Eric The Blue

Ballot designs in south Florida

 

Criticism of election administration in south Florida has it all wrong.  The problem isn't with security or counting.  The problem is with ballot design.  The above is an image of a Broward county ballot from the recent midterm election.  Notice how the ballot instructions are entirely contained within the first of the ballot's three columns.  At the top of the middle column, where it can't be missed, is the high-profile governor's race.  The US Senate race is squirreled away in the first column beneath the instructions, where it can be easily overlooked by someone whose eye is attracted first to the gubernatorial choice.  The ballot instructions should go all the way across the top of the ballot, and there should never ever be, in the same column, both instructions and a space for voting.  It's especially bad if the instructions take up most of the column and then, at the very bottom, there are just one or two ballot choices to be made.  This detail of the Broward County ballot is expressly condemned by commissions that study election administration and issue recommendations on "best practices" to election officials.

Does it matter?  Well, all over Florida, from the panhandle down the Gulf side, around Miami-Dade, but skipping Broward County, then up the rest of the Atlantic coast to Georgia, including also the interior--Orlando, Gainseville--the number of votes for governor and US senator were a near match.  Which makes sense: who would trouble themselves to vote but skip the election for either governor or US Senate, the two marquee races?  In Broward County, however, about 26,000 ballots--3.7%, or about 1-out-of-every-27--indicated a choice for governor but no vote in the senate race.  It's because of the ballot design!  Broward is a heavily Democratic county and the most populous in Florida.  The Democratic Senate candidate, Bill Nelson, got more than twice as many votes in Broward as Republican Rick Scott.  Had there been an additional 26,000 votes, distributed between the candidates in the same proportion, Nelson would have gained about 10,000 votes in that one county.  It appears right now that Scott is going to be declared the winner of the statewide race by about 12,000 votes.

So, yes, it matters.

The astounding aspect of this misadventure is to me the way in which education did not occur.  Palm Beach County is just to the north of Broward County.  In the 2000 presidential election, the vote for wingnut Pat Buchanan tracked the Bush vote all over Florida: that is, Buchanan got his highest vote shares in the counties that went heavily for Bush and he did his worst in the counties carried by Gore.  (Skeptics can satisfy themselves of this fact by clicking around on this interactive map.) The exception was Palm Beach County, which was one of Buchanan's best results in the state despite going for Gore by 62-35 percent.  What could account for that?  The terrible design of the Palm Beach County ballot!  In that case, it was the notorious "butterfly ballot" that placed candidates for the same office not in a single vertical array but in separate columns, so that some names were opposite others.  It happened that Gore's name was opposite Buchanan's, and the result was almost certainly that a lot of people (especially the sight-impaired elderly among south Florida's population), meaning to vote for Gore, inadvertently marked their ballots for Buchanan.  In the certified final result, Buchanan received 3,411 votes in the Democratic stronghold of Palm Beach, and Bush carried the state by 537 votes.

The point is not about partisan advantage but just basic competence.  (The consequences of the incompetence fall by chance hither or thither.)  What happened in Palm Beach County in 2000 should have alerted election officials from sea to shining sea about the perils of poor ballot design.  But apparently officials in the county next to Palm Beach weren't paying attention.  I'm sure they weren't the only ones, but by bad luck Florida's close elections are directing attention to their incompetence.  Administering elections is what election officials do for a living.  Why aren't they better at it?  I have to laugh every time I see on the news an item about some fledgling democracy conducting an election "with the assistance of American advisers."  Like we're the great experts!  Our charity should begin at home, in Florida.

O O O O that Shakespeherian rag

The place of A.C. Bradley in the history of Shakespeare criticism may be judged by the following lines from the pen of some forgotten wag of the 1920s, which places it a couple of decades after the publication of Shakespearean Tragedy and a decade before Bradley's death, in 1935:

I dreamt last night that Shakespeare's Ghost
Sat for a civil service post.
The English paper for that year
Had several questions on King Lear--
Which Shakespeare answered very badly,
Because he hadn't read his Bradley.

The most interesting droppings from the Wikipedia entry for Bradley concern how he was the youngest of 21 [sic] children born to the preacher Charles Bradley and his second wife, a circumstance that may account for Bradley never marrying and living for much of his adult life with one of his many sisters: I imagine each of them, at some point in their young lives, separately considering the crowded conditions in the parsonage and concluding that there must be a better way to live.  

Shakespearean Tragedy is largely a commentary on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, which are taken up in turn and in the order of probable composition.  For the general reader, the attraction is accessibility.  Over and over again, you read something and think it's exactly right and would have occurred to you, too, if only you were as smart and careful a reader as Bradley.  For example:

Imagine Goneril uttering the famous words [of Lady Macbeth, explaining why she had not herself killed Duncan], Had he not resembled/My father as he slept, I had done 't.  They are spoken, I think, without any sentiment--impatiently, as though she regretted her weakness: but it was there.

I wonder whether Bradley's choice of plays to discuss elevated them above the others (so strong has been his influence), or whether he chose them because they were already regarded as preeminent.  It does seem that Hamlet, the first of them, likely written in 1600, the year Shakespeare turned 36, represents a new phase: it's about half again as long as any of its approximately twenty predecessors in the drama and contains more than 600 words that Shakespeare had not till then deployed in any play or poem.  He also for the first time abandons plot plausibility in order to create swirling effects of psychological disturbance, despair, savagery, and nihilism--effects that carry through in Othello (1603?), King Lear (1605?), and Macbeth (1606?).  The implications for Shakespeare's biography are intriguing but Bradley's focus is on these four plays, especially the characters.  One learns to keep one's guard up and not be knocked out by famous, soaring passages that are frequently turned in some way by a terse and regrettably forgotten reply.  

Macbeth:
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

Doctor:
Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.

And from The Tempest:

Miranda:
O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in 't!

Prospero:
'Tis new to thee.

Trump: "This is what I've been saying"

It happens that yesterday, while I was typing up my opus on Trump's bogus claims of voter fraud, the president was himself sitting for an oval office interview with The Daily Caller.  One of the questions related to the ongoing vote count in Broward County, Florida.

Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States:

Look, you know, the bottom line--it's, she's [Broward County election commissioner Brenda Snipes] a disaster.  You look at her past, she's a disaster.  Even with me.  I won Florida and, you remember?  That area, Broward, didn't come in.  It didn't come in.  I think Palm Beach was like--they wouldn't call Florida, I won.  Then it got to a point where I won by enough that all the votes of the people that lived there would, you know, in other words--you can only put in so many votes, although she may change that system.  

You can only put in a number of people that are registered voters or live there.  Now they're, I guess they were trying to take illegal voters but these are--I've been saying, this is a problem all over the country, by the way.  This is what I've been saying.

This is a problem in California that's so bad of illegals voting.  This is a California problem and if you notice, almost every race--I was watching today--out of like 11 races that are in question they're gonna win all of them.

The Republicans don't win and that's because of potentially illegal votes, which is what I've been saying for a long time.  I have no doubt about it.  And I've seen it, I've had friends talk about it when people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles.  Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again.  Nobody takes anything.  It's really a disgrace what's going on.

The disgrace is that, voter ID.  If you buy, you know, a box of cereal, if you do anything, you have a voter ID.

Well, over here, the only thing you don't is if you're a voter of the United States.  A voter in the United States of America.  I think it's a disgrace what's going on.   Really a disgrace.  And they try to shame everybody by calling them racist or calling them something, anything they can think of, when you say you want voter ID.  But voter ID is a very important thing.

If you look at what happened in New Hampshire, where thousands of people came up and voted from a very liberal part of Massachusetts and they came up in buses and they voted.  I said, 'what's going on over here,' my people said, 'you won New Hampshire easily except they have tremendous numbers of buses coming up.'  They're pouring up by the hundreds, buses of people getting out, voting.  Then they're supposed to go back within 90 days.  And of the people that are supposed to go back, almost none of them do.  In other words, they go back after the vote is over.  They go back--and I think it's like three percent--I mean, almost nobody goes back to show that, you know, that they were allowed to vote.  And so what do you do?  Recall the election.  I mean, there, you should be able to recall the election.

Whew.  I think I got that right.  The full transcript is here, if anyone wants to check my work.  It's sort of hard to transcribe, toggling back and forth between screens.  Usually you can read a sentence on one screen and memorize it long enough to type it into another screen, because the sentence is a sentence and makes sense, but that is not an advantage bestowed upon stenographers of our president's speech acts.

Massive fraud? No, just counting votes

It's pretty clear by now that the eternal Republican cry--"Voter fraud!"--every time they lose a close election is an automatic reflex unconnected to reality.  They disbanded their "voter fraud commission" without discovering a thing, yet here is the president:

Trying to STEAL two big elections in Florida! We are watching closely!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 10, 2018

It's a serious charge.  What is the evidence?  The elections are close, and as more ballots are counted, the Democratic candidates gain; therefore, the votes are being "discovered" "out of nowhere" and there is "massive fraud" (Trump's words from other tweets).  I think that's a fair summary of the unspecified "evidence." 

But of course the votes aren't being discovered out of nowhere.  There are mailed ballots, provisional ballots, overseas ballots, military ballots.  All require special processing, the mailed ballots are by far the most numerous, and all but the military ballots trend Democratic.  We know this from past experience and it's not that hard to understand why.  People who vote on Election Day self-select for being older and more traditional in outlook--the selfsame traits that incline one toward voting Republican.  They include most retired people, who do not find it inconvenient to show up at their polling place on a particular Tuesday at 10 in the morning or 2 in the afternoon.  People who request a ballot beforehand and mail it in so that it's received by Election Day--they're a different group: younger, impatient with tradition (and lines), many with jobs (or hustles) that require travel, so that on October 1 they don't know where they'll be on a particular Tuesday five weeks hence.  It's their envelopes that are now being opened, signatures compared, ballots smoothed for the scanner, the results added to the Election Day tally.  And these voters prefer the Democrats.  It's all familiar to anyone interested in elections and explains, for example, why two years ago Hillary Clinton's margin in the national popular vote kept increasing as more and more ballots were counted after Election Day.  There was no controversy about it then because there was no prospect of the mailed ballots affecting the electoral college result.  Now, however, the Democrat passed the Republican in the Arizona Senate race, more and more Democratic candidates are being declared the winner in California congressional races, and the high-profile races for Senate and governor in Florida are tightening.  Massive fraud!

President Trump may or may not be ignorant of these widely known facts but it is certainly true that he enjoys fomenting anger, suspicion, division, and doubt.  He hasn't quite said so, but his view seems to be that any narrow Democratic victory is illegitimate, and his camp followers concur.  Here is John Hinderaker, of the Power Line blog, on the day after the election:

The midterm elections are turning out just about exactly as most observers expected.  By historical standards, the Democrats underperformed.  They stand to net somewhere between 25 and 35 House seats, a mediocre performance for a new president's first midterms.  Meanwhile, the GOP will gain two to four Senate seats, depending on how Arizona and Montana turn out.  Republicans Martha McSally and Matt Rosendale currently lead in those races, which will test the theory that Republicans can't win close elections because the Democrats can always find a few extra votes if they need them.

I love how lightly this is tossed off.  The "evidence" will be if the Democrat wins (which they did).  What could possibly rebut the (very serious) charge?  The result of the 2000 presidential election?  The Republicans ultimately prevailing this year in Florida's gubernatorial and senate races?  A long list of  elections between these bookends in which the Republican was declared the winner of a very close race?  I'm not going to bother compiling such a list, because the claim cannot be falsified.  It's put out there without evidence and there is no evidence that would cause it to be withdrawn.

Pollsters outperform my new ISP

Oh boy, I have switched internet service providers and no wonder I'm saving money with the new guys: so far, all they've done is zinged my credit card for the first month's payment and expressed puzzlement about why I can't connect.  The upside is I am discovering how pleasant it is to sit inside this neighborhood café with a plate full of pancakes, a cup of coffee, complimentary WiFi, and the sun streaming in the tall windows.  Hope I don't spill syrup on my keyboard.  

This being south Minneapolis, the young woman in front of me, way more chic than I (honest!), also has her laptop open, and is either remotely prosecuting her employer's business or maybe working on her screen play, the Diablo Cody of 2018.  The young man over my right shoulder is running down Trump, and his female companion, during a brief interlude, finally has a chance to mention that her relative once worked for Walter Mondale.  I have enough snark to cover my fellow travelers with the left-overs.

I've been a little worried about committing a 21st century social gaffe, appearing standoffish when it's really just my bumbling new ISP.  Sue, I do follow Andy Borowitz--or did, until this past weekend, when I started saving a few dollars a month on home internet.  I just got up for a coffee refill and noticed that the Trump-hater is wearing a t-shirt that says "Shakespeare Downtown."  I don't know what that means but for some reason am reminded of all the times I've thought to myself that what the MAGA crowd calls "virtue signaling" is almost always just plain virtuous.  What can you say about people who try to make a virtue of their sneering contempt for people doing good things?  You volunteer at the shelter?  Weak!

The result of the midterm elections is moving me toward the conclusion that pollsters get an undeserved bad reputation in just the same way that weathermen do: only their failures are remembered.  It's cold today, just as the guy on the radio said it would be yesterday, and the Democrats will take control of the House, with a net gain of 35-40 seats, though the Republicans might gain a couple of Senate seats, also all as predicted.  Moreover, supposed errors are exaggerated.  For example, at the end of the 2016 presidential campaign, an average of the polls indicated Clinton had about a 3-point lead, and she won the national popular vote by just over 2 percent.  Were the polls off by 0.9%?  Horrors!  (It's more likely that there was a bit of movement toward Trump in the final hours.)  On Election Eve 2016, Nate Silver, a card-carrying member of the despised media elite, gave Trump a 30 percent chance of prevailing in the electoral college.  A couple days later, Trumpists gleefully noted his "error" but all that happened is that Jose Altuve's grounder made it through the infield. The pollsters did a lot better than Trump has.

Pitching a new game show

Idea for a game show:

Contestants are shown clips of actual American nutbag political types holding forth and also satiric send-ups of them such as might be performed on SNL or a Comedy Central program.  The contestants get points for correctly identifying the clip as "satire" or "real life."  For example:

 

Last night, God answered Michele Bachmann’s prayer that Democrats hadn’t taken the House by giving the Dems a few more seats. #ElectionResults2018 pic.twitter.com/6CUsLwtaey

— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) November 7, 2018

Winning answer for this one would be "real life."  It's hard to lampoon some people, they are so good at it themselves.  

 

Election notes

 

Scrolling through election results last night, I noticed the above ballot initiative from the state of Nevada.  When I first saw it, the ayes and nays were evenly split, which seemed predictable, but, as the night wore on, woke men weighed in and the initiative is going to pass.  If MAGA men were smarter, they'd realize that the tax burden is being shifted onto their broad shoulders.  Maybe the next ballot initiative will relate to sales tax on chewing tobacco.

It was a rough night for Democrats in the Senate races, but I have hopes for Tester pulling through in Montana.  As of a couple hours ago, the Republican, Rosendale, was leading by fewer than 3,000 votes.  The results from 106 precincts (out of 669 total) remain to be tabulated, and they are mainly from counties carried by Tester.  The New York Times is currently projecting that when all ballots are counted there is an 89% chance that Tester will win.  In the Arizona Senate race, which is also still too close to call, the Times thinks the Republican, McSally, has a 60% chance of prevailing over Democrat Kyrsten Sinema.

No one took me up on the bet I offered regarding the US Senate and governor races in five states: Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin.  These were the key states in Trump's electoral college win, and I thought his support had eroded sufficiently that it would be safe to bet that the Democrats would win a majority--at least six--of the high-profile statewide races in these swing states.  And it turned out that, despite narrowly losing both Florida contests, the Democrats went 7-for-10, including 6-for-6 in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.  Of the Democrats' seven wins, only the gubernatorial result in Wisconsin was close.  So, even if it was only because you weren't aware of the offer, congratulations on not taking the bait.  

The national result was bifurcated: a Democratic surge in the suburbs around the country's urban centers gave the Democrats their new House majority, while Republicans did very well in the Senate races, which by chance this year were contested mainly in smaller, more rural states.  The local results here in Minnesota exhibit what's happening in the country as a whole.  When I first started working in local government, the director of Hennepin County's election division knew I was interested in politics, and he loved lecturing me on election lore.  One of his maxims concerned household income, which he deemed the most reliable indicator of voting behavior--the higher your income, he said, the more likely you were to be a voter, and the more likely you were to prefer the Republicans.  Maybe it was true then.  It's not anymore.  The Republican incumbent representing a band of mostly affluent suburbs west of Minneapolis was trounced, and a second Republican incumbent was defeated in his south suburban-exurban district.  Meanwhile, Republicans picked up at least one, and probably two, seats in the more rural and hardscrabble first and eighth congressional districts.  If I still worked with that guy I'd tell him that, nowadays, there's a good chance all your representatives are Democrats if you live within ten minutes of a Whole Foods store.  

The local Democrats' statewide victories were fueled by landslides in the Twin Cities metro area, where the huge Democratic vote in the central cities is no longer offset by Republican gains in the suburbs.  In the state legislature, the House of Representatives flipped from Republican to Democratic control, the pickups being almost entirely in the Twin Cities suburbs.  Democrats won the open race for governor by a double-digit margin; likewise, both races for US Senate.  The trend isn't a bad one for Democrats but the name of our local party--the DFL, for Democratic-Farmer-Labor party--is about as apt as that of the NBA's Utah Jazz.  The farmers and laborers are Republicans.  The DFL's winning coalition is made of nonwhites, urban hipsters of assorted stripes, suburban moms, and the young, earnest, educated, highly caffeinated teachers, lawyers, and high-tech types who live in my neighborhood with refrigerators full of craft beer.  In the 1850s, the divide was regional, and the country almost fell apart.  I don't know what happens when the divide is intra-state.

Just a couple more notes about obsessions of mine.  In the US House, the Democrats got control despite the fact that the Republicans' gerrymander probably prevented a "wave."  Remember the "tea-party midterm" of 2010, when Republicans gained 63 seats in what was considered a Democratic meltdown?  Well, the aggregate vote for US House in that election favored Republicans by 6.7 percent, whereas the Democrats' seemingly more modest victory last night is going to clock in at right around 7.0 percent when all the votes are tabulated.  After the next census, we Democrats have to do whatever we can to keep from getting ratfucked for another decade by Republican mapmakers. 

I described here and here the criminal misadventures of the first two congressional endorsers of Donald Trump for president.  One, Chris Collins, who represents New York's 27th congressional district, is under federal indictment for insider trading.  The other, Duncan Hunter, who represents California's 50th congressional district, has been indicted for over 60 financial offenses connected to using campaign donations to bankroll his expensive personal habits.  Both were reelected last night, raising the question of what happens assuming they are convicted before their terms are up.  I'm trying to think of a clever acronym for GOP wherein G stands for Grifter.

Election Eve

 

Are you wondering what I accomplished on my 25-hour Sunday?  Well, I raked leaves, and then noticed, about an hour later, while I was obsessing about the election, that it maybe would have made more sense to climb the tree and pluck the remaining leaves from the branches, because the green of the grass was already covered again by the brownish orange leaves of the big maple tree in my front yard.  Actually, I sort of knew that was going to happen, but I needed an excuse to be outside doing something on a nice fall day, and now if Mother Nature has any more of them I'll have the same excuse again.

About the election obsessing:  my favorite website these days is FiveThirtyEight, which provides a percentage estimate of how each race in House and Senate will turn out.  Here are the most recent numbers representing the fractional chance the Democratic candidate wins the US Senate race in the named state:

Florida--------5/7
Indiana--------5/7
Missouri-------4/7
Nevada--------5/9
Arizona--------3/5

That in the world according to Nate Silver &c the Democratic candidate is at least a modest favorite in each of these purple to red states is cause for nervous delight.  If the Democrat were to prevail in all of them, the Blue Team would likely be only an upset away--Tennessee? Texas?--from winning a majority in the Senate, and their chances of winning a House majority are in the range of 7-in-8 (FiveThirtyEight's estimate, again).  But, assuming I remember my lessons from Probability and Statistics, the chance the Democrats run the table in those races is the product of the five fractions, and

5/7 x 5/7 x 4/7 x 5/9 x 3/5 < 0.1.

In other words, just under a 1-in-10 chance.  But that's if the outcomes are independent of each other.  Most likely they aren't.  It often happens that "something's in the air"--up the butt of the electorate--so that all or almost all of the close ones break in the same direction, either Democratic or Republican.  There are signs that if that's the case they are more apt to break toward the Dems.  For example, a Quinnipiac poll released this morning showed both Andrew Gillum and Bill Nelson ahead by high single digits in their Florida races for governor and senate, respectively.  Most other polling had shown them ahead but by just a point or two, three at the most--all well within the poll's margin of error.  So in one big state--possible movement toward the Dems detected on Election Eve. Also, the 7-in-8 chance of Democrats winning the House is as high as FiveThirtyEight has pegged it through the entire campaign season.

On the other hand, if the toss-ups break heavily toward the Republicans, they would gain a few seats in the Senate and have a shot at holding the House as well. Trump would then in 2019 push the accelerator to the floor, possibly put out a contract on the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. 

This is what I mean about obsessing.

My TV crush, former Republican Nicolle Wallace, said on MSNBC last night that the turnout war is all about love and hate.  You need a reason to vote, and loving your candidate or hating the other side's are the best motivators. You need one of the two, and she indicated that Democrats were poised to win on account of having both.  We hate Trump, yes.  But the Democrats also have a lot of really good candidates, many of them running neck-and-neck against a Republican in unfriendly territory.  Wallace didn't have time to name them, but I imagine she's thinking, at a minimum, of Beto O'Rourke, Stacey Abrams (the African American woman in an apparent dead heat with the Republican in Georgia's gubernatorial race), and the aforementioned Gillum, who in a debate with his Trumpean opponent landed possibly the season's heaviest body blow (see video above).  It was only two years ago that pundits were wailing about the Democrats' lack of a bench and generalized geriatric malaise--Hillary, Bernie, Joe Biden &c.  I think that problem suddenly cured itself.  

FiveThirtyEight has a guide to watching election returns--what to look for early and late--here.  I'll be looking, too, at the top-of-the-ticket races in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.  These were the five states that fueled Trump's electoral college win, and by chance it happens that each of them has both a US Senate race and a governor's race this year--ten statewide contests in the battlegrounds that two years ago put Trump in the White House.  Of course I don't know what's going to happen, but if anyone wants to bet that the Republicans win half or more of those races, I'm in for as much as you want to be.