court gutted an important provision in the Voting Rights Act, opening the door to a succession of voting restrictions. But recent court decisions have stymied efforts by mostly Republican-led legislatures to restrict voting access in Texas, North Carolina, North Dakota, and elsewhere before the November election.

Still, as the following stats show, the fight for voting access isn’t over yet:

Sources: Card 1: Brennan Center for Justice; Card 2: National Conference of State Legislatures, Brennan Center for Justice; Card 3: North Carolina State Board of Elections, Veasey v. Perry opinion, Frank v. Walker opinion, University of California, San Diego; Card 4: TMJ4, Frank v. Walker opinion; Card 5: University of California, San Diego; Card 6: The Sentencing Project; Brennan Center for Justice; Card 7: 2012 Survey on the Performance of American Elections; Card 8: Justin Levitt, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

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Voter Fraud Is Still a Myth, and 11 Other Stats on the State of Voting Rights in America

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Wisconsin’s Strict Voter ID Law Is Back on the Books

by GroverTovlw Posted on August 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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Wisconsin voters will likely vote this November under the state’s strict voter ID law after a federal appeals court struck down a trial court’s ruling that would have allowed voters to cast ballots without identification.

In Wednesday’s ruling, a three-judge panel from the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that the trial court’s decision would likely be reversed on appeal. The lower court ruled on July 19 that election officials had to let people vote without ID if they signed a form saying they had problems getting proper documents.

The trial court’s ruling, in turn, came in response to an appeals court ruling in April finding that the state’s 2011 voter ID law would likely prevent people from voting who had legitimate difficulties obtaining documentation to get IDs, and it tasked the trial court with coming up with a method to help those people. That method was the affidavit, which the appeals court ruled Wednesday wasn’t targeted enough, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

“Instead of attempting to identify these voters, or to identify the kinds of situations in which the state’s procedures fall short, the district court issued an injunction that permits any registered voter to declare by affidavit that reasonable effort would not produce a photo ID—even if the voter has never tried to secure one, and even if by objective standards the effort needed would be reasonable (and would succeed),” the appeals court judges wrote, adding that the trial court judge did not attempt to distinguish between genuine difficulties voters might have in obtaining the proper documents and “any given voter’s unwillingness to make the effort that the Supreme Court has held that a state can require.”

Rick Hasen, an elections expert at the University of California-Irvine, wrote Wednesday that the ACLU, which originally brought this case, might appeal the case to the full 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. But the practical effect of the ruling, he noted, is that the strict voter ID law will be in place for November. The ACLU could also appeal Wednesday’s ruling to the Supreme Court.

Dale Ho, the director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, says he is disappointed that the judges “removed a safety net for voters after earlier this year holding that such a safety net would be appropriate. Their decision will guarantee disenfranchisement of many Wisconsonites in this fall’s election.”

Ho says the ACLU is evaluating its options, but that an appeal to either the full 7th Circuit or the Supreme Court will happen soon.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, said in a statement that Wednesday’s ruling was “a step in the right direction” and that his administration would “continue to work to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.”

A separate case challenged the 2011 voter ID law and other voter restrictions put in place by Wisconsin Republicans, including limits on early voting and on college students’ ability to register to vote. A federal district judge struck down those provisions on July 29, but its ruling on voter ID affected the ways in which voters can obtain a voter ID. The case is still awaiting appeal. Wednesday’s ruling, for its part, addressed what happens when voters get to the polls without an ID.

This story has been updated with comments from Dale Ho.

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Wisconsin’s Strict Voter ID Law Is Back on the Books

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"This Could Be the Stupidest Thing Ever Said in the History of Presidential Campaigns"

by JaninaRomilly2 Posted on August 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump and nukes. Nukes and Donald Trump. They don’t really go together, unless you are having a nightmare. Over the past few weeks a fair number of people have been understandably freaking out over the idea that if Donald Trump wins in November, he will have virtually unfettered power to fire off nuclear weapons. In June, Politico ran a frankly horrifying piece outlining exactly how presidents go about facing the nuclear question. (If the military ever detected—accurately or inaccurately—a nuclear attack against the United States, the president could have as little as 30 seconds to decide how to respond.)

Esquire has a Q&A today with John Noonan, a retired Air Force officer and former adviser to Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush. Noonan doesn’t mince words about Trump being unprepared. You should read the whole thing because (1) it’s fascinating, (2) it’s terrifying, and (3) this issue really can’t be talked about enough. It’s too important.

Here’s one bit that really caught my eye:

Think of the world as a playground. Does the bully—the five-foot-tall third grader with a pituitary disorder—pick on the star athlete or the 60-pound weakling? They’re not going to punch the athlete in the nose because they’ll get socked right back, so they go for the weakling every time. In America’s case, we don’t just stand up to the nuclear-armed bullies—we also stick up for the weaker kids. Russia, to wit, could impose its will on the small Baltic democracies because Russia is big and they are small. It’s American resolve, backed by nuclear weapons, that keeps Russia in check. That’s what you call deterrence.

This is what I hear from Trump: that he wants to flip that equation and make the United States the bully. That is, We’re big and we have nukes and we can use them to kill terrorists in Raqqa and Mosul. Stop us if you dare. It’s how he’s run his businesses for decades: I can do whatever I want. In the business world, it was shady and unethical. In the national-security world, it’s downright dangerous.

I don’t think it’s empty talk either. His spokesperson said a few months ago, “what good is a nuclear triad if you can’t use it?” That could the sic stupidest thing ever said in the history of presidential campaigns, which puts it in the running for stupid thing ever said in the history of humanity. (Emphasis mine) Nuclear weapons are like an understanding between the athlete and the bully: You don’t screw with me and I won’t screw with you. It’s a way for the two biggest kids on the block to communicate with each other in no uncertain terms. That Trump allegedly believes that nukes are solutions to low-intensity problems like ISIS and Al-Qaeda is raw, unfiltered insanity.

Go read the whole thing.

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"This Could Be the Stupidest Thing Ever Said in the History of Presidential Campaigns"

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This Voting Rights Battle Could Determine the Election

by DeneenConley6 Posted on May 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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House and Senate Republicans in Virginia announced Monday that the GOP would sue to block Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s restoration of voting rights for more than 200,000 felons in time for the November election.

McAuliffe, a Democrat and longtime friend of and fundraiser for Bill and Hillary Clinton, used an executive action on April 22 to restore voting rights for felons who had served their sentences and completed their parole or probation as of that date. “There’s no question that we’ve had a horrible history in voting rights as it relates to African Americans—we should remedy it,” the governor told the New York Times when he announced the decision. The paper noted that the decision would have a major impact in a potential swing state this November, as many of the felons are African Americans who are “a core constituency of Democrats.”

The governor estimated his actions would apply to 206,000 people and said he instructed state officials to prepare similar monthly orders that would apply to felons who would qualify to vote after the original April 22 cutoff date. In a statement issued Monday, Brian Coy, McAuliffe’s communications director, said the governor was acting on his “constitutional authority” when he issued his executive order.

“The Governor is disappointed that Republicans would go to such lengths to continue locking people who have served their time out of their democracy,” Coy said in the statement provided to Mother Jones. “While Republicans may have found a Washington lawyer for their political lawsuit, they still have yet to articulate any specific constitutional objections … These Virginians are qualified to vote and they deserve a voice, not more partisan schemes to disenfranchise them.”

Republicans in the state legislature said Monday they will not use taxpayer money to fund the lawsuit they say is necessary to fight McAuliffe’s executive order.

“Governor McAuliffe’s flagrant disregard for the Constitution of Virginia and the rule of law must not go unchecked,” Virginia Senate Majority Leader Thomas K. Norment, Jr. said in a statement. “His predecessors and previous attorneys general examined this issue and consistently concluded Virginia’s governor does not have the power to issue blanket restorations. By doing so now with the acknowledged goal of affecting the November election, he has overstepped the bounds of his authority and the constitutional limits on executive powers.”

The Times noted in a separate piece that the impact of McAuliffe’s decision could be pivotal in a close election—President Barack Obama won the state by 149,000 votes in 2012—but not as significant as one might imagine. “Ex-felons are disproportionately young and less educated, the two most powerful demographic predictors of low voter turnout in the United States,” the paper wrote.

Nearly every state—with the exception of Maine and Vermont—has restrictions on the voting rights of felons. Virginia’s restrictions have been in place since after the Civil War, when the state’s constitution permanently barred former felons from being able to vote.

This piece has been updated to include a statement from McAuliffe’s office.

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This Voting Rights Battle Could Determine the Election

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