Thursday, October 31, 2024

Judicially Approved, Last-Minute Election Interference

October 30, 2024 featured at least two stories of meddling in current elections initiated by Republican operatives and (so far) sanctioned by the judiciary. One case involves early voting in St. Charles County in Missouri and the eleventh circuit court. The other involves voter registration purges in Virginia and the US Supreme Court. Both reflect the fixation of Republicans on suppressing voting via registration processes or merely making the actual voting process as inconvenient as possible. But they also reflect the willingness of courts -- including the highest court in the land -- to ignore the law in support of these efforts.


Meddling in Missouri

The Missouri case involves a motion filed by Travis Heins, a member of the St. Charles County GOP, that sought an emergency injunction to ensure that "no in-person absentee early voting occurs without the presence of challengers / watchers." Heins' rationale is that state law permits (note that word... permits) watchers and challengers to be present anywhere in-person absentee ballots are being prepared and counted. Ergo, the same right should apply to any location where early voting is taking place.

Okay, let's go with that for a second. I'd even agree with it. So what is stopping this? If you can find "volunteers" among the Republican election fraud conspiracy fanatics who want to show up and watch people stand in line for eight hours each day until Election Day, go ahead. Under this interpretation of the law, you're entitled. However, the law PERMITS these challengers / watchers. It doesn't REQUIRE them. That's why we operate each voting location so that TWO election officials sign off on every ballot and why TWO election officials must supervise any handling of machines and final tallies.

A child of ten could read the applicable statute and come to that conclusion and reject Heins' request for an injunction. But the judge who reviewed the request APPROVED it, with this language:

1. The plaintiff has demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits of the case.
2. The Plaintiff will suffer immediate and irreparable harm if the temporary restraining order is not granted.
3. The balance of equities tips in favor of the Plaintiff.
4. The issuance of the temporary restraining order is in the public interest.

ACCEPTED.

Likelihood of success on the merits? In a petition that doesn't understand the difference between PERMITS and REQUIRES?

Immediate and irreparable harm? How many prior individual votes or elections have been altered by the operation of these challengers / watchers? NONE. How many voters might decide to stay home if multiple days of early voting are eliminated and they have to face trying to vote on Election Day?

Balance of equities? How does a partisan group's interest in posturing as tough guys in front of voters outweigh the rights of THOUSANDS of voters to vote via legal means?

Public interest? ZERO public interest is served by halting early voting simply because one partisan group failed to find volunteers to participate in this charade of "poll watching."

The real intent of this petition would seem at first to be more puzzling after considering local politics.. However, those politics actually suggest more troubling concerns with this attempt. St. Charles County is a heavily Republican leaning county. Missouri is a Republican-dominated state. What possible motivation would Republican party officials in a BRIGHT RED county in a BRIGHT RED state have in suppressing votes in their own county? Trump will win handily in Missouri. Republicans in US races and Missouri State races will win heavily in St. Charles County. However, the Missouri ballot does have one issue that is not so skewed towards Republicans. Amendment 3 is on the ballot (despite months of Republican extra-legal efforts to keep it off the ballot) and would re-establish abortion rights in the state. This issue could very well win in the state and, as a bedroom community of the larger St. Louis metro area, St. Charles County possibly has more voters that would support this one special initiative. Perhaps the Republican party fears enough defections on this one traditional Republican issue that they have assumed suppressing turnout in St. Charles County is crucial to defeating Amendment 3 and preserving Missouri's draconian abortion ban.

Or... Is something else afoot?

Is it possible that a "secret deal" referenced directly by both Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson is somehow involved with this challenge to early voting in Missouri? No outlet has unearthed exactly what Trump or Johnson might be referencing but one theory being circulated involves the rules for selecting a President if the Electoral College is unable to certify 270 votes for either candidate. The Constitution says:

The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such Majority, and have an equal Number of Votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately chuse by Ballot one of them for President; and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like Manner chuse the President.

It's that last sentence in bold that requires parsing word by word to understand this theory.

The majority of votes being referenced isn't a majority of the POPULAR votes for each candidate. Obviously. But it isn't referencing the majority of electoral votes submitted from each State Legislature in their Electoral College delegation either. It is referencing the CERTIFIED Electoral College votes, which is a function performed by the Senate. As already evidenced in 2020, there are numerous elected Senators more than willing to reject Electoral College delegations from multiple states with ZERO evidence of actual election issues in support of their partisan preference.

This "secret deal" between Trump and Johnson is feared because it seems to hint that schemes have been hatched to selectively reject Electoral College delegations from states that might vote for Harris but are controlled by Republicans at the State Legislature, allowing those Republicans to invent bogus rationales for withholding certification of their own state's vote leaving their Electoral College votes uncounted. If the election were won by Harris at a state level that exceeded 270 votes, these Republicans might pick off enough EC votes via these illicit tactics to drag the "certified" total below 270 and throw the final selection into the House. That final House election would be even MORE undemocratic than the original Electoral College process and more undemocratic than normal gerrymandering would normally lead one to conclude. Why?

That final House vote won't reflect the actual Republican / Democratic split of seats based upon the 2024 election. Instead, each state's House delegation gets ONE vote and the majority wins. Even if the Republicans LOSE control of the House via the 2024 election, a one state / one vote contest will still heavily favor Republicans due to all of the sparsely populated states that are dominated by Republicans.

So how would this skirmish over voting in a BRIGHT RED county alter Missouri's likely vote in this nightmare scenario? It wouldn't alter Missouri's contribution at all. However, should this nightmare scenario play out, it WOULD be helpful to the bogus case being made that election anomalies occurred all over the country, casting more doubt that could be cited by those involved in such a scheme that some state results (even if not Missouri) could not be trusted. This could trigger some Senate members to reject electoral slates from some states, take the ACTUAL electoral tally below 270 then throw the final Presidential race into the House. As the 2020 election already demonstrated, the groups wiling to overturn elections are only interested in noise and chaos, not reality. Any confusion they can generate, even in Republican dominated areas, can help achieve their desired results.

Meddling in Virginia

The US Supreme Court accepted a motion on its "rocket docket" involving a case in Virginia involving a mass scrub of voter registration records in the state. The names were identified by comparing jury duty records where individuals (presuming meaning name + address) had marked a checkbox after being solicited for jury duty claiming they were ineligible because they were not citizens. These (name + address) combinations were matched against voter registration records and any matches were slated to be removed from voter rolls. Virginia Governor Youngkin ordered state officials to expedite the data analysis and ultimate purge on August 7, 2024. The action was immediately opposed in court, was litigated and appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court which ruled 6-3 on October 30, 2024 to allow Virginia to execute the purge.

This case merits some analysis to unpack the immediate consequences and longer term implications. Per court filings, there are about 1600 registrations involved with this effort. Elections HAVE been extremely close but in general, the quantity involved here is not great. In the immediate sense, the state's supposed theory is that if these voters checked "non-citizen" on their jury duty form yet registered to vote, at the very least they lied on government forms so therefore, if purged based upon their own lies on government forms, well... Tough luck. If the underlying database matching logic was sound and verified, it would be tough to argue against this rationale.

However, it is exceedingly easy for a lazy / sloppy database coder to perform these matchups between multiple databases incorrectly and find "matches" due to incompletely applied criteria that don't really exist but will result in a name appearing on the output as a match. The possibility of these types of errors and the difficulty some voters might have in re-registering after being incorrectly purged is why the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 explicitly bans such mass purges within 90 days of any federal election. Now note the date upon which the State of Virginia initiated this purge and the date it's Republican Governor approved it. August 7. Exactly 90 days prior to the November 5 election. But note that Virginia Governor Younkin directed state officials to expedite this purge ON August 7. They did not have the data nor had notifications to affected voters already been sent on August 7.

Again, a child of ten could seemingly review the dates of these actions, review the letter of the law ("thou shalt not touch registrations within 90 days of an election") and immediately conclude this purge was illegal under federal law and should have been stopped. Yet the Supreme Court REJECTED the decision of both the original judge and the appeals court who upheld the block on this purge and held in favor of Republican officials in Virginia.

In this case, a total of 1600 registrations are involved. There isn't an allegation that the entries on the list themselves reflect any particular geographic or demographic bias within the state. It isn't statistically likely any federal race in Virginia will be decided by 1600 votes. So why is this Supreme Court decision important?

This decision is important partly because it is yet another giant bat signal flashing in the sky to groups around the country devising new ways to suppress access to the polls that the US Supreme Court will entertain any scheme, regardless of its mechanics and regardless of its timing, to manipulate registration rolls, even if such efforts have a significant chance of disenfranchising legitimate voters. In the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court, the rights of political partisans to feel confident that "illegals" aren't voting are higher in priority than the rights of actual citizens who might be blocked from voting by such measures to ACTUALLY vote. Despite ZERO evidence anywhere in the country that incidents of voter fraud exceed HANDFULLS per state.

This decision is more important because it is yet more proof that the US Supreme Court is operating in a new post-precedent world where the rule of law means nothing because words themselves mean nothing to the Supreme Court. The "conservative" justices on the Court will come to any conclusion that suits them based upon the parties in front of them and their own political preferences. That is the very antithesis of "equal protection under the law."


WTH

Tuesday, October 29, 2024

Missouri AG Frets Over Population Loss

Missouri's current Attorney General Andrew Bailey recently filed a lawsuit that demonstrates his continuous efforts to blaze new trails in the law and civic cynicism in service to the goal of ever more restrictions on the reproductive rights of citizens not only in Missouri but the entire United States. The reasoning behind the suit not only conveys the depravity of those pushing these restrictions but demonstrates how little they understand about the larger feedback loop between the medical system they have disturbed and the larger economic system it impacts.


Prioritizing Power Over People

Bailey's suit was filed in conjunction with AGs from Kansas and Idaho and lists the FDA as defendant. The ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY NINE pages of the suit claim women "face severe, life-threatening harm" as a result of the FDA's approval of abortion drugs like mifepristone and approval of their distribution by mail-order. It claims nearly one in twenty five women who use one of these drugs will still require emergency room care and that women should be required to see a doctor in person prior to obtaining a prescription for any of these drugs.

You can see a copy of the full lawsuit here in PDF format at the court's document management web site:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txnd.370067/gov.uscourts.txnd.370067.195.1.pdf

The suit cites a variety of statistics to induce shock and anger over the medical impacts of abortion drugs on women. For example, it cites the required FDA label on drugs stating 2.9 to 4.6 percent of users will visit the emergency room after using the drug. THE ER! These must be horrific complications! Well, maybe. But this statistic could just be a reflection that primary care access SUCKS in many areas and if a patient encounters heavy bleeding, they're not going to get into an OB/GYN or primary care physician with one hour's notice. These visits aren't necessarily a sign of undue risk with the drugs, they're a sign of a completely dysfunctional health care system.

Another statistic cited in paragraph 627 illustrates how innumerate and / or manipulative Bailey and team are in their narrative.

627. The study also found that ED visits coded severe or critical for women who underwent a chemical abortion increased by 4,041.1% between 2004 and 2015, compared to a 450.6% increase for surgical abortion subjects and 20.9% for live birth subjects.

Again, that's dreadful! Right? Well, maybe. But mifepristone first became available in the United States in 2000. Prior to 2000, the number of Emergency Department (ED) visits due to mifepristone was ZERO because the drug wasn't legal. Per this report from the Guttmacher Institute, the share of medical abortions has grown from 0% in 2000 to 53% in 2020.

https://www.guttmacher.org/article/2022/02/medication-abortion-now-accounts-more-half-all-us-abortions

Over that same rough period, the number of total abortions has dropped from about 1.3 million in 2000 to 930,160 in 2022. In 2004, medical abortions were about 14% of all abortions or 0.14 x 1.25 or 175,000. If medical abortions are 53% of the total 930,160 now, that's 492,984 medical abortions. So the volume of medical abortions increased 281% over the period. So if the ER visit count jumped 4041% in that period, clearly the drugs are far more dangerous than surgical abortions or office-supervised abortions right?

Not necessarily. Again, a large number of Americans visit an ER not because emergency care is truly needed but because primary care capacity does not exist to handle non-critical issues and patients are not qualified to judge what is life-threatening or not. No one is citing skyrocketing death rates among patients opting for a medical abortion. None exist.

Section XXII of the lawsuit is entitled Economic Injuries to Plaintiffs’ Medical Systems and spans forty pages from 152 to 191 with similar tables and claims which all look very "sciency" and meticulously researched but are likely reflecting a similar cherry-picked process that takes the data completely out of context.

In any civil lawsuit, the plaintiff is required to explain how they have standing to file the action and summarize how the defendant's actions are causing harm to the plaintiff. The Plaintiffs, all three Attorneys General, state their position as AG and their claim as having authorization per state law to "institute, in the name and on the behalf of the state, all civil suits and other proceedings at law or in equity requisite or necessary to protect the rights and interests of the state."

That's some curious wording there. "...interests of the state." I would have worded that as "protect the rights and interests of the citizens of the state", just to make it absolutely clear what is being protected.

But I'm not Andrew Bailey. Andrew Bailey makes it perfectly clear much further in the text of the lawsuit where his priorities lie. Page 190 contains two paragraphs that have drawn particular attention and disgust.

751. These estimates also show the effect of the FDA’s decision to remove all in-person dispensing protections. When data is examined in a way that reflects sensitivity to expected birth rates, these estimates strikingly “do not show evidence of an increase in births to teenagers aged 15-19,” even in states with long driving distances despite the fact that “women aged 15-19 … are more responsive to driving distances to abortion facilities than older women.” This study thus suggests that remote dispensing of abortion drugs by mail, common carrier, and interactive computer service is depressing expected birth rates for teenaged mothers in Plaintiff States, even if other overall birth rates may have been lower than otherwise was projected.


752. A loss of potential population causes further injuries as well: the States subsequent “diminishment of political representation” and “loss of federal funds,” such as potentially “losing a seat in Congress or qualifying for less federal funding if their populations are” reduced or their increase diminished.

The point in paragraph 751 seems bizarre. Bailey and his cohorts are attempting to create a sense of drama / urgency from the fact that teen birth rates among women 15-19 DID NOT increase as a sign of a problem. Um, how can one put this gently? The GOAL of allowing remote dispensing of abortion drugs WAS to reduce the birth rate among teens who did not want to have a child. The GOAL of the program WAS to make the choice available to people with barriers to driving 300 miles to visit a reproductive health clinic. OF COURSE the number of surgical abortions would decline and the number of medication-induced abortions would go up.

The point in paragraph 752 is a sign of much deeper problems to come. Bailey and his cohorts are essentially arguing that State Attorney Generals have a vested interest in fostering population growth as a means of maintaining and increasing their influence over federal funds allocated to states based on population and maintaining a state's relative legislative influence in the US House by limiting the means by which CITIZENS can choose to control their fertility. That is not hyperbole. That is EXACTLY what this lawsuit states.

It's bad enough that politicians have prioritized their own power and influence over the rights of their citizens. It's worse that this language in paragraph 752 is such a distortion of the priorities that the judicial system is intended to reflect. That language likely appears completely tone-deaf to average citizens but it is likely to be viewed with outright contempt by many (most?) in the legal profession. Yet, it appears in this lawsuit. Why? It's not an accident. It seems clear that Bailey and company made this claim because they've identified a judge or a circuit court that has given prior indications of sympathy to such a justification. If this court can land on that judge's desk in the right circuit, this team will edge closer to getting the issue of constitutionality of contraceptive drugs and abortion drugs onto the Supreme Court's docket. Current US Supreme Court justices have directly stated in recent rulings they are EAGER to invent originalist justifications for declaring such drugs unconstitutional and would entertain cases seeking to ban their use entirely.


Show Me Brain Drain from Extremism

The language in this lawsuit only emphasizes how ignorant extremist anti-abortion advocates are about EVERYTHING related to abortion, the larger healthcare system and society in general. If Andrew Bailey is worried about population loss resulting from a reduction in teen pregnancies and the subsequent loss of federal funds and legislative representation based on population loss, he will have much more to worry about as the impacts of Missouri Republicans' draconian efforts really begin to take root and feed on each other.

What doctor is going to want to serve their residency in a Missouri hospital that might threaten their career before it begins if they specialize in OB/GYN and perform a procedure to save a woman's life that some mouth-breathing Republican takes exception to and sues the doctor for violating Missouri's abortion prohibitions because the patient wasn't close enough to death?

With fewer doctors willing to complete their residencies in Missouri hospitals, how long will it be before hospitals and local practices have difficulty maintaining staff for critical procedures and routine care alike?

How many young women are going to want to attend college in Missouri for four years and run the risk of getting pregnant and not being able to obtain an abortion?

How many young couples are going to want to stay in Missouri when they begin having a family for fear one of those pregnancies encounters issues that Missouri Republicans decided ISN'T severe enough to allow appropriate treatments to save the mother's life (and future fertility)?

How many EXISTING businesses are going to want to remain located in a state gaining a well-deserved reputation as a social backwater and risk not being able to attract and retain the kinds of employees they need?

How many NEW businesses making a decision on where to locate would choose a state as backward as Missouri which will make it drastically more difficult for that new business to attract talent?


WTH

Sunday, October 27, 2024

VOTING: The Only Like That Matters

Here are three of my favorite quotes about elections and society:

Vote early and vote often. -- attributed to Al Capone

We can have a market economy but we cannot have a market society. -- George Soros

I like to vote. I like going into the voting booth and pulling those levers and stuff. Only sometimes, I'm not sure my machine is hooked up to anything. Sometimes I'll pull the lever for something like "healthcare" and something like "flag burning amendment" comes out. -- comedian Jake Johannsen

The elections of 2016, 2020 and 2024 have been equally surprising to the public, for multiple reasons that likely all stem from the effects of social media. While swamped with technologies that seem to be able to deliver "instant" information and collect instant feedback on people's likes, we actually seem to know less about actual reality and the ideas of our fellow citizens and leaders. Citizens seem to sense a disconnect between these modern technologies that seem to be instantaneous and truthful and outcomes in our political processes. We now seem to be at a point where people think their retweets and social media comments carry more weight than their vote in an election for the people that ACTUALLY control the levers of power in our legistlatures and executive branches at the federal and state level.

A large proportion of the public has literally become addicted to interacting with "content" presented via social media technologies. These platforms may not have been CONSCIOUSLY designed from the git go as brain hacking platforms to manipulate elections but their current evolutionary state is having EXACTLY that impact. To be clear, these systems are not hacking the election systems (registration tracking systems, voting machines and tallying machines) themselves. Instead, they are altering the public's internal perceptions about events around them, perceptions about causes and effects, feeding addictions for immediate (but worthless) feedback and stimulus and leaving the public confused about what really drives change in the world.


How Social Media Warps Public Perception

The other day, I watched a video, seemingly dropped into my YouTube recommendations at random, about the "Secret Life of the Videorecorder" that was narrated, Carl Sagan-like, by a man named Tim Hunkin and originally aired on the BBC around 1987. The video traced the design of VCRs back to the origins of recording tape and included a demonstration of how recording tape is literally a bunch of iron filings stuck to a strip of plastic tape and how a signal can be recorded and played back from that tape. Pretty cool. The video was digitally cleaned up so it looked like a modern resolution video clip. Okay, that was pretty cool. CLICK. Here's a like.

From the moment I submitted that "like", each new view of my suggestions in YouTube has included one or two more restored videos from that program series, and some new ones the host is apparently creating now in the 2020s. It's almost like Google realized I wanted a glass of water and is now offering me a firehose. We all experience this.

There's no surprise to how this works. Google collects the like. The video that was liked is linked to a collection of tags such as "science technology demonstration vcr hunkin". Google can instantly find other active videos with similar tags. Google can further analyze all of the tags of all of my likes to correlate with others who liked the same video and identify new tags that don't appear as often in my likes and randomly add one of those tags in generating my recommendations to toss in a new category of videos I might like. If I click on that video and watch more than a few seconds of it, Google will increase the weighting on that new tag by X amount. If I actually LIKE that new video from that new tag category, Google will increase the weighting on that new tax by 3X amount and now I'll see a LOT more of those in my recommendations.

Nothing in the world has changed to make that topic 3X more salient to me or to anyone else and nothing in the content itself has changed in its validity (good or bad). But suddenly, Google has figured out how to monetize it and so they do. And now some other random topic that might be worth my attention gets crowded OUT of my recommendations as Google attempts to extract more revenue from advertisers or by getting me to succumb to subscribing to YouTube premium to avoid those ads.

If the only impact of this algorithm was a viewer or reader getting steered from one provider of science explainer topics to another provider of science explainer topics, the adoption of these algorithms would pose no problem to society and democracy. These platform providers and advertisers that use them for the most part do not care about the "content" that attracted the eyeball that watched their ad. It could be science explainers about VCRs, it could be a "news report" about a network coaching a Presidential candidate about interview questions before the interview or a story from the fringe claiming the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre was staged by disaster actors. It's all just "content," right? I got my ad watched by my target demographic, all's good. Mission accomplished.

However, these algorithms ARE damaging our society and posing a dire threat to conditions required for democracy to survive. A click generating a like can certainly be tracked, associated with other meta data, analyzed, trended over time and used to make certain predictions with relative accuracy. Unfortunately, interpreting a binary inputs such as "likes" in a content system and attempting to extrapolate them to preferences about complex topics is inherently flawed, for several reasons.

First, interpreting a binary "like" as feedback on an idea obviously loses a great deal of information. It's the equivalent of attempting to color code a beautiful sunset as one of two colors: black or white. Well? How would you describe the colors in that scene? It doesn't matter how many people click on one of those two choices, information has been lost in the process. Any conclusion drawn from those millions of votes is only reflecting the bias of the person claiming to interpret those black / white answers as anything else.

Second, it isn't just platform providers and advertisers who have learned how the algorithm works and manipulated the system to their benefit. Content CREATORS have figured it out as well. At a harmless but annoying layer, this is why most YouTube videos now feature thumbnails with the creator making some exaggerated sad face, puzzled face, irate face or even duck face. A FEW creators did that on a few videos that went viral (maybe for that reason, maybe for some other reason), the algorithm responded, steered more traffic to those videos, other creators saw the pattern, started making the same types of thumbnails, started getting rewarded with views and the rest of the creators saw their traffic PLUMMET... Until they also started posting their new videos with these childish thumbnail photos. There's now almost a meme on YouTube of every creator publishing a video explaining how they HATE this process and how they are having to spend nearly as long creating the THUMBNAIL for their 10-15 minute video as they did editing the full content.

But the "duck face" problem is much more serious than stupid thumbnails. The tendency of algorithms to hype any content that triggers even a mildly more intense volume of reaction rewards more extreme content with more impressions which leads to more views. In the early days of the Internet and these platforms, this was thought to be a benefit by providing people not solidly in the middle of the bell curve on any particular dimension a sense that they were not alone in their opinion, preferences or plight. That's supposed to be good, right?

Well, if a user merely used a platform to FIND that such ideas existed, that's one thing. If the platform then drastically alters its behavior and begins feeding that user DOZENS of similar articles, the platform isn't just providing evidence the idea exists, it is warping the user's perception that the idea is COMMON or WIDESPREAD and thus has more weight and merit than it possibly has in the real world. For people not familiar with the design of the technology or a firm grasp on reality to begin with, this disorientation via content flooding can be life altering.

The third danger in the dominance of these social media platforms as indicators of engagement is that by leveraging millions of units of free raw material generated every day by users, the platform providers are pitting every content provider against every other content provider and forcing them to chase algorithm driven trends and extremes if they want to maintain view levels and sustain their own ability to profit from their viewership.

Most content providers are not sophisticated enough to recognize this form of business blackmail being applied to them. They create a presence, money starts to flow in, they become dependent on that revenue then chain themselves to the whims of the algorithm going forward to protect their own income. The minute they decide to stray, the algorithm will drop their presence to zero, their views will plummet overnight and their ad revenue will vanish. Many creators of the most absurd, fraudulent content didn't start out in those genres, they simply followed where their monthly AdSense income led them because they lacked the ethics or intelligence to do anything else.


Themes for an Election

So how do these observations tie back to the quotes at the beginning of this rant?

Vote early and often. First, social media platforms have warped the public's perception of WHERE their preferences are most accurately collected and reflected. The illusion of instant feedback provided by social media platforms has fooled millions into thinking the most effective way for them to make a difference is by tweeting with a trendy hashtag or clicking a like button. If all three hundred and fifty million people in the US woke up tomorrow and simultaneously tweeted #endwarnow, that won't change a thing in Ukraine or Gaza. And in a world where troll farms register millions of fake userids to generate "like spikes" on content being pushed by foreign governments, no one should trust the volume of likes, views and comments on ANY platform as an accurate measure of sentiment on anything. Voting early and often via social media isn't voting at all. You are only creating false data used by giant corporate monopolies to trick others into using their products and allowing them to sell ads and confusing the public about what topics really merit attention.

We can have a market economy but we cannot have a market society. Social media platform engineers believe that nearly any problem can be boiled down to data and algorithms and subjected to market forces to find a solution. They're engineers and software developers. It's in their interest to believe that. They command lucrative salaries designing and building systems based upon that premise. But it's not true. You can attempt to model a system when data about that system's current state and inputs can be accurately collected without bias. But most of the world's most critical problems involve human actors who a) do not fully understand the world around them, b) have a tendency to lie about their actual preferences and c) have psychological predispositions to ignore situations that don't match their current perception of reality. Any attempt to discern the true needs of a society via social media popularity will inevitably swamp any true signal from the boring middle with noise from the far extremes of the audience. And any solutions derived primarily from the fringes will further disorient and alienate those in the middle, further eroding confidence in the system.

I'm not sure my machine is hooked up to anything. The dirty secret here is that this FEELING that our actual voting process isn't hooked up to anything is the actual INTENT of many of the actors in the system who are relying on apathy and frustration to push away voters who would normally thwart their intentions if they participated in the process. We have politicians in office for decades running on the complaint that government can't do anything right. (Then why do you keep running for office?) We have special interests pushing for online sports betting claiming the change will boost tax revenue to help suffering schools. (Well, if we want to help schools, why aren't you proposing an amending to raise taxes specifically for schools and let us vote on that? If taxes on gambling revenue helps schools, why have our schools declined for forty years despite state lotteries, riverboat gambling and full casino gambling that have been in place for 30+ years?)

The reality is that the voting machine is the ONLY machine able to change what's wrong in front of us. But the process comes with caveats. The process is not immediate -- it is incapable of instant gratification. You won't get everything you want the next day, the next week or month or the next year. The process must be used consistently. Political terms are staggered by design to PREVENT sudden extreme changes. If you want big change, you must participate in the process consistently over time. Decades, perhaps. The process must be fed coherent choices over time. Voting for a pro-abortion Presidential candidate then voting for extremist Senators and Representatives who support abortion bans and even contraception bans is not a coherent voting strategy. Voting for Democrats after Republicans tank the economy then returning Republicans to power as the economy recovers to steer it into the next disaster is not a coherent voting strategy.

Is there any way to jostle the disaffected out of this democracy funk and properly comprehend the stakes? Perhaps a mental exercise would help. If you are looking at the current situation and thinking democracy as a means of preserving your freedoms and improving your opportunities for personal success is a lost cause, try travelling back in time to the morning of June 6, 1944 and imagine yourself aboard one of the boats nearing the beaches at Normandy. You are standing behind an iron door that is already clanging with machine gun fire from Germans in protected fortifications. You know that in seconds, those steel doors are going to drop and you will be facing that machine gun fire until either you take IT out or it takes YOU out. And when that door drops, you step out and race across the beach to confront that immediate threat and the larger threat it represents.

THAT'S how much democracy meant to people in that generation and THAT'S what they were willing to sacrifice to preserve it, not only for America but its allies.

Today, the average voter doesn't need to run out of a landing craft into a wall of machine gun fire to protect American democracy. That average American just needs to surf the internet, preview the ballot in their community, read up on a few issues and amendments then consider who seems to WANT people to vote and who seems to want to PREVENT people from voting. Then spend an hour waiting in line to pre-vote, vote on Election Day or mail in a ballot and participate.

If you are seriously contemplating NOT voting in this election, what would you say to one of those veterans who faced a far more dire situation than you and ran into machine gun fire to preserve YOUR right to vote? #TLDV (too lazy, didn't vote)?


WTH

Friday, October 18, 2024

Online Betting: Do It For the Kids

What is it with the state of politics in America where corrupt gambling industry moguls and equally corrupt politicians have landed on a formula for expanding gambling that boils down to a pitch of… Do it for the kids?

First it was lotteries that were reintroduced to most states beginning in the 1970s. Then casino style gambling started getting pitched in communities in river locales still attempting to foster some nostalgic sense of old-timey paddlewheel riverboats that historically hosted a variety of gambling activities. Then "riverboat gambling" morphed into its modern grotesque form of "boats in moats" -- giant complexes supposedly still floating within concrete wrapped perimeters that bore zero resemblance to "boats" and were so massive that anyone entering the facility encountered zero stimuli that even implied they were boarding a "boat" of any kind. Then dozens of states threw in the towel on the "riverboat gambling" farce and approved pure casino developments.

That's been going on over the last twenty years. Now it seems the last frontier of unexploited gambling is online sports betting. And gambling interests are attempting to blow that barrier away and take in business from every state possible. However, eliminating this barrier still requires voter approval. So what's the angle being used to gain voter approval?

The same angle used to gain approval for lotteries, riverboat gambling and full casino developments. Tying approval of gambling development to tax revenues promised for education. You know… Do it for the kids.

Missouri voters will be voting on Amendment 2 in the November 2024 election which will allow online sports betting in the state. Supporters of the amendment describe the amendment as a tax on sports betting revenue that will generate MILLIONS of dollars that will go directly / solely to primary / secondary education in the state. Flyers sent by backers of the amendment cite appalling statistics regarding Missouri's appearance in nationwide statistics on teacher pay (#48) and class size (#48), implying that all of those problems will be instantly solved by approving this amendment and collecting the easy millions from those willing to bet money on sports.

A local television station's ongoing "ask us anything" segment fielded a question from viewers asking to confirm this claim. The station's review and discussion with a political science professor at a local university found pretty much exactly what you would expect:

  1. There is no language in the actual amendment that guarantees any minimum level of funding that will be provided to educational uses.
  2. There is no language in the actual amendment that actually restricts the State Legislature to only spending this tax revenue on education - the money goes straight into General Revenue.
  3. The amendment actually allows companies operating these online betting businesses to deduct costs from revenue PRIOR to calculating any tax due - which means this ISN'T a tax on top-line REVENUE, it's a tax on bottom-line INCOME which is subject to being rigged by the business to inflate expenses and reduce taxable income.

Visiting an actual casino in most areas of the country is an experience that is vastly different than what gets portrayed in ads on TV. In TV ad fantasy land, ads for casinos talk about "action." Ads consistently depict young, attractive stylishly dressed 20-something women and men standing around a well-lit card table cheering on some central character who is on a roll and about to score big on blackjack. These ad people are clearly winners in life, holding down prestigious jobs, blowing off a little steam with friends and impressing their future mates with their winning ways. You know… Action…

My employer used to host its annual "Holiday" Party (think the birthday cake scene in Office Space with 1700 reluctant employees) in a ballroom at one of two local casinos. This was a tradition from 2015 through 2022 except for a COVID break in 2020. Inevitably, the scene I would see upon driving to the selected casino at 5pm (the earlier you arrive, the earlier you can leave, right?) didn't involve hundreds of young 20-somethings arriving after work in their new $60,000 cars, dressed to the nines heading into the restaurant prior to hitting the casino. The scene I saw typically involved older people, no younger than late 40s, arriving in 20+ year-old beater automobiles with Bondo paint, missing hubcaps, unfixed dents, etc. Many would get out of their car and trudge to the entrance from the parking garages, with oxygen tank in tow as they prepared to sit next to a slot machine for three hours smoking themselves closer to death and spending themselves closer to oblivion.

For someone that might go to Vegas a few times for a weekend, gambling is just an excuse to make noise with friends while having a few drinks and playing games which are almost incidental to the larger experience. These people are NOT the types of people producing profits for casino and betting operators. Their entire business model is geared towards magnifying existing compulsive tendencies in maybe three to five percent of the population to drain their pockets as efficiently as possible. That's not an ethical business. That's the equivalent of a meth dealer operating with corporate protections.

So here's a question for the businesses and corrupt politicians to answer. And here's a question for voters facing these kinds of initiatives to ask.

Missouri has had a state lottery since 1986. Missouri has had riverboat gambling since 1992. Missouri has had full-blown casino gambling since 1997. Each of those changes required approval from voters who were told at the time tax revenues would be used to support schools.

With all of that gambling revenue, why are Missouri schools still #48 in the country for teacher pay and classroom size?

What's different about THIS bill for online sports betting that is different that will improve education in Missouri? Nothing.


WTH

October Surprises or Yawns?

Probably not by mere coincidence, some surprises HAVE popped up in October as voting begins for the November 2024 Presidential election. Two surprises, specifically. And they both cropped up within twenty four hours of each other.

Surprise #1 is a formal complaint filed with the FCC by an organization called the Center for American Rights against CBS regarding its interview with Vice President Harris aired on 60 Minutes. Their complaint? "Engaging in significant and intentional news distortion.

https://www.americanrights.org/cases/cbs-accused-of-news-distortion-in-vice-president-kamala-harris-interview-center-for-american-rights-files-formal-fcc-complaint

From their press release…

The complaint stems from two different broadcasts of the same interview aired on CBS's "Face the Nation" and "60 Minutes" on October 5 and 6, 2024. In both broadcasts, the same question was posed to Vice President Kamala Harris regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but CBS aired two conflicting responses. These discrepancies, CAR argues, amount to deliberate news distortion—a violation of FCC rules governing broadcasters' public interest obligations. The complaint demands CBS release the unedited transcript of the interview to set the record straight.

“This isn’t just about one interview or one network,” said Daniel Suhr, President of the Center for American Rights. “This is about the public’s trust in the media on critical issues of national security and international relations during one of the most consequential elections of our time. When broadcasters manipulate interviews and distort reality, it undermines democracy itself. The FCC must act swiftly to restore public confidence in our news media.”

The complaint cites long-standing FCC precedent that broadcasters cannot engage in intentional falsification or suppression of news and seeks an order compelling CBS to release the full unedited transcript of the interview.

From their actual complaint filed with the FCC: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kBqZo-10xBLE0Y1dhvBpzZnvcRUvH0H4/view?pli=1

WCBS TV aired the Sunday CBS morning news show “Face the Nation” on Sunday, October 5. It also aired the CBS program “Sixty Minutes” on Monday, October 6. The two programs featured the same question asked to Vice President Kamala Harris, with two completely different answers.

In the first clip, CBS journalist Bill Whitaker asks the Vice President about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “But it seems that Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening.”

In that clip, Harris replies: “Well, Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by or a result of many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.”

In the second clip, Whitaker asks the exact same question. But in this clip, Harris replies: “We are not gonna stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.”

Same interview, same question, two completely different answers.

Note the implication of that wording: Same interview, same question, two completely different answers.

From that wording, it might seem in hindsight that reporter Bill Whitaker and subject Kamala Harris jointly sat down to film MULTIPLE TAKES of the SAME QUESTION to allow Harris to perfect her answer in the optimal sound-byte friendly prose. Then CBS editors later forgot about the multiple TAKES and gave one version to promote on Face the Nation on Sunday morning and used the other version in the longer interview aired on Monday night.

It's POSSIBLE that CBS did that. However, it is FAR more likely that these variations are absolutely typical of ANY media outlet's down-to-the-second editing of video clips to fit allocated time slots in video pieces aimed at an increasingly ADD-addled population. It is FAR more likely that

  1. the interview was conducted in one continuous take
  2. one version of that answer was edited to fit in with other excerpts in a much shorter Face the Nation piece whose hour of airtime was split across four or five topics, not just the VP interview
  3. another version of that answer was edited for airing in a much longer time slot and a different part of the answer was selected to tie into other interview topics aired in the longer 60 Minutes slot.

Is this constant "re-mixing" of news footage and interview content annoying? Absolutely. Is this constant "re-mixing" of news footage and interview content confusing? Potentially yes, if you haven't watched any television in the last twenty years and haven't learned to detect it and discount it and stop assuming every altered slice is a new news-breaking event or sinister conspiracy. Is this re-mixing journalistically unethical? That depends on intent.

Suppose a reporter asks question A and gets answer A lasting 120 seconds, and the reporter's network airs 95 seconds of that 120 seconds on program 1 on day 1. Now imagine world reaction to that 95 second answer reflects concern the subject botched the question or divulged something they meant to keep quiet. At that point, if the network takes the original 120 second answer and "re-mixes" it into a DIFFERENT 90 second clip that omits the faux paus or blunder and airs clip #2 that on a DIFFERENT program a day later, that could easily be construed as an attempt to help the interview subject and re-spin what happened.

There's no sign of that being the case with this interview of Harris.

The two different clips are saying essentially the same thing. The first clip aired on Face the Nation is slightly more skewed at addressing how Biden Administration officials have influenced Netanyahu TO DATE in its conduct of its war in Gaza. The second clip aired within 60 Minutes seems to be looking forward over the next weeks into a potential Harris Administration about how resolved America is to continue supporting Israel while applying pressure to Netanyahu to correct perceived problems with Israel's impact on civilians. The two different answers are not in logical conflict with one another. Neither response is more erudite or precise than the other which might suggest someone was attempting to re-spin a wandering answer.

So what's the motivation of the Center for American Rights in filing this complaint with the FCC?

First, the Center for American Rights is operated by Daniel Suhr. Suhr previously worked as policy director under Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. He also has written numerous articles in affiliation with The Federalist Society. From his bio on his own organization's web site, As former managing attorney of a nonprofit law firm firm, Daniel litigated cases of critical national importance to block nationwide public health mandates, halt the growth and abuse of administrative powers, and protect and expand school choice for students across the country.

Second, the Harris interview on 60 Minutes was generally viewed as a draw or slight win for Harris in that a) she showed up, b) sat for nearly an hour of questions, c) didn't freeze up or make any obvious "no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe" blunders and d) after it aired, the net public reaction was a yawn. Most politicians and campaign advisors view these interviews as 90% negative risk so any result that isn't negative is pretty much a positive on our warped, sliding scale of political performance. In contrast, Trump chose to AVOID this opportunity, leaving his campaign and supporters to counter an opponent's positive with a void. Their only alternative? Do something to attempt to sully the opponent's positive.

Here, a conservative policy consulting firm chose to file this complaint to cast doubt on whether CBS and Harris conspired to "rehearse" questions and answers and selectively edit and air different takes for different audiences purely based upon what HELPED Harris. This complaint isn't a legal action that requires appearing in court under oath regarding facts. It merely involves sending a letter to a government agency then touting it on a website and feeding it to conservative media to attempt to get inertia behind the distraction.

Surprise #2 involves…

….wait for it…

…Donald Trump, a porn star, lawyers and ham-handed attempts to secure a non-disclosure agreement.

The only surprise here is that while most of the actors and premise are the same, this is a brand new incident. Over the last few months, Stormy Daniels has been attempting to settle the counter-lawsuit Trump brought against her after she filed a defamation lawsuit against Trump over the original 2016 scandal. Daniels lost that counter-suit and was ordered to pay roughly $650,000 in legal fees to Trump and the two parties have been haggling over that exact amount since that decision.

As lawyers for Daniels and lawyers for Trump neared a final deal, Trump's lawyers wrote a letter to Daniels' attorneys on July 25, 2024 stating the following:

We disagree that a payment of $620,000.00 would be in full satisfaction of the three judgements. However, we can agree to settle these matters for $620,000.00, provided that your client agrees in writing to make no public or private statements related to any alleged past interactions with President Trump, or defamatory or disparaging statements about him, his businesses and/or any affiliates or his suitability as a candidate for President, with the terms of these points to be specified in a forthcoming separate agreement.

Daniels and her lawyers rejected the offer and the deal was finally settled with a payment of roughly $628,000 dollars. As we have learned in nearly eight years of mandatory attendance at Trump Law School, paying hush money is not illegal. It is probably not illegal to disguise the existence of a hush money deal in the context of a private legal settlement resulting from a prior failed hush money deal. However, it's really dumb to voluntarily re-entangle one's self in the exact same problem with the exact same actors a second time leading into ANOTHER election.

This is especially true when your campaign spokesman is dumb enough to double down on the stupid by issuing this statement:

These purported documents were obtained as part of an illegal, foreign hacking attack against President Trump's campaign and his team. We are working with authorities to determine the legal repercussions for those likely committing federal offenses by posting and utilizing stolen material by terror regime adversaries. Ms. Daniels has been held to account by having to pay President Trump over and above the money she owes to him as a result of her wrongdoing.

There is a lie in nearly every clause of every sentence in that statement. Specifically:

  • A document cannot be "purported" if it actually exists. If you are staring at an anvil on a stump, you don't make references to the "purported anvil." It exists.
  • When you SEND a document to another party and keep a copy, there are TWO copies in existence and you only have control of ONE copy.
  • Copies of these documents weren't stolen from Trump, they were given to MSNBC by Daniels' lawyers after receiving them from Trump's lawyers. You know, the SECOND copy in existence?
  • Daniels didn't have to pay "over and above" the amount owed to Trump, the court ruling specified a basic amount and the two parties were directed to resolve questions about interest owed over the period between the ruling and final settlement.

This new chapter teaches us nothing new about Trump or his inner circle. It does raise a key question. For an event Trump claims never happened, he seems incredibly ashamed to see it in the public, to the point of risking MORE embarrassment in two different Presidential campaigns. If Trump is so ashamed of this event, why aren't more of his supporters ashamed of him? Or ashamed of themselves for supporting him?


WTH

Thursday, October 17, 2024

Anomolies or Trends in Media / Extremism

Here are two stories reflecting a larger trend in America at the moment - elected officials routinely, consistently making unhinged racist comments to staff, coworkers or the public.

The first case involves Probate Judge Kathleen Ryan in Oakland County, Michigan who was recorded by a coworker over several months engaging in profanity laced diatribes about woke liberals, minorities, LBGTQs, etc. The coworker first submitted the recordings in an official written complaint to the head of the superior court who initially did nothing until he then submitted the same information to the Michigan State Supreme Court, at which point the superior court removed the judge from the docket pending a review. A final decision has yet to be announced but it is clear this judge should never sit in a courtroom in a position to affect the fate of others ever again.

https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2024-09-06/michigan-judge-loses-docket-after-shes-recorded-insulting-gays-and-black-people

The second case involves Idaho State Senator Dan Foreman -- proud Republican, Roman Catholic -- who appeared at a candidate forum on October 1, 2024 with other Republican and Democratic candidates running for various state seats. The forum was organized to allow questions from the audience to be addressed by the candidates. One question posed to Foreman was whether discrimination existed in Idaho. Foreman simply replied "No." Later in the rotation, another candidate Trish Carter-Goodheart followed up with her response to the same question. In a post later, she summarized her response this way:

https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/politics-government/2024-10-03/dan-foreman-racism-idaho-nez-perce-candidate-kendrick

The question on the floor was about a state bill addressing discrimination. One of the candidates responded, claiming that "discrimination doesn't exist in Idaho." When it was my turn to speak, I calmly pointed out that just because someone hasn't personally experienced discrimination doesn't mean it's not happening. Racism and discrimination are real issues here in Idaho, as anyone familiar with our state's history knows. I highlighted our weak hate crime laws and mentioned the presence of the Aryan Nations in northern Idaho as undeniable evidence of this reality.

That's when Sen. Foreman lost all control. His words to me: "I'm so sick and tired of this liberal b*llsh*t! Why don't you go back to where you came from?!"

Trish Carter-Goodheart is a member of the Nez Perce tribe. The Nez Perce have roots in the Idaho region going back a few thousand years. She IS home.

The Idaho State GOP later issued a statement defending Foreman and denying he said anything racist or offensive. However, Lori McCann, Carter-Goodheart's Republican opponent in the race for a Idaho House seat read Carter-Goodheart's statement and confirmed her version of events, stating she "found it to be an accurate account of what transpired in Kendrick."

Was this just one bad night for this Republican? Uhhhhh, NO. He has a history of extreme outbursts in public, AT the public. Check out the examples at the end of this video from the Boise NBC affiliate KTVB covering this story. See the video at the 4:57 and 5:40 marks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MnMqlP10lM

The first clip is body camera footage taken by the County Sherrif's Office in September 2017 when Foreman attended the county fair and became verbally abusive. The fact the footage came from body camera footage seems to indicate police were called to diffuse the situation and intervention was needed. The second clip was filmed in 2018 when students at the University of Idaho arrived for a SCHEDULED meeting to talk to him about birth control and were instead greeted by him screaming at them that abortion is murder and the next time they show up at his office, they'll be dealing with the Idaho State Police.

There is one aspect of these stories that is providing a hint of optimism. Watching the local news coverage of these events seems to reflect a noticeable change in editorial style. Local news outlets have been gutted over the last 20 years as the FCC allowed further network consolidation and the few stations left still attempting ANY journalism about local events have become so afraid of offending advertisers or frankly offending their local audience that virtually ANY issue is couched in obligatory "both-sides" rhetoric to avoid charges of bias. However, as more of these extreme incidents occur, I seem to be seeing more local reporters just look into the camera and report these for what they are. Watch the demeanor of the reporter in the KTVB clip. As another example, check out this example from Kyle Clark on Next9 that airs on the NBC affiliate in Denver:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DTcHLPvf2w

Mass media outlets have contributed to these problems by soft-pedaling public incidents of these behaviors by couching them as just one side of an issue. Local media outlets are under EXTREME financial pressure due to dwindling audiences and viewership. Given those pressures, seeing more coverage like these stories presented without the type of "weasel word" disclaimers that has prevailed over the last twenty years of media consolidation that coincides with unchecked extremism is unexpected. Is it a sign that key actors who contributed to this mass-media induced psychosis have seen enough of the consequences and are more willing to stop softening their reporting and identify these behaviors as unacceptable? If so, it may help at least dilute the Kool-Aid in the toxic punch bowl that has been poisoning public dialog.


WTH

Sunday, October 13, 2024

Data Scrubbing or Vigilante Election Interference?

A local news story in Bryan County, Georgia provides a disturbing look into the strategies being pursued across multiple states to interfere at wholesale volumes with the voting rights of legitimate registered voters. The story involves a request submitted by a single citizen to purge 859 voters from the county's voter rolls. The county attorney followed the law, notified those affected by the suggested purge and participated in a hearing in front of the county election board. Roughly 100 citizens attended that meeting, the county attorney presented his analysis of the request and its validity and the election board voted to REJECT the ENTIRE request.

This incident is not only maddening in its particulars but it is a reflection of a more harmful trend with conservative legislative trends in controversial areas of policy that shift the point of origination of criminal accusations or enforcement of ordinances from appointed public officials and those in law enforcement to the general public.

The Applicable State Law

Georgia State law includes a provision in Section 21-2-229 that allows ANY voter within a county to challenge the voting eligibility of any OTHER voter in the same county by filing a formal notice with the county. The applicable statute can be read here:

https://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/title-21/chapter-2/article-6/section-21-2-229/

but the gist of it is this:

  • Any Georgia voter ("elector") can submit a challenge to the local election board regarding the eligibility of any other voter in the same county to vote
  • There is no limit to the number of voters whose eligibility can be challenged
  • The county election board has ten business days from receipt of the request to conduct a hearing
  • The county election board must notify those challenged within that same ten business day interval
  • The burden of proof lies with the person challenging eligibility
  • Any voter ruled ineligible has ten business days to submit an appear

Most notably, nothing in the statute establishes any "freeze" period prior to any election during which voter rolls are protected from potential mass changes. In theory, any voter can submit thousands of claims 23 days prior to an election, and given the intervals dictated for initial notification (10 days), formal notification via US mail of a decision (3 days maybe) and time required for appeal (10 days), a voter removed under false pretenses would lose their right to vote with no practical way to restore their right prior to an election.

The Complaint

In this Bryan County matter, a woman named Jenifer Hilburn submitted her list on September 19, 2024 as an Excel spreadsheet. Per the attorney, the spreadsheet was not manually compiled by Hilburn after methodical, manual due diligence. Instead, he stated it appears to have been downloaded from a third-party web site of a commercial data broker that blends data from other online public records. Here is what Hilburn stated in her submission to the county:

https://statesboroherald.cdn-anvilcms.net/media/documents/Voter_Challenge_Bryan_County_Redacted.pdf

First, she starts off with what in hindsight may easily prove to be a false statement:

I, Jenifer Dawn Hilburn, attest that I am a registered voter in Bryan County residing at (redacted), Richmond Hill, GA 31324. My voter registration number is (redacted). I further attest that I have personal knowledge of the manner in which these documents were prepared, and that they were not generated in a systemic manner.

She then provides bullets to describe the different "match buckets" that resulted from her "analysis":

  • Of the 859 voters included in the list, 2 are being challenged on the basis that the address associated with their voter registration is invalid either on the basis that it does not exist in the jurisdiction (i.e., “123 Address Way”) or because it appears to be located out-ofstate.
  • Of the 859 voters included in the list, 115 are being challenged on the basis that they both: appear on the National Change of Address (NCOA) database and there has been an application for a homestead exemption at the new address indicated on their NCOA application.
  • Of the 859 voters included in the list, 381 are being challenged on the basis that they both: appear on the National Change of Address (NCOA) database and have registered to vote in another jurisdiction. Their new voter registration was matched by crossreferencing the address listed in NCOA and the voter’s first and last name on the new voter registration.
  • Of the 859 voters included in the list, 361 are being challenged on the basis that their registration is associated with an address that is not coded or zoned for a residential purpose or use (e.g., it is zoned as being a restricted industrial zone).

Pitfalls of Bulk Scrubbing of Name / Address Data

These descriptions all appear very logical on the surface but those with data scrubbing experience with large datasets can recognize the problems lurking. Here are some examples.

Matching on (firstname + lastname) combinations? Did "Jim Smith" enter his name as "Jim Smith" or "James Smith" or "Jimmy Smith"? Did "Nate Bargatze" enter his name as "Nate Bargatze" or "Nathan Bargatze" or "Nathaniel Bartgatze"? How about Dan, Danny or Daniel? You can see the complications that arise. People may not use the same level of formality on voter registrations as they do a change-of-address form with the post office. And your name is not as unique as you might think.

Using the National Change of Address (NCOA) database? Data in the NCOA database is only retained for 48 months so it cannot be used as a definitive source to "catch up" on a scrub of voter rolls that have not been properly periodically revalidated. If you think you've notified all the banks and businesses you care about of your move directly and don't care who gets your junk mail that remains, you aren't REQUIRED to fill out a change of address form so the ABSENCE of a record in the NCOA database can't be used in a logical decision to invalidate a voter roll entry. But the PRESENCE of a record is still subject to the (firstname + lastname) problems above.

The logic used when matching against NCOA isn't crystal clear either. If the Bryan County voter rolls were stored in table oldvoterrolls, any NEW voter registrations they consulted were in a table newvoterrolls and the post office change of addresses were stored in a table changeofaddress, the data might look like this:

MariaDB [mock]> select * from oldvoterrolls;
+----------+-------+----------+-----------+---------------------+-------+-------+-------+
| voter_id | fname | lname    | ssn       | address             | city  | state | zip   |
+----------+-------+----------+-----------+---------------------+-------+-------+-------+
|        1 | Jim   | Smith    | 500119999 | 1313 Mockingbird Ln | Bryan | GA    | 31324 |
|        2 | Jim   | Smith    | 500229999 | 2112 Rush St        | Bryan | GA    | 31325 |
|        3 | Nate  | Bargatze | 500339999 | 1999 Prince Ave     | Bryan | GA    | 31323 |
|        4 | Dave  | Jones    | 500669999 | 1492 Columbus Ave   | Bryan | GA    | 31322 |
+----------+-------+----------+-----------+---------------------+-------+-------+-------+
4 rows in set (0.000 sec)

MariaDB [mock]> select * from newvoterrolls;
+----------+--------+----------+-----------+----------------+-------+-------+-------+
| voter_id | fname  | lname    | ssn       | address        | city  | state | zip   |
+----------+--------+----------+-----------+----------------+-------+-------+-------+
|      101 | Jim    | Smith    | 500119999 | 461 Ocean Blvd | Miami | FL    | 33101 |
|      102 | Jim    | Smith    | 500449999 | 555 Maple Ln   | Miami | FL    | 33102 |
|      103 | Nathan | Bargatze | 500339999 | 3434 Oak St    | Miami | FL    | 33103 |
+----------+--------+----------+-----------+----------------+-------+-------+-------+
3 rows in set (0.000 sec)

MariaDB [mock]> select * from changeofaddress;
+---------+-------+-------+-----------+---------------------+-------------+----------+--------+----------------+---------+----------+--------+
| ncoa_id | fname | lname | ssn       | oldaddress          | oldcity     | oldstate | oldzip | newaddress     | newcity | newstate | newzip |
+---------+-------+-------+-----------+---------------------+-------------+----------+--------+----------------+---------+----------+--------+
|     101 | Jim   | Smith | 500119999 | 1313 Mockingbird Ln | Bryan       | GA       | 31324  | 461 Ocean Blvd | Miami   | FL       | 33101  |
|     102 | Dave  | Jones | 500779999 | 1968 Truth Way      | Los Angeles | CA       | 90210  | 467 Ocean Blvd | Miami   | FL       | 33101  |
+---------+-------+-------+-----------+---------------------+-------------+----------+--------+----------------+---------+----------+--------+
2 rows in set (0.000 sec)

MariaDB [mock]>

Note that I've included a column for SSN to allow the uniqueness of each name overlap to be preserved, even when that value itself wasn't tracked in these databases. More on that in a minute.

Given these three table structures, the SELECT query to find a list of candidates for removal might look like this:

SELECT n.voter_id as newvoterid,n.fname as newfname,n.lname as newlname,
       o.voter_id, o.fname, o.lname, o.address, o.city, o.state, o.zip,
       o.ssn as oldssn,n.ssn as newssn,c.ssn as possn
FROM newvoterrolls as n
LEFT JOIN changeofaddress as c ON (
   (n.address = c.newaddress) AND
   (n.city    = c.newcity) AND
   (n.fname   = c.fname) AND
   (n.lname   = c.lname)
   )
LEFT JOIN oldvoterrolls as o ON (
   (o.address = c.oldaddress) AND
   (o.city    = c.oldcity) AND
   (o.fname   = c.fname) AND
   (o.lname   = c.lname)
   )
WHERE o.voter_id IS NOT NULL\G

The results of this query look like this:

*************************** 1. row ***************************
newvoterid: 101
  newfname: Jim
  newlname: Smith
  voter_id: 1
     fname: Jim
     lname: Smith
   address: 1313 Mockingbird Ln
      city: Bryan
     state: GA
       zip: 31324
    oldssn: 500119999
    newssn: 500119999
     possn: 500119999
1 row in set (0.000 sec)

MariaDB [mock]>

In the mock data, there WAS a "Jim Smith" (with underlying SSN=50011999) who

  • appeared in the old voter rolls
  • appeared in the change of address database as moving from an old address on the old voter rolls to a new address seen in new voter rolls elsewhere
  • had those old/new addresses appear along with his fname / lname in the change of address database

So this query appears to be "correct." As far as it goes…

But read the description of the logic used by the woman who submitted the list of suspect registrations:

Their new voter registration was matched by crossreferencing the address listed in NCOA and the voter’s first and last name on the new voter registration.

That SOUNDS like it is possible the final join may have only keyed on fname / lname. What happens if the final match criteria omits the city and address?

SELECT n.voter_id as newvoterid,n.fname as newfname, n.lname as newlname,
       o.voter_id, o.fname, o.lname, o.address, o.city, o.state, o.zip,
       o.ssn as oldssn,n.ssn as newssn,c.ssn as possn
FROM newvoterrolls as n
LEFT JOIN changeofaddress as c ON (
   (n.address = c.newaddress) AND
   (n.city    = c.newcity) AND
   (n.fname   = c.fname) AND
   (n.lname   = c.lname)
   )
LEFT JOIN oldvoterrolls as o ON (
   (o.fname   = c.fname) AND
   (o.lname   = c.lname)
   )
WHERE o.voter_id IS NOT NULL\G

The query returns a second FALSE match on the "Jim Smith" with SSN=500229999 in the oldvoterrolls because the change of address record involving the 50011999 version of Jim Smith was only joined back to the oldvoterrolls table by (fname/lname) which matched on BOTH "Jim Smith" entries in that table.

*************************** 1. row ***************************
newvoterid: 101
  newfname: Jim
  newlname: Smith
  voter_id: 1
     fname: Jim
     lname: Smith
   address: 1313 Mockingbird Ln
      city: Bryan
     state: GA
       zip: 31324
    oldssn: 500119999
    newssn: 500119999
     possn: 500119999
*************************** 2. row ***************************
newvoterid: 101
  newfname: Jim
  newlname: Smith
  voter_id: 2
     fname: Jim
     lname: Smith
   address: 2112 Rush St
      city: Bryan
     state: GA
       zip: 31325
    oldssn: 500229999
    newssn: 500119999
     possn: 500119999
2 rows in set (0.000 sec)

MariaDB [mock]>

You learn when doing this type of database work to print out all unique columns across your table sources when creating the logic for a query to spot these "false matches" based on overly lax criteria. Just because the output structure of a query LOOKS correct, the underlying join can reflect logical flaws that may not be evident in the output you chose to display.

In this case, a logical flaw like this that went undetected and unchallenged could have resulted in denying the right to vote to the second 50022999 version of "Jim Smith". This list of challenges was submitted on September 19, 2024 and finally gained a hearing on October 10, 2024, less than 30 days before the election.

Use of zoning codes for addresses or ZIPs? This is the type of third party data that Jenifer Hilburn could NOT have verified on her own. If you have ever worked in e-commerce or in the telecommunications industry where the ability to install and deliver service is based on exact physical location and proximity to other infrastructure, you know that taking an ADDRESS as a data point and attempting to map it to exact (latitude, longitude) or map it to a county or city boundary is NOT an exact science when done from afar. Unless you physically walk to each mailbox, physically check your GPS location on a phone and audit every address, many third-party databases claiming to provide this "geo-coding" data are only approximately correct and they usually lag reality by 6-12 months. These databases rely in part upon plat plans being filed for subdivisions, construction permits being filed for specific lots, etc.

The Outcome in This Case

The county attorney presenting the challenge for review by the election board spent much of his time explaining the legal obligations of both the election board members to process these requests and explaining that the burden of proof lies with the person filing the action, NOT those appearing on the list. He then noted that the person who submitted the request failed to attend the hearing, presenting no additional evidence or explanation to justify her findings. That was met with frustrated laughter by nearly everyone in attendance. At that point, the attorney ceded control of the meeting to the chair who called a motion to reject the request which was approved unanimously by the entire board.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flnGlMFO0fA

So what was the point of this particular effort? If Jenifer Hilburn had no intent to attend the hearing to provide supplemental proof of the validity of her recommendations, what was accomplished? From a rational citizen's perspective, this was just a hassle to the citizens involved and a waste of time for the county attorney and the election board. From the perspective of those trying to taint the perception of elections and physically throw sand in the gears, the goals were likely quite different.

The election law involved in Georgia stems from changes made in 2021 by forces in the state who supported Donald Trump's fake elector scheme. Since the law is so new, it appears no one was sure how clearly the law's provisions would be understood… OR FOLLOWED by any particular local election board. Bryan County sits on the Atlantic coast south of Savannah and is an island of core Republican support surrounded by areas that tend towards an even split or Democratic support. Was Jenifer Hilburn's request an attempt to test processes under this law in her county to see how lax they would be? Was it an attempt to set a marker for later allegations of voter fraud that could be used to delay election certifications in that county as part of a larger scheme across the state?

In this particular case, despite Bryan County appearing to be a "bright red" jurisdiction, there is zero sign anyone involved with this case at the county level supported this petition or thought it had ANY merit. The vocal roll call on the motion to dismiss the request indicated nearly unanimous frustration with this blatant attempt to arbitrarily toss people off the voter rolls.

Two conclusions appear obvious in this case. As a first conclusion, Hilburn was not supplying evidence worthy of being taken seriously if she found 859 suspect cases yet was unwilling to attend a hearing to explain her logic and underlying validation process. Even if one gives her the benefit of the doubt that SOME work was performed to join database A with B then to C, it seems clear she lacked the technical sophistication to include extra controls in the process to avoid "false joins" amid notoriously flawed data.

The second conclusion is that these types of "vigilante" laws being pushed by conservatives are SERIOUSLY flawed in both a legal and ethical sense. Turning average citizens into amateur data scientists and turning them loose on flawed, un-audited data to create proof for crackpot theories is legally flawed because it is essentially handing over part of PUBLIC ("group") power to INDIVIDUALS who lack the expertise and ACCOUNTABILITY to exercise even partial control of such vast powers. These types of vigilante activism are ethically wrong because they are allowing corrupt politicians to outsource their dirty work to individual citizens while preserving deniability when individual citizens wind up infringing the rights of other citizens. But do not be misled. Such cases of citizenry going out of bounds against other citizenry isn't a FLAW of these laws, it's a FEATURE in the eyes of those proposing these laws. It creates the fear, uncertainty and lack of trust desired while shielding those benefiting from it from legal consequences when abuses actually occur.


WTH

Wednesday, October 09, 2024

Advise and Consent in the Modern American Era

Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse announced results from a nearly six-year investigation his office undertook regarding the investigations performed by the FBI during the nomination process for Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh's nomination looked like the typical partisan charade between conservatives and liberals until a former classmate came forward with an allegation of a physical sexual assault that took place in high school and another woman came forward with an allegation of inappropriate sexual conduct in college. And of course, there was THE BEER. After the initial sexual allegations, "further investigations" were performed by the FBI, summarized to the Senate Judiciary Committee and the nomination went to the floor and was approved.

Since that confirmation, Sheldon Whitehouse has been conducting an investigation into the conduct of both the FBI at the time and the Trump Administration, getting stonewalled for most of the period. Whitehouse finally released a report on his findings. A short press release was issued on his website at this link:

https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/release/whitehouse-unveils-report-examining-failures-of-supplemental-background-investigation-of-justice-brett-kavanaugh/

The entire report is available here:

https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/KavanaughReport_final.pdf

The key procedural takeaway from the investigation is very direct.

Third, although the Trump Administration and the FBI assured the Senate that the FBI’s investigation was being conducted "by the book," they failed to disclose that there was actually no "book" at all. The FBI produced no written protocols for supplemental background investigations, saying it was merely acting as the "agent" for the White House in such matters. Although this undisclosed practice of requiring step-by-step instructions from the White House for supplemental background investigations may be appropriate for following up on discrete, relatively minor questions that routinely arise during a nominee’s initial background investigation, it was uniquely inappropriate for investigating the serious, high-profile allegations against Kavanaugh. Not only did this practice enable the Trump Administration to kneecap FBI investigators’ ability to adequately investigate those allegations, but the lack of transparency misled the Senate and the public about the investigation’s thoroughness.

But here is the bombshell...

The FBI did not pursue information reported to it through the FBI’s "tip line." The FBI held out this tip line to the Senate and the public as proof of the supplemental background investigation’s thoroughness. In reality, however, the FBI simply sorted Kavanaugh-related tips from general tip-line trafc and forwarded the tips it collected from the tip line to the Trump White House, without any investigation.

Former classmates or friends of Ford, Ramirez, and Kavanaugh reported difficulty getting the FBI to respond to their outreach, or finding someone at the FBI to whom they could convey their information. After being unable to speak to anyone or after being redirected to and from FBI field offices, many people resorted to the agency’s online and telephonic "tip line." The FBI reported receiving "over 4,500 tips, including phone calls and electronic submissions," related to the Kavanaugh supplemental background investigation. None were investigated or even screened for indicia of credibility.

Stop and think about that for a moment. After the allegations made by Christine Blasey Ford became public, over FORTY FIVE HUNDRED other people contacted the FBI tip line with information presumably regarding that specific allegation or allegations of similar weight. I'm not sure I even know 4500 different people. I'm not sure 4500 people know ME by name. I'm quite sure there are not 4500 people willing to contact an FBI tip line to provide any information on me, pro or con. Yet 4500 people reached out and called the supposed FBI tip line established for the Kavanaugh "investigation."

Yet the process set up to handle those tips was a COMPLETE sham and the job involved was a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, not a county council seat or local charity board. It is bad enough the information was not used by the FBI itself to further verify the claims of inappropriate behavior and keep a morally / ethically deficient nominee off of the Supreme Court. In reality, the information was likely used by those pushing his nomination to ensure media defenses were ready in case any tipster went public in frustration after seeing no perceptible change in direction in the nomination.

This is the state of public discourse around some of the most important and powerful roles in our entire society. Which suggests a "tip" for anyone in the future finding themselves aware of disqualifying information for any future nominee to any position of power. If you have information, don't call the FBI tip line. Call your Senator and Representative (regardless of their party affiliation) to ensure they are accountable for knowing the information you have. Then call a media outlet. At this point, as Whitehouse points out, no one is going "by the book" inside government. It's been a sham for decades.


WTH

Wednesday, October 02, 2024

The Revised Battle Plan for Trump

Jack Smith filed his motion to explain his rationale for continuing the prosecution of Donald Trump for the events of January 6 in light of new immunity protections defined for Presidents by the Supreme Court. Judge Tanya Chutkan reviewed Smith's motion and Trump's counter-motion over the weekend and decided to release Smith's redacted version to the public for review. The redacted motion can be viewed at this link:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/3e401ee1-1a33-4961-8b15-94348d010a5f.pdf?itid=lk_inline_manual_4

Other commentators have been labeling the document as a bombshell. My take is that is is actually NOT a bombshell, for one reason. The public knew Smith likely had vast amounts of damning evidence against Trump and his eventual co-conspirators. That's not a bombshell. If there's a bombshell to this document, it is the fact that Smith has had to alter very little of the entire case in light of the immunity ruling. Only one actor disappears from the indictment and possibly two bits of evidence disappear from the case. But literally dozens of names and dozens of actions remain in the case while Smith makes the argument that immunity plays no role in protecting these actors or evidence of their actions.


Dismantling Immunity Claims

Section I spells out many of the events Smith plans on referencing in the actual trial and provides eighty one double-spaced pages of information regarding specific actions and conversations between various parties. More on some of these details will be discussed later. Section II of the document is really the heart of the filing Smith was obliged to provide to the court and outlines his rationale for why charges and related evidence in the case should remain and go to trial. Section III then itemizes the different categories of actors and communications to provide more explicit justification for why they remain in the case.

The legal framework section starts with this observation:

These principles for assessing whether the conduct alleged in the superseding indictment is immune apply equally to evidence. The Government may not introduce evidence of immunized official conduct against a former President at a trial, even to prove that the former President committed a crime predicated on unofficial conduct.

Smith states that the only actions in the original indictment that explicitly meet the criteria established by the USSC for immunity involved communications between Trump and Jeffrey Clark and between Trump and some other DOJ officials. So those indictments were dropped from the case.

Smith then states that everything else in the indictment -- both charges and evidence -- still remain. Specifically:

  • Trump's interactions with Pence as VP are not protected by immunity because the VP has no actual power in the electoral college process and his actions in the process are unrelated to Presidential functions and powers
  • Trump's interactions with Pence as a candidate are not protected by immunity because campaign activity itself is not related to the exercise of power of an office
  • interactions between Pence's staff member P58 and CC2 (Eastman) were unofficial acts outside the protection of presidential immunity
  • Trump's direct interactions with various state officials were unofficial acts outside the protection of presidential immunity because the President has zero authority over the administration of any elections
  • Even if the court somehow determines these contacts with state officials were official, the prosecution can rebut the presumption of immunity
  • Trump's public speeches and social media communications were unofficial

This companion document to Smith's superseding indictment in light of the USSC immunity ruling reflects a few key outcomes for the actors involved and the country.

First, Jack Smith concisely argues that the Supreme Court's immunity ruling has virtually zero impact on the original indictment filed in the case. The only two elements Smith removed from the case based on that new immunity ruling involved conversations Trump had with Jeffrey Clark in the DOJ and other conversations Trump had with DOJ officials. That's TWO elements of the case out of literally dozens of actions involving six co-conspirators.

Second, Jack Smith lays out an argument that all of the remaining actions charged in the indictment and all of the evidence at hand related to those actions are unprotected by the Supreme Court's synthesized presumptive immunity protection because none of the actions taken by Trump involve his official duties as President and all of them explicitly involve responsibilities of state governments that have nothing to do with the President. In the same train of thought, Smith goes further to explain that even if the judge rules these areas of activity still qualify for a presumption of immunity, he can confidently argue any argument for immunity can be rebutted.

Those two takeaways suggest other eventualities likely to come about as this process iterates through the next phases of litigation. First, given Smith's conclusions that virtually no aspect of the core case qualified for the John Roberts Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card treatment, one could argue that the Supreme Court's involvement in this case served no actual legal purpose and only served to benefit Trump by simply delaying the inevitable and giving Trump a chance to possibly win re-election before the trial reached a crucial tipping point that could further jeopardize Trump's freedom.

Of course, after Judge Chutkan reviews the Smith motion and Trump's counter-motion and rules on it, Trump's team will immediately appeal any decision to go forward with the trial. Since the basis for appeal involves claims of immunity to AVOID prosecution in the first place, this appeal will freeze the criminal trial (AGAIN) until the appellate court rules, just like the original appeal. And just like the first go around, if the appeals court rules in favor of the prosecution, Trump will immediately appeal to the Supreme Court, freezing the actual trial (AGAIN) until they rule. At that point, the Republican majority on the Court will have another bite at the apple, having a clear roadmap on the sane arguments already made to dance around them to find yet other rationalizations for maintaining their doctrine of immunity.

The most disconcerting takeaway from this revised indictment and motion regarding actions and evidence related to "official actions" is that the worst lesson has probably already been learned by future corrupt leaders. The next time you want to go criming, ensure you've appointed enough criminals IN YOUR CABINET to accomplish your goals and use them for the wet work. Sure, the Supreme Court has maintained immunity does not attach to non-existent powers or illegal acts but the Supreme Court has also essentially established a default "taint" for any evidence of immunized conduct, preventing its use in proving crimes NOT protected by immunity. If the only evidence of a crime exists in Administration controlled channels, a President can simply claim communications related to those crimes are related to "core official acts" and prevent their use in court or even discovery. This can drastically limit the availability of evidence to use in prosecuting a corrupt President for acts unprotected by immunity.


Political Takeaways

This filing obviously has important legal impacts on this case and the conduct of future Presidents. It also provides a reminder of the number of other actors involved in this conspiracy up to their eyeballs who are currently un-indicted co-conspirators. There are at least six co-conspirators Smith has identified who appear in this document as:

CC1 Rudy Giuliani
CC2 John Eastman
CC3 Sidney Powell
CC5 Kenneth Chesebro
CC6 Boris Epshteyn

Note that CC4 doesn't actually appear in this motion document which seems to confirm that co-conspirator #4 in the the original indictment was DOJ official Jeffrey Clark. He has vanished from this revised indictment because the evidence available to charge him is direct communication between a President and his own administrative officials and was thus protected by the Supreme Court's new immunity protection.

There are also other parties merely labeled Pnn, many of who were Republican State government officials and legislators who were contacted by Trump's private team in the course of filing bogus charges of fraud and went through some of the motions but quickly dug in and refused to cooperate in the absence of ANY evidence of Trump's claims. However, one party in the document stands out. P39 in the document is clearly RNC Chairwoman Rona McDaniel. The litany of events and evidence summarized in the motion references P39 quite frequently and she seemed to be another incarnation of Mark Meadows. Someone in the middle of a significant volume of communication about criminal acts who was more than willing to keep the memos and text messages flowing among all of the co-conspirators and lackeys across the Republican Party.

Her deep involvement in the flurry of communications between the Trump campaign and the core Republican Party seems a bit off, given the pearl-clutching demonstrated by her father Mitt Romney as he bemoaned how MAGA fanatics have destroyed his traditional country-club loving, private-equity friendly Republican Party of yore. Mitt, if you were that concerned watching your party go to hell in a handbasket, maybe you should have called a family meeting and had a philosophical chat with your own daughter.

Here's a reference to Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson:

Later that morning, CC5 worked with another attorney for the defendant, who contacted a U.S. Senator to ask him to obtain the fraudulent Wisconsin and Michigan documents from the U.S. Representative’s office and hand-deliver them to the Vice President.

And don't forget. There are one hundred and six Republican members of Congress who were serving in December 2020 who signed a joint amicus brief sent to the Supreme Court arguing ON BEHALF OF arguments that would have allowed state legislatures to selectively reject their own electoral college slates and replace them with another if they objected to anything altered by other government officials (Governors, Secretary of State, Attorney General, etc.) during the execution of the state's election. Most of them are still in power and likely to win re-election.


WTH