Protecting The Right To Vote

One of the (far too many) newsletters I get is one from Democracy Docket. Founded by lawyer Marc Elias in 2020, the platform is dedicated to information, analysis and opinion about voting rights and elections. It’s especially focused on the multiple lawsuits Elias and his firm have brought against the Trump administration–most of which they’ve won.

A recent newsletter was a bit different: it was a list of suggested laws that would protect voting rights.

The newsletter presented the list for consideration by Blue states, presumably because the adoption of such protections would be highly unlikely in Red states like Indiana. (Actually, I think a strategically-smart campaign to protect the vote might do better than the organization thinks…at least, it would be worth a try. Opposing people’s right to cast a ballot is a dicey position–at least, it should be.)

So what are the laws that Democracy Docket believes would strengthen voting rights?

The first is somewhat surprising–passing a statute protecting the right to vote. There is no right to vote in the federal constitution, and although some state constitution include such protections, Elias tells us that “too often these rights are ill-defined or have been limited by past legal precedent.” An explicit, statutory right to vote would correct the ambiguities.

The second is common sense; we need to get over the “signature matching” that states employ to (theoretically) authenticate  mail-in votes. As Elias writes,

The problems with this approach are serious. Every election, hundreds of thousands of lawful ballots are discarded because an election official decides that, in their opinion, two signatures do not match. We need to ban this harmful practice.

First, there is no requirement that a voter maintain a consistent signature to exercise the right to vote. Many voters, particularly young voters, do not keep a consistent signature across documents. With more voters registering on tablets, this problem is worsening with each passing election.

Second, there is simply no science supporting the current practice of having election workers compare a single signature to the image of a specimen signature on file. Election officials are not experts in signature comparison, and true experts have repeatedly testified that the methods used by states to compare signatures cannot support the current practice.

This proposal really resonated with me, because my own signature has changed immensely since I began using the computer for most of my communications. Even on the rare occasion when I have to write a check rather than paying online, my current chicken scratches bear little resemblance to the handwriting of my younger days.

Third on the list should be a no-brainer. Count every ballot postmarked before election day, even if they arrive a few days later due to postal delays. Voters who follow the rules shouldn’t be disenfranchised because of post office delays.

Number Four will never get passed. Elias wants states to guarantee voters that they won’t have to wait in line more than 30 minutes. He’s absolutely correct when he points out that long lines discourage voters and disproportionately penalize voters who can least afford time off work, but there are numerous reasons such a rule would be impractical–everything from machine breakdowns to unanticipated rates of turnout could make compliance a nightmare. Extending early voting and voting hours might be a more practical way to reduce wait times.

The fifth proposal is a ban on third-party voter challenges and other forms of what Elias calles “vigilantism.”

No one should have their registration or right to vote challenged by a random stranger they do not know and have never met. Yet that is what is happening in too many places.

Republicans have built private voter databases used to encourage third-party activists and election vigilantes to submit spreadsheets of voters they want removed from the rolls or hassled at polling places. This practice should be banned and outlawed.

Along the same lines, his sixth proposal is to impose civil and criminal penalties for voter harassment and intimidation, and the seventh and final item on his voting wishlist is to strengthen the vote certification process. As we’ve seen in the Trump “big lie” era, that process has been weaponized– local election offices are increasingly filled with election deniers, and people serving on county election boards are being pressured not to certify accurate results.

Some of these measures would be difficult to pass in Red states, but assuming a vigorous grass-roots campaign, others might actually be adopted. Even if they weren’t, such a campaign would force wider recognition of the barriers people face to having their votes counted.

Worth considering…..

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Our New Digital Reality

Transparency can be so inconvenient.

Elon Musk’s X recently added a new feature that–among other things– allowed users to see where an individual poster was located. Guess what? A huge number of those supposedly “real Americans” turned out to be what we might delicately call “foreign agitators.”

As Lincoln Square (among many others) has reported,

MAGA is not just a political movement of goateed, 50-ish white dudes who all rock that same avatar of them copping what they imagine is an expression of manly vigor in the front seat of their behind-on-the-payments Ford F-350.

It’s a delivery system.

A supply chain for chaos that starts in Moscow and Tehran and Beijing, runs through bot farms in industrial parks outside St. Petersburg or the Pardis Technology Park north of Tehran, or some Nigerian click farm, or a Chinese-criminal-owned social media and tech scam prison in the wilds of Burma, bounces off a rage-merchant influencer “from Ohio” who has never set foot in America, and ends up in your pissed off MAGA uncle’s Facebook feed as a “patriotic truth.”

What conclusions can we draw-should we draw–from the revelation that, as the linked article says, “a bunch of ‘red-blooded American MAGA patriots’ were not American at all. Why would posters from places like Russia, Nigeria, Iran, India, Thailand, and Eastern Europe be cosplaying as neighbors and “real Americans” who were patriotic MAGA partisans?”

It turns out that a significant percentage of MAGA’s online “grassroots” is AstroTurf shipped from overseas. The multiple accounts that make a fringe movement feel much bigger isn’t composed of real people exchanging real attitudes and beliefs. Instead, it’s thousands of fake ones, formed to promote divisive and polarizing content and turn Americans against each other.

Researchers have been documenting this fake MAGA ecosystem for years: foreign accounts that become amplifiers of actual American MAGA propagandists, plus engagement farms, plus MAGA-centric media outlets who either don’t know or don’t care they’re serving as useful idiots. This Twitter reveal was just the icing on the cake.

These aren’t random trolls freelancing for clicks. The U.S. government (until Trump’s second term, of course) has repeatedly disrupted Russian-directed influence networks aimed at American politics, including domain seizures and sanctions for coordinated malign-influence campaigns.

It turns out that our “techie” world has changed the nature of warfare. In the Ukraine war, battles are fought with drones; in today’s version of the Cold War, Russia and other countries with grievances against America don’t need to fire bullets or endanger their soldiers. Instead, they can use tweets to set one American against others, to disrupt the political environment, to encourage enmity. They can turn Americans against each other, with a minimal financial investment and no need to buy weapons of war. As the article quite accurately points out, “social media is a perfect asymmetric weapon; nations that could never take on America in hard power use the addiction of social media that defines our entire culture to hack our politics, our society, and our brains.”

And why does this work? Why do their domestic American targets fall for the tactic?

Because MAGA’s media ecosystem is already pre-programmed for foreign capture, give it a big, loud, dumb narrative that says American liberals eat babies, the U.S. is a decadent and failing experiment, democracy is fake, all the most lurid conspiracies are real, liberalism is a disease, and strongmen should rule. The whole machine lights up like a Christmas tree….

The Kremlin doesn’t need to invade America to build a Ministry of Propaganda; it buys it cheap, drop-ships it here, and MAGA sells it in bulk.

And the foreign architecture of amplification is at its very center. Every time a MAGA influencer runs a pro-Russia theme, or anything else that deepens the engineered political and social divides in America, these foreign engagement networks show up like a flash mob.

The posts spike. The replies swarm. A million clicks and likes make the MAGA faithful feel like they’re in the biggest, baddest tribe.

What’s most infuriating is that the tech bros could stop this, but they’ve chosen not to.

Independent reporting has documented this activity, and Meta, YouTube, and the others have promised to address it. They haven’t. As we know, the social media business model is engagement, and engagement comes from outrage. If that outrage is manufactured by foreign propaganda, well…it still works. So, as the article concludes, “MAGA gets a firehose of artificial oxygen from abroad, and Silicon Valley stands there with its hands in its pockets.”

Once Trump is gone, we have our work cut out for us.

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About That Misuse Of Language…

In yesterday’s post, I focused on the Right’s habit of using words to mean their opposites, exemplified by MAGA’s insistence that working for social amity and equal treatment for all Americans was really playing “identity politics.” In reality, MAGA’s core belief–that the country should privilege White Christian men–is the essence of “identity politics.”

MAGA’s tactic of using language to undermine the actual meaning of the words being used isn’t limited to that one example. As an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education recently pointed out, in last year’s legislative session, Indiana Republicans provided another, even more egregious example. Under the pretext of protecting “intellectual diversity,” Indiana’s Act 202 is  aimed at limiting the plurality of viewpoints on campus. The Act is a frontal attack on academic freedom, masquerading as the opposite.

The essay began by noting the removal of a social work professor from her classroom for the unpardonable sin of making one graduate student “uncomfortable.” His discomfort was triggered by the instructor’s use of a chart distinguishing between overt and covert racism. The chart included “Make America Great Again” as one of several slogans that can be used as covert white supremacy, and it was used in a class on “Diversity, Human Rights and Social Justice.”

As the essay pointed out, IU’s suspension of the instructor (after the student complained to Indiana’s ultra-MAGA Senator Jim Banks) actually violated the clear terms of the act, both procedurally and under terms which prohibit institutions from limiting the freedom of faculty members “teaching, researching, or writing publications about diversity, equity, and inclusion or other topics.” (This language was intended to protect critics of DEI, but it clearly applies here.)

As the essay’s author points out, attacks on universities on pretexts of protecting intellectual diversity have a long history.

The right has taken the language of the left, mockingly imitating the words and then turning them into tools of repression.

In 2003, David Horowitz urged conservatives to “use the language that the left has deployed” and declare that there is “a lack of ‘intellectual diversity’ on college faculties.” Horowitz tried to invoke “academic freedom” to justify suppressing it, creating the Academic Bill of Rights and his “Students for Academic Freedom,” claiming that protecting the rights of students meant banning professors from expressing political views.

Act 202 undermines both intellectual diversity and due process by permitting university trustees to fire professors deemed “likely to subject students to political or ideological views and opinions that are unrelated to the faculty member’s academic discipline or assigned course of instruction.” Note that no evidence of actual misconduct is needed, simply a belief–founded or not– that a professor might be “likely” to say something forbidden.

Act 202 also prohibits professors from saying anything unrelated to their classes. Anything. That’s in clear contrast to AAUP’s appropriate standard, which is for “teachers to avoid persistently intruding material which has no relation to their subject.”

It’s not the presence of any ideas unrelated to a class that violates academic norms, but only persistently intruding material. And this rule must be applied in a viewpoint neutral manner. Colleges cannot punish unrelated speech about politics more than they punish unrelated speech about football or the weather or any other topic. By targeting political viewpoints alone for penalties, SB 202 clearly violates the First Amendment.

Act 202 also weakens tenure protections–protections that were specifically created to protect intellectual diversity. Act 202 requires–okay, threatens– a “post-tenure review” by trustees–officials with no demonstrated competence to judge academic work. A professor’s work should be judged by academic peers rather than unqualified political appointees.

I can attest to the chilling effect of these provisions and IU’s over-eager implementation of them. During numerous conversations, former colleagues have shared dismay and discomfort, given that–under the Act’s language– it is impossible to know what ideas might be deemed “unrelated” to a professor’s academic field by a trustee who knows nothing about that field. (And in Indiana, where our MAGA Governor has personally chosen all of the trustees, that ignorance is pretty much a given.)

The tactical brilliance of laws like Act 202 is obvious. People resisting a law that is dishonestly framed as protective of intellectual diversity invites critics to charge that they are denouncing the concept rather than trying to protect it.

Indiana’s legislature may be accomplishing the true purpose of Act 202. The state is losing some of its best academic minds, who are decamping to institutions willing to protect genuine intellectual diversity, and under its current administration, a formerly proud and storied academic institution is poised to descend to the self-satisfied mediocrity of that legislature.

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The Real Identity Politics

One of the many things that exasperate me about what currently passes for political dialogue is the substitution of labels for efforts to communicate. (And yes, I find myself engaging in that practice from time to time–it’s easier to call the administration “fascist” than to carefully describe the behaviors that lead me to affix that label. Mea culpa.)

Although people on all sides of the political divide indulge in this dismissive exchange of epithets, there’s one particularly dishonest label that is increasingly employed by MAGA and the Right: Identity politics. The accusation is a companion to the “woke” label and the persistent attacks on DEI and similar efforts meant to erase the bigotries that have made life more difficult for women and minorities.

If there is one tactic that the MAGA movement has perfected, it is calling out its opponents for behaviors that are actually its own. A recent article from the New Republic pointed out that it is the Right, not the Left or Center Left, that is consistently engaged in “identity politics.”  The article was a conversation with Kimberle Crenshaw, a noted scholar of America’s various forms of bigotry and their interrelationship.

Crenshaw began by discussing the anti-Black animus that is the core of Trump’s agenda and appeal–an animus that has become too obvious for the rest of us to ignore–and the way in which anti-Black and anti-woman bias worked to defeat Kamala Harris.

I found one observation especially “on target,” because it gets to the root of the way labeling often deflects reality. Crenshaw points out that when the Right screams “identity politics” it defines identity politics in “terms of women, queer people, and Black folks.”

When Trump and MAGA world say things like, If you want to get anything done, you have to put white men in charge, they don’t call that identity politics. When they take all the books off the shelves that they think are about identity politics and leave Mein Kampf on the shelves at the Naval Academy, that’s identity politics that they don’t talk about. So the identity politics that is at the core of the anxiety that MAGA builds itself into is never named.

So it’s clear that there’s a particular kind of identity politics that they are willing to wrap themselves in. And that’s an old-school, long part of the American faction that wanted to think about the United States as a white, male, Christian country, which has now shown up in white Christian nationalism. That is the identity politics of the moment.

It is in pursuit of protecting the prerogatives of that identity–White Christian male identity–that MAGA and the Trump administration are attacking any and all efforts to promote equity in what is, despite their hysterical denials, a multiracial society.

That is their identity politics now. It’s called the assault on improper ideology. And if you want to see what it looks like in real time, look at their assault on DEI. The assault on DEI is basically if people of color, if women, if any people who don’t look like us, are in any way involved in something that is bad, we can say that they are the fault of it.

And what does that mean? If you happen to be the mayor of Baltimore when a ship collides into your bridge, because you’re Black and you are there, we can pin the responsibility on you. If there’s an air disaster over Washington, D.C., we can pin it on DEI. No proof, no nothing. All we have to do is claim it.

When I read this, my first thought was “of course! Why didn’t I see this before?” When I thought about that question–why I hadn’t recognized the real identity politics–I had to (grudgingly) give the Right credit for learning the lessons taught years ago by Frank Luntz and first employed by Newt Gingrich.

Luntz advocated using vocabulary that was carefully crafted to produce a desired political effect (an effect that didn’t include descriptive accuracy). He counseled GOP strategists to use the term death tax instead of estate tax, for example. Luntz has described his specialty as “finding words that will help his clients sell their product or turn public opinion on an issue or a candidate.”

I don’t know whether Luntz was personally involved in the (mis)use of the term “identity politics,” but that tactic–accusing opponents of something you yourself are doing–certainly bears his hallmark.

And that hallmark is misdirection, not communication. 

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False Equivalence

Most of us learned early in our lives that pointing out the misdeeds of others wasn’t going to persuade our parents to forgive our own misbehaviors. Evidently, a lot of political actors either never learned that lesson or have forgotten it, because one of the favored arguments of today’s partisans are accusations of false equivalence.

As Frank Bruni recently noted in an essay for The New York Times, those claims tend to claim a symmetry that doesn’t exist.

They’re equivalences not merely false but fantastical. They ignore the severity, the prevalence, the consequences of the misconduct in question. Imagine defending a suitor who’s a serial arsonist because the other guy has a jaywalking citation; both bachelors are lawbreakers, after all. That’s the perverse moral arithmetic of more than a few Trump apologists.

Bruni notes the dishonesty of claims that Trump is no worse than Biden–claims that send me up the wall. Biden was an institutionalist; his longstanding public service had given him a respect for the norms of American governance, the independence of the Department of Justice and the authority of the co-equal branches of our government. And the fact that Biden surrounded himself with highly competent officials meant that when he suffered the ravages of age, the country wasn’t plunged into chaos; the clown car that is the Trump administration has no ability to temper the damage done daily by Trump’s ignorance and increasingly obvious dementia.

As Bruni points out, nothing that occurred during the Biden administration is even remotely analogous to Trump’s purge of Justice Department lawyers who have been unwilling to pursue his improper thirst for vengeance–his insistence that lawsuits be brought against those who crossed him despite the lack of evidence of any wrongdoing.

The Trump supporters who swallowed the Big Lie that the 2020 election was “rigged” argue that partisanship, rather than  wrongdoing, motivated the legal cases against him. As Bruni writes,

To accept that magical thinking, you must erase the photographs of classified documents keeping company with a commode at Mar-a-Lago. You must delete the recording of Trump telling Brad Raffensperger, the top election official in Georgia, to figure out some way to reverse Biden’s victory there in 2020. And you must persuade yourself that Trump’s emphatic proclamations that the 2020 election was being stolen, his haranguing of former Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the election results and his support of Big Lie conspiracy theorists were just politics as usual. That’s a sequence of moral calisthenics so arduous they burn more calories than an hour at CrossFit.

Bruni offers many other examples; he focuses especially on the “relentless, boundless and unabashed Trump’s monetization and merchandising of his political station.” It’s worth clicking through and reading the entire, sorry story.

The wrongheadedness of these efforts to draw false and phony equivalences is part of the larger effort to normalize behavior that is abhorrent, criminal and decided uncivil. The truth of the matter is that, in the history of this country, there has never been a President or an administration remotely like this one. (“Tricky Dick” Nixon was, indeed, a crook–but at least he had a sense of propriety that motivated him to pretend that he wasn’t.)

The offenses that Bruni focuses on, and the many–many–others that we read about daily, are unprecedented. Much of what this administration is doing is blatantly criminal. But allow me to indulge in my own version of a false equivalence by suggesting that Trump’s crass and boorish language and behavior–his utter lack of any civility–may be equally damaging to the body politic.

No former President has used the sort of demeaning language that Trump routinely employs; no former public servant would have survived an episode in which he called a reporter “piggy.” It isn’t simply the looney, misspelled and ungrammatical tweets–it’s the utter lack of propriety and respect, what we used to call (dismissively, to be sure) “political correctness” that is taking America into a gutter of animus and our public discourse to the level of a third-grade playground.

Granted, the loss of civility isn’t killing people– RFK, Jr., the DOGE cuts, and the Big Beautiful Bill are doing that. But the decline of civility isn’t a small matter; it’s an invitation to barbarism, to attitudes and behaviors inconsistent with a civilized society.

When we finally eject this abominable administration and begin the necessary legal and policy remedies, we also need to insist that our elected officials demonstrate the civility required by a democratic polity. (Good grammar would be a plus…)

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