He backed Annette "gut-check" Ziegler, he voted a big Yes on the amendment, and he thinks we should stay in Iraq for, well, it's not clear how long. (Indeed he's appalled people accuse the Bush Administration of lying in the runup to the Iraq war.)
In other words, Rick Esenberg holds views that put him squarely and snugly on the right. But because, unlike a staggering number of his ideological confreres, he can write, because he can reason, because he sometimes says reasonable things, and because he reasonably respectfully engages with lefties on his blog -- and on the radio -- he is considered someone worth listening to by lefty bloggers. (Indeed the Brawler gives the Shark credit for having the sense of humor to prominently include Brawler's description of him as "the shame of the Brawler's native Washington Heights" on his blog.)
That's why the Brawler was disappointed when he read Esenberg's recent piece arguing why we need voter ID -- a move that, significant research demonstrates, could suppress the number of voters by nearly three percent. That's a sizable fraction in today's climate. (Folbum's written extensively on the voter fraud myth.)
From Esenberg:
During the 2004 election, I was a poll watcher at the Washington Park Library polling place. The woman running the place was a consummate professional and there was, at one point, eight lawyers on site.
You could have waltzed in there and voted in the name of someone else or someone dead and we would have had no chance of catching you.
If a number of people did this, what might show up later would be anomalies in the number of votes or the addresses of voters. These might be clerical errors or there might be evidence of fraud. It may or may not be possible to tell which.
Second, the notion that identification-related fraud "doesn't happen" requires one to believe either that no one cares enough about the results of election to try or, unlike every other area of human endeavor, we all manage to become saints when making some of the most important choices a community must make.
My guess is that there isn't widespread identification fraud because someone would talk, but that's about the only way to catch it. Still, we normally don't accept the absence of confession as equivalent to the absence of crime, see. e.g., racial discrimination which also has a low rate of confession and "capture." (Brawler's bold)
Opposing voter ID seems to be a choice to accept the potential (and, to some degree, the reality) of fraud because you don't think it's "fair" to require someone who wants to vote to go to the trouble of getting identification or, more accurately, because you know that many of the people whose votes you want won't think it's worth the effort.
Hyping the threat of a vast voter fraud conspiracy is the sort of nonsense the Brawler would expect from the likes of Ol Lady Owen Robinson or Esenberg's No. 1 fanboy, Patrick McIlheran. Not the Shark!
Alas.
Esenberg, in his highminded fashion, opines saying ID-related fraud "'doesn't happen requires us to believe either that no one cares enough about the results" of an election to try or "we all manage to become saints when making some of the most important choices a community must make."
Stinging! Until you realize there's at least a third thing to consider: Massive ID-related voter fraud -- the kind we have to be worried about -- doesn't happen because it would be incredibly difficult to pull off.
Richard L. Hasen, an election law expert who also is a law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and was ranked one of the top 100 California Lawyers in 2005, made this point in a Slate article last month:
Suppose I want to swing the Missouri election for my preferred presidential candidate. I would have to figure out who the fake, dead, or missing people on the registration rolls are, and then pay a lot of other individuals to go to the polling place and claim to be Mary Poppins or Old Dead Bob, without any return guarantee—thanks to the secret ballot—that any of them will cast a vote for my preferred candidate. Those who do show up at the polls run the risk of being detected ("You're not my neighbor Bob who passed away last year!") and charged with a felony. And for what—$10? As someone who's thought about this a lot, if I really wanted to buy votes in an enforceable and safe way, I'd find eligible voters who would allow me to watch as they cast their absentee ballots for the candidate of my choice. Then, I would pay them. (Notably, ACVR and supporters of voter-ID laws have generally supported exemptions from ID requirements for voters who use absentee ballots.) Or, I might find an election official to change the votes. Polling-place fraud, in short, makes no sense. (Brawler's bold)
Let's say Party X loses to Party Y in an election by 6,000 votes. The election in the next cycle appears headed the same way, so Party X says, "Screw it, bring on the Voter ID fraud." So Party X decides they need to get 7,000 fraudulent votes into the ballots. (If you want to win you're not going to go for 6,001 votes). Let's say you try to do it with 2,000 people voting more than once (You would want a reasonably large number of people to vote fraudulently because you don't want to run the risk of getting stuck in lines, being observed at too many locations, etc. If you try to do it with too few, a thousand or less, you're going through a lot of trouble that might not get rewarded and you increase the likelihood of conspirators being ID'd at the polls.) Those people would need to be found, first of all. And how many people do you ask before you find a person to commit what's clearly a criminal act? Let's be generous and say one out of five people would agree to this for $10 (The Brawler thinks it'd be more like 1 in 10, if not more, but he's never tried doing this). That means you've contacted 10,000 people or more about a criminal conspiracy. And you would probably need a couple hundred volunteers or staff to run such an operation.
Yes, if you have a conspiracy involving thousands of people, odds are high "someone would talk," as Esenberg says with the understatement that makes him such a fine stylist.
Rolling up his rhetorical sleeves, Esenberg goes on to say: "Still, we normally don't accept the absence of confession as equivalent to the absence of crime, see. e.g., racial discrimination which also has a low rate of confession and 'capture.'"
To which the Brawler responds: you don't create a system that would depress the electorate unless you have evidence a crime has been committed. The onus has to be on advocates of Voter ID that there is a real problem to be combatted, not just their gut-check. You would think that a supporter of a war justified by BS WMD claims would be hesitant about unleashing shock and awe on the electorate without conclusive proof of a problem.
In his concluding paragraph, Esenberg says:
Opposing voter ID seems to be a choice to accept the potential (and, to some degree, the reality) of fraud because you don't think it's "fair" to require someone who wants to vote to go to the trouble of getting identification or, more accurately, because you know that many of the people whose votes you want won't think it's worth the effort.
Actually, the Brawler thinks that the republic is healthiest when the greatest number make their voices heard. Voter ID would depress that number, so the Brawler opposes it. (Though Hasen has a proposal for a universal registration/Voter ID initiative that the Brawler would contemplate supporting though he suspects right wingers would reject it.)And yes, the Brawler is perfectly willing to accept the reality of fraud. It's a cost benefit analysis. If someone can demonstrate the damage wrought by fraud exceeds that of preventing people from voting, the Brawler would reconsider.
In comments, Esenberg goes on:
In fact, what does it mean to say that votes are "deterred"? Any voter ID law that I would support would have to provide free ID and some outreach. If that is done, then what does it mean to say that someone has not voted because they lack ID?
If it means that someone has not voted because he or she can't be bothered to obtain ID, then have we really deterred voting in any way that we ought to be concerned about? Dad29 raises an interesting question. Is high turnout good in and of itself? If you won't make the effort to obtain ID to vote, will you make the effort to inform yourself about who you are voting for? And, if you won't, should the rest of us care if you stay home?
(The Brawler would be interested in hearing how Esenberg defines "some outreach." Would it be less ambitious than Hasen's? The Brawler thinks so.)
The Brawler fails to see why a citizen who will register to vote in one scenario but not in another should be considered unworthy of participating in an election. Who established Esenberg (who decries "elitism" elsewhere) or other Voter ID supporters as the arbiters of virtue on this front? And his ultramontane question "Is high turnout good in and of itself" and concern about people informing themselves about the candidates made the Brawler laugh, albeit mordantly.
If in 2004 we had disqualified Fox TV viewers who thought that Sadaam Hussein was involved in 9/11, would Bush be in the White House?
Cost-benefit analysis: Shoplifting costs us all a lot. So let's depress the number of shoppers.
Let's especially focus on those most likely to shoplift. Let's make them show ID not just at the entry of a mall, and not just some of the time. Nope, let's stop them and make them show ID at the entry of any and every store, all of the time. . . .
And if they don't have IDs, and they can't afford the cost-benefit result of taking off from work to get IDs at understaffed state agencies, tough.
Fewer shoppers means fewer shoplifters. If the logic works for democracy, it ought to work for capitalism -- and to heck with laissez faire, letting businessowners decide that systems they put in place to curtail shoplifting reduce the crime to acceptable levels.
If they don't like it, close their doors. The Shark should love the logic of it.
Posted by: Anonymous | June 07, 2007 at 09:06 AM
great post. while i know nothing about your local politics, you can take this post and stick almost anywhere in the country. just change the name of the local guy writing about why we need voter ID to stop the imaginary voter fraud and your golden. thx for posting.
Posted by: hotpotatomash | June 11, 2007 at 08:24 PM