Link Banana

Specifically, does it count if you cast an absentee ballot but die before the actual day of the election? In South Dakota you wouldn’t count, but in other states you would.

In 2004, USA Today reported that California, Texas, Tennessee, Ohio, and West Virginia all allow for the counting of absentee ballots of deceased voters while many other states technically do not. Many states that prohibit these so-called “ghost votes,” however, lack the reporting system to quickly update voter rolls with recent deaths. That means it’s very unlikely that a recently deceased voter would have his or her absentee ballot nullified.

Bruce Ackerman and Jennifer Nou offer the most interesting argument I’ve seen regarding the Supreme Court’s recent voter ID ruling:

Indiana’s law insists on a photo ID to vote, which in turn requires documents, like a birth certificate or passport, that verify identity. Getting these papers costs voters money as well as time and effort. This leads to the question the court failed to ask: Does the extra expense violate the absolute ban on all “taxes” imposed by the 24^th Amendment?

Maybe I’m the only one who enjoys discussions about demographics and voting patterns, but I thought this was interesting:

America’s suburbs used to be bastions of Republicanism. No longer. Robert Lang of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, examined the voting behaviour of metropolitan counties and found that close-in suburbs now reliably vote for Democrats. That should be expected: as they become more urban, their residents care more about public transport, schools and other government-sponsored activities—and they attract more city types, often of a liberal bent, from the urban centres.

So emerging suburbs and exurbs, the farthest-out among them, are the new political battleground. George Bush poured resources into this urban fringe in 2004, says Mr Lang, running up larger margins there than when he lost the popular vote in 2000. The result was Mr Bush’s more impressive re-election.

The most effective way: shame.

[S]end out letters telling people whether they and their neighbors have voted in past elections and promising to send a followup letter after the election. The unsubtle message is: voting records are public information, and if you don’t vote this year your neighbors will know about it. So do your civic duty, dammit.

Result: turnout among those who got the letters was a whopping 8.1 percentage points higher than the control group.

Abner Mikva, a former Illinois legislator (like one of the Democratic presidential candidates), argues that there’s nothing wrong with all of Mr. Obama “present” votes.

I recall voting “present” on many bills when I was in the Illinois Legislature. In the 1960s, for instance, I voted “present” on the annual highway appropriations bill. Like many of my fellow senators, I thought some of the money being allocated should have gone to public transportation. Still, I didn’t want to vote no, because I did not want to stand against the basic principle of maintaining our public roads. So I voted “present.”

It never occurred to me or to any of my critics that I was ducking responsibility for a making a decision. Mr. Obama was an outspoken member of the Illinois Senate, and not someone known for dodging questions, whether they were on ethics, police responsibility, women’s choice or any other hot-button issue.

In today’s New York Times Magazine, Linda Hirshman offers sixteen interesting ways that observers try to understand female voting patterns. In doing so, she shows that there is not easy way to do it.

RACE FACTORS into the gender gap in two important ways. In 2004, for example, the nonwhite female vote was 12 percent of the electorate; the nonwhite male vote was 10 percent. So when polled, women as a group were less “white” than men were — and nonwhite women are more likely to vote Democratic than white women are. Second, nonwhite women are more likely to vote Democratic than nonwhite men (75 percent to 67 percent in 2004). In other words, nonwhite women make “women” more Democratic than the nonwhite men make “men” Democratic. In 2004, 55 percent of white women actually favored George Bush.

David Brooks’s column in yesterday’s New York Times tackles the hard-to-discern problem of what really motivates voters. Though the piece raises nearly as man questions as answers, it’s well worth reading.

In reality, we voters — all of us — make emotional, intuitive decisions about who we prefer, and then come up with post-hoc rationalizations to explain the choices that were already made beneath conscious awareness. “People often act without knowing why they do what they do,” Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner, noted in an e-mail message to me this week. “The fashion of political writing this year is to suggest that people choose their candidate by their stand on the issues, but this strikes me as highly implausible.”

Slate’s Dahlia Litwick’s not shy about wearing her convictions on her sleeve in her critical summary of the day’s arguments in Indiana’s voter identification case before the Supreme Court.

To recap: I fear I am counting five justices who believe that a nonexistent problem can be constitutionally cured by burdening the fundamental right to vote. Happy byproduct? Doing away with those pesky facial challenges that liberals like to use to address massive injustices. So in the guise of doing away with hypothetical future challenges to a law, the court is poised to uphold a law that solves hypothetical future problems in voting. And for those of you wondering why the court didn’t see fit to release audio for today’s monumentally important argument, the answer remains, who knows? But here’s one guess: The justices didn’t want to be caught on tape sounding like the same 5-4 court that decided Bush v. Gore, even if nothing has changed.