Alaska Politics From Afar

We'll be back in Anchorage in about a week.  Meanwhile gramping duties divert my blogging concentration.  I've been the healthiest adult for the last few days - my coughs much better, but others have it now.  So yesterday I dropped nieta at a program at the Kidimu and picked her up two hours later.  (No school this week.)  Later we went shopping for dinner with a stop at the library to drop off a book and get another.  Walking home with two bags of groceries - it was ok, but I should have thought about weight a bit more when I was shopping.  Then back to the library for READ to a dog a little later after preparing the veggie chili.  Today a friend comes over and we'll walk down to the Historical Museum after lunch here.  It's all good, but there is soooo much happening in Alaska, so let me try to at least mention some things.  I will say that I'm pleased with the much increased coverage of Juneau by the ADN and by AKLedger and Dermot Cole since I tried to blog the legislature in 2010.  

It was clear to me back in 2013 that Dunleavy was a danger to Alaska.  I watched in Anchorage as he chaired the special session of the Senate committee that was charged with moving the legislation (Erin's Law) out of committee to allow the full Senate to vote on it.  The bill was to require age appropriate lessons in schools on child molestation and teach kids how to report it.  Dunleavy took the clean, three page bill that had passed overwhelmingly in the House and added six pages that gutted much of the original bill and added a bunch of stuff on parental rights.  Parental Rights, I found out at the time, is code for things like home-school, anti-public school, and giving fathers more power in custody issues.  In the Erin's Law case it would mean giving abusive parents more control to keep their kids from finding out how to report sexual abuse.

So, it was clear that Dunleavy was working from some weird ideological place that allowed him to ignore the damage he was doing to kids in Alaska.

And that's my best guess about what's happening now.  After Dan Sullivan's family in Ohio bought him the Alaska US Senate seat over Mark Begich, Dunleavy's brother, also Outside, figured he could buy the Alaska Governorship the same way.  And he did.  And Mark Begich - the Alaskan born and raised Democrat - was the victim once again.  Along with his brother's money (and who else's we don't know) comes a crazy anti-government, libertarian opportunity to experiment by cutting money from Alaska education and everything else.

It's like, hey, if you guys help me get my brother get elected, you can then show the world how your ideas of cutting government will work.  But we already know this failed spectacularly in Kansas and Wisconsin and Michigan among other places.

And unlike those places, the Republicans in the Senate aren't as ideologically crazy as the ones in the other states.  Well, a few are.  And somehow - I still haven't figured it out - the Democrats have managed to get themselves into a bi-partisan majority in the State House.  So Dunleavy won't have it as easy getting his budget through in Alaska as the others did in their states.

But, if someone breaks into your house and lets the water overflow in the tubs and toilets, turns off the heat in the winter, and randomly destroys things, it's going to cost a lot to get it back into livable shape.

So I'm looking forward to being back in Alaska so I can get a better sense of how much damage we're going to incur from this ideologically-crazed governor and his (I need a gender neutral word for 'henchmen')

I'm also thinking about how democracy can survive if a majority of voters can be swayed by lies and nonsense, and another significant chunk thinks their participation is pointless.  We may not get our ideal candidate, but Trump and Dunleavy should have taught enough people that less than ideal is way better than horrible.  

That's the key question for me - how do we help citizens care enough to figure out what candidates will really do before they vote for them.  And to help other citizens to overcome their belief that their vote doesn't matter because all candidates are bad.

But the kinds of propaganda that the Nazis used to gain power has been perfected by Republican marketing geniuses with no morality.  We have Fox News as the most recognized example, and Putin's been using those techniques to wreak havoc in the US 2016 election, in Brexit, in the French election, in Ukraine, and in Italy.  He's showing the way to kill democracy is to kill truth.

Alaskans, let's not let our state Senate prop up Dunleavy the way the US Senate has been propping up Trump.  (And there are good signs they aren't.)  This guy has to go.  As fast as possible.

I realize this might sound like a rant to some, but I'm pretty sure my take here is accurate.  And I have two six year olds coming over for lunch in 30 minutes.  But I also wanted to mention the election board in North Carolina that invalidated a US House election because of a consultant who committed election fraud (note:  NOT voter fraud) by manipulating mail in ballots.   I'd note we had this same thing happen on what we believe to be a much smaller scale when Rep. LeDoux hired a California election consultant to get her Hmong constituents to vote.

"A subsequent count of absentee ballots gave LeDoux a 117-vote win. But state elections officials also said they found evidence of voter fraud among the absentee ballots, and they sent their findings to prosecutors for review.
Elections officials said they received absentee applications in the names of seven dead people. Those ballots were not mailed out, but officials also identified 26 suspicious ballots that were returned.
All 26 of those votes went to LeDoux."

That consultant died and it appears that ended deeper investigation into the issue.  But let's be vigilant.   Republican election fraud, voter suppression, and gerrymandering are  much bigger threats than Republican imagined voter fraud.

Fight Citizens United - Call Your Assembly Members to Support Constitutional Amendment [UPDATE: It Passed]

There's a resolution before the Anchorage Assembly tonight.  It would support a Constitutional amendment to counter Citizens United, the US Supreme Court decision which allowed for unlimited money in US elections from corporations.

There are conflicting views on the effectiveness (and unintended consequences) of this proposed Amendment, but it seems to be the leading contender to push back the effects of Citizens United.

Here's the FAQ page of the website of Move To Amend, the organization sponsoring this around the country.

The ACLU supported Citizens United in the Supreme Court.  Here's what they say about it on their website.  

HERE'S TONIGHT'S RESOLUTION:    (I put the actual Amendment in red)

1. A RESOLUTION OF THE ANCHORAGE MUNICIPAL ASSEMBLY
2. 2  SUPPORTING AND CALLING FOR AN AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION
3. 3  OF THE UNITED STATES TO ADDRESS ISSUES THAT RESULTED FROM
4. 4  COURT DECISIONS SUCH AS THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT’S
5. 5  DECISION IN CITIZENS UNITED v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION.

6 7

8. 8  WHEREAS the heart of democracy is the right of human beings to govern
9. 9  themselves, and the United States is the first and foremost democracy since the days of
10. 10  ancient Greece; and

11

12. 12  WHEREAS the founding documents of the United States, the Declaration of
13. 13  Independence and the Constitution, recognize that human beings have certain inalienable
14. 14  rights; and

15

16. 16  WHEREAS the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution
17. 17  do not mention or grant any rights to corporations or to any artificial entities other than the
18. 18  United States of America and its constituent States; and

19

20. 20  WHEREAS corporations and other artificial entities are not and never have been
21. 21  human beings, and are only entitled to the legal powers and protections that the People
22. 22  grant to them; and

23

24. 24  WHEREAS recent judicial decisions, including the United States Supreme Court
25. 25  decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 130 S.Ct. 876, 558 U.S. 310
26. 26  (2010), have held that corporations and other artificial entities are “persons” under the
27. 27  United States Constitution with a constitutional right to spend as much money as they wish
28. 28  on political speech, thereby greatly expanding the power of corporations and other
29. 29  artificial entities to influence elections and otherwise undermine the power of the People to
30. 30  govern themselves; and

31

32. 32  WHEREAS when freedom of speech is equated with freedom to spend money, the
33. 33  free speech of 99 percent of the People is overwhelmed by the messages of the few who
34. 34  are able to spend millions of dollars to influence the political process; and

35

36. 36  WHEREAS respected national political polls show that large majorities of the
37. 37  People from all parts of the political spectrum believe that corporations and other artificial
38. 38  entities have too much power in our political system; and

39

40. 40  WHEREAS we the People are supreme, and have the power to overrule the
41. 41  Supreme Court through a constitutional amendment; and

42

AR supporting Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Page 2 of 2 to address effects of the Citizens United decision

WHEREAS over 800 municipalities and local governments, and 19 state governments, have already passed resolutions calling for an amendment to the United States Constitution to address the types of issues identified above;

NOW THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Anchorage Assembly supports, and calls for, an amendment to the United States Constitution, establishing that:

Section 1. The United States Constitution does not create or grant or protect any constitutional rights for corporations or other artificial entities; and
Section 2. That money is not speech, and that the government has the right to enact statutes and regulations governing the expenditure of money to influence elections and political decision making, to the end that all voices and opinions of the People can be expressed and heard.

The Municipal Clerk is directed to deliver copies of this resolution to the Anchorage delegation to the Alaska Legislature and to Alaska’s delegation to the United States Congress.
PASSED AND APPROVED by the Anchorage Assembly this ____ day of ______________, 20____.


This is the most organized effort to blunt the effects of the Citizens United decision.  While it won't solve the campaign finance problems completely, and it raises some free speech questions, I think it forces the debate to a higher profile.  That's worth supporting this.  


Here's a list of Assembly members' email addresses.

If you don't know who your Assembly members are (most people have two), here's a map of the districts.  For more precise maps you can click on each district:  ( District 1) ( District 2) ( District 3) ( District 4) ( District 5) ( District 6)

Even if you don't want to call or attend the meeting tonight, you should at least know who your Assembly members are.  

[UPDATE Dec 22, 2018:  I'm told it passed with little or no comment.]

My Voting Reform Fantasy - A Short Story

It's two months before the election in the not-to-distant future.  She had three more days to take the voting test.  She'd looked on line and studied all the questions and the answers.  She was excited.

It had taken years, but when people realized what Alaska was ike after four years of Dunleavy, the reform movement began.  People realized that knowing something about a candidate's past, and knowing something about how things worked, made you a better voter.  Things like how a trust fund works, or how much an income tax would cost most people compared to a Permanent Fund check.  Like knowing what the budget was before they said it was too much and needed to be cut.  Like understanding what services government provides people BEFORE they get cut.  And understanding the link between potholes and the cost of car repairs, between crime and insurance rates.   Like understanding the costs of a good school system compared to the cost of any prison system and how those costs are related.  Just knowing the size of the population and understanding how to figure out costs per capita.

So finally, Alaskans passed new voter registration rules.  Everyone could still register to vote.  But you also had the option of taking a bi-partisan approved factual exam.  The more answers you got right, the more your vote counted.  It could count one time if you didn't do very well, two times if you got half the questions right, and three times if you 90% of the questions right.

No, Alaskans hadn't gotten rid of the one person one vote rule.  The extra votes didn't change the election.  But along with the actual one vote per person results, Alaskans got to see what the results would have been if informed people got two votes and very well informed people got three votes.

So she took the test and instantly learned that she was rated "informed."  She was looking forward to the results of this experiment.  Would it make a difference?  Would the people of Kivalina, (who are in a lawsuit over  the loss of their village due to climate change)  vote for a climate change denier instead of a a strong advocate of slowing down climate change if they knew the facts?  Would knowing the facts change people's voting?  (Kivalina example from a FB message from Elstun Lausen.)

Avoiding The Dark Because It's Too Nice To Stay Inside

Yesterday, after watching Dark Money at the Bear Tooth, the sun came out.  Not so dark.  So I did a bike ride around the Universities bike trail.

South fork of Chester Creek runs through the UAA campus.

Goose Lake was telling the sky, Backacha.

And even though the sun was getting down low on the horizon, the amanita mascara were brightening up the groundscape everywhere.

And this morning when I took the kitchen scraps up to the compost, I picked my morning raspberries.

But I am still thinking about Dark Money.  It's not that I didn't know the basics - how Citizens United has made it possible for large corporations to invisibly support candidates with tons of unmarked campaign dollars - but the details of the movie's example of stealing seats in the Montana legislature is still disgusting.

I'm not sure how many hurdles would have to be overcome, but what's bothered me about politicians getting to office through various undemocratic shenanigans is that no one really gets punished.  Laws that get passed by such politicians stay passed, benefiting their shadowy supporters and screwing everyone else.  (OK, the guy in the movie got fined about $60,000, but I doubt his supporters didn't help him out there.  He didn't resign, though his term was up shortly.)

 Besides murky campaign help, I include gerrymandering as well. Today's ADN had a Washington Post  article about how a federal appeals court had found - once again - that North Carolina had illegally gerrymandered the state so that while Republicans had 53% of the vote they got 77% of the state's delegation to the US House.

“I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” said Rep. David Lewis, a Republican member of the North Carolina General Assembly, addressing fellow legislators when they passed the plan in 2016. “So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.”

He added: “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.”

To say this out loud, in public, shows that he knows there's nobody who's likely to hold him accountable.

At least the judges understood that the Republicans had essentially stolen that last three elections and weren't inclined to let this next election go as is - despite how late it is in the election cycle.  After all, it's late because the Republicans kept appealing the decision and making more mischief.

"He said the court was leaning against giving the North Carolina legislature another chance to draw the congressional districts.
“We continue to lament that North Carolina voters now have been deprived of a constitutional congressional districting plan — and, therefore, constitutional representation in Congress — for six years and three election cycles,” Wynn wrote. “To the extent allowing the General Assembly another opportunity to draw a remedial plan would further delay electing representatives under a constitutional districting plan, that delay weighs heavily against giving the General Assembly another such opportunity.”

This sort of stuff is a threat to the whole idea of democracy.  The movie made it clear how corporations can set up shell organizations to hide money and then spend tons of money on last minute ads that lie about  and smear their anointed candidate's opponent.  And once they have them elected, the movie narrator said, there's no longer even the need to lobby, because they own that official.

I don't think removal from office, prison terms, even nullification of ill-gained legislation are too harsh a punishment for the both the corporate manipulators and their elected stooges.  And people like Rep. David Lewis.  These are domestic (well not all the corporate funders are necessarily domestic) terrorists, taking over our democracy.

Have some fresh raspberries.

"The Plural of Anecdote Is Not Data" Commission Member Dunlap's Problems With Presidential Advisory Commission on Elections

The Presidential Advisory Commission on Elections was controversial before it began   Today one of the Democrats on the commission (though they were shut out from viewing documents and meetings) published a letter he wrote to the defunct committee's chair and to the President.  First come experts from a news report, then below is the letter itself.


From the Bangor Daily News :  

PORTLAND, Maine — The now-disbanded voting integrity commission launched by the Trump administration uncovered no evidence to support claims of widespread voter fraud, according to an analysis of administration documents released Friday.
In a letter to Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who are both Republicans and led the commission, Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap said the documents show there was a “pre-ordained outcome” and that drafts of a commission report included a section on evidence of voter fraud that was “glaringly empty.”
“It’s calling into the darkness, looking for voter fraud,” Dunlap, a Democrat, told The Associated Press. “There’s no real evidence of it anywhere.”

Kris Kobach disagreed.

“It appears that Secretary Dunlap is willfully blind to the voter fraud in front of his nose,” Kobach said in a statement released by his spokesman.
Kobach said there have been more than 1,000 convictions for voter fraud since 2000, and that the commission presented 8,400 instances of double voting in the 2016 election in 20 states.
“Had the commission done the same analysis of all 50 states, the number would have been exponentially higher,” Kobach said. 

But Dunlap says:

In response, Dunlap said those figures were never brought before the commission, and that Kobach hasn’t presented any evidence for his claims of double voting. He said the commission was presented with a report claiming over 1,000 convictions for various forms of voter misconduct since 1948.
“The plural of anecdote is not data,” Dunlap said in his Friday letter to the shuttered commission’s leaders. 

But here's Dunlap's complete letter to Kobach and Trump outlining his complaints.  He doesn't mince words.

Matthew Dunlap Presidential Advisory Committee on Elections (PACEI) Docs Findings Letter - by Steve on Scribd

You can get 29 additional documents Dunlap received at the Maine Secretary of State website.

Supreme Court Decision Allows Ohio To Drop Voters For Missing Election And A Post Card

Justin Levitt, a redistricting expert I respect, wrote a very detailed analysis of yesterday's Supreme Court decision which allows Ohio to purge voters who miss an election and a follow up post card. The whole thing is worth reading; here's a snippet:

"And then there’s the Supreme Court decision, its own bundle of disappointments. It’s a disappointing approach to have so little regard for what Congress was trying to achieve.  Congress set out to limit unwarranted purges of eligible voters, and it’s hard to believe they approved a process allowing voters to be kicked off of the rolls without any reliable evidence that they might in fact be ineligible.
It’s a disappointing triumph of empty formalism. Recall that the statute says that individuals can’t be removed because they haven’t voted. At one point, Justice Alito explains that Ohio does not purge people because they haven’t voted, because purging also turns on the failure to return a postcard. This is an astonishingly thin conception of causation, and a mechanical version of textualism that should by all rights fail the Turing test.
It’s a disappointing trivialization of the franchise. Magazine subscriptions lapse because of inactivity. But part of the whole reason for this portion of the federal code is the notion that access to fundamental rights doesn’t.
And it has disappointing consequences. Some eligible voters who have not recently participated and who miss a single mailing will be unaware that they are no longer registered, and in states without same-day registration, will discover the problem too late to cast a valid ballot. Joe Helle registered in Ohio in 2004, missed a few elections while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, and arrived home to find himself purged from the rolls and shut out from the coming election, despite no change in his underlying eligibility. The process will likely have inequitable ramifications beyond servicemembers, as well: groups that tend to vote less often, the very citizens we should be making more efforts to engage, will naturally be more affected."

I'd also like to know what sort of accountability the department has on their purging activity. Are people in all areas treated the same?

And if anyone is wondering if they have been purged from the voting rolls here in Alaska, I called the Election Office and spoke to Rachel who showed me where to check online.  So it's pretty easy to make sure you're still there.

But the process here is much more lenient.  After four years of voter inactivity (that means not voting) they send you a post card and ask you if you want to stay registered.  If that comes back with a forwarding address, they'll send a second post card.  After that you are put on a list called "inactive purge."  That lasts another four years, for a total of eight years without having voted.

If you're on inactive purge and you go to vote, you won't show up on the list of voters in your precinct or anywhere else.  But you can vote a questioned ballot and if you're on the inactive purge list, your vote will count.  But, as I understood it,  you will only be able to vote for statewide offices - say this November, Governor, House of Representatives, and any propositions.

Within and hour of posting, I decided there needed to be more.  It's not quite long enough to call it an update.  

I looked up whether you could check online to see if you were registered in Ohio as well.  You can.  Here's the link to the page.

I've complained in the past that Alaska has way too many registered voters.  People die, people move away from Alaska.  Few of them (or their heirs) notify the state.  Other people move to different parts of the state.  And we have a pretty low voter turnout.  Not voting for eight years, seems like a pretty lenient policy.    And no one has presented evidence that people are falsely voting on behalf of any of these no-longer-here voters.

If voter fraud isn't a problem, what difference does it make if ghost voters hang around eight years?  Nothing too serious, certainly not serious enough to accidentally purge people who think they're registered.

Candidates will have more voters to contact when they run for office.  But they tend to ignore people who haven't voted for a number of years.  Many just go after the super voters in their party (and independents).  So that's not a big problem.

Perception of voting turnout.  If there were 100,000 registered voters (an easy number to calculate with) and 20,000 voted in an election, we'd say the turnout was 20% of the registered voters.  Not very good.
But if 30% (30,000) of those 100,000 no longer lived in Alaska but were still on the list of registered voters, then there'd really be only 70,000 registered voters.  20,000 voters out of a total of 70,000 registered voters would come out to 28% turnout.  That's quite a bit better, but still pitiful.

With smart phones and iPads on the campaign trail, candidates and their supporters can go online and show potential voters whether they are still registered or not.  Yes, it's an obstacle, but given how many people don't vote at all, it's probably a rather small bump.  But as Justice Sotomayor pointed out in her dissent in this case, it affect low income and minority voters much more than suburban white neighborhoods.

"It is unsurprising in light of the history of such purge programs that numerous amici report that the Supple- mental Process has disproportionately affected minority, low-income, disabled, and veteran voters. As one example, amici point to an investigation that revealed that in Ham- ilton County, “African-American-majority neighborhoods in downtown Cincinnati had 10% of their voters removed due to inactivity” since 2012, as “compared to only 4% of voters in a suburban, majority-white neighborhood.” Brief for National Association for the Advancement of Colored People et al. as Amici Curiae 18–19. Amici also explain at length how low voter turnout rates, language-access prob- lems, mail delivery issues, inflexible work schedules, and transportation issues, among other obstacles, make it more difficult for many minority, low-income, disabled, homeless, and veteran voters to cast a ballot or return a notice, rendering them particularly vulnerable to unwar- ranted removal under the Supplemental Process."

I'm sure some see this just as a simple task that responsible citizens take care of, others see this as an intentional tactic to lower Democratic voter turnout, and along with the myriad of other ways of stacking the vote from voter id to gerrymandering, each of these attempts all together create a sizable obstacle for some voters.  

We Like Majority Rule, Except When We're Not In The Majority - HB 175

HB 175 is currently in the House Judiciary Committee.   Here's the whole bill.

A BILL
FOR AN ACT ENTITLED
"An Act ratifying an interstate compact to elect the President and Vice-President of the United States by national popular vote; and making related changes to statutes applicable to the selection by voters of electors for candidates for President and Vice-
President of the United States and to the duties of those electors." [emphasis added]

HOUSE JUDICIARY 

GRUENBERG 120   1:00 PM   M W F 

Standing Committee

	CHAIR:	Representative Claman*
	VICE-CHAIR:	Representative Fansler*
		MEMBER:	Representative Kreiss-Tomkins*
		MEMBER:	Representative LeDoux*
		MEMBER:	Representative Eastman
		MEMBER:	Representative Kopp
		MEMBER:	Representative Reinbold
		ALTERNATE:	Representative Millett
		ALTERNATE:	Representative Stutes *

 *indicates members of the House majority.  So this should get out of the committee and could pass in  the House.  Senate fate is probably not too good.  Republicans love the electoral college and come up with all sorts of arguments to keep it.

Here's a letter in the Alaska Dispatch News today that proves my point - you don't like 'majority rule' if you're in the majority and you like it when you're in the majority.

"Without Electoral College …
The benefit of the Electoral College can be seen by subtracting the state of California from the equation. Without California, Trump won by 2 million popular votes and well over a hundred electoral votes. Subtract New York as well and he won by 3 1/2 million popular votes and two to one in the Electoral College. Do we really want one or both of those states dictating policy to the whole rest of the country? As it is, just those two guaranteed blue states mean Democrats can count on almost a third of the electoral votes needed to win the presidency before the election even starts.
— Bill Tolbert
King Salmon"

So, majority rule is bad if Trump loses (popular vote) and good if he wins (electoral college.)  But what is this nonsense about "without California" and "without New York"?

California, with 37 million people is  about 12% of the US.  New York, with a population of over 19 million, makes up about 7% of the US population.  So Bill Tolbert has no issue with deducting nearly one-fifth of the US population to get his numbers.

He also neglected to take out the second most populous state - Texas - with 25 million people, or about 8% of the US population.  I can't imagine why he would have skipped Texas. (I*)

Tolbert's argument is like saying, if it weren't for the heart attack, he would have lived to 80.  And if it don't count his cancer either, he could have lived to 90.  Creating alternative worlds through mathematical fiction.

Can The "Efficiency Gap" Concept Change The Supreme Court's Mind On Gerrymandering?

[UPDATE September25, 2017: Gill v. Whitford is scheduled to be heard at the US Supreme Court October 3, 2017]


A Mark Butler FB repost got me to a Slate article on something I'd never heard of in terms of gerrymandering.  Since I got pretty involved in blogging the last Alaska redistricting process, I figure if I didn't know about this others don't either.

The article talks about a challenge to the Wisconsin state redistricting process that successfully used this concept of "efficiency gap."  The case has been appealed to the US Supreme Court, so it's something to pay close attention to.

While double checking, I came across a New Republic article written by Nicholas Stephanopoulus who was quoted in the Slate article.  It seemed more appropriate to go to the horse's mouth for my quotes about 'efficiency gap.'

Stephanoupoulus begins by pointing out that while the Supreme Court isn't for gerrymandering, litigants haven't come up with solutions that they are comfortable with.  He says they have hinted at some ideas such as Justice Stevens' idea of 'partisan symmetry.'  So Stephanopoulos and Eric McGhee have come up with what he claims would test for that, though he calls it something a little different.

"No litigants have seized this opportunity yet, but they should. To assist them, McGhee and I have devised a new metric of partisan symmetry called the efficiency gap. The efficiency gap is simply the difference between the parties’ respective wasted votes in an election, divided by the total number of votes cast. Wasted votes are ballots that don’t contribute to victory for candidates, and they come in two forms: lost votes cast for candidates who are defeated, and surplus votes cast for winning candidates but in excess of what they needed to prevail. When a party gerrymanders a state, it tries to maximize the wasted votes for the opposing party while minimizing its own, thus producing a large efficiency gap. In a state with perfect partisan symmetry, both parties would have the same number of wasted votes. 

Suppose, for example, that a state has five districts with 100 voters each, and two parties, Party A and Party B. Suppose also that Party A wins four of the seats 53 to 47, and Party B wins one of them 85 to 15. Then in each of the four seats that Party A wins, it has 2 surplus votes (53 minus the 51 needed to win), and Party B has 47 lost votes. And in the lone district that Party A loses, it has 15 lost votes, and Party B has 34 surplus votes (85 minus the 51 needed to win). In sum, Party A wastes 23 votes and Party B wastes 222 votes. Subtracting one figure from the other and dividing by the 500 votes cast produces an efficiency gap of 40 percent in Party A’s favor. 

The efficiency gap has several properties that make it ideal for measuring the extent of gerrymandering. First, it directly captures the packing and cracking that are at the heart of every biased plan. Surplus votes for winning candidates are the definition of packing, and lost votes for defeated candidates the essence of cracking. All a gerrymander is, in fact, is a plan that results in one party wasting many more votes than its opponent. The efficiency gap tells us exactly how big the difference between the parties’ wasted votes is."

If you didn't read that carefully, here are some key terms:

Two Kinds of Wasted Votes - votes that didn't contribute to victory
Surplus Votes - those votes more than needed to win
Lost Votes - votes cast for candidate who was defeated

Efficiency Gap is simply the difference between the parties’ respective wasted votes in an election, divided by the total number of votes cast.

An extreme example was Pennsylvania where gerrymandering gave the Democrats lots of lost votes.   From Republic Report:

"In Pennsylvania, one state in which the GOP drew the congressional districts in a brazenly partisan way, Democratic candidates collected 44 percent of the vote, yet Democratic candidates won only 5 House seats out of 18. In other words, Democrats secured only 27 percent of Pennsylvania’s congressional seats despite winning nearly half of the votes."

Democrats, who have been hurt badly by Republican control of redistricting after the 2010 census, are hoping this case could break open some opportunities for them.  Here's a FairVote article from December 2016 looking at this case and the larger picture.  

Electoral Integrity Project Report Puts North Carolina Along Side Cuba, Indonesia , And Sierra Leone

This was from a tweet I got today.  There was an article in the News&Observer that said, among other things:

"In the just released EIP report, North Carolina’s overall electoral integrity score of 58/100 for the 2016 election places us alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies like Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone. If it were a nation state, North Carolina would rank right in the middle of the global league table – a deeply flawed, partly free democracy that is only slightly ahead of the failed democracies that constitute much of the developing world.
Indeed, North Carolina does so poorly on the measures of legal framework and voter registration, that on those indicators we rank alongside Iran and Venezuela. When it comes to the integrity of the voting district boundaries no country has ever received as low a score as the 7/100 North Carolina received. North Carolina is not only the worst state in the USA for unfair districting but the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project."

But how do you know if this is real or fake news?  

I quickly mistyped their name into google and got to articles about the Election [not electoral] Integrity Project.  This one is clearly a right wing project whose name is very similar and whose acronym is the same as the Electoral Integrity Project.  Getting a name very close to a legitimate and respected organization is a common practice of scammers.  I discovered that when I wrote about the Alaska International Film Festival which took advantage of the similarity of its name (and same acronym) to the legitimate Anchorage International Film Festival.  HOWEVER, one shouldn't jump to conclusions without facts.   The online tracks I found show that the Election Integrity Project began shortly before ("February 2012") the Electoral Integrity Project ('mid-2012').  I'm guessing they would not have known about each other when they began.

Think Progress investigated the funding of the Election Integrity Project:

"Since launching its 2012 Election Integrity Project in February, the right-wing Judicial Watch has been a leading player in the push for more voting restrictions. The group — best known for its Clinton-era lawsuits — has demanded more voting roll purges like Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) failed efforts in Florida. But a ThinkProgress examination of tax filings reveals that the group has received millions of dollars from foundations tied to conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife since the start of 2001.
Though other rich right-wing funders like Sheldon Adelson and Foster Friess have gotten more attention in this campaign, Scaife has bankrolled the conservative movement for decades. A 1998 Washington Post story dubbed him the “funding father of the right.” Since the 1960s, the Pittsburgh media baron and heir to the Mellon banking and oil fortune has distributed hundreds of millions of dollars to conservative causes including the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, and the Hoover Institution. He controls the Scaife Foundations — a group of conservative and philanthropic tax-exempt organizations. Between 2001 and 2010, the Allegheny Foundation, Carthage Foundation, and Sarah Scaife Foundation — all part of the Sciafe empire — gave at least $5.8 million to Judicial Watch."

OK, so that raises serious questions about the Election I P.  What about the Electoral IP?

It's getting harder to find things online.  Everything in the first several pages was either from the Electoral IP itself, or was someone citing the article about North Carolina.  Here's what their own website says:

"The Electoral Integrity Project is an independent academic project based at Harvard University and the University of Sydney. The EIP project is directed by the founding Director, Professor Pippa Norris, and governed by an International Advisory Board.  The project is administered by the EIP Project Coordinator, Ms. Alexander Kennett. The work has been generously funded by many foundations and partners, notably the Australian Research Council Laureate Award.
AIMS AND OBJECTIVES
Since its inception in mid-2012, the Electoral Integrity Project has focused upon three issues:
When do elections meet international standards of electoral integrity?
What happens when elections fail to do so?
And what can be done to mitigate these problems?
EIP has sought to produce innovative and policy-relevant scientific research that achieves international standing in the social sciences and leads to a significant advancement of capabilities and knowledge about elections, democracy, and autocracy.
STRATEGIES
The project has used several strategies to achieve these objectives:
Developing and deepening concepts and theories concerning the causes and consequences of electoral integrity;
Gathering valid, reliable, and generalizable empirical evidence (through expert indicators, mass surveys, experimental designs, and case-studies) monitoring and comparing electoral integrity across and within nations; and
Building a worldwide research community engaging scholarly and practitioner networks drawn from diverse disciplines, theoretical approaches, global regions, international organizations, and methodological techniques to advance knowledge of electoral integrity."

Evaluations of the organization were scarce.  But I did find this one which looks pretty legit:  Association of Accredited Public Policy Advocates to the European Union (AALEP).  The Electoral Integrity Project is on their list.  Their entry begins:

"THE ELECTORAL INTEGRITY PROJECT
SUBMITTED BY CHRISTIAN* ON SUN, 08/14/2016 - 19:44
The Electoral Integrity Project (EIP) is an independent research project based at the University of Sydney and Harvard University. For the past four years, the EIP has been bringing together scholars and practitioners from around the world to discuss effective research and how to design evidence-based programming that will increase the integrity of elections. Since the EIP’s inception, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) has been an active participant in the project."

*Christian would appear to be Christian de Foully, Chairman of the AALEP

Another page on the AAPPAEU website explains what a Public Policy Advocate is:

"Why Choose a Public Policy Advocate
A Public Policy Advocate provides intelligent, unbiased advice that achieves the best results for a client or employer. Most importantly, trust is always implicit in a relationship with a Public Policy Advocate.
Being designated as a real professional public policy advocate is a designation for a select few who have been recognized by their peers, employers, and clients for their commitment, knowledge, experience, wisdom, and integrity in the public policy advocacy field.
No matter the size or scope of an assignment, Public Policy Advocates  leverage their experience to assess the past, present, and future and provide sound solutions on the many diversified issues encountered in the broad field of public policy advocacy.
An array of clients, from government to small business, relies on the wisdom of Public Policy Advocates to map the way to informed decision making. Clients include:
Government agencies
Publicly and privately held corporations
Individuals
Trade Associations
Professional Societies
NGOS
Energy companies
Financial institutions
Universities
Healthcare Providers
Hospitals etc …"

The Electoral Integrity Project has been around since 2012 and has monitored elections around the world and come up with frameworks with which to do that sort of work.

Although the author of the News&Observer story focuses on North Carolina (he's a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, so he's writing about his own state, though it appears it was a long road to there given his degrees from East Anglia, Capetown, and San Diego), the EIP website map shows neighboring states with similar and even lower scores than North Carolina.  (Alaska and Hawaii don't seem to count.)

But the writer notes that North Carolina is the worst in one category:

"Indeed, North Carolina does so poorly on the measures of legal framework and voter registration, that on those indicators we rank alongside Iran and Venezuela. When it comes to the integrity of the voting district boundaries no country has ever received as low a score as the 7/100 North Carolina received. North Carolina is not only the worst state in the USA for unfair districting but the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project."

Sorting through what to believe and then figuring out what it means is tricky. I'm betting there are people in North Carolina who are spitting mad and dismissing this report as liberal propaganda. But I bet that when they saw reports of election problems in foreign countries by this organization they just assumed it was true.  And assumed their own superiority in elections.

I haven't looked carefully at their study or their methodology and the factors they review.  But I suspect that while experts could dispute why they choose one factor over another and how the factors are weighted, that it's probably a pretty rigorous tool.  And that its application to US states wasn't altered and so that, using their measures, the comparisons are accurate.  And that someone else could come up with a measure that might rank the US states differently.

Americans Need To Take Election Hacking Seriously - Computer Experts Do And So Do Hackers

[NOTE:  I'm not claiming here that the election was rigged, that machines were hacked.  But I am saying that it's not all that hard to do and it easily could have happened.  The numbers needed to tip the election in swing states was low.  We have to take this seriously, test some key precincts in this election, and require automatic audits of all future elections.]

I'm constantly surprised at how skeptical people are when I talk to them about how easy it is to tamper with voting machines.  They don't want to believe it.  It's the underlying trust we have in our democratic system.  But if that trust is going to continue, we have to take this seriously.  But when the polls are way off, hacking is NOT one of the possible explanations most pundits discuss.  

I began  to seriously learn about this in 2012 when the Anchorage Municipal election had all sorts of problems.  It began with precincts running out of ballots and making up paper ballots from scratch for people to vote on.   But then we learned about more security issues.

• Security seals on the bags with the ballots could easily be opened and resealed (better ones are now being used)
• Voting machines got picked up the night before the election and were kept at the Precinct Captain's house over night (making access to computer cards in the machines easy)
• Voting machines were brought to election central by the precinct captain - there could be more people, but there weren't necessarily

I blogged it closely as did other local bloggers. 

While covering all this I began reading about how the voting machines worked.  It's clear from what experts post online that hacking voting machines is NOT hard.  What's also clear is that IF there are paper ballots that the machines count, then just counting the ballots and comparing them to the machine count will tell us the answer.  Yes, of course, this requires that the paper ballots have been kept securely as well, which is not necessarily the case.  But they should be numbered and tracked at the polling places (at least they are in Anchorage).  If they are not that is a sign.  

So, at the very least, every election should include procedures for manually checking some random precincts against the machine count.  Citizens shouldn't have to demand that and pay for such recounts (as happened in the Anchorage situation, though eventually, when all the problems were exposed, the Assembly repaid the citizens group).  Losing candidates shouldn't have to demand that.  It should be part of the process.  

So when I got an email from a Pennsylvania computer nerd in 2014 raising questions about the Alaska elections in 2008, I took it seriously.  NOTE:  'Seriously' means I decided it was important enough that it should get more attention, particularly from computer folks who could test what he was saying.  'Seriously' does NOT mean, 'believe it all without verifying."

You can read that 2014 post which outlines in detail what he was alleging, what kind of evidence he had, and links to websites that deal with hacking elections and links to my posts about the 2012 election.  I wasn't simply passing this on without thinking about it and doing serious background checking.  

But for those who aren't going to check that link,  I've checked these links to hacking elections again now and here they are: 

• Votescam -  large overview of electronic voting issues
• What Really Happened  
• There's a great HBO video - Hacking Democracy - the link takes you to the official site.  I can't find it free and easy online, but Amazon seems to have it and Netflix says they have it on DVD and you can poke around.  It will totally change your view of the security of our elections.
• Even conservatives are now using voting machine fraud arguments.
• How Many Ways Are There To Steal An Election? And Why Doesn't Anyone Care?
  This is a post I did in 2012 when I was covering the Anchorage Municipal election problems.  It lists different ways to rig an election outcome and has lots of supporting links.  It talks about hacking as well as things like voter suppression and other forms of impacting the election underhandedly if not illegally.

Here are some more links I've come across in recent weeks:

J. Alex Halderman, Prof of Computer Science, University of Michigan  Want to know if the election was hacked?  Look at the ballots

Wired:  Hacked or Not, Audit This election (And All Future Ones)

And for a different take, here's 538's counter:  Demographics, Not Hacking, Explain The Election Results - They've analyzed the votes and kinds of voting machines used and feel there's little likelihood that election was hacked.  But they conclude:  

"Maybe some irregularities at the county level in early Wisconsin vote-counting are signs of wider problems. Maybe we’d find something if we dug down to the precinct level, or if we looked at other states with mixed voting systems. But at a time when the number of voters without confidence in the accuracy of the vote count is rising, the burden of proof ought to be on people claiming there was electoral fraud. The paradox is that in our current electoral system, without routine audits, seeking proof requires calling for a recount, which in itself can undermine confidence in the vote."

Catch 22 - You need to have proof if you make the claim, but without an audit you have no proof.  But if you call for an audit, you undermine the integrity of the election.  So, as I said above, I think all the elections need to have audits built in.

Better Than Calexit - California Should Export Voters To Swing States

There were two opinion pieces in yesterday's LA Times discussing some Californians' interest in possibly seceding from the US.  A law professor in Indiana who says California will always be home, considers some of the issues with his heart on his sleeve.  A political science professor from UC San Diego uses logic and practicalities to oppose the idea.

In Alaska, the secession sentiment has always been around.  We even have an Alaska Independence Party.   And given our geographic isolation from the rest of the US, it makes some geographic sense.  The Daily Mail reported a petition to the president to have Alaska secede and rejoin Russia.  Was that one of the earlier Russian attempts to cyberjack the US?

I've heard a couple people recently talking about joining Canada which makes a lot more sense, but we know that won't happen either.


But here's my suggestion to California.  Export excess Democratic voters to swing states.

Clinton beat Trump in California by over three million votes!


In Michigan, Clinton, as of November 10, was behind by 13,000 votes only.

In Florida Clinton lost by only 120,000 votes.

In Pennsylvania Clinton lost by only 67,000 votes.

In Wisconsin Clinton lost by only 27,000 votes.

You get the picture.  California had more than enough excess votes to change the results in these four states and several more.  That's assuming that the voting machines weren't hacked.  If they were, then none of this would be necessary.

click to enlarge and focus

California Democrats could send out electoral missionaries so to speak who would go live in these states long enough to be eligible to vote.  Everything is perfectly legal.  No need to change the constitution - though that effort could continue.






You don't even have to be there a long time.  Michigan's proof of residency seems to require about 90 days.






















In Pennsylvania, best as I can tell, you only have to have lived there for 30 days.

"11. Declaration I declare that 

• I am a United States citizen and will have been a citizen for at least 1 month on the day of the next election.
• I will be at least 18 years old on the day of the next election.
• I will have lived at the address in section 5 for at least 30 days before the election.
• I am legally qualified to vote.

Wisconsin requires that you've been a resident for 28 days, but there's a clause - "with no intent of moving."

Florida has a similar assumption about intent to stay.

"Legal residence-Permanent. Legal residency is not defined in law. However, over the years, the courts and the Florida Department of State/Division of Elections’ have construed legal residency to be where a person mentally intends to make his or her permanent residence.1 Evidence of such intent can come from items or activities such as obtaining a Florida driver’s license2, paying tax receipts, paying bills for residency (light, water, garbage service) and receiving mail at address, claiming the property as homestead,3 declaring the county as domicile, and doing other activities indicative or normally associated with home life. Therefore, legal residence is a convergence of intent and fact. Once residency is established for voting purposes, it is presumptively valid or current until evidence shows otherwise. See Op. Atty Gen. Fla. 055-216 (August 26, 1955). A business address is not typically a satisfactory legal residential address but if the person resides there despite the zoning ordinance, the address could become the person’s legal residential address.4"

So people spreading the gospel of Democracy there ought to make at least a one or two year commitment.  But that's how I originally conceived this anyway - a one or two year mission.  It wasn't until I saw the short time requirements that other possibilities arose.  No, let's do this honestly.  No one can be sure how long they will live in any one place anyway.  One or two years is clearly long enough.

A year or two in Wisconsin or Florida to save the United States?  It's a much better deal than going to Iraq and probably would do more to save American democracy than fighting in Iraq or any other world hotspots.


Californians CAN live in other states. They can survive.  They're much more resilient than, say, New Yorkers who don't even know how to drive or that there is civilization beyond Manhattan.   A large number of Californians are from other states anyway.  They can speak the local dialect and blend right in.  It's easier than trying to change the minds of Trump voters (though I expect Trump will do that himself in the next four years.)

After their two year commitment is up and the 2020 election is over, they can decide to stay or move back to California, though many may find that living in communities where they can walk or bike to work is kind of nice.

John Foelster's Research Into Alaska's AV-OS Voting Machines And How To Hack Them

As the early election results came in, I put the presidential race into a box and put it outside, turned off the radio, and did other things.  I wasn't ready to address what was happening.  I'm still not.

This post is something of a guest post.  I posted about John Foelster in 2014.  He alerted me several weeks ago that he was close to completing his website with all his evidence.  I wrote this last night but decided to wait until I'd slept before posting it.  I'm still not ready to address much and I have an afternoon appointment on something totally different today.  John's also posted this on Daily Kos.

My one bright bit of news this morning is that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.  Imagine Trump's supporters if he had won the popular vote but lost the electoral college.



I've never met John Foelster, but we have exchanged emails.  This 2014 post gives my thoughts about John and why I posted about his work then.  I got some education in computer voting hacking while covering the Anchorage Municipal election fiasco in 2012.  The posts on that election are listed in the 2014 post linked above.

I posted Foelster's stuff in 2014 and I'm posting his recent stuff for several reasons:
1.  While I don't totally understand all that he's saying, I'm convinced that he's done his homework on the technical side.  He's found everything that's to be found online about the machines we use in Alaska and how we handled them.
2.  He doesn't have an agenda other than righting what he perceives as a wrong.
3.  The work he's done should be seen by those who can review it technically and determine its value.  And if there are others looking at this topic, they may find John's work useful. Or can point out his errors.

I have less confidence in Foelster's ability to fill in the gaps that are left by what is NOT available online.  It's reasonable that he try to explain how this could have been done.  But I wish he'd talked to people to find out if his suppositions about how this was carried out have merit.

My thoughts on all this, including a list of my posts about the 2012 Municipal election fiasco are on the 2014 post I devoted to Foelster's work then.

I've looked at his private website.  It's massive.  There is lots and lots of information.  His statement is like a two second look through a hole in the fence around his work.  I couldn't get through it all.  Whether it is fact or fiction, it is, in its own way, a work of art.   While John may not have tied all the loose ends, and may have tied some of them incorrectly, he is not a crazy conspiracy nut.  He's done way too much detailed study and analysis to not be taken seriously.  If his work is full of holes, exposure to the world will demonstrate that.  If it is worthwhile, not putting it up would be wrong.  I'm willing to put it up here since all this is related to Alaska elections.

Here's what John Foelster has to say.


[I've cut this out based on a request from the author - see comments below.]

Voting Booth Selfies - There Is A Good Reason To Ban Them

When I first heard about bans on voting booth selfies, I thought this was ridiculous, and probably impossible to enforce.  After all, I've taken pictures in the voting booth myself for this blog.   The one on the right I took after voting and slipping my ballot into the secrecy sleeve at the August primary election.

But last night at dinner the conversation turned to the American tradition of taking voters to the polls and then paying them to vote for a particular candidate.  According to this Washington Post article published in 2012, it still happens and the price is often alcohol and cash.

But before cell phone cameras people buying votes had to rely on the honesty of the voter, and considering the voter was willing to sell his vote, that wasn't necessarily a sure thing.

But with everyone carrying cellphones with cameras now, a vote buyer could condition the payment on a selfie of the voter with his filled out ballot in the voting booth.  Selfies make buying votes a much more certain enterprise.

But There's Better Reasons Not To Ban Them

That said, I still don't see this as being enforceable.  Are we going to have TSA monitor elections and everyone has to empty their pockets before they vote?  Even having election officials ask people to empty their pockets and leave their purses and other bags outside the voting booth is untenable. I hope that doesn't happen and it certainly shouldn't even be considered until there is hard evidence that vote selling/buying is at a level where it is affecting the outcome of elections.

And this ignores the positive message that gets sent when people see their friends' voting selfies online.  Perhaps selfies that show how someone voted that are found online can get a fine if buying votes for selfies becomes a thing.  But maybe better drug and alcohol rehabilitation and poverty programs would be a better way to spend anti-voting-selfie funds.

Now that I've written this post, I'm going to read this Mother Jones article I found titled The Case Against Voting Booth Selfies.   OK, I've read it now.  It's basically the argument I just made about verifying bought votes and it's shorter than this post.

As I'm writing this I'm thinking about my discussion with the village head man near the town where I taught English in Thailand and influencing the elections there.  Maybe I'll do that as a part 2 to this post.

Another Election, Same Problem - State Gives Lindbeck 56% When He Really Got 68%

The Alaska Democrats agreed once to the ADL ballot (Alaskan Independence, Alaska Democratic and Alaska Libertarian (A-D-L)), which means that candidates from various parties all appear on the same ballot in the Alaska primary elections.

One rational is that it's more democratic, unlike the Republican ballot where only Republicans can vote.  But a primary originally was supposed to be where the parties chose the candidates that they preferred to run in the election.  You could almost say it was like letting your opponent pick what players you were going to have on your team against them.

The issue I have in particular showed up again in Tuesday's election.  In a primary, not only are candidates trying to win, but to win decisively enough to convince funders that they convince funders that they have a good chance of winning.

Here are the results for the ADL ballot for the Democratic primary Tuesday from GEMS (it's the third race down):

Hibler, William D. DEM        2578      9.40%
Hinz, Lynette         DEM        4445    16.21%
Lindbeck, Steve     DEM     15493     56.50%
McDermott, Jim C. LIB        3533     12.88%
Watts, Jon B.           LIB        1371       5.00%

The casual observer would go, "Oh, Lindbeck did pretty good.  He got 56.5% of the vote."  But compared to Don Young's (his November opponent)  89% in the Republican primary, that looks pretty weak.

The problem, as I see it, is that the ADL combines candidates who ARE NOT running against each other, and the state election office treats their percentages as though they were.  But the DEM's are running against the DEM's and the LIB's are running against the LIB's.

So against the other Democrats, Lindbeck actually got 68% of the vote, a pretty decent tally, a landslide in many people's minds.

I wrote about this issue at length after the 2008 primary.   Here's the summary of that post:

SUMMARY OF FINDINGS:  

1. The Alaska Primary elections had ballots that combined candidates for the Democratic Party, Alaska Independent Party, and the Libertarian Party of Alaska. The Republicans had separate ballots.

1. By combining two or more parties onto one ballot, the primary is no longer a contest between the two party candidates for the nomination of their party. The percentages of vote for candidates that are not running against each other makes no sense at all.

1. The state law says "The director shall prepare and provide a primary election ballot for each political party." To me, that sounds like a separate ballot for each party.  [A document put out by the state says a blanket primary is legal.]

1. The Division of Elections Media Guide says that "In Alaska, the political parties determine which candidates will have access to their ballot and which voters are eligible to vote their ballot."

1. Both the Libertarian Party and Alaska Independent Party by-laws call for what is known as a 'blanket" ballot which lists all candidates for all offices. That makes sense since they don't have more than one candidate for any office. Between the two parties, I could only find a total of three candidates in only the US House and Senate races. They have provisions for other options if the other parties do not allow blanket ballots.

1. I couldn't find the Democratic by-laws, but their Plan of Organization says, " The Alaska Democratic Party’s primary election is open to all registered voters." That doesn't say open to all other parties. 

It all seems to hinge on whether the Democratic Party by-laws call for an open primary or a blanket primary.

You can go there to see to see the details. (And since I'm on vacation in Paris right now, I haven't reread the original post carefully, so there may be some aspects I would change.  You can point them out.

At this point, though, I think the Democrats disadvantage themselves by letting the percentage reflect more than the candidates they are running against.