– I know y’all know this but since it’s my last open thread before the election (depending on how late Tuesday’s is, but most post offices will probably be closed), hey everybody vote please. Our trolls are voting, so, you know at the very least cancel them out. But if you need a reason, here are some Spine-Chilling Reasons to Vote in These Midterms.

– It seems many of the president’s detractors were so eager to declare a new “Obama’s Katrina” – the 11th in a series – that they overlooked the nagging detail that the federal response to Ebola has actually been quite effective.

– The Koch Brothers spending money on knocking out Jeff Merkley this late in the game seems a bit strange, especially in Oregon where most of the ballots should already be in.

– Is it not true that your program is fundamentally socialistic to take over private business? With more taxes?

– You guys, I’m really sad for Mars Hill

– #ILookGoodOnAPronto looks like a fun little event.

A while ago, Goldy thought Sound Politics might have gone the way of the Buffalo. I guess they did in the fact that it looked like they would be gone, but they’re still around. This is a bad metaphor so I guess instead of continuing it, I should still make fun of them? This Jim Miller piece [h/t to my friend N via email and to Tensor in comments] goes for it, starting with a violation of Betteridge’s Law and then not getting better after that.

Do Illegal Votes By Non-Citizens Sometimes Determine Elections Here In The United States?

No? Does Sound Politics need a new hobby horse? Yes!

I began thinking about that problem more than two decades ago, and concluded, tentatively, that the answer was yes. After the 2000 presidential election, and all the disputes that went with it, I put more time into the problem and, in 2002 gave an example, Maria Cantwell’s defeat of Slade Gorton, where that may have happened.

It sure is convenient to be able to just assume out of thin air that any close election must really belong to you. Because reasons.

The logic of my underlying argument is simple:

As it is written by a simpleton.

1. There are more non-citizens living in the United States than ever before.

Are there? No links or any other evidence was provided. It wouldn’t surprise me if, for example, when we were building the West with a significant amount of Irish, German, and Scandinavian (among others) immigrants that there was a higher number of non-citizens in the US.

2. Some small proportion of them will be tempted to register and vote, illegally.

Well, if some small portion are tempted to do a thing, that thing must happen all the time in fact. QED, I don’t think we need to even go on.

3. Many places have few checks against non-citizens voting, so most of those tempted will succeed.

Some amount of a small number will be tempted could in theory do a thing then that thing is always already happening.

4. The non-citizens here in the United States tend to favor the Democratic Party.

Again, no need to actually prove this.

Therefore, I concluded, some close elections were being tipped to the Democrats by these illegal votes.

So two unproven assertions and two things that are admittedly not very large combine to… something? Here, let me try:

1) Puppies are adorable
2) Most people who hate puppies are Republicans
3) That time Mitt Romney tied his dog to the roof of a car, or whatever
4) A small number of cars have been owned by Mitt Romney

Therefore, I conclude that people who hate puppies are the only reason that Romney won any states.

All through this time, however, I have been unhappy that I could not find any academic studies of the question. And it was obvious to me that it was not a difficult research problem, that you could get a good start on it simply by running a large survey, and asking the right questions, in the right way.

Hey you know how sometimes our trolls will come into the comment threads with large lists that if you’re a dummy — and don’t understand they’ve been obviously ripped out of context — sometimes seem a bit silly? I mean, I don’t know everything this survey does, but I imagine if our trolls actually cared, as opposed to were just copying and pasting from some nonsense list someone compiled, that they would add asking people who can’t vote if they vote. It’s a large survey and it probably does have value. But I wouldn’t posit this piece as the most important.

Now, finally, three researchers, Jesse Richman, Gulshan Chattha, and David Earnest, have done that study, and provided direct evidence for the conclusion I reached more than a decade ago.

I mentioned in the last Open Thread a thing that refutes this. So I’ll quote from that instead of Jim Miller’s quoting of the piece, and then pick it back up with Miller.

The limitations are, in fact, numerous, and not limited to those that Richman and Earnest enumerate. Their estimates rely on a key question from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study: “Are you registered to vote?” Notably, this is not the same question as “Are you registered to vote in the United States?” In principle, non-citizens could be registered to vote only in their home country and respond affirmatively, and truthfully, to the question on the survey.(Respondents are asked for the Zip code at which they are registered to vote, but this could be interpreted as the Zip code at which non-citizens receive absentee ballots from abroad. Mexico, for example, has allowed absentee voting by mail from abroad since 2005.) If this sounds outlandish, consider that 20 percent (15 out of 75) of those non-citizens claiming to be registered in 2008 were in fact verified as not being registered to vote in the United States. Another 61 percent (46 of 75) could not be matched to either a commercial or voter database. That leaves only 14 out of 75 non-citizen respondents claiming to be registered in 2008 who were in fact confirmed as registered to vote in the United States.

Anyway, back to the nonsense.

You may want to apply those numbers to make back-of-the-envelope estimates of the likelihood that illegal votes by non-citizens gave Democratic candidates victories in your favorite close elections. For example, this strengthens my conclusion that Cantwell’s victory in 2000, by just 2,229 votes, was illegitimate. And it makes it nearly certain that Christine Gregoire’s 2004 victory over Dino Rossi, by just 129 votes, was illegitimate. In fact, I will go further and say that, if you could have magically eliminated the non-citizen votes from just Seattle, Dino Rossi would have won the final recount.

Um, OK. They asked 55,400 people about their voting habits and 13 said they voted when they weren’t citizens. Assuming none of them misinterpreted the question and none of their answers were entered wrong, that’s 0.000235% of the population voting despite being unable to vote in the country legally. So yes, if you assume that is a correct number, there were 659.3999 of the 2,810,058 people who voted in the Rossi-Gregoire race that voted who shouldn’t have. That’s higher than the total difference in the vote, but (a) there’s nothing to indicate how they would vote if they exist except for the general results mean they probably would have gone something like half-and-half to each candidate, with a few to the Libertarian and (b) the state GOP and conservative blogs spent months and months looking for illegal votes, but really didn’t turn up anyone in this category. I can’t imagine if there were 659.3999 humans out there who had voted illegally that none of them would have been found. Talk about Sound Politics being a bastion of rank incompetence.

There is nothing difficult in the chain of reasoning that I went through years ago, and I am nearly certain that others came to the same conclusion, independently. I think it likely that unscrupulous Democratic operatives saw that they could gain a few votes by making it easier for non-citizens to vote, and that Republican operatives saw that they could be on the side of truth and justice — and gain a few votes, net — by putting tighter controls on registration and voting. Understanding that non-citizens were sometimes tipping elections to the Democratic Party would explain, for example, why George Soros, and others, put money into the Secretary of State Project.

Not the actual, legit disenfranchisement of voters that happens when you put those things in place. It’s the 0.000235% at most of people.

As has happened far too often in recent years, I wish that research had proved me wrong, wish that our close elections were not sometimes being determined by illegal votes.

Done! Today only I can grant wishes.

Cross posted at Jim Miller on Politics.

I’m totally reading it again!

(For the record: I can think of a few places where illegal votes by non-citizens might help Republican candidates, for example, where there were many immigrants from Russia, or other countries that have suffered from Communism.)

For the record, I’m not sure that immigrants from Russia today are particularly opposed to Communism. Does Jim Miller not know what’s happened in the last couple decades in Russia? Anyway, there can be lots of reasons that people vote.

– On Street Harassment

– I don’t know why we’ve developed a system where Microsoft gives any money to anyone.

– OMG look at all the ferrigners votin’ in R elektionz. Oh, wait, what? Facts?

– The fact that so much misery was created for so little should permanently shame the justices who voted for it. It’s judicial review at its least defensible.

– I cannot tell you how much it warms my heart that K Records is getting involved in the Thurston County PUD race.

– Light Up Your Ride

– The sunset was pretty spectacular last night.

– Join Mayor Murray on a vigil walk for 7-year-old struck on MLK

– I don’t know why you would want to be Ray Rice for Halloween this year, but don’t.

– Wait, some people don’t mark their ballot based on how they feel about the undead?

– The background checks initiative looks like it’ll pass, still vote, for goodness sake.

– It’s led to countless pieces scrutinizing the president’s policies less on the merits and more on their capacity to be emotionally satisfying. Obama is often expected to respond to crises the way a pundit would, and when he doesn’t, his actions are deemed necessarily flawed, often with little regard for merit.

– Oh, but I like their tofu.

After the Marysville-Pilchuck High School shooting, Goldy quite rightly said that now is the time to talk about this, including in ways that are politicized. It’s happening and if we can’t talk about reasonable solutions for dealing with these things as they happen, they’re going to keep happening.

But the other question is when the fuck would be the time we talk about them?

I’ve mentioned on this blog before that I had a roommate who was murdered.* It was the better part of a decade ago, and shit still sets me off about it sometimes. I mean I literally cried about it this weekend (and writing this post), and certainly part of the reason I’ve been thinking about it more now is it is the gun debates in the air. But they’re still worth talking about, because they’re the only way we figure out policy.

Shit sets me off sometimes. It was pretty close to where I was working, and for at least a year I would drive past where it happened at lunch or after work even though it was a little out of the way. One time I stopped my car and got out and had actually ate just looking at the building, but usually I just drove past. A couple years ago, I had jury duty and they asked the jury pool about crimes that had been committed to people who we knew. I told the story, as I’d done before without incident, and I don’t know if it was the judge saying “I’m so sorry” because sometimes strangers saying that is more of a problem than people I know, or because I woke up early and it was just a stressful day but I just couldn’t concentrate the rest of the day. I have a cousin who I love very much but who is a big ol’ NRA person and sometimes I argue with him about these things, and it’s super draining.

And so I’ve been reluctant to get involved in this particular debate beyond some snarky posts because, as important as it is, it also sometimes seems like just a big ol’ chance to feel like shit. I have some family who are pretty actively volunteering on the campaign, and for a while I thought I should too, but I just can’t. And I don’t know if there will be a right time for the family and friends at SPU. And I don’t know that there will be a right time for people whose families have just been victims of street crime or suicide with guns. I don’t know that there is or that there will be a right time for me in the future, but I’m still glad we’re having the debate because it’s the only way we can prevent the next one.

[Read more…]

– What’s broken about Mars Hill is the misogyny and homophobia more than the way one guy wrote about it, or even the money stuff.

– I’d like to take a step back and urge you to question why you or anyone would take to the internet to insult a celebrity to begin with.

– Downballot races like County Crank deserve more attention.

– There’s all sorts of Halloween stuff. I don’t think I’m going out this year, but if I do it’ll be as sexy Carl Ballard.

– All the best to Kevin Drum

– Did You Know about cities are some of my favorite Tom The Dancing Bug.

In case you were wondering how to vote on the initiatives, vote the opposite of this:

VOTE YES ON INITIATIVE I-591– The WSRP joins the Washington Council of Police and Sheriffs (WACOPS), the Washington State Law Enforcement Firearms Instructors Association (WSLEFIA), and 7 county sheriffs to support I-591. I-591 protects our national guidelines which prohibit the state from confiscating firearms from law abiding citizens without due process. Initiative I-591 would also prevent government interference in temporary gun loans to friends or relatives, and blocks the state from creating a universal gun registry that would set the stage for future confiscation.

Look, if you’re going to loan a murder weapon to someone, the state shouldn’t be involved. It’s especially true if you’re deluded enough to believe that the state is somehow in the process of setting “the stage for future confiscation.” Honestly, saying out loud that you think the state might “set the stage for future confiscation” is proof beyond proof that you don’t deserve a gun, and the state should take it away. They won’t, of course, but they should at that point.

VOTE NO ON INITIATIVE I-594 – The WSRP joins the Washington Council of Police and Sheriffs (WACOPS), Washington State Law Enforcement Firearms Instructors Association (WSLEFIA), and 17 county sheriffs in opposing I-594. While supporters of I-594 claim it is about “background checks,” actually it is an 18-page document of complex regulations and restrictions that pose a severe danger to our Second Amendment rights, and criminalizes the actions of law-abiding gun owners. None of the modern mass shootings would have been prevented by the regulations in this initiative. I-594 would expand the state government database of lawful hand gun owners, and in sweeping language it would severely restrict private loans and transfers of guns between friends or relatives.

Um, isn’t “criminalizes the actions of law-abiding gun owners” an oxymoron? I mean if what they’re doing becomes criminal, and they keep doing it, then they’re no longer law-abiding. Unless you think any regulation on guns “criminalizes the actions of law-abiding gun owners” and if that’s the case, then maybe you aren’t in a position to talk intelligently about potential gun regulations. Also, it wouldn’t restrict the transfer of guns between anyone, it would mean that you’ll have to fill out some paperwork some times.

VOTE NO ON INITIATIVE I-1351 – The WSRP supports our school teachers. However, this initiative in the guise of “reducing class size,” actually requires four billion dollars of extra spending in the next biennium with two-thirds going to administration and overhead. This budget busting initiative provides no funding mechanism for this additional spending, so it would lead to tax increases and pressure to impose a state income tax.

We support school teachers, but not at the cost of doing anything to support school teachers. We support the idea of school teachers in the abstract. We support the political good will that comes with saying you support school teachers. We support looking like we care about education.

Also, but not for nothing this paragraph pretty casually admits that you can’t have lower class sizes without an income tax. The state GOP basically can’t come up with non-income tax related ways we might pay for this initiative. I thought there was all that waste fraud and abuse just lying around to save us. Turns out, no.

– A suspension of sweeps of Tent City 3 is great news indeed. Now maybe the city can work on more permanent solutions to homelessness.

– With no further ado, I give you the ten best reasons to ban me from the Bay Area Science Festival after I retweeted a tweet that linked to a blog post revealing a horrible thing someone else did:

– A more walkable Olympia would be nice.

– Artist stitches catcalls into beautiful needlework

– Cathy McMorris Rodgers’ Q&A about innovative policies won’t answer questions about innovative polices.

– Since I mentioned unnecessarily quoting the founders last week, I don’t even understand why you’d go out of your way to misquote them.

– It turns out SPD officer’s nonsense lawsuit was nonsense.

– Guns are a health issue because when people get shot it does all sorts of bad things to their health, like kills them or paralyzes them or, at best, seriously wounds them. Anyway, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy would not be out there confiscating everyone’s guns. Too bad. He tweeted something.

– Here’s hoping the red bus lane on Battery actually works.

– GIF-splanation is my favorite new word.

– Everything Old Is Nuts Again

– Well, I’m officially looking forward to No Cities to Love.

– “It’s a joke to think they could ramp up the amount of tankers through our territory and convince us world class systems are in place. We’re scared. We’re scared about what this could mean.”

– (a) Well done Twitter. (b) I really like Keene, NH.

– Measure 89 provides equality for the majority of Oregonians (50.5%) who are women and girls.

– I know this post was meant to reassure me that spiders can’t burrow under my skin, but since I hadn’t thought of it as a problem before, I’m still worse for having read it.

– WSDOT is looking for people to write haiku for the ramps to nowhere. I’m more of a fan of Double Dactyl, so here’s my contribution:

Higgledy piggledy,
Interstate 520
Had an idea to make
Another ramp for your car

But if you drive on it,
Uncharacteristically,
For this mode of transit
You won’t go far

You’re welcome?

This is a little old, but State Senator Mike Padden is writing nonsense in the Spokesman-Review.

Gov. Jay Inslee’s justice reinvestment task force has met just twice and has until December to produce its recommendations. Already, however, there are signals that it may propose easing up on prison time for drug and nonviolent property offenders as a way to save money and delay building a new state prison. Some outside commentators have called that a “smart-on-crime” approach.

The executive order to form the task force was only signed in June. Then it takes some time to get everything together. They’ve also had another meeting since this was published, that presumably Padden knew was on the agenda.

The task force was created in June through a federal-level initiative that is supposed to take a data-driven approach to increasing and reinvesting in public safety. Yet the data I have, as Senate Law and Justice Committee chairman, fail to support the notion that putting more burglars on community supervision will do much – except put them in a better position to reoffend.

Keeping people in jail for low level property crimes seems like an excellent way to integrate them back into society. Also, are we deriding the very notion of data driven approaches?

“Facts are stubborn things,” John Adams once said. Here are three facts that cannot be ignored:

There was really no value added in quoting Adams there. The guy who signed the Alien and Sedition Acts likes facts. Here are some context free facts about prison in Washington:

First, reports of crimes and arrests have declined across Washington. Since 1990, the state’s population is up 40 percent, yet arrests are down 18 percent, and overall crime is down 10 percent. Washington’s incarceration rate is almost one-half the national average, and its property and violent crime rates have fallen one-third or more in about 10 years. There is no reason to believe these trends will not continue.

So less crime means we need to get tougher on criminals? It’s solid thinking right there.

And not for nothing, but we started doing adult drug courts in 2003 as one way of of moving away from mass incarceration. I’m sure whoever the equivalent of Senator Padden then was complaining about mollycoddling criminals and addicts. But while correlation doesn’t equal causation — and of course there are multiple causes for anything as complex as changes in prison population — I would posit that that’s a more reasonable explanation for a decline in crime in that time than harsh penalties.

The root cause of overcrowding at state correctional institutions is not the number of inmates but a lack of bed space that coincides with the state’s closure of not one, not two, but three prisons in recent years.

How we would pay for keeping more prisons open with the recent spate of austerity budgets pushed for by the GOP is left to the reader’s imagination.

Second, Washington’s prison population contains a large number of serious criminals. Almost 5,000 of those in prison as of June 30, 2014 – or 28 percent of the total prison population – were there for crimes of seriousness level 11 or higher. Level 16 is for prisoners serving life sentences or on death row; levels 11 and 12 include first- and second-degree rape, rape of a child, and intentional assaults causing great bodily harm.

I thought this article was about “drug and nonviolent property offenders.” Now we’re talking about the quarter or so of offenders that are in prison for serious crimes? How you deal with addiction (or for that matter people relaxing after work or however else non-addictively they use drugs) and petty theft should probably be different from how you deal with more serious crimes.

More than one-half of those admitted to prison in 2013 served time at least once before, and more than 40 percent of those admitted were convicted of crimes against persons. While less than one-third were property offenders, even 40 percent of them had prior violent offenses.

There’s no discussion in this if going to prison as opposed to committing those crimes is the cause of future crimes or escalation. But maybe don’t put how Washington’s prisons aren’t doing a good job of rehabilitating people into your article about how we need to send more people to prison for longer in Washington.

I suspect these statistics, which came from the task force, understate the dangerous nature of Washington’s prison population. For example, the governor’s group categorized certain burglaries as “nonviolent” offenses. Either way, even the task-force members would be hard-pressed to deny that earning a prison sentence in Washington means committing a lot of serious crimes. That’s how it should be, which is exactly why trading prison sentences for community supervision is no way to increase public safety.

Well it depends on the crime.

Finally, reducing punishment doesn’t reduce crime. Property offenses are the least-punished offenses in Washington, so this year I introduced legislation to increase sentences for habitual property offenders. In public testimony on this bill, law enforcement and lawyers told of offenders with 50 or more prior property crimes who don’t face prison time until after a dozen or more felony convictions. We heard similar accounts at the Senate Law and Justice Committee’s Oct. 3 work session in Spokane Valley – an area that is no stranger to property crime. In such cases, who is looking out for the victims?

I’m sorry, but if someone is committing 50 property crimes and not getting punished for it, they aren’t serious crimes. Or they’re like children or there’s some other mitigating factor.

Some argue that increasing supervision after prison will reduce recidivism. I am not persuaded, especially given a recent Freedom Foundation report that uncovered serious problems with home detention and electronic monitoring in our state, including a lack of adequate service and timely notifications to law enforcement. What’s to discourage a burglar from stealing if being caught is unlikely to mean prison or even effective community supervision?

So instead of having a bill to make supervision work better, Senator Padden decided to introduce legislation for throwing people into prison.

Benjamin Franklin once wrote that “pardoning the bad is injuring the good.” While releasing certain offenders may save money in the short run, doing so stands to hurt the people of Washington in the long run – and in more than their pocketbooks.

That quote is better than the Adams one, but I’d still ax it. Anything you want to say can probably be said better without it. Anyway, congrats on having a copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and/or having memorized two vague quotes from Founding Fathers.

– I haven’t read it yet, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t link to The Stranger’s endorsements.

– These reframes of the criminal justice system are good because they focus on the prevention of trauma rather than punishing things after the fact. But there is still a long way to go before we live in a world where women’s bodies aren’t commodified, exploited, and victimized.

– How do we deal with the idea of the mom taxi for people living car free?

– Pregnant Texans Are Being Charged With Crimes That Don’t Exist

– What’s Up Seattle?

A Hoquiam High School football player has been accused of raping two women. You’ll notice the story isn’t former high school football player, because he’s still on the team.

Two women came forward this summer and accused Smith of rape.

One, a former girlfriend, said Smith forced himself upon her when she was 16 in December 2012.

The second accuser, an 18-year-old girl, was described by prosecutors as an acquaintance from Facebook.

In both cases, the accusers said they told Smith to stop and repeatedly said “no” when he made sexual advances.

According to court documents, Smith admitted one of the women was saying “no,” but the detective said Smith told him he “thought she was saying no for pleasure and not to stop having sex.”

Innocent until proven guilty is an important thing in our laws and in society, and it should be respected. But when two different women say he raped them, and when he admits to going forward after one of them said no, kick him off the football team, at the very least.

– There is still a lot of work, of course. But I think it’s fair to say public pressure on Cherry Point (and legit safety concerns) have produced quite a victory.

– I’m also mostly of the opinion that the ACA is a great accomplishment. Even if I would have preferred a public option or just single payer.

– The Whiteness Project: Good Luck with That

– I realize a claim is not definitive proof, but Rosalind Brazel deserves to have her claims taken seriously.

– What women like Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, Brianna Wu, Adria Richards, Kathy Sierra, and others have gone through, and continue to go through, all for having the unmitigated temerity to be women in gaming and tech, is incredible. And reprehensible. And shameful beyond description. And harmful.

– Congrats to Alaska gay couples, and supporters of the same.

– I keep passing the Pronto Cycle booths. I can’t wait to try it out.

– I look forward to future groundbreaking judicial decisions such as, “Yes, ‘finders keepers, losers weepers’ does apply to your PIN at the gas station.”

– Those of you who read Dave Neiwert’s book And Hell Followed With Her will remember Oin Oakstar (and those of you who haven’t should). He has died in Everett.

– What Seattlish said. This has been What Seattlish Said.

– 3 reasons why I wish I could tell you to vote for none of the above in the Clerk race, but I won’t

– #TWIBnation on the Ground in the Aftermath of the #shawshooting

– The Counter-Intuitivist