The Latest On Legalization

The marijuana sanity movement gets a new anthem:

Recent polling suggests that “Oregon is likely to be the third state to legalize marijuana”:

The poll found 52 percent of likely voters plan to support the initiative while only 41 percent plan to vote against it. The remaining 7 percent are undecided or refused to answer.

Meanwhile, the marijuana market in Colorado continues to grow:

New figures from the Colorado Department of Revenue show that recreational marijuana sales continued to climb in August, the most recent month for which data are available. Recreational sales totaled approximately $34.1 million in August, up from $29.3 million the previous month.

But Sullum spotlights a problem facing Colorado’s cannabis tourists – they often don’t have legal places to toke up: 

Public officials who do not welcome marijuana tourists have ways of making marijuana tourists feel unwelcome, most conspicuously when it comes to finding a place to legally enjoy the cannabis they are legally allowed to buy. Because Amendment 64 prohibits consumption of cannabis on the premises of the state-licensed stores that sell it, Colorado does not have anything like Amsterdam’s famous “coffee shops,” where you can buy and consume marijuana along with soft drinks and snacks.

The Colorado Clean Indoor Air Act, which has been amended to cover marijuana as well as tobacco, bans smoking inside bars and restaurants. Outdoor areas of those businesses are exempt from the smoking ban, but that does not necessarily mean tourists can enjoy their newly purchased pot there. The section of Amendment 64 that eliminated penalties for marijuana use does not apply to “consumption that is conducted openly and publicly,” which remains a petty offense under state law. Last year Denver, the state’s largest city and the center of marijuana retailing, passed an ordinance defining “openly and publicly” broadly enough to foil the plans of visitors who thought they could legally smoke pot on the patio of a bar or restaurant.

When Does Spanking Become Child Abuse? Ctd

Our reader who wrote the remarkable email that sparked the thread follows up again:

I just wanted to thank everyone, so very much, for the conversation threads and for the editorial care. Reading the emails has been a difficult, emotionally tricky experience – and an unexpectedly healing one, too. I’m profoundly grateful for it all.

The conversation continues:

Wow, this is probably the most amazing thread on the Dish to date, and there’ve been some good ones. And the key is to see all sides of the debate, not just what may be “right”. Publishing emails from those who justify abuse is just as important, so we can see what the cycle of violence produces.

My beatings always came from the by-products of my disinterest in school.  I was pretty sharp as a kid, but I never liked the doldrums of doing homework.  I’d get report card after report card stating that assignments were not turned in, effort was lacking, etc, even though I usually did well on the tests.  The days those wretched reports came (8 times a year) were usually pretty awful.  I think your original reader nailed it: no child is equipped to handle such psychological terror.

For instance, I knew that the train from the city to the suburbs arrived in the station at 6:13pm. Calculating the drive to our house: 11 minutes.  A minute to put his things down, and then my mom would share the bad news with him: 3 minutes.  Then the footsteps on the stairs that didn’t take long. So all afternoon, after arriving from school and finding that goddamn carbon-copied paper sitting on the kitchen counter, I’d wonder if the train would be late, or if he’d stop to get gas, offering me a few more minutes of either relief or terror, not sure which.

If everything was on schedule, I was going to get slapped around 6:28pm.  I’d wait in my room, knowing that the door would soon open and I’d have to endure not only the physical hell, but the emotional hell.  After one time when he ruined my glasses because they were on my face for the first hit, he’d always tell me to take my glasses off with deceptive calm.  After the slapping was over and I’d calmed down enough to think again, there would follow a two-hour discussion of the merits of school and responsibility and such, me sitting there in shame with a prickling face.

Another reader shifts the focus to school itself:

I grew up in the South, but my mom was fairly progressive and my parents were divorced. So my experience with corporal punishment was in school. The teachers, who were often also the football coaches, took great pride in their paddles.

Massive, two-handed affairs with holes drilled to reduce wind resistance, painted in fearsome colors. Or a stack of yard sticks, since they would most certainly be broken if used. Switches weren’t used because, darn it, the kids needed to be clothed (I knew one guy who wore four pairs of underwear when he knew he was in trouble).

My personal experience in the ’60s and ’70s was that some kids had it a lot worse at home. The school paddling stung, but because it was done in front of the class, the embarrassment was also a part of the punishment. In general, I was a pretty good kid, so I only experienced it a few times and don’t really think of it as traumatizing. But the stories of some kids home lives was deeply disturbing to me. My best friend was so beat one day that he asked to be allowed to stand in class. He had to go the the nurse when blood started leaking through his pants.

Now I have my own child. I can’t tell you that I haven’t been tempted to hit him. Especially when he was younger, it seemed like he was deliberately obnoxious. But not so. We found that there were ways to negatively and positively incentivize him that didn’t require embarrassment or pain, like taking away a GameBoy or dessert.

Anyway, our boy now is well behaved, and I thank God I never hit him. If I had, I would have started an escalation that would have required more and more hitting to achieve “results”. Only as so many others have indicated, it rarely has the desired corrective affect; it just relieves the parents tension at the moment. But instead, my son is attentive, and responsive to correction. He now responds most to my disappointment; words aren’t even needed many times.

Another tackles a previous reader:

I just read again more justifications for hitting children as a form of discipline.  This line struck me:

Indulgence is not a kindness. It is a parent’s job to raise an adult, not a life-long child incapable of tolerating frustration or following rules. If you think the results of spanking are bad, you should visit some of my former indulged clients in prison.

First, I truly wonder if this person has really worked in the prison population.  My father did for years and it was very clear that the majority of the inmates were abused as children.  There were not many (if any) from “indulged” backgrounds.  Further, failure to perform physical violence on a child is not a form of indulgence.  Indulgence connotes that improper behavior is tolerated without consequence.  Such parenting is really neglect because the parent broadcasts to the child that no behavior (good or bad) can raise the parent’s attention.   This lack of attentiveness creates no boundaries for children and children clearly suffer without boundaries.

Boundaries include discipline but spanking does not have to be than form of discipline.  Spanking sends the wrong message.  What children learn is that hitting is an acceptable method of resolving problems.  For example, if my daughter hits my son, how is punishing her by hitting her in turn effective?  What the child learns is that the bigger and stronger party controls the aggressive behavior.

But many readers are still defending corporal punishment:

Some kids need to be spanked sometimes, period.  Not beaten, cut, smashed, bruised or battered, but swatted smartly on their backside.  Why?  Because nothing else works with some kids and some kids, particularly smart, willful kids, will figure out pretty quickly – as our grandson has done – that they can throw a temper tantrum in public and either get whatever they want or force their parents to leave. Our son and daughter-in-law refuse to swat our grandson’s little behind and stick him in his crib until he comes around.  As a result, he plays his parents like a fiddle.

You haven’t been down this road, so you are on the outside looking in.  You are hearing from folks whose parents, usually the father, went well beyond what any sane parent has in mind when disciplining a child.

If there is any tolerable reason to strike your kid, this reader has it:

I have been following the thread on spanking with interest. I find the idea of breaking a child’s spirit utterly abhorrent, especially through violence.

And yet, for my eldest son, I had to resort to some tactics I hated. From the time he could walk, he tried to run in front of cars. The moment we stepped outside, if there was a moving vehicle anywhere, he tried to get in front of it. Heavy traffic made him squeal with delight and he would do everything in his power to go and be in it.

The only way, and I mean the ONLY way – I tried everything – to get him to stop running in front of speeding vehicles was to spank him. He’d lunge for the street, I’d yank him back and whack him on the butt (hand only, his clothes on, not hard enough to bruise, but hard enough to get his attention.) He’d wail in protest. Rinse and repeat. For a year and a half. He finally, around his fourth birthday, figured out that he was not supposed to run in front of cars.

Did I break his spirit? I think you could say that the part of him that took joy in the glory of several tons of metal bearing down on him is probably gone forever. I look at it as doing what’s necessary for him to make it to adulthood, or at least to an age where he can puzzle out the harsh consequences of the laws of physics for himself.

Update from a reader with a strong counterpoint:

I’m calling bullshit again. This parent says that she spanked her son for a year and a half when he tried to dart into traffic, and it sounds like this happened pretty much every day. Well, obviously spanking DID NOT WORK. If it did, then after two or three spankings, he would have learned to not run into traffic. Instead, what likely happened was that traffic lost its attraction for him around age 4 (just as knocking over block towers probably became less interesting around age 2). Spanking her son had NO effect on his behavior.

I would have recommended she get one of those leash things and then test him every two or three months without (and with another adult to run interference if he dashed for the traffic again).

Another is on the same page:

There are products specifically designed for this!  Many children try to run off and there are restraining systems built for it, thus eliminating the need for spanking.  If that parent could stop them with their hand, they easily could have put a leash on him before going outside.

Yes, it’s a parent’s job to keep them from harm.  But not to inflict it.

The Chemical Weapons We Uncovered

Earlier this week, CJ Chivers reported that US troops were exposed to decaying Iraqi chemical weapons on multiple occasions (accompanying video above):

In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

The United States had gone to war declaring it must destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration with the West.

Murtaza Hussain pushes back on Iraq war supporters claiming vindication:

The inconvenient truth is that the U.S. was aware of the existence of such weapons at the Al Muthanna site as far back as 1991. Why? Because Al Muthanna was the site where the UN ordered Saddam Hussein to dispose of his declared chemical munitions in the first place.

Those weapons that could not safely be destroyed were sealed and left to decay on their own, which they did. The site was neither “active” nor “clandestine” – it was a declared munitions dump being used to hold the corroded weapons which Western powers themselves had in most cases helped Saddam procure.

The fact that people thoroughly invested in supporting the war apparently had no idea about this is in many ways emblematic of their complete cluelessness about the country which they helped destroy.

Jessica Schulberg argues along the same lines:

If the post-2003 discovery of a decaying chemical weapons program could serve as proof that the invasion was justified, the Bush White House would have seized the opportunity to proclaim so. By 2005, CIA weapons inspectors concluded in a 92-page report that the WMD investigation had “gone as far as feasible” and found no evidence of an active weapons program. The CIA report included an addendum: “military forces in Iraq may continue to find small numbers of degraded chemical weapons — most likely misplaced or improperly destroyed before the 1991 Gulf War.”

Despite that, Abe Greenwald claims that the NYT report “partially vindicates” Bush. He insists that “Saddam’s old chemical weapons were always cited as a danger in the run-up to the war”:

The 5,000 undeclared chemical weapons constitute one of the administration’s few intelligence victories in Iraq. Why, then, the secrecy? Perhaps because Iraq was a leaderless country swarming with jihadists and roiled by civil war, and advertising the amounts and whereabouts of chemical weapons would have made things much worse.

Kevin Drum, on the other hand, suspects the administration was acting politically:

Iraq had no active WMD program, and it was an embarrassment to the Bush administration that all they could find were old, rotting chemical weapons originally manufactured by the West. So they kept it a secret, even from troops in the field and military doctors. But lies beget lies, and American troops are the ones who paid the price. According to Chivers, “The government’s secrecy, victims and participants said, prevented troops in some of the war’s most dangerous jobs from receiving proper medical care and official recognition of their wounds.”

Today, the consequences of our lies continue to haunt us as the rotting carcasses of these weapons are apparently falling into the hands of ISIS.

Fusion To The Rescue?

Lockheed Martin has announced a major breakthrough in nuclear fusion. Kevin Drum sizes up the stakes:

If Lockheed Martin can actually pull this off, it would mean huge amounts of baseload power using existing grid technology. It would mean cheap power from centralized sites. It would mean not having to replace every building in the world with high-efficiency designs. It would mean not having to install wind farms on millions of acres of land. It would mean not having to spend all our political efforts on forcing people to make do with less energy. More generally, it would mean gobs of green power at no political cost. That’s huge.

Mark Kleiman calls out skeptics on the left:

Of course the Lockheed Martin folks could turn out to be wrong about the physics (though that doesn’t seem especially likely), or (much more plausibly) one of the ancillary problems such as materials development could turn out to be insoluble or too expensive to be economically practical. But the only reasonable reaction to this from someone not invested in Exxon or Koch Energy or Putinism is a (somewhat hesitant, because the idea is still more likely to fizzle than to work) “Yippeeeeee!!!!”

Therefore, I find it frustrating (and only wish I found it surprising) that ThinkProgress, run by people who consider themselves “progressives,” is rushing to pour cold water on the idea because the timeline can’t meet the arbitrary deadline someone in the global-warming PR business has dreamed up. (Really, of course, because cheap non-polluting energy would help reduce the relevance of a bunch of Green ideas about regulating this and subsidizing that, and because at some point after 1973 gloom and fear got to be the official emotions of the progressive movement, when by rights they belongs to conservatives.)

Over at Wired, Kathleen Palmer runs through the scientific skepticism. Her bottom line:

If they can iterate fast enough, they may just be the first to get to a functional nuclear reactor… probably in about 10 years.

The Math On The Midterms

Election Leads

Sean Trende created the above table to answer a question: “At any given number of days out, if a candidate has a lead of a certain size, how often does that candidate win?”:

An example of how we would read this chart with respect to current polls: Assume that as we get polls from the North Carolina race that concluded Tuesday, Wednesday, or today, they confirm Sen. Kay Hagan’s (D) lead of roughly two points. Candidates who lead by two points 19-21 days out win about 65% of the time. So we’d conclude that Hagan is the favorite, but her lead is not insurmountable.

Like other poll watchers, he calculates that Republicans are favored to take the Senate:

To predict Democrats retaining Senate control, you basically have to bet on (a) Democrats sweeping South Dakota, Iowa, Colorado, and North Carolina; (b) picking off enough Republican seats in very red states like Kentucky, Kansas, or Georgia to offset any losses in (a) or; (c) systemic polling failure. You can make a plausible case for each of those scenarios, with (b) probably being the most likely. Regardless, given the current state of polling and knowing how races have behaved over the past few cycles, those really do appear to be the options left for Democrats.

However, the 538 forecast only gives Republicans a 60.1 percent chance of winning the upper house. Harry Enten explains:

How is that possible, even as some other models have seen Republican chances climb higher and higher? The FiveThirtyEight model is relatively conservative: It takes more evidence to convince the model a race has shifted and more evidence to convince it a state is totally out of play.

The model views a larger group of states as competitive compared to other forecasts. So movement in the more marginal battleground states — the Democrat solidifying his lead in Michigan, or the Republican pulling away in Kentucky, for example — matters more. If you consider those states as mostly out of play, the favorites improving their position there won’t affect your overall outlook as much.

Sam Wang speculates about the polls being off:

If every front-runner today were to win, the Senate outcome would be 52 Republicans and 48 Democrats and independents. But history tells us to expect two or three of the current leaders to lose. Democratic wins in the key states of Iowa and Colorado would give a 50-50 split, with Vice President Joe Biden breaking Senate ties in his party’s favor. (This assumes that Kansas independent Greg Orman would caucus with Democrats and the other independents, which is not a sure bet.) Of course, if the opposite were to happen North Carolina—with Republican Thom Tillis defeating Democratic Senator Kay Hagan, who leads narrowly—the GOP would end up with a convincing 53-47 majority.

Regardless, Americans aren’t paying much attention to the midterms. And Dylan Matthews observes that, “according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, Americans are actually losing interest as the race progresses.”

Ebola In The Air

Amber Vinson, the second nurse to contract Ebola after treating Thomas Eric Duncan in Texas, took a commercial flight from Cleveland to Dallas on Monday, one day before she entered the hospital with symptoms. Now we learn that Vinson had called the CDC to ask whether she could fly – and wasn’t told not to:

CBS News reports that Vinson called several times before boarding the flight, and reported that she had a temperature of 99.5 degrees. She was allowed to fly because only a fever of 100.4 degrees or more is considered “high risk.” “I don’t think we actually said she could fly, but they didn’t tell her she couldn’t fly,” an anonymous federal health official told the New York Times. “She called us,” he said. “I really think this one is on us.” While her symptoms did not appear until she returned home, the CDC is interviewing the 132 passengers who flew with her on Monday.

Amy Davidson is none too impressed with how CDC Director Thomas Frieden has handled this situation:

His account of how Vinson got on the plane, related in the conference call on Wednesday, was at least evasive and, depending on what he knew and what exactly Vinson was told, may have been worse. He was asked three different ways if Vinson had been told not to fly, and each time dodged the question in a way that left the impression that Vinson was some sort of rogue nurse who just got it into her head that she could fly wherever she wanted. He talked about her “self-monitoring,” and that she “should not have travelled, should not have been allowed to travel by plane or any public transport”—without mentioning that his agency was who allowed it.

Dreher is alarmed:

Do you know how many people in Texas Presbyterian hospital became exposed to Ebola via Thomas Duncan?

According to the AP, “about 70.” How many people want to have anything to do with that hospital today? Doctors, nurses, staffers, they all have to show up there to work, but patients? Would you go to an appointment in that hospital right now, knowing how lax it was with the Ebola patient? … How many other patients in that hospital were exposed inadvertently through the nurses doing “normal patient care duties” after having been shat and vomited on by Duncan? Those patients, do we know their travel schedules? And on and on.

Kent Sepkowitz tries to calm everyone down:

Speaking of air travel, the single most important epidemiologic fact arguing for the public’s safety is this: Patrick Sawyer, the American who flew from Liberia to Nigeria while sick with Ebola, spread infection to absolutely no one who shared the plane with him. This information should go a long way to assuring those Frontier Airlines passengers who accompanied the second infected nurse from Cleveland to Dallas this week.

And still more: Spain, where a nurse caring for two repatriated patients dying of Ebola herself developed the disease, has not seen a second case related to these men’s care or the ill nurse’s, despite what has been reported by local groups as a complete lack of preparation and appropriate supplies to minimize the risk of transmission. Despite a raging, unconscionable epidemic in West Africa, no other cases other than Duncan have appeared unexpectedly outside of Africa. Europe: Zero cases. USA: No further cases three weeks since Duncan’s illness began. Obviously past performance does not predict future returns and the world is not out of the danger zone but for now, the infected traveler is a rare event.

And Alex Davies notes that “despite the common belief, airplanes are not flying petri dishes … because the air in the plane is much fresher than you may think, and constantly scrubbed by high quality filters”:

When the air is pulled into the grills in the floor, pilot Patrick Smith writes in Cockpit Confidential, about half is expelled from the plane. The rest is filtered and recycled with fresh air from the compressors. High efficiency particulate air filters, installed on every commercial airliner made since the late 1980s, remove up to 99.97% of all microbes, and “there’s a total changeover of air every two or three minutes,” Smith writes. According to the WHO, “under normal conditions cabin air is cleaner than the air in most buildings.”

The highest risk of catching something nasty from your fellow travelers comes when you’re sitting on the ground. The engines aren’t running, so fresh air isn’t being pulled in. That’s why WHO recommends airlines ensure “adequate cabin ventilation” during ground delays of 30 minutes or more.

In any case, the revelation has raised the possibility of an Ebola no-fly list and sent airline stocks falling:

As of 2:50 pm on Wednesday, no doubt in response to the news, virtually every major air carrier had seen its stock drop. Shares of American Airlines had fallen nearly 1.5 percent (though they have since recovered, and closed half a percentage point up on the day), Delta had dropped by almost 2 percent, United Continental had dipped by more than 3.6 percent on the day, and Spirit Airlines had tumbled by roughly 3 percent. The dip, though particularly pronounced today, actually spans back to the beginning of the month–tracking pretty closely with rising concerns about Ebola continuing to spread. 

Codifying Consent, Ctd

I haven’t weighed into the debate over California’s sexual consent law or the new regulations in many colleges, including my alma mater, Harvard, that defines any sex without vocalized continuous consent as sexual assault or rape. One reason is my lack of any real experience of male-female sex where the power dynamics can often be very different from gay sex. But what does concern me a great deal is the lack of any due process for the accused in these unfortunate and often deeply contentious circumstances. Mercifully, some of the faculty at Harvard – specifically the law school – have now risen up against what look to me like kangaroo courts, designed to instill fear into one gender alone. In an open letter, published in the Boston Globe, the law profs write:

Harvard has adopted procedures for deciding cases of alleged sexual misconduct which lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process, are overwhelmingly stacked against the accused, and are in no way required by Title IX law or regulation. Here our concerns include but are not limited to the following:

■ The absence of any adequate opportunity to discover the facts charged and to confront witnesses and present a defense at an adversary hearing.

■ The lodging of the functions of investigation, prosecution, fact-finding, and appellate review in one office, and the fact that that office is itself a Title IX compliance office rather than an entity that could be considered structurally impartial.

■ The failure to ensure adequate representation for the accused, particularly for students unable to afford representation.

Ezra Klein – in a remarkable column that we featured yesterday – actually defends the lack of due process as a positive aspect of the new regulations, because their inherent bias against accused men will create a climate of fear that is necessary to curtail male sexual violence and assault:

To work, “Yes Means Yes” needs to create a world where men are afraid … Critics worry that colleges will fill with cases in which campus boards convict young men (and, occasionally, young women) of sexual assault for genuinely ambiguous situations. Sadly, that’s necessary for the law’s success. It’s those cases — particularly the ones that feel genuinely unclear and maybe even unfair, the ones that become lore in frats and cautionary tales that fathers e-mail to their sons — that will convince men that they better Be Pretty Damn Sure.

Jon Chait and Charles Cooke both note the profound illiberalism here – and it’s enabled by the pomo gender ideologues who now control most discussion of sex and sexual identity in the academy. But what’s also impossible to ignore is how the social left is now trying to micro-manage what goes on in the bedroom with almost as much assiduity as the social right – and to do so in order to target one gender alone.

When all men are regarded as potential rapists, and when you have bought into the argument that the patriarchy is so entrenched that only radically illiberal procedures to punish, stigmatize and shame them will suffice, you have embraced a new Puritanism almost as troubling as the old. Play out this scenario: If a judicial process were set up that assumed that all women reporting sexual assault and rape were liars until somehow proven truthful, there would be an outcry. But if an identical judicial process is established that assumes all men accused of sexual assault and rape are guilty until proven otherwise – with no due process allowed – that is, apparently, a progressive move.

And it may well be a progressive move; but it sure isn’t a liberal or fair one. This does not mean that I don’t take the issue of sexual assault and rape seriously. In fact, it’s precisely because I do take it seriously that I’d support laws and regulations that allow real justice to be done, in which the accused have some basic right to defend themselves. The rest is a function of a leftist academic culture in which men are somehow inherently a problem; and almost anything is justified to make sure their “privilege is checked” and their gender stigmatized. At some point, the sexism inherent in this needs to be confronted as well.

A Virtual Physical

James Hamblin makes the case for telemedicine:

If some basic needs were addressed remotely, doctors could focus on more dire cases during their busy office hours. Patients could ask simple questions without needing to take an afternoon off work for an office visit. As of last year, only 12 percent of Americans had ever texted or e-mailed with a doctor, according to a survey conducted for The Atlantic. But about a third of people under 30 were open to having their primary communication with their doctors be online. …

Under the current model, doctors don’t see patients on an ongoing basis. As a result, a patient is inevitably getting advice from a doctor who, because she hasn’t seen what he looks like when he’s not sick, can’t tell whether he really “looks sick”—a gut valuation that remains crucial to effective primary care.

Yet, with the American Association of Medical Colleges projecting a national shortage of more than 90,000 doctors by 2020—especially in rural areas—there simply may not be enough doctors to provide this kind of ongoing care. Telemedicine could play a crucial role in addressing basic needs, particularly in settings where long-term relationships don’t come into play, like emergency rooms. Already, to take one example, a company called Avera Health makes physicians in cities available via video to hospitals in small towns, where they are remotely helping to staff emergency rooms overnight. (They work in concert with people who are on-site. So, for instance, a nurse might perform hands-on work at the direction of an onscreen doctor until a local doctor can arrive.)

Previous Dish on telemedicine, as applied to abortion, here. Update from a reader:

Haven’t we had telemedicine for like a decade now?

Heh. Another reader:

Personal anecdote: the Fortune 100 company I work for rolled out a telemedicine option (“free for 2014!”), so I tried it for a persistent cough I’ve had this week. The doctor told me that in most states you’re required by law to have a webcam, so the doctor can see you and look down your throat, I guess. After hearing my symptoms, she wrote a prescription to my local pharmacy for a strong cough suppressant. Pretty handy, huh?

I decided to get a second opinion. After being told to wear a mask in the office, the Nurse Practitioner did a nose swab (just as much fun as it sounds), diagnosed me with Influenza B, and signed me up for Tamiflu

I have an 18-month-old daughter. I’m sure telemedicine will have it’s place, but I’m gonna stick with the clinic for now.

Does Voter ID Inherently Discriminate?

Screen Shot 2014-10-15 at 12.48.54 PM

Dara Lind highlights a new study illustrating the subtle ways in which race influences white Americans’ opinions of voter ID laws:

The study, which was conducted by two University of Delaware professors and a Pennsylvania high school student, was fairly straightforward. It asked people whether they supported or opposed laws that required people to show a form of government-issued ID at the polls.  Some respondents were shown a picture alongside the question, of either a white voter or a black voter, and others weren’t shown a picture at all. The researchers found that black and Hispanic respondents were about equally likely to support or oppose the laws regardless of who was featured in the picture. And white respondents were as likely to support the law when they saw a picture of a white voter as they were when they saw no picture at all. But when the picture alongside the question showed a black voter, more whites supported voter ID .…

The study isn’t too surprising. Similar research has shown that whites are more likely to support harsh criminal justice policies, like stop-and-frisk, when they see images of or hear statistics about black prisoners. And voter ID is like stop-and-frisk in one important respect: it’s a race-neutral policy in theory, but in practice it ends up disproportionately harming people of color.

Bouie puts the study in context of a growing body of evidence that voter ID laws have discriminatory effects, even though that may not be their intent:

Likewise, a 2013 study from researchers Keith G. Bentele and Erin E. O’Brien found a tight relationship between race, Republicans, and voter ID. If a state elected a Republican governor, increased its share of Republican legislators, or became more competitive while under a Republican, it was more likely to pass voter ID and other restrictions on the franchise. Moreover, states with “unencumbered Republican majorities” and large black populations were especially likely to pass identification laws.

For Bentele and O’Brien, this comes down to partisanship. “These findings demonstrate that the emergence and passage of restrictive voter access legislation is unambiguously a highly partisan affair, influenced by the intensity of electoral competition,” they write. Even with the context of the other studies, I think this is right. Voter ID boosters don’t hold anti-minority animus as much as they want to maximize political advantage.

Chris Ingraham hopes the tide is turning against these laws:

The legal justification for voter ID laws stems from a 2008 Supreme Court ruling that the laws are generally applicable and nondiscriminatory, meaning that they’re not meant to reduce turnout among a particular group. But studies this year have demonstrated strong evidence for discriminatory intent behind the laws. The University of Delaware study adds to this body of evidence. It also seems that the judiciary is starting to agree: Courts have blocked the enactment of voter ID requirements in Wisconsin and Texas this year, citing these disproportionate impacts.

Even more notably, Judge Richard Posner, the Ronald Reagan appointee whose 2008 ruling in favor of voter ID was upheld by the Supreme Court, has had a change of heart. In a blistering opinion released last week, he concludes that the case for voter ID laws is at odds with the evidence.

Michael Hiltzik digs into Posner’s opinion and explains why it’s such a BFD:

Posner’s dissent in the Wisconsin voter ID case is especially telling, because he wrote the so-called Crawford decision in 2007 upholding Indiana’s voter ID law, in which he was upheld by the Supreme Court. But he has since recanted. In a 2013 book, he accepted the view that such laws are properly regarded as “a means of voter suppression rather than fraud prevention.” That’s the view that informs his latest opinion.

“There is only one motivation for imposing burdens on voting that are ostensibly designed to discourage voter-impersonation fraud,” he writes, “and that is to discourage voting by persons likely to vote against the party responsible for imposing the burdens.” More specifically, he observes, photo ID laws are “highly correlated with a state’s having a Republican governor and Republican control of the legislature and appear to be aimed at limiting voting by minorities, particularly blacks.” In Wisconsin, according to evidence presented at trial, the voter ID law would disenfranchise 300,000 residents, or 9% of registered voters.

On the other hand, Noah Feldman argues that Posner’s heart hasn’t changed – the evidence has:

A close reading of Posner’s opinion indicates that the judge hasn’t so much reversed his earlier view as he has taken seriously data that were unavailable in 2007. The numbers, as Posner now interprets them, do strongly suggest that the purpose of voter ID laws is to make it more difficult for poor people, especially blacks and Latinos, to cast votes. According to Posner, he wasn’t wrong in 2007. It’s just that then, there was no basis to assume that Indiana was trying to exclude minority voters. Now, there’s evidence in favor of that view.