98% of prisoners in NY in Republican Senate districts

[anaxarchos]

You are absolutely right.

If I remember correctly, there is also a downstate/upstate split with something like 2/3rds of prisoners coming from NYC but being used to pad Republican districts upstate. It's even worse in many other states (particularly in the south and west) where felony disenfranchisement is used to produce a "double whammy", with "felons" (disproportionately poor, black, and Democratic) losing their right to vote AND then having their bodies used to pad, not the districts they are from, but inevitably Republican districts where their incarceration or even their probation originates. A lot of the techniques date directly back to "Jim Crow" (post-reconstruction).

There is already a LOT of work done on this and even a few web-sites.... Let me see what I can dig up from my notes. You are quite right that it is high time to discuss the racket as a whole.

I remember an article going back 10 years ago or more on the "Big Seven" of Republican Election manipulation. From memory, they were:

1) Registration rules, regulations and jurisdictions
2) Registration suppression
3) Geographic manipulation (including the Electoral College)
4) Ballot "spoilage"
5) Felony Disenfranchisement (including "prison-mandering")
6) Vote Suppression
7) Election Fraud


A lot of the "strategies" were "legal" or quasi-legal on the face of it but clearly illegal in combination. Others were openly illegal... again like post-Reconstruction.

[wli]

I suspect there may be even more methods involved in addition to this, though. I suspect, but have zero evidence of, that these include:

1. Politically-motivated gentrification
2. Using control of drug dealing operations to target political districts thus creating disenfranchisement
3. Using control of court and law enforcement appointments to target political districts and thus target disenfranchisement
4. Use of law enforcement to disrupt non-Republican political parties' voter mobilization and organization efforts (i.e. COINTELPRO -type affairs)
5. Using control of court and law enforcement appointments to target politicians in non-Republican political parties.
6. Using control of media organizations to deny access of non-Republican political parties to the press (more generally using the MSM as a propaganda machine).
7. False flag terrorist attacks to inspire right-wing/nationalist political moods and so influence elections.
8. Improper interactions with religious organizations to proselytize Republican Party membership under the aegis of religious proselytization.
9. Manipulation of financial markets for political patronage (i.e. campaign contributor payback).
10. Manipulation of government contracts for political patronage (i.e. campaign contributor payback).

I'm not really sure how well any of this can be substantiated.

[Michael Collins]

Thanks for the information and the link. Holy cow! They will stop at nothing!

[wli]

[a href="http://www.fairvote.org/?page=773"] Fairvote's Shrinking Battleground Report [/a] has more information on how the electoral college screws things up on a scale even larger than we generally realize.

[Michael Collins]

This is a great thread for me since I'm learning some new stuff. The FairVote site is excellent and the list of Republican techniques rings a bell. Amazing what we can do when we're unimpeded by dipwads.

Now for my question. I want to write something on 'spoilage.' That's pissed me off for a long time, even before the whole election fraud movement started.

If there's a "classic" out there, I'd like to know or an authority who is the cat's meow.

Also, the articles I read on spoilage assume I know what it is exactly. I don't. What are some examples of a spoiled ballot? Is the spoilage due to poor equipment, ill maintained equipment? Is there a relationship between the race of the poll workers and the spoilage in minority districts? I want to anticipate the Lou Dobbs logic (well, the mayor of NOLA is black...so fucking what Lou, the victims are the point of focus-he's very good sometimes, but when he's bad, he's very bad).

Thanks for any thoughts or pointers.

[anaxarchos]

... this is going to look like a setup. Yours truely knows something about that too (he says, very sheepishly). The following was the body of my answer to a post from someone on DU that claimed it was not significant. While it focuses on 2000, it cites all of the "classics" including Klinker (very important). Of course, the search on DU is disabled (because of traffic) so I can't link it. I have to cite it inline (what self promotion... sheesh). Anyway, you have a great idea and I can provide tons more links if you need them.


<Begin Quote>


He who argues only with himself...

...need never worry about losing to anyone else.

I have no idea what you are talking about above but I guess I am grateful that it took more than 15 minutes, this time, to answer. You are still stuck on that insult thing though...

Since you simultaneously plead ignorance and challenge me (in a smug way, I might add), let me back up my assertion.

It is extremely well known that significant ballot spoilage has occurred in every recent election. That is one of the statistics at the heart of election performance and you can find it anywhere (just google). If you are lazy, here is just one citation from the Caltech-MIT voting project describing residual vote rates (residual vote = spoiled ballots, or close enough for our purpose here) from 1988 to 2000.

http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~voting/C...t_Version2.pdf

Table 3

Residual Vote as a Percent of Total Ballots Cast By Machine Type and Year
US Counties, 1988-2000 Presidential Elections

1988 2.5% 1992 2.0% 1996 2.1% 2000 2.0%


Elsewhere on that site you can find spoilage rates for elections going back to 1976. They are largely consistent with some variation from election to election and year to year (perhaps .5%).

That establishes that spoilage exists (and HAS existed) but not how it is distributed. On this subject, there is considerable analysis which dates from before 2000. There is, for example, this:

Stephen Knack and Martha Kropf, Invalidated Ballots in the 1996 Presidential Election: A County-Level Analysis (May 2001).

Available here:

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/conten...00003/art00013

"Evidence indicates that voided ballots are significantly more prevalent in counties with higher percentages of African Americans and Hispanics..."
But the above seems tame compared to the analysis after 2000. For that we owe the great election theft of that year. In response to complaints that African Americans in Florida were victimized by ballot spoilage, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) decided to investigate. Lo and behold:

http://chris-bowers.mydd.com/story/2004/6/22/155425/153

"Harvard law professor Christopher Edley Jr., a member of the Commission on Civil Rights, didn't like the smell of all those spoiled ballots. He dug into the pile of tossed ballots and, deep in the commission's official findings, reported this: 14.4 percent of black votes--one in seven--were "invalidated," i.e., never counted. By contrast, only 1.6 percent of nonblack voters' ballots were spoiled."

Edley, BTW, is now the Dean of the Berkley Law School.

The USCCR study, in turn, opened up the floodgates of analysis and expanded that analysis to cover the entire nation. The research that followed is striking. There is for example, this:

Special Investigations Division, Committee on Government Reform. “Income and Racial Disparities in the Undercount in the 2000 Presidential Election.” U.S. House of Representatives (July 2001)

Available here:

http://www.house.gov/roybal-allard/undercountreport.pdf
Some highlights:

“This report analyzes voting results from 40 congressional districts in 20 states. Twenty of the congressional districts examined in this report have high poverty rates and a high minority population, and 20 of the districts have low poverty rates and a small minority population. The report analyzes the percentage of uncounted votes for president in each of the 40 districts and compares the percentages of uncounted votes in the two types of districts.”

“On average, voters in low-income, high-minority districts were over three times as likely to have their votes for president discarded as voters in affluent, low-minority districts. Voters in some low-income, high-minority districts were 20 times as likely to have their votes discarded as voters in other congressional districts.”

“Almost 3.5 million ballots were cast in the 20 districts with high poverty rates and a high minority population in the 2000 election. Almost 140,000 of these ballots were not counted in the presidential race. This is an undercount rate of 4.0%... There were significantly more ballots cast in the 20 affluent districts with a low minority population, but the number of ballots that were not counted was much smaller. A total of over 5.7 million ballots were cast in these affluent districts, and 67,000 ballots were not counted in the presidential race. This is an undercount rate of 1.2%.”

“Overall, voters in low-income, high-minority districts were over three times more likely to have their vote for president discarded than voters in affluent districts with a small minority population.”

“Voters in some low-income, high-minority districts were twenty times more likely to have their votes discarded than voters in other districts.”

“The ten congressional districts with the highest rates of uncounted ballots were all districts with high poverty rates and a high minority population.”

One of the most interesting papers produced in this period is this one:

Klinker, Philip. “Whose Votes Don’t Count?: An Analysis of Spoiled Ballots in the 2000 Florida Election,” Appendix XI in the USCCR Report (25 June 2001).

That is available here:

http://www.hamilton.edu/news/florida...20Analysis.pdf

Some highlights from this:

“Interestingly, education and income appear to have no effect on the rate of spoiled ballots. Thus there is little evidence in the data for the claim that spoiled ballots in Florida resulted mostly from the individual errors of voters who lacked the education or experience to cast accurate votes.”

“As the regressions for the “stupid voter” model indicates, these individually controlled variables exert little explanatory power. The adjusted r2 is only .452, meaning that the model explains less than half the variance in the pattern of spoiled ballots across Florida counties. Furthermore, none of the variables, save for literacy is statistically significant. This model and the previous one show quite clear that the pattern of spoiled ballots in Florida was much more influenced by systemic factors rather than individual ones.”

“In conclusion, this analysis offers two important findings:

1. There is no evidence that higher rates of spoiled ballots resulted from such individual factors as education and literacy. Instead, the factors influencing spoiled ballots were systemic. Thus, rather than speaking of individuals who spoiled their ballots, we should speak of individuals who were placed in situations in which it was more likely that their ballots would be spoiled. Furthermore, this finding indicates that any effort to reduce the rate of spoiled ballots must focus on systemic solutions--improved technology, more and better election workers, and stronger efforts to investigate and prosecute any instances of corruption and/or racial disenfranchisement.

2. Even after controlling for other factors, rates of ballot spoilage remain higher in predominantly black areas than in other areas of Florida. As the last model indicates, with all else being equal, for every 1-point increase in the percentage of registered voters who are black, there was a .07 percentage point increase in spoiled ballots. In addition, these rates were even higher where substantial numbers of blacks were found in counties with large margins for George W. Bush. All of this corresponds to and further reinforces the findings of the USCCR that there is evidence of racial disenfranchisement in the 2000 election in Florida. Consequently, it is important that federal authorities should investigate this matter more thoroughly.”

Also, in the Addendum to this study, you will find a debate with Professor John Lott of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Lott claims a primary correlation to poverty rather than race and traces this back through the 1996 elections and before. Just follow the references.

But the above isn’t really necessary is it? You will see a lot of references in the sources above to a “systemic” problem or “systemic bias”. In other places, you will find spoilage “correlating” to race or other factors. That is not a single election issue is it? That would make it an anomaly. A systemic bias is “systemic, if it applies to “all elections”, or exactly what I said and also what I quoted you from the Harvard study.

In retrospect, your assertion that I had not shown any evidence for any other election is just silly. So is your reference to some non-votes being intentional. That is a canard, like voters not registering because they have “lost interest” in politics. In reality, both percentages are relatively small.

There is much, MUCH more. If you don’t like academics, here are some serious newspaper examinations that supplement the above:

A ‘Modern’ Democracy that Can’t Count Votes; Special Report: What Happened in
Florida is the Rule and Not the Exception. A Coast-to-Coast Study by the Times Finds Shoddy System that Can Only be Trusted When the Election Isn’t Close, Los Angeles Times (Dec. 11, 2000).

A Racial Gap in Voided Votes; Precinct Analysis Finds Stark Inequity in Polling
Problems, Washington Post (Dec. 27, 2000).

Many Votes Uncounted in Ohio’s Poor Areas, Columbus Dispatch (Dec. 17, 2000).

You might ask, “Why black voters in particular? Are Republicans such racists?”. Well, they are but the reason is much more practical as well. African American voters constitute the single most concentrated block in the U.S. electoral scheme, voting 85 to 90% Democratic in most U.S. elections. They are often also a marker for poor Hispanic and poor white voting populations, particularly in certain urban areas. These populations tend to be 2 to1 Democratic and 60/40 conservatively. Very little impact in this grouping has huge impacts on the outcomes of close elections.
That, in turn, gets us to the numbers:

http://chris-bowers.mydd.com/story/2004/6/22/155425/153

“Florida's racial profile mirrors the nation's--both in the percentage of voters who are black and the racial profile of the voters whose ballots don't count. "In 2000, a black voter in Florida was ten times as likely to have their vote spoiled--not counted--as a white voter," explains political scientist Philip Klinkner, co-author of Edley's Harvard report. "National figures indicate that Florida is, surprisingly, typical. Given the proportion of nonwhite to white voters in America, then, it appears that about half of all ballots spoiled in the USA, as many as 1 million votes, were cast by nonwhite voters."

So, lets see… 1 million spoiled non-white votes, conservatively 80% Democratic plus 1 million white votes, 50% Democratic, gets us to 1.3 million votes in 2000 (it might be as high as 1.5 million). That was the threshold, going INTO the 2002 and 2004 races.

The interesting thing is that this is all generally accepted. Despite your pleas of ignorance, much of this analysis (standing on its ear, of course) has been used to justify BBV on the premise that BBV changes the rate (but not the distribution) of spoilage. Even the crap-media, like USA Today, anticipated the impact of widespread e-voting on spoilage prior to this election:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politic...g-errors_x.htm

“Cutting voting errors in half would add about 1 million votes that would have been uncounted in previous elections. That could help Democrat John Kerry because mistakes historically have been highest in Democratic precincts, especially those with many minorities.”

Of course, that didn’t really happen, did it? The soap just moved. We’ll get to that soon enough.

Now we are simply back to my assertion:

“Yes, I do assert that ballot spoilage is VERY significant ("millions"), it disproportionately (and overwhelmingly) favors Republicans, and it is true in EVERY election dating back to well before 1988. That is my assertion. Do you dispute that?”

That “bald” assertion now has some hair, or at least some support from, by my count, the USCCR, The House of Representatives, some leading newspapers, a boatload of professors from some of the stuffiest joints in town and some logic. And, I haven’t found much that claims to refute this… not even at HannityCroaks.com.

And, it is true that this supports TIA’s assertion, much as that may piss you off.

But it occurs to me that I have been very rude. I have hogged all the “heavy lifting” while you have merely been “thinking”…

So now, it’s your turn.

Point #1, Master Mistwell. Which is it? Accept or refute.


<End Quote>

[wli]

There is no way to dig ourselves out of this once they've gotten their grip on power. This isn't a policy study, this is a postmortem.

The only way this will be rectified is under threat of military action against the neo-Nazi junta. For the foreseeable future, the only coherent military force that might do so is the regular army. This does not bode well. It's turned into "take your pick: military dictatorship or military dictatorship."

[anaxarchos]

To me, it seems more like a last gasp then a permanent foothold. I think that it will take a "Democratic Movement" to "fix" but, in someways, that is long overdue. It may take a while and it sure won't "get fixed" by "election reform" or "paper ballots" but I don't think it is unwinnable.

In 200 years, we've had 3 bites at the apple of democracy (the revolution, the civil war, and the civil rights movement in the 60s). Getting there in 4 bites isn't so bad. I suppose you could argue that the progress took 1 revolution, 1 war (that killed more Americans then all other American Wars put together) and a nearly total social breakdown. Still, in the end, the bastards always lose...

I wouldn't bet on them.

[wli]

One must bear in mind that movements truly beneficial to the masses are near-nonexistant in the whole of history. The "bites" you mention are in fact some of the only instances ever where such movements for equality and social justice have ever taken place.

I would not advise enthusiasm, but rather grim determination to advance a goal that will not be realized in our lifetimes or even that of our great-grandchildren or great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren. Lying to ourselves about false prospects only serves to discredit the causes of liberty, equality, and socioeconomic justice.

Yes, "grim determination." Grim, in that we remain aware of the unfathomably vast resources aligned against us. Determined, in that the progress to be made is not a benefit we ourselves will reap in our lifetimes or those of our immediate descendents.

[anaxarchos]

Let's divide the work up, just as we have in the thread, put the shit out there and see what falls from the rafters...

;-)

[Michael Collins]

I'm humbled (doesn't happen often)

[wli]

Election fraud is far from the only device being used to manipulate elections. [a href="http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/news/fact-30-8-2004.shtml"] An old Fact of the Week [/a] at Prisoners of the Census shows that "prisonmandering" is being used to manipulate electoral shares at the state level.

It would be useful to collect information about this on a broader scale (e.g. the effect of prisonmandering in other states) as well as other methods of disrupting electoral processes (politically-biased gentrification, Katrina evacuee dispersal, etc.).