Purging the Voter Rolls

According to The Hill,

Indiana has purged nearly a half-million registered voters from its rolls since Election Day.

The purge is part of a massive effort to update the state’s voter rolls after years of improper maintenance and neglect, Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson said. Since the November elections, 481,235 registered voters have been taken off the list.

“When I became secretary of state, I discovered voter list maintenance was not being done statewide and many outdated voter registrations were still on the rolls,” Lawson said in a statement.

Lawson is undoubtedly correct that Indiana’s voter rolls were out of date, a situation not unique to Indiana. Giving states the responsibility of maintaining their own voter rolls is one of the many idiosyncrasies of America’s election “systems,” and it doesn’t work very well. (I put systems in quotes, because the way in which we conduct elections is anything but systematic. Or uniform.)

Other countries–not that we would ever admit that other nations may have things to teach us–have established national, nonpartisan agencies to administer elections. The virtues of such an approach are rather obvious, especially in a country where voters freely move from state to state. A national system makes record keeping uniform, ensures that polling places adhere to the same rules and stay open during the same hours (Indiana’s polls close at 6:00 pm, while citizens in most other states are still casting ballots at 8:00), and it minimizes the opportunity for local partisan mischief.

Perhaps political hostility to that last “virtue” is why we still have local control…

Secretary of State Lawson initiated her purge by sending postcards to every registered voter in Indiana. If postcards were returned as undeliverable, Lawson’s office would send a second, forwardable postcard.

People who failed to update their voter records after receiving the second card were marked as inactive on the state’s list of registered voters. And those who didn’t cast ballots in 2014, 2015 or 2016 were purged from the rolls after the November election.

That sounds simple enough, but of course, nothing in American democracy is simple. As Huffpost reported a month or so ago,

In April, Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb (R) signed legislation authorizing election officials to remove voters from the rolls if they were found to be registered in more than one place. According to the legislation, one of the ways officials can identify people who are registered in more than one place is by using Interstate Crosscheck, a system developed by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) that 27 states use to compare voter information.

It isn’t illegal to be registered in more than one state. But if Crosscheck flags a voter as being registered in another state, the Indiana legislation authorizes local election officials to remove them from the rolls if they can verify that person is indeed registered in their jurisdiction.

A lawsuit filed Wednesday by Brennan Center for Justice on behalf of the Indiana chapters of the NAACP and League of Women Voters accuses that process of violating the 1993 National Voter Registration Act. The federal law requires election officials to provide notice to a voter they are at risk of being removed and then permits the officials to remove them from the voting rolls if they don’t respond over a period of time. In their complaint, lawyers called the Indiana law a “flagrant” violation of NVRA.

Research has shown that purging based on Crosscheck causes the cancellation of 200 legitimate registrations for every registration that could be used to cast a double vote. Researchers at MIT have found a 13.6 percent chance that any random voter could be matched to another voter with the same name and birth month and year.

Florida and Oregon have both discontinued use of the program, citing its unreliability. (Florida evidently did so after the program purged Governor Rick Scott. Schadenfreude, anyone?)

If you are an Indiana voter, and you want to be sure you are still eligible to vote, use this link.

Comments

Media, Left and Right

Well, I see that the Republican Governors’ Association has decided to enter the “fake news” sweepstakes. According to reports,

The Republican Governors Association has quietly launched an online publication that looks like a media outlet and is branded as such on social media. The Free Telegraph blares headlines about the virtues of GOP governors, while framing Democrats negatively. It asks readers to sign up for breaking news alerts. It launched in the summer bearing no acknowledgement that it was a product of an official party committee whose sole purpose is to get more Republicans elected.

The website was registered July 7 through Domains By Proxy, a company that allows the originators of a website to shield their identities. […] As of early Monday afternoon, The Free Telegraph’s Twitter account and Facebook page still had no obvious identifiers tying the site to RGA. The site described itself on Twitter as “bringing you the political news that matters outside of Washington.” The Facebook account labeled The Free Telegraph a “Media/News Company.”

Evidently, after the Associated Press made inquiries, the site added a very small, grey box at the bottom of the page, disclosing its origins.

The “mastermind” behind this effort is Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker; he may have been inspired (if that’s the word) by Mike Pence’s ill-fated attempt to establish a state-owned Indiana “news bureau”(aka propaganda site).  Dubbed by critics “Pravda on the Prairie,” it was embarrassingly obvious and ignominiously withdrawn. Walker is evidently better at stealth.

The problem is, this sort of disinformation campaign works–especially with people who want to believe, who want both their own opinions and their own “facts.” As an article in the American Prospect put it,

As we learn more about how Russia used social media as part of its campaign to help elect Donald Trump, what stands out is how easy it was. Spend $100,000 on Facebook ads, create a bunch of Twitter bots, and before you know it you’ve whipped up a fog of disinformation that gives Trump just the boost he needs to get over the finish line. Even if it’s almost impossible to quantify how many votes it might have swayed, it was one of the many factors contributing to the atmosphere of chaos and confusion that helped Trump get elected.

As new as it might seem, this is just the latest manifestation of a broader problem that goes back a long way, one of the degradation of truth, a conservative electorate taught to disbelieve what’s real and accept whatever lunatic things their media figures tell them, and liberals who can’t figure out how to respond.

As the author points out, a liberal version of these mechanisms won’t work. The effect that right-wing media has on its audiences is of a “profoundly different character than what conservative media achieve.”

There’s a doctrinal basis to conservative media that makes it fundamentally different from liberal media, that makes Rush Limbaugh most definitely not the mirror image of a liberal radio host and Sean Hannity not the mirror image of Rachel Maddow. It’s not merely about the conservatives’ and liberals’ respective adherence to truth or penchant for ugly demonization of their opponents, though they differ in that too. It’s that an argument about the larger media world is the foundation of conservative media. Conservative hosts and writers tell their audiences over and over again that nothing they read in the mainstream media can be accepted, that it’s all twisted by a liberal agenda, and therefore they can only believe what conservatives tell them. It’s the driving backbeat to every episode, every story, and every rant.

Liberals complain about media coverage of one story or another all the time. What they don’t do is tell their audiences that any news source that is not explicitly and exclusively devoted to their ideological agenda cannot be trusted. But conservatives do.

The bottom line is that very few of the people who fall within the liberal camp are “good soldiers” in the same way that the Fox News audience is. Liberals still occupy a pretty big tent, and even when they agree on a broad premise–healthcare is a right, for example–they differ significantly on the policies to achieve their goals. As recent research has conclusively shown, conservative and liberal minds work differently.

Which leaves us at the mercy of propaganda. When some people are saying, in effect, “lie to me to reassure me that my tribe is right”–what do we do?

Comments

Design Defect?

In the short time it has existed, Vox has proved to be one of the smartest sources on the internet; its “explains the news” feature, credible reporting and excellent writing have made it a “must go to” for many of us.

Recently, the site had a political science meditation by Lee Drutman, titled “Yes, the Republican Party has become pathological. But why?”

The article began by quoting an often-cited paragraph from Mann and Ornstein:

In Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein’s now-classic and still-true description of the party, “The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

Drutman doesn’t quarrel with this observation, but says that the pressing question is why did the GOP go insane? And unlike those who pin the problem on flawed leadership, or the Christian Right, or even the racism that has become embarrassingly obvious, he argues that the opportunities and incentives that are built into the system are “design defects,” that have caused the astonishing dysfunction we now see.

My argument is that the modern Republican Party is a direct result of the design flaws of the American political system — our winner-take-all single-member electoral districts, our reliance on private money to finance elections, and our increasingly presidentialist system of government. You simply can’t understand the GOP’s pathologies without understanding the larger political system in which it operates.

Drutman’s argument begins with America’s  two-party system. When voters are given only two choices, the key to victory is being less unappealing than those other guys. “Such is the twisted logic of negative partisanship.”

Drutman dismisses the widespread belief that American politics are ideological; that may be true for the so-called “elites” who are perhaps 10-15% of the voting public, but it doesn’t hold true for the average voter. Instead, voters look to their political parties to decide what policies they embrace, and they choose their party affiliation by deciding which “tribe,” is composed of people “most like me.”

At heart, when we vote, we ask the question: “Who represents people like me?” We support candidates who we think share our values. And here, party is a very strong cue…

Certainly we shouldn’t overstate the level of blind partisanship. But one of the most remarkable and consistent political science findings is how little voters really think for themselves. This is why many previously moderate Republicans didn’t leave the party as it moved rightward — they just became less moderate. Their ideology was far more flexible than their partisanship, because it was less deeply rooted.

All well and good–but if it is the system that has produced today’s cult-like GOP, why haven’t the Democrats similarly gone off the rails? Drutman quotes Jonathan Chait:

The] Democratic Party is racially and economically heterogeneous. Even if he had wanted to take vengeance upon white America for its sins, Obama had far too many white supporters to make such a course of action remotely practical. (A majority of Obama’s voters were white, in fact.) On economic issues, the Democratic Party relies on support and input from business and labor alike.

… There is little such balance to be found in the Republican Party. Republicans concerned about their party’s future may blanch at Trump’s pardoning of the sadistic racist Joe Arpaio or his gleeful unleashing of law enforcement. In the short term, however, they have bottomed out on their minority support and proven able to win national power regardless, by using racial wedge issues to pry away blue-collar whites.

But what about Drutman’s assertion that America’s political design has incentivized the GOP’s troubling behaviors?

One factor is that the past three decades have been a very unusual period in American politics, in which national elections have all been quite competitive, with the balance of partisan control of institutions hanging in the balance. Because American institutions are majoritarian, and because the president has considerable power, a small number of votes can mean the balance between two very different outcomes. When the stakes are this high, the political incentives push hard on gaining every little advantage.

Drutman points to gerrymandering and the single-member plurality-winner district  design feature that makes gerrymandering possible. And at the end of his essay, he comes back to the (considerable) drawbacks of a two-party system.

It’s long, but the entire thing is well worth reading.

Comments

The Public Good

Americans need to reclaim the concept of the public good, and nowhere is that more important than in health policy.

Law Professor Fran Quigley has a new book coming out that examines the interface–or more accurately, the lack of an interface–between Big Pharma, Congress and the common good. Quartz recently published a review of the book, and began by referring to the infamous “Pharma Bro,” Martin Shkreli, who purchased a life-saving drug that had been on the market for some time, and jacked up the price astronomically–because he could.

Shkreli is not an outlier, according to Indiana University law professor Fran Quigley’s new book Prescription for the People. The pharmaceutical industry jacks up prices on life-saving drugs to extort windfall profits from desperate patients as a matter of course. That’s an immoral way to treat medicine, Quigley argues. The solution? Stop treating medicine as private property—and start treating it as a public good, like education or infrastructure.

It’s one thing to allow private companies and markets to set prices for items like big-screen TVs or cars, Quigley explains via email. In those cases, “purchasers can compare prices and walk away from the transaction if they wish.” But a patient with cancer or a child diagnosed with Type II diabetes can’t just walk away. “That kind of choice is not present when the good in question is life-or-death and there are no options for comparison shopping,” he writes.

 One of the great virtues of Quigley’s book is its explanation of the major role government plays in drug research. Big Pharma has long justified high prices by citing the costs of R & D; as Quigley points out, much of that research is funded with our tax dollars–but drug companies, not taxpayers, enjoy the return on that investment.

Furthermore, drug companies don’t actually funnel the bulk of their profits into research and development. Case in point: Reuters has reported that Pfizer made $45.7 billion in revenue in 2014, of which it spent $14.1 billion on sales and marketing and $8.4 billion on research.

The book details the various ways in which drug companies’ concern for the bottom line takes precedence over concern for the public’s health, and it goes into considerable detail about the perverse public policies that have facilitated those companies’ profitability.

The genesis of those favorable policies? Follow the money.

How did we get to this point? “In the last 40 years, the pharmaceutical industry has deployed billions of dollars of lobbying and political campaign contributions” to change laws to their benefit, Quigley says. One of their most remarkable successes was the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed corporations to patent publicly-funded research. This means that pharmaceutical corporations essentially receive monopolies to sell government-created products, “truly one of the most bullet-proof business models in modern history,” Quigley says.

Quigley also takes aim at current patent practices.

The US should even consider ending medicine patents altogether, Quigley argues. “The patent system fails miserably in making medicines available to those who need them,” he says. Studies show that 70% of newly marketed drugs make no therapeutic advances on existing medicines; they are “me-too” drugs that try to carve out a portion of already existing markets for things like cholesterol medication, without bringing any improvements to the table. Furthermore, patents prevent competitors from building on previous research. Expanding grants for patent-free, open-source research would focus medical research on innovation, and make research findings available to everyone immediately, Quigley argues.

Quigley is not the only observer who faults the current patent system; economist Dean Baker goes considerably farther:

Are corporate patent and copyright monopolies a form of government-licensed private taxation? Dean Baker of CEPR thinks so: “Government-granted patent and copyright monopolies are actually much more important in determining future flows of income than debt. In the case of prescription drugs alone, patent and related protections raise the price of drugs by close to $370 billion a year over the free market price, a bit less than 2.0 percent of GDP. This is considerably larger than the current interest burden of the debt, which is approximately 1.6 percent of GDP, net of money refunded from the Federal Reserve Board to the Treasury. These monopolies are effectively like privately collected taxes.”

The book is Prescription for the People.

I know Fran Quigley, I know both his passion and his meticulous attention to fact and evidence. He’s a clear writer and a clear thinker. You should buy the book.

Comments

Money, Tax Havens and Inequality

Income inequality has become a major concern over the past several years, as multiple indicators point to a gap between the rich and poor that exceeds that of the Gilded Age. Economists and policymakers recognize the existence of the gap, but haven’t necessarily agreed on its dimensions.

Meanwhile, Congress– surprise!!– is just beginning debate on a tax “reform” bill that in its current form would further exacerbate inequality, with a “reverse Robin Hood” approach that takes from the poor and gives to the rich.

New studies that give us the ability to make more accurate estimates of the gap’s size suggest that–if anything–the distance between rich and poor is far larger than previously supposed.

From Journalists’ Resource, we are directed to recent research on tax havens and other methods used by the very rich to–shall we say “obscure”– the actual amount of their wealth.

And guess what? The rich are a whole lot richer than even the more suspicious among us  thought.

It’s difficult to assess the net worth of the world’s super-rich. Havens like the Cayman Islands, Switzerland and Hong Kong are happy to stash their cash, offering privacy and a shelter (often perfectly legal) from taxes. And without knowing how rich the rich are, we can’t make an accurate assessment of income inequality.

But new sources of data, including leaks such as the Panama Papers, are helping researchers shine light on these shelters.

That is the impulse behind two new working papers for the National Bureau of Economic Research by Annette Alstadsæter of the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Niels Johannesen of the University of Copenhagen, and Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley. The team shows that measuring income by tax declarations alone is misleading – since so many people dodge their taxes – and that income inequality in many countries is far worse than previously thought.

One team of researchers estimates that amounts equivalent to ten percent of global economic output – that was $5.6 trillion in 2007 – are held offshore. Because it is out of the taxman’s sights, it is also out of sight of those trying to account for global wealth and/or global tax avoidance.

Speaking of “tax avoidance” (another word for evasion), a second study focused on Sweden, which the researchers believe–for a number of reasons– is one of the countries with the lowest percentage of tax cheats.

They found that households with $10-12 million in assets were twice as likely as households with $5-6 million to conceal assets from tax authorities. For that matter, the richer the  household, the more likely to cheat; households with over $45 million were four times more likely to “stash” their wealth than those with “only” $5-6 million.

Thus, the wealth in offshore tax havens is “extremely concentrated”; the top 0.01 percent of households own about 50 percent of it.

For the top 0.1 percent of households, accounting for accounts offshore increases their wealth by a third.

So–if the percentage of tax evaders in the United States is no more than the percentage in Sweden (and if you believe that, I have some swampland in Florida to sell you…), the top one percent of American plutocrats have a third more wealth than we previously thought.

And what we previously thought is bad enough! Click through for the graphic…

If history is any guide, this will not end well.

Comments