Free and Fair Elections

The bedrock of democracy is the free election of those who govern. Our founders created the world’s first constitutional democracy in 1789, but only white men with property were allowed to vote at the beginning. Although some highly undemocratic states allow everyone to vote under very restrictive conditions, democracy has become synonymous with universal suffrage. The United States only achieved universal suffrage because of the protests of the 1960s, after which Jim Crow laws excluding African Americans from the franchise were gradually dismantled.

Voting is complicated. Two weeks ago, over 116 million Americans voted for thousands of political offices, the highest proportion of eligible voters in a midterm election since 1914. Hundreds of jurisdictions across America set their own rules, make their own ballots, and supervise their own elections. The rules for voter registration, absentee ballots, and the possible need for identification are all over the map.

My wife and I decided to be election judges in our county in central Illinois. Judges here perform the official functions of insuring that someone who wants to vote is registered and votes in the proper precinct, and then documenting that the person has voted. But the unofficial work on Election Day is just as important: helping people to vote, who are confused about some element of this system. At my polling place, which included three precincts, we helped voters find the proper precinct or told them where to go if they were at the wrong place. We guided new voters to the county courthouse if they were not yet registered, because Illinois allows voters to register on Election Day. Voters who had recently moved, who had changed their names, whose polling place had moved since the last election, or who had made a mistake in filling in their ballot were all handled with courtesy and care. It was a long day, from 5 AM to 8 PM, but everything went smoothly. Nobody had to wait more than 5 minutes to cast a ballot. Democracy in action.

That was not the case for all American voters.

Voters had to wait for hours in Georgia and other states. Voters in big cities, like New York and Philadelphia, reported very long lines. The likelihood of unusually heavy turnout had been discussed for months, but many polling places were unprepared for large numbers of voters.

There were problems across the country with voting machines. Most states use voting machines that are more than 10 years old, and 43 states have machines that are no longer manufactured. Inadequate numbers of outdated machines, some of which broke down almost immediately, caused long delays for thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of voters. We had two machines at my polling place, which broke down several times during the day, once at the same time. A technician who came from the courthouse to fix them said there were many machine problems across the city. Fortunately, we had paper ballots for anyone who wanted them.

Not so easy to fix are the structural problems that make it hard to vote. Inadequate staffing at many polling places caused preventable delays. Siting of polling places far from where voters live reduces voting.

The Republican legislature in North Carolina recently passed new rules which resulted in the closure of one-fifth of all early polling places. That came after a federal court ruled that the legislature’s 2013 law, which reduced early voting by a week and eliminated same-day registration, was designed to reduce African American voting with “surgical precision”.

Racial vote suppression has been a permanent feature of American democracy, even after the end of Jim Crow. Democratic and Republican Congresses felt the need to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for nearly 50 years. In Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, the Supreme Court eliminated that federal scrutiny of local electoral behavior, when it decided that systematic racial discrimination no longer existed. Suppression of the black vote, and of other non-white Americans, had become more subtle.

The placement of voting machines in Ohio in 2004 led to long lines in black districts. A thorough analysis of the 2012 elections showed that most voters there waited only a matter of minutes to vote. But in some communities, the average wait was almost two hours. The only way to explain these differences was race: African Americans had to wait twice as long as white voters.

Where polling places are located can encourage or discourage voting. My polling place was over one mile away from one of the precincts we covered.

Purging people from lists of registered voters has been another tactic used by Republican state officials to tilt the results. In Ohio, two million voters were purged between 2011 and 2016, overwhelmingly low-income, black Democratic voters. Voter purges have been used recently in many states, eliminating millions more, always predominantly Democrats.

Democrats did it, too. American history provides a gold mine of notorious examples of every political party cheating about elections by gerrymandering the geography of electoral districts. But Republican officials across the country developed such extreme methods to target their most persistent electoral foe, African Americans, that the same Supreme Court admonished them to stop.

The justices rejected Pennsylvania’s gerrymandered electoral maps, designed prevent Democratic victories. Republicans had won 13 of 18 congressional districts in 2016 with only 54% of the popular vote, but only 9 two weeks ago.

Federal judges struck down the North Carolina electoral map engineered to insure that Republicans won 10 of 13 congressional districts, but that map was still used in this election, and 10 Republicans won again. The vote totals show how the Republicans did had concentrated all the Democrats they could into a few districts. In all three districts that Democrats won, the margin was more than 40%. In four of the districts that Republicans won, the margin was 10% or less.

Republicans don’t even try very hard to hide the purpose of their voting “reforms”. North Carolina Republican consultant Carter Wrenn told the Washington Post in 2016, “Look, if African Americans voted overwhelmingly Republican, they would have kept early voting right where it was.” The map creator himself, Republican state rep. Dave Lewis, said, “I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats, so I drew the map to help foster what I think is better for the country.” He explained, “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats, because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.”

Legal proceedings will only catch the worst electoral criminals. Voters this time had a chance to voice an opinion about how voting should proceed. Voters in Colorado (71%), Michigan (61%), Missouri (62%), and Utah (by a hair’s breadth) passed proposals to put the drawing of district lines in the hands of non-partisan authorities, as did Ohio (75%) earlier this year. Ballot measures passed in Nevada and Michigan to automatically register as voters anyone who proves their citizenship while obtaining an ID card.

There are many ways to cook an election. We must always insure that our governers are not cheating. The methods are new, but the targets are the same. As long as Republicans believe that their power depends on preventing some Americans from voting, we will have to fight for the basis of our democracy.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

November 20, 2018

Where Is Our Country Now?

On Tuesday, millions of voters selected among thousands of candidates to run our country. Now thousands of people are telling us what these elections mean about America. So it’s easy to find claims that every side won.

Trump won.

Democrats won.

Women won.

Minorities of all kinds won.

It’s important to say over and over again that a person looking for truthful analysis and clear explanation can find them in profusion in American media. The New York Times is a national treasure, but newspapers that I have lived with in Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Providence, and Washington make a powerful effort at non-partisanship and objective research. The tiny newspaper I wrote for didn’t cover much and was shrinking before my eyes, but it was reliable and truthful.

                                                                                                                                                           

TV news, on the other hand, has been taken over by showmanship and bipartisanship, which is displayed by letting people from both camps say whatever they want and calling it news. Television employs countless spin doctors, who only care about reducing the pain for their own partisans. They tailor their claims to the needs of their party at the moment. Tomorrow they’ll say something entirely different. Mingled in are useful commentators, whose biases are subordinated to their professionalism, but they often end up sounding like just like the hacks they appear next to.

FOX News can only be trusted to seek market share by telling its viewers what they most what to hear. What FOX promotes most is the most biased. Its star, Sean Hannity, explained what he does: “I'm not a journalist jackass. I'm a talk host.” FOX put its partisan purposes into practice by blaming liberals and Democrats for sending pipe bombs to themselves.

MSNBC annoys me with their repetitive gleeful reporting of whatever makes conservatives look worst. But they don’t make anything up. Their content is researched, insightful and reliable. They were as good at interpreting the election in real time on Tuesday night as anyone else. I’ve been putting all kinds of sources together to outline the election results and explain what I think about it all.

Who voted last week? The Washington Post delivered a fine graphic overview. Voters in all age groups picked Democrats in House votes at the highest rates in over 10 years, including two-thirds of 18 to 39 year olds. Suburban voters preferred Democrats by a wide margin, except in the South, where the parties were even. 60% of women preferred Democrats, while men narrowly preferred Republicans, better for Democrats among both genders than at any time in the last 10 years. Democrats got more votes from college-educated men and women than at any time since 2006: two-thirds of women who had gone to college voted for Democrats. Many voters who did not go to college had jumped away from Democrats in 2010, but have been coming back since then.

Across America, Democrats received 5 million more votes in House races than Republicans, winning 52% to 47%.

Women did win. There will be over 100 women in the House next year, many more than ever before. The first female Senators from Tennessee and Arizona will take their seats.

Minorities won. In Congress, we’ll see the first two Native American women, the first two Muslim women, the first Hispanic women from Texas. The first openly gay man was elected as Governor, among other LGBT winners.

Trump did not win. He was not on the ballot, although he told his supporters to act as if he were. Of the 75 House and Senate candidates he endorsed, who were in heavily Republican-leaning districts, only 21 won. He made public appearances for 36 House and Senate candidates in heavily Republican-leaning districts, and 21 won. He endorsed 39 other candidates, also in Republican districts, and they didn’t win.

Some combination of Trump’s unpopularity among people who had voted for Republicans in the past, the positive appeal of new candidates, among them many women and people of color, and the desire of most voters to entrust Democrats with taking care of their health and education created a wave of Democratic victories in districts held by Republicans.

Was it a big wave or a little wave or a ripple? Who even knows what those words mean applied to national elections? Numbers are better. The Democrats gained at least 36 seats in the House, flipped 7 governorships, and 8 state legislative chambers.

Here is what did not change and what will continue to animate political controversy. It is hard for many Americans to vote. Republicans profit from suppressing the vote. The numerous court judgments that they have done this unlawfully have not stopped them yet.

Republican gerrymandering has been dented, but not yet defeated. Voting in North Carolina proceeded in districts that were declared unconstitutional twice: although Republicans barely won there in terms of total votes 50.3% to 48.4%, they won 10 of 13 seats in the House. But voters approved ballot measures that would eliminate partisan gerrymandering in 4 states, with 3 of those decisions overwhelming. When they had a chance to register an opinion, voters were in favor of making voting easier.

White men are still in charge in America. Their hold on power has been weakening for decades, and 2018 was an important milestone on the path toward more equality. But everywhere you look, from the White House to Congress to elected officials at every level to company board rooms, white men are mostly in charge.

The Republican Party is the party of white evangelical men. 60% of white men voted Republican and 75% of white evangelical Christians. White men made up 46% of Republican voters, white women 39%, and minorities only 16%. Minorities were 40% of Democratic voters, white men 26% and white women 34%.

Less than half of Democratic Congressional candidates were white men, but 77% of Republican candidates. White men were 76% of the much more numerous Republican candidates for state legislatures, a proportion that has remained unchanged since 2012.

Americans who think that sexual harassment is not a serious problem, that it is not important to elect more women and racial minorities to office, that Roe v. Wade should be overturned, and that stricter gun control laws are a bad idea are all reliable Republican voters.

Lots of electoral commentators are comparing this “blue wave” with past waves, often to prove that their side did extraordinarily well. It’s more important to think about the future. Will the overwhelming liberalism of young Americans gradually replace the self-interested conservatism of my generation? Will women keep moving in a liberal direction? Will they take the men around them along?

Women didn’t just win races. They shoved American politics to the left by running and donating and voting and winning.

American government has many new faces. We’ll see if they can produce better results.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

November 13, 2018

The Humanity of Patience

It’s Election Day! We are all overwhelmed with news about the immediate present. Certainly the next two years of our nation’s life will be shaped by the election results. How about our own personal lives?

To some of my relatives, today’s politics don’t matter. Vera, 13 months old, and Leo, 10 months old, remain blissfully unaware of Democrats and Republicans, Congress and the President, who’s winning and who’s losing. They are in the middle of a uniquely human phase of life – extended childhood.

Humans develop very slowly. Humans are the slowest of animals to learn to walk: a newborn horse can walk within an hour after birth. My granddaughter has just learned to walk at one year and running will come much later. She can’t talk, although she can communicate many simple desires.

Human brains are much less developed at birth than the smaller brains of other animals, because the human birth canal is too narrow to allow fully developed big brains to pass through. Much of our brain development comes after birth, allowing us tremendous adult brain capacity, but requiring years of dependence on adults.

Years will pass before Vera and Leo are ready for school. Most human societies across the globe plan a dozen years of schooling before we assume that our young are ready to be self-sufficient. So-called advanced societies plan another 4 years or more of schooling to prepare for more complex professions. Years and years of slow development and preparation to become physically, mentally and psychologically ready to be adult humans.

We might say that humans develop at a snail’s pace, but some snails are sexually mature at 6 weeks old. Humans must develop skills far beyond what any other animals are capable of, such as speech. Both the complexity of human society and the biological nature of the human animal contribute to the long years of development. This slow maturation is uniquely human.

We make an enormous investment of time into the growth of our children. Observing my granddaughter and her parents day after day, I realize how important is patience to human life. Nothing seems to change from day to day. The same tasks and lessons are repeated countless times before they appear to have any effect. Negative lessons, like not touching hot things or pulling men’s beards, have to be repeated hundreds of times before they are learned. The whole process depends on unending patience.

It’s ironic that good parenting depends on patience, but our constant efforts to urge patience on our babies are useless. When they are hungry or tired, when they want to be picked up or put down, get out of their strollers or clothes, or generally do that thing that is inconvenient for adults, we say “Wait a minute. Have patience. Soon.” But the words are meaningless. Patience is the long game and babies can only think of now. Like other adult qualities, patience develops very slowly.

Patience is not just useful in dealing with children. It also helps us deal with the world’s problems. To build a better world for Vera and Leo and all of our babies, we must patiently find good solutions.

But patience has its limits. Sometimes patience is a code word for doing nothing. During the Civil Rights era, after centuries of white tyranny over black Americans, whites in power kept saying, “Not so fast. Patience.” In that case, reasonable patience had long ago run out.

Our children will face a difficult world, if we don’t take action now to counteract climate change. We have let the time for patience slip by. If we keep doing nothing, by the time that Vera and Leo are ready to have children of their own, rising seas will have inundated our coasts, storms of unprecedented power will have battered our homes, crops will fail around the world, people will die of the heat.

We need patience to raise the next generation of human beings. We need action to insure that their lives are as good as they can be.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

November 6, 2018