Tag: election

Vote suppression, accidentally or on purpose

NYTimes: Voter Registration by Students Raises Cloud of Consequences – NYTimes.com. See also Cavalier Daily, Voter registration code raises concerns (temporarily dead link, use the PDF version). Brief version: two bulletins from the registrar of elections for Montgomery County in Virginia advised students, incorrectly, that registering to vote in Virginia could cost them scholarship money, insurance coverage, and could cost their parents through loss of dependent status.

Bureaucratic foulup, or deliberate suppression?

One would think that the registrar of elections would be interested in facilitating voter turnout.

There’s a little bit of a blog kerfluffle about this right now–seems Jon Taplin reported it as a Republican suppression effort, but there’s no evidence that the registrar, Randall Wertz, is partisan. But the sort of consequences for registering to vote are pretty typical vote-suppression claims, and Wertz seems proud of the eight students who called to withdraw their applications.

So it could go either way, but it seems to me that we should be encouraging Montgomery County to register more students.

Sarah Palin’s morning in America

So far, John McCain’s nomination of Sarah Palin on the basis of a 15 minute interview is proving to be the best illustration of why you should carefully vet vice presidential candidates–particularly those who haven’t run for national office before.

I’m still trying to figure out whether this choice of McCain’s is desperate or brilliant. The arguments for both:

Desperate: This has the appearance of an appointment made in haste. It’s been established that Joe Lieberman, McCain’s first choice, was not acceptable to the Republican base, and it appears that Palin was picked very late in the game. All the indications are that Palin’s vetting was shallow; indeed, Talking Points Memo indicates that the Republican team has just now hit the ground in Alaska to do the deep digging. And certainly the ongoing information suggesting that Palin used her office to try to force the firing of her sister’s ex-husband, and that she did fire his boss when she couldn’t get the ex-brother-in-law fired, suggests that McCain’s team was not aware of this abuse of power on Palin’s part. As does the unfortunate situation with her daughter. As do her misleading statements about her support for the Bridge to Nowhere (brief: she supported it before she condemned it). As does her apparent past membership in the Alaska Independence Party.

Brilliant: McCain needed to differentiate himself from Obama while seizing hold of the “change” meme to pick up independent voters, but he also had to play to his base, who were late to fall in line behind the one-time “maverick.” Picking Palin on the basis of who she was (conservative, anti-choice, pro-guns, a short history as a reformer) helped shore up the base.

But more than this, maybe there’s a new calculus in play, a short-term thought process that says that the American people are going to be more likely to think whether a candidate for the second highest office in the land is “like them” than they are to worry about the person’s fitness for the job. In this short-term way of thinking, someone can be good to vote for simply because they are empathetic, because the voter wants to be that person. It’s kind of a “politician as celebrity” play.

Whether the choice, which looks to me like pandering, will work is still at play. Gallup and Rasmussen both show Obama widening his lead over McCain after the pick, primarily by picking up undecided voters. But polls have been wrong before.

See also: Why Palin should be taken seriously (Scripting News).

Update: Illuminating in light of the above: McCain campaign manager Rick Davis says “This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” So in other words, the McCain camp is betting on the celebrity view of politics that I describe above. Which is ironic, given their ads bashing Obama for being a celebrity.

Preparing for the Obama backlash

Though the AP has called the Democratic nomination for Barack Obama based on its own private delegate counts, I think it’s too early–or maybe too late–to celebrate. Cause the weirdness is just beginning.

Aside: An email list I’m on recently sent out an article advising blog authors to focus on one thing only, and I’m about to break that rule in a big way by writing about the Democratic nomination. But it’s because of other things that I do–namely, genealogical research–that I have the perspective I’m about to share.

I have a distant relation who sends information about the family from time to time. We’ve never met, and aside from the family connection six generations or so back we have nothing in common, which is made abundantly clear from the right-wing emails bashing Obama (not HRC) that he regularly sends out. But getting his email is an interesting opportunity to see how the unofficial smear machine will take on Obama’s candidacy, because every one of them that pops up is getting forwarded.

Last night he sent one that consisted of a collection of supposedly inflammatory quotations from Obama’s books closing with this line and editorial:

And FINALLY the Most Damming one of ALL of them!!!

From Audacity of Hope: ‘I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.’

Now, it’s hard to imagine how this is supposed to be damning. To begin with, it’s incoherent as a standalone quotation, and it’s only damning if you think that standing with “the Muslims” is unequivocally bad. But if you put it into context, it’s even more puzzling. Here’s the quotation from the book, as sourced by “Right Truth”:

Of course, not all my conversations in immigrant communities follow this easy pattern. In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific reassurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.

Now, I have some basic reading comprehension skills, and I have no problem parsing this: concern that the nation’s xenophobia unfairly penalizes immigrants during national emergencies, remembrance of overreactions of the past, and a recognition that immigrants want national leaders to help them and safeguard their rights. The quotation does not say “I will stand by the Muslims,” but that he sees that the immigrants want their adopted country to stand by them.

I sent an email back to the author pointing this out. He replied,”Thank you so very much for this statement. It does say that he will stand with the Pakiasttani and Arab Americans if the Political winds shift etc.”

Um, WTF? Not at all what it said, or I said. But this is the sort of “logic” that opponents of Barack will use to try to block his campaign for the white house.

We all need to be alert to this and help put out these smears as they come up. The stakes in this election are too high for our reason to be led astray by those who would manipulate our fears.