Author Archives: Sheila

A Measured And Accurate Rebuttal

Richard Hasen– probably the pre-eminent American scholar of voting and elections–had a column in last week’s  New York Timesin which he patiently dismantled Trump’s barrage of criticisms of mail-in-voting.

Not that anyone who listens to or actually believes anything Trump says would be likely to read the Times. 

I have only one quibble with Hasen’s essay–his assertion that Trump’s relentless attacks on mail-in voting are part of a “strategy.” After watching Trump for nearly 4 years, it is my considered opinion that the development of a strategy–let alone adherence to it–is far beyond his capacities.

Be that as it may, Hasen says there are two possible reasons for the assault: to create an excuse in advance of a loss, or an effort to create chaos that will both drive down turnout and undermine the legitimacy of the election. Hasen “very much fears” that the latter is correct, and that Trump is laying the groundwork for contesting his loss in a close election.

You can’t say he isn’t giving it his all. As Hasen reports,

Mr. Trump has made at least 91 attacks on the integrity of voting so far this year (and more than 700 since 2012) and backed up his complaints about mail-in ballots with lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Iowa. He has repeatedly tweeted the unsupported claim that increased use of mail-in ballots in November, necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic, will lead to voter fraud and a rigged election.

These attacks have been more than a little contradictory–evidencing Trump’s usual scattershot and illogical approach to most issues–and raising a not-insignificant possibility that they will end up hurting Republicans as much as–or even more than–the Democrats who are his targets.

The end game here is a bit curious because Republicans traditionally have relied on mail-in balloting to get out the vote, and there are already signs that Republican turnout might be hurt by his rantings. How else to explain the president seeking to distinguish between good “absentee” voting and bad “mail-in” balloting and urging Floridians to vote by mail? And how else to explain the president not only repeatedly voting by mail but using a third person — what Mr. Trump refers to as “ballot harvesting” — to deliver his own ballot to election officials in the Florida primary on Tuesday?

Hasen patiently explains why Trump’s claims of fraud are bogus (or as he phrases it, “unsupported by the evidence.”) Absentee ballot fraud is rare. There have been fewer than 500 prosecutions for such behavior over a 12 year period in which more than a billion ballots were cast, and Hasen tells us that they tended to involve small elections “when there wasn’t an active press looking for chicanery.”  (An observation that reinforces the importance of a robust local press…but that’s a subject for another day.) Furthermore, Hasen says that the relative rarity of cases shouldn’t surprise us, because states have all kinds of security measures in place. Those security measures go well beyond signature matching, to include ballot tracking and statements signed under penalty of perjury.

The real danger posed by this campaign of disinformation is in the event of close election results on November 3d.

A “blue shift” toward Democrats as later votes are counted is now a well-established phenomenon; as Democrats vote later, their ballots are counted later, leading to a good number of elections where Republican leads on election night turn into Democratic victories when the full and fair count ends.

Trump could claim, as he did in a 2018 U.S. Senate race in Florida, that later-counted ballots are fraudulent (a claim he abandoned when Rick Scott, a Republican, won the race). It could lead millions of his supporters to believe that Democrats stole the election, when in fact all that happened was that battleground states engaged in a close and careful count of ballots to ensure the election’s integrity.

To the extent that Trump has a “strategy,” my guess would be that this describes it. And after years of anti-government rhetoric, topped off by the in-your-face-illegality of this administration, Americans’ distrust of our institutions will feed those suspicions.

Vote early–and if at all possible, in person.

Comments

The Republican Voter, Again

A couple of days ago, I posted excerpts from an article suggesting that the disasters that define our current civic reality aren’t primarily attributable to Trump, appalling as he is, but to the voters who form the base of whatever it is the Republican Party has become.

Since then, I have continued to encounter evidence confirming the accuracy of that diagnosis.

Exhibit One:  In the run-up to the Republican convention, an event presumably intended to persuade people to support the party, convention planners enlisted the entitled, bigoted St. Louis couple–the ones who brandished guns and threatened Black Lives Matter protesters marching past their mansion– to appear and publicly affirm their support for Trump.

I can’t think of speakers more likely to offend viewers who don’t display Confederate flags or have swastika tattoos.

The choice of the St. Louis couple underscores the point made by an opinion writer in The New York Times, who has concluded that “Trumpism” is the current GOP. As he says, even if  Biden wins and Trump leaves office peacefully — two big ifs — Democrats will still confront a Republican Party that is the party of Donald Trump.

In 2016, Mr. Trump didn’t change the Republican Party; he met it where it was. The party had been ready for him for years: In 2012, the congressional scholars Thomas Mann of the center-left Brookings Institution and Norm Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute wrote, “The G.O.P. has become an insurgent outlier in American politics.” More recent studies, including by Pippa Norris of Harvard, have confirmed this assessment. In a brief summary of her research — which compared the U.S. Republican Party “with other major parties in O.E.C.D. societies” — she found the G.O.P. “near far-right European parties” that flirt with authoritarianism, like the Polish Law and Justice of Poland or the Turkish Justice and Development parties.

This is not a party poised to pivot toward moderation — even in the face of an electoral landslide loss. The inevitable calls for reform (like the party’s abandoned “autopsy” report after the 2012 election) will yield to the inescapable gravitational pull of the party’s own voters and the larger forces dominating our politics.

The author, one Adam Jentleson, says that the GOP is not only unlikely to moderate in the wake of a defeat,  it is likely to turn to reactionary politicians like Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas. (You will remember Cotton for his despicable attempt to sabotage President  Obama’s nuclear negotiations with Iran.)  If Trump loses, Cotton is evidently seen–along with Tucker Carlson(!)– as a leading contender for the 2024 Republican nomination.

Jentleson says the “way forward” is to recognize what the Republican Party has become. That means ignoring them and working to deliver the results Americans want and need.

I agree. Assuming (fingers crossed) the Democrats take the Senate in November, they should focus on restoring checks and balances and passing long-bottled-up legislation. That will require eliminating the mechanisms that have allowed the Senate GOP to stonewall, obstruct and play partisan politics.  As Jentleson writes,

Sure, invite Republicans to participate constructively in the legislative process, but take away their ability to scuttle it.

To this end, it is encouraging to see Mr. Biden shifting from his staunch opposition to reforming the filibuster, whose modern iteration is what has allowed Republicans to raise the bar for passing most bills in the Senate from the majority threshold the framers set to the current 60-vote supermajority.

I have written before about the way the filibuster has been changed over the years; it’s no longer the process depicted in “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.” As Jentleson writes,

The Republican Party is now an even more hopeless tangle of pathologies than it was back then. If Republicans choose to take personal responsibility for unwinding themselves and contributing productively to intelligent solutions, they are welcome to do so. But Democrats cannot bet the future of the country on it.

He’s right, of course. But that leaves us with a far more troubling dilemma: a two-party system in which one party has morphed into a cross between bat-shit-crazy conspiracy theorists and a fascist cult.

Comments

The Military And January 20th

In passing, during their most recent New York Times “Conversation,” Gail Collins and Bret Stephens wondered whether the American military would remove Trump from the Oval Office if he loses but refuses to go. 

Stephens emphasized the importance of having a secretary of defense who puts the Constitution first, and dismissed the widespread belief that “the upper reaches of the armed forces are one uniform bloc of Trump voters.”

Most general officers I know are pretty moderate in their views and deeply committed to the idea of a depoliticized military and civilian control. I’m also guessing they weren’t exactly impressed by the bone spurs deferments.

Stephens also reminded Collins that most of the people who see Trump up close and personal come to really hate him, an observation supported most recently by the very public resignation of one Kyle Murphy from a position as a senior analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency. Murphy wrote about it for an industry publication, Just Security, “after experiencing firsthand the actions of U.S. government leaders to suppress nonviolent dissent during the recent nationwide protests for racial justice.”

But it was an open letter to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, written by John Nagl, a retired Army officer and veteran of both Iraq wars, and Paul Yingling, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who served three tours in Iraq, another in Bosnia, and a fifth in Operation Desert Storm that really displayed the commitment to the Constitution and civilian control that Stephens referenced.

That letter pulled no punches.

As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, you are well aware of your duties in ordinary times: to serve as principal military advisor to the president of the United States, and to transmit the lawful orders of the president and Secretary of Defense to combatant commanders. In ordinary times, these duties are entirely consistent with your oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…” 

We do not live in ordinary times. The president of the United States is actively subverting our electoral system, threatening to remain in office in defiance of our Constitution. In a few months’ time, you may have to choose between defying a lawless president or betraying your Constitutional oath. We write to assist you in thinking clearly about that choice. If Donald Trump refuses to leave office at the expiration of his constitutional term, the United States military must remove him by force, and you must give that order. 

Due to a dangerous confluence of circumstances, the once-unthinkable scenario of authoritarian rule in the United States is now a very real possibility. First, as Mr. Trump faces near certain electoral defeat, he is vigorously undermining public confidence in our elections. Second, Mr. Trump’s defeat would result in his facing not merely political ignominy, but also criminal charges. Third, Mr. Trump is assembling a private army capable of thwarting not only the will of the electorate but also the capacities of ordinary law enforcement. When these forces collide on January 20, 2021, the U.S. military will be the only institution capable of upholding our Constitutional order.

The letter–which I urge you to click through and read in its entirety–then proceeds to list the President’s criminal behaviors and to enumerate his efforts to subvert the election.  Nagl and Yingling write that America’s political and legal institutions “have so atrophied that they are ill-prepared for this moment. Senate Republicans, already reduced to supplicant status, will remain silent and inert, as much to obscure their complicity as to retain their majority.”

At this moment of Constitutional crisis, only two options remain. Under the first, U.S. military forces escort the former president from the White House grounds. Trump’s little green men, so intimidating to lightly armed federal law enforcement agents, step aside and fade away, realizing they would not constitute a good morning’s work for a brigade of the 82nd Airborne. Under the second, the U.S. military remains inert while the Constitution dies. The succession of government is determined by extralegal violence between Trump’s private army and street protesters; Black Lives Matter Plaza becomes Tahrir Square….As the senior military officer of the United States, the choice between these two options lies with you. 

For 240 years, the United States has been spared the horror of violent political succession. Imperfect though it may be, our Union has been moving toward greater perfection, from one peaceful transfer of power to the next. The rule of law created by our Constitution has made this miracle possible. However, our Constitutional order is not self-sustaining. Throughout our history, Americans have laid down their lives so that this form of government may endure. Continuing the unfinished work for which these heroes fell now falls to you. 

When the rubber meets the road…..

Comments

The Root Of The Problem

Innumerable people have made the (obvious) point that any effort to cure a disease or solve a problem requires an accurate diagnosis of the ailment or problem first. In a recent essay in The Week, titled “The Republican Problem No One Knows How to Solve,” Damon Linker offers a diagnosis of America’s current woes that confirms my own, painful conclusion.

Most non-Trumpian Americans would agree with his opening paragraphs:

In the raging debate among Trump-critical conservatives over whether the goal in November should be merely to defeat the president or to pursue the more radical strategy of burning the Republican Party to the ground, I’m firmly on the side of scorched earth.

The case for maximalism is strong. The head of the party is a corrupt and malicious imbecile. Republicans in Congress are a mix of Trump enablers, obstructionist-demagogues out to maximize the wealth of their donors, know-nothing conspiracist loons, and a few reformers experimenting with the most politically palatable way to blend nationalism with socialism. All of them are primarily motivated by the drive toward self-promotion within the right-wing media complex. And when we move further down the Republican hierarchy to the state and local level, things only get worse.

Most of us would also agree that America needs at least two political parties that are reasonable, responsible and principled. Some of the “Never Trump” Republicans who have defected from the GOP’s current iteration hope that a sufficiently brutal defeat in November–up and down the ticket–will restore the party to what they remember as its former respectability. Others have looked back at the party that was –notably Stuart Stevens, whose recent book “It Was All A Lie”–and concluded that it never really stood for the principles it espoused.

Linker’s diagnosis suggests that Stevens’ analysis comes closer to the truth. It also presents us with a much more difficult problem than reconstituting an adult, center-Right political party,  because he locates the root of the problem as the Republican voter.

As Linker reminds us, every one of the Republican sycophants, fundamentalists and ignoramuses we regularly criticize was elected by those voters–and often re-elected over and over.  Even assuming a Democratic win–or even a Democratic sweep–in November, that result will come despite Trump’s continued strong support from an overwhelming majority of Republicans.

The voters who swooned for Sarah Palin in 2008; who seriously considered giving the nod to Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Ben Carson, and Rick Santorum in 2012; who four years later elevated a reality-show conman to the head of their party, cast ballots for him to win the presidency, and have rallied around him ever since — most of these voters remain undaunted in their conviction that politics is primarily about the venting of grievances and the trolling of opponents. The dumber and angrier and more shameless, the better…..Unless and until it changes, the Republican Party will continue to spew raw sewage into the country’s political system and public life.

The threat to American democracy isn’t the current Republican party; it is the Republican voter–the substantial number of people who are motivated by, and enthusiastically support, the racism, misogyny and xenophobia that the current party embodies.

If that’s true–and I’m very much afraid that it is–what can be done about it? As Linker argues, burning the party down won’t deliver an epiphany to voters whose support is founded on animus and nastiness; these are people who have proved impervious to facts and evidence.

It is also hard to dispute Linker’s observation that the Rush Limbaughs, Sean Hannitys, Tucker Carlsons, Laura Ingrahams, and others wouldn’t be “hocking their pestilential opinions for profit if there wasn’t a large and appreciative audience for them.”

So once again, we’re back to the bedrock truth that what has turned the GOP into a political cesspool is the preferences, tastes, and convictions of Republican voters.

Could anything change these voters — turning them, not into liberals or progressives obviously, but into thoughtful citizens capable of engaging with reality, thinking about actual problems, and rewarding public servants who make a good-faith effort to respond to them? The honest truth is that I don’t have the slightest clue how to make it happen. Which also means that I have no idea how the United States might work its way back to having two civically responsible parties instead of just one.

He’s right, and this is what. keeps me up at nights.

Comments

State By State By FiveThirtyEight

There has rarely been an election where turnout and (as Paul Ogden has repeatedly reminded us) accurate counting of the ballots cast by the voters who do turn out, has been more important.

In recognition of that reality, a number of state and national efforts are being made to help people register  and cast a vote: websites like Indiana Citizen, JustGoVote and a number of others–some, like that produced by NBC News, that are really impressive– have joined the official sites maintained by government agencies and the more established nonprofit sites like Ballotpedia.

There is no dearth of information and it is accessible to even the least “politically connected” voter.

That said, the recent state by state voting guide prepared by FiveThiryEight.com is one of the most comprehensive compilations I’ve seen. The “landing page” is color-coded, showing at a glance how difficult or easy it is to vote in each state, whether each state allows voting by mail, and if so under what circumstances (are excuses required? If so, what are they? Does fear of the pandemic count?)

For each state, the site’s text explains how to register, how to request and submit an absentee ballot, whether the state allows early voting, and whether the state plans to close polling places or otherwise make in-person voting more difficult. It also has a category called “what we’re watching.”

Here’s the information on Indiana’s page (without, however, the colorful graphics that make it both attractive and easier to read.) There is a similar page for every state.

Indiana
Registration
Register to vote by Oct. 5. You can register online here.

Voting early
Counties must offer early voting Oct. 6-9, Oct. 13-16, Oct. 19-24, Oct. 26-31 and Nov. 2. Counties may also offer it Oct. 10-12, Oct. 17-18, Oct. 25 and Nov. 1; check with local election officials for locations and the exact schedule in your area.

In-person voting
So far, no plans to close polling places have been announced.

Requesting an absentee ballot
In order to vote absentee, you must have an excuse, such as being age 65 or older, sick or out of town on Election Day. You can apply for an absentee ballot online here. Election officials must receive your application by Oct. 22.

Submitting an absentee ballot
Absentee ballots must be received by noon on Nov. 3.

What we’re watching
Indiana waived the need for an excuse to vote absentee in its June primary, but it may not do so in the general election. A pair of lawsuits are still pending that would allow anyone to vote absentee and extend the deadline by which ballots must be received.

Share the URL and share it widely– then prepare to help friends and neighbors cast their ballots! Make sure they have the documentation required by our ridiculous “Voter ID” law, offer them a ride to the polls, call them the day before and again in the afternoon of November 3d…whatever it takes.

And if you want or need a reason to work harder than you ever did before to get SANE people to the polls, go listen to Nate Silver’s 2020 election forecast.

Comments