Why you should always vote!

I would rather see a 90% turnout with 60% voting for someone I didn't like than a 60 % turnout with 60% voting for someone I liked.

Think about it!  In the first case 54% of the eligible voters elected the winner.  This is democracy.  A government by "the people".

In the second case 36% of the eligible voters elected the winner.  This is oligarchy, government of the few.

Always vote!  You may not like your choice, but if you don't vote for "the lesser of two evils" you may get "the greater of two evils".

Also never ever believe polls.  Did they ask you who you would vote for?  Chances are better than 90% that they did not even call you.

Never respond to polls.  If you don't respond you increase the uncertainty of polls.  By increasing the uncertainty you will decrease the uncertainty of people who might not vote because their candidate was "down" in the polls.

Polls have another bad effect on democracy.  Candidates may change their messages to align with the polls.  If candidates ignored polls, they would work harder to convince you of their solutions.  if candidates adjusted their messages to match the polls, they might give you solutions which they have no intention of implementing.

Finally, my favorite mantra that I have yet to see elsewhere:

Always vote!
The only way you throw you vote away
Is to stay away!

Be Counted! We the People Are Counting on You!

Election day is next Tuesday.  Are you registered?  Have you made your picks?  Please remember to show up.  Without your vote, the candidates you favor least have a better chance of winning.

I’m serious.  Time and time again, candidates have won in a “landslide” because far too many people didn’t show up.  In 1980 many media outlets reported that Ronald Reagan won over Jimmy Carter in a “landslide”.  The “real’ winner was “none of the above”!  Ronald Reagan came in a distant second with 27% of the eligible voters; 47% didn’t bother to show up.

In many ways 2000 was a ridiculous election.  Because of the electoral college system, George Bush won with 47.9% of the votes compared to Al Gore’s 48%.  Some people claim that Ralph Nader gave the election to Bush.  Would those who voted for Nader have voted at all?  Bush had 537 votes over Gore; 2,912,790 to 2,912,253.  Nader had over 90,000 votes, a tiny count compared to the no-shows.

Drat!  For years I’ve depended on the Election Project at George Mason University for turnout figures.  It is no longer available, and even many of the cached pages are no longer available.

According to the Florida Secretary of State’s office, turnout in 1980 was 70.1%.  That is, over 2.6 million registered voters didn’t bother to show up.  The de facto “none of the above” certainly swamped Nader votes.  We really don’t know if the Nader voters would have voted for Bush or Gore or stayed home.

Ah! I just dug deeper and Prof. Michael McDonald has taken his Election Project to the University of Florida.  See www.electproject.org.  McDonald claims that over four million eligible Florida voters didn’t show up (he’s counting eligible rather than registered).  Both Bush and Gore came in a distant second to “I don’t give a damn.”  That’s a helluva way to run a country.

Are you following the polls?  I say don’t bother because polls don’t determine elections.  You showing up can turn polls on their head.  Think about the 1948 post-election headline: “Dewey wins!”  The papers rushed to publish based on a telephone poll showing Dewey ahead.  However, the pollsters didn’t compensate for many Democratic voters not having telephones.

Even polls that claim to call people on landlines and cellphones may be missing an important clue.  Many people have caller ID; if they don’t know the caller, they don’t answer.  Have you seen any polls that mention the no response rate?

Another classic example of polls really missing the mark was the 1998 Minnesota gubernatorial election.  The polls had Skip Humphrey in the lead, Norm Coleman second, and Jesse Ventura last.  The results were Jesse Ventura winning, Norm Coleman second, and Skip Humphrey last.  I think that Jesse Ventura’s complaint about the auto-emission testing stations and the high taxes on his fancy cars resonated with a lot of drivers.  You can rest assured that somebody didn’t design their poll well.

Many rightfully complain about all the money in politics.  But the high spenders don’t always win.  Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, former CEOs of major tech companies, spent oodles of their own money to run for office in California,  Neither was elected.

Big spenders who lose are not confined to either party.  I had the pages up the other day which gave the spending by each party in the Presidential elections.  Surprise, the bigger spender wasn’t always the Republican candidate.  And when the bigger spender was a Democrat, he didn’t always win the general election, hanging chads or not.

A practice that has really gotten worse in recent years is the attack ads.  Candidate Joe will raise your taxes even mo’.  Candidate Tom doesn’t beat the drum for the military enough.  Candidate Bill didn’t spend enough on infra-structure (never mind that he did vote for a ten percent increase).  The silliest I’ve seen is that Al Franken voted with the President 85% of the time.  Duh!  When Bush was President, how often did Republican members of Congress vote with the President?  I would hope it was not 100% but definitely between 75% and 90%.

We can avoid many attack ads by not watching TV but they appear on billboards, in the newspapers and even on web pages.  I was surprised to see a silly attack ad on a web page against Stewart Mills who is running for Rick Nolan’s Congressional seat.  It was on a web site of a Wisconsin company!  The web knows whether you have been naughty or nice.

The purpose of attack ads is not to get you to vote for the attacker but to not show up at all.  Gosh!  I thought Sen. Foghorn was a great guy, but I guess I won’t bother showing up to vote for him this year.

So, what’s a poor confused citizen to do with all this obfuscation.

First, find all the neutral sources you can for information.  I know, there aren’t many of those.  About the best we can do is to read the candidates’ own statements in newspapers or on the web.

Second, show up and vote.  The only votes that don’t count are the votes not cast.

If you believe in democracy, you must be part of the demos, that is the people.

Mel hopes that he has to wait in line to vote.

This also appears in the Reader Weekly of Duluth at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2014/10/30/4267_be_counted_we_the_people_are_counting_on_you

Congressism

We have racism, sexism, and anti-semitism.  Now we have Congressism.  Congressism is a dislike of Congress out of all proportion to reality.  Commentators claim Congress is broken.  Polls indicate that people are very dissatisfied with Congress but that they are satisfied with their own Representatives and Senators.

Wait a minute!  Congress is broken but people like their own Representatives and Senators.  But Congress is made up of other people’s Representatives and Senators.  And those other people are satisfied with their members of Congress.  If all these Congress members are doing such a good job according to the people who supposedly elected them, how can Congress be broken?

“The Tea Party wins if we start hating our government. The solution is to find ways to be informed and engaged in our democratic process all the time, not just when there is a presidential election.” - Annabel Park, a Coffee Party founder (see www.coffeepartyusa.org)

“Well, Doctor, what have we got – a Republic or a Monarchy?”  Doctor Ben Franklin replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

If we don’t trust Congress, which is supposed to be most representative of the three branches of our government, are we giving up on keeping our republic?

So, let us not give up on our government.  Let us count the ways we can improve it.

First, of course, is to show up at every election and vote.  This is especially true if you live in a “gerrymandered” district.  You could contribute to an upset or you could reduce the margin of victory.

Also, don’t make any assumptions based on polls.  Vote whether the candidate you support is ahead or behind the polls.  The polls sample far fewer people than actually vote.  Remember also that polls can be very, very wrong.  In 1998, the polls predicted Skip Humphrey, Norm Coleman, and Jesse Ventura for governor in that order.  The results were Ventura, Coleman, and Humphrey.  As far as big money in politics, Ventura spent about one-tenth as much money per vote as either of his opponents.

Second, write about government.  Write letters to the editor.  Write to your representatives.  Write to the mayor, governor, or president.  You don’t need an essay.  You can simply state your support or opposition for some action.  Personally, I prefer writing directly to signing petitions.  One hundred persons writing about an issue probably has more influence than one thousand people signing a petition.

Unless you have some compelling information for or against an issue, a short letter is best.  Consider that the more people a politician represents, the greater the volume of mail and the less the chance that the politician will even see your letter.  But his or her staff will probably be counting them by subject and position.

One of the reasons Congress is “broken” is that few, if any, members read every word of the bills they vote on.  They depend on staff advice and often just follow their party.  I read that somebody challenged Congress to read the Patriot Act before voting on it.  Supposedly only one Congressman took up the challenge and voted against it.  I find it a bit hard to believe because supposedly complete copies were not available to Congress until twelve hours before the vote!  What’s this about the U.S. Senate being the greatest deliberative body in the world?  And people who are making the most noise about limited government now voted for the Patriot Act then.

Maybe we should follow Grover Norquist’s example and get Congress to sign a “Read the Bill Pledge”.  Maybe Warren Buffet or George Soros could fund this effort.

If all of these ideas seem to be getting nowhere, then maybe a few brave souls would start a new third party.  Say a few Republicans who don’t like the theft of the Party of Lincoln by the Tea Party and Southern Conservatives and a few Democrats who don’t care to jump whole-heartedly into every cause that some in the party expect everybody to support unconditionally.  Also, members of either party who feel that large corporations have too much influence on a “government of the people, by the people, for the people”.

The name I thought of was “Pragmatic Populists”.  That is, the government should work for the people as a whole with consideration that there will be conflicts of interests.

As usual, when I think I have a new and unique idea, somebody has already thought of it.  One source I found is an analysis of Justice John Paul Stevens’ decisions with regard to the First Amendment.  Gregory P. Magarian considers the balance that Justice Stevens sought in “The Pragmatic Populism of Justice Stevens’ Free Speech Jurisprudence”.  The abstract is at http://law.bepress.com/villanovalwps/art57/ and you can get the full text by clicking the “Download” button to the right of the title.

I don’t know if I’ll ever finish all forty-some pages of legal reasoning, but Magarian writes that Justice Stevens thought that the purpose of the First Amendment was to ensure that all could participate in political discourse, regardless of their background, status, or wealth.  Justice Stevens was writing opinions in support of this view, opposing his colleagues who interpreted the First Amendment as protecting political speech from government interference.  In other words, he didn’t think the First Amendment protected those who had the most bucks from buying the biggest microphones thereby overwhelming any speech of those who disagreed with them.

And the great irony is that John Paul Stevens is a Republican appointed by a Richard Nixon, a Republican.  The next irony is that Stevens seems to be holding the ideal of protecting individual against state power and the other conservatives seem to be favoring state or corporate power.

You can find an interesting biography of him in “TheDissenter, Justice John Paul Stevens, Majority of One”, Jeffrey Rosen, New York Times, 2007-09-23.

"Congressism" was also published in the Reader Weekly, 2013-10-23 and can be found at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2013/10/24/2305_party_of_one-2

I still don't believe the polls

… and I don't really have any well-based predictions of my own.

Consider that our phone rings several times a day.  We don't answer and very few leave a message on the answering machine.  Those who do leave a message have some meaningful connection to us.  Given the approaching election, these "empty" calls are

1) Robo-calls for a candidate or a party
2) Person calls for a candidate or a party
3) Poll calls

Also consider that many people have cell phones but no land line.  Although some pollsters say they are calling both land lines and cell phones, many cell phone numbers are not in any directory.  My cell phone has few calls and the two recent unknown calls may have been misdials or random spamming.  Besides, I generally have it off.

Which way will those who are not reached by a poll lean?  I can't really say.  Will too many younger voters stay away because they didn't think Obama didn't do enough?  Are those who don't answer more likely to lean toward Obama?  As I write this yet another call came in that stopped after three rings.

How likely are those who respond to actually vote?  One of the questions is if the respondent is a likely voter.  Many people say they are likely voters because they are embarrassed to admit that they don't plan on voting.

I think the election will be determined by the balance of unhappy people, which group will stay away in larger numbers - Tea Party types who don't think Romney is "conservative" enough or "liberals" who don't think Obama did enough.  My inclination is that the latter will be the larger group.

I hope you, dear reader, will not be a stay-away on election day.  Please remind your friends to vote.

How to vote intelligently

We went to a League of Women Voters meeting, supposedly to watch "Patriocracy", a movie about the divisiveness in this country.  For some reason, the movie never made it to the meeting place.  Instead we had an impromptu discussion about the subject.

One of the complaints voiced is how many news organizations don't separate fact from fiction, treating every pronouncement from politicians as fact, especially on TV.

I gave these four suggestions for voting intelligently:

Don't watch TV
Don't answer the phone
Read lots of newspapers
Show up and vote

If you don't follow my advice on the first three points, do me, yourself, and your country a favor by proudly acting on the fourth point.

Why I don't believe polls

I've long been suspicious of polls, especially political polls.  I also dislike polls because they turn elections into horse races rather than thoughtful consideration of candidates and because they reinforce the myth of "the two-party system".

The first question is who is asking what questions of who.

Who are the pollsters?  Are they completely neutral or are they hired by a party or a candidate?

What are the questions and what order were they made?  Were the questions framed to get a desired response?  Were questions asked in an order to set up the responder for a desired answer?

Who responded to the poll?  Was it only people who happened to be at home?  Was it only people who always answer the phone and politely enter into a dialog?  How many people screen their calls and won't respond to pollsters or other solicitation calls?  How many people who did answer hung up right away?  What about people who only have cell phones?  Even if cell phones are called by pollsters, do the phone owners screen their calls and don't respond to unknown callers?

For some of these difficulties facing pollsters, see "Pollsters struggle to find the right sample of voters", John Harwood, Star Tribune, 2012-08-06.

Polls also can be very far off.  One iconic picture is Harry Truman holding up a newspaper in November 1948, "Dewey Wins".  Harry Truman didn't even stay up for the results, but the polls were way off.  It was one of the first telephone polls, but nobody seemed to think that many Democratic voters didn't have telephones.

More recently, the 1998 Minnesota gubernatorial polls predicted Hubert Humphrey III (DFL), Norm Coleman (Rep), and Jesse Ventura (Reform Party) in that order.  The result was just the opposite with Ventura winning with 36.99 percent of the votes.  The turnout was 60 percent, and so Ventura came in second to none of the above.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_gubernatorial_election,_1998.

I wonder if anyone bothered taking a poll of the 40 percent who didn't show up.  What fraction were Democrats who didn't feel Humphrey would do "enough", what fraction were ex-Republicans who didn't like the direction the party was taking even then, and what fraction were people who just didn't give a damn about getting good governance?

Polling the self-selected

The political world is filled with polls that are targeted toward audiences that agree with the questions.  These polls are generally sent only to those who are predisposed to "positive" answers to the questions.  The Democratic National Committee does it.  The Republican National Committee does it.  News media with a particular slant do it.  Political offshoots of all kinds do it.

I generally avoid polls of all kinds, no matter what the source.  I don't even like the follow-up calls from businesses with whom I plan to buy again and again.

My Congressional Representative, Chip Cravaack, is one of the worst offenders in the biased presentation of polls.  His latest is about "What Would You Cut", a list of three items he would like to cut from the budget - replacing TSA employees with private contractors, dispose of excess baggage scanners, and "Terminate a National Science Foundation program aimed at shaping public opinion on climate change".  On the last he writes, "A review of prior grants made by the program shows a repeated pattern of funding activities intended to sway public opinion on a controversial topic about which the facts remain in heated dispute."  The controversy is coming from those who ignore the facts and have a lot of money to lose if there is to be a serious mitigation of climate change.

This particular poll is at http://cravaack.house.gov/press-releases/cravaack-what-would-youcut/ as of 2012-05-15.  Cravaack's staff will probably reuse this URL for a subsequent poll.

Rather than submit my answers, I sent the following webmail to Rep. Cravaack:

"With regard to your "What would you cut" email and many others, please have a chat with Bill Frenzel on how to communicate with constituents.

Rep. Frenzel wrote facts about what Congress was doing, not what he wanted constituents to agree with.

Each one of your "What would you cut" items makes it very clear what you want constituents to answer.

There are many much larger costs for things that are not really needed but have large constituencies supporting them.

I hope I don't have to tell you what these are; that would tell you what my biases are."

Bill Frenzel was the Representative from the suburbs of Minneapolis.  He would be considered a RINO by today's Republicans.  He wrote quite interesting newsletters about Congress that hardly ever touted what he was doing.

Ham's a winner, diners lose at Georgia's restaurant

Georgia's restaurant got a really great deal from her supplier.  It would send her 1000 bulk dinners at a greatly reduced cost.  The only catch was that they had to all be the same item.

So, Georgia took a poll of her customers, giving them a choice of ginger ham, macaroni and cheese, or bean soup.  Her poll received 47.2% for ginger ham, 27.4% for macaroni and cheese, and 25.4% for bean soup.

Based on this poll she ordered 1000 dinners of ginger ham, the clear winner.  She went broke on the order; she only sold a third of them.  First, she neglected that most of the macaroni and cheese voters were vegetarians and most of the bean soup voters were vegans.  Neither group would eat meat of any kind.

Only 13.2% of her regular customers voted.  Those who wanted chili, fish, or spaghetti didn't even participate.

Sources of figures:

47.2% - percentage of votes cast for Newt Gingrich in the State of Georgia's 2012 Presidential Preference Primary as reported by the Secretary of State, http://sos.georgia.gov/elections/election_results/2012_0306/0005001.htm.

13.2% - turnout in Georgia for the 2012 Presidential Primary as reported by CNN at "As GOP Fight Continues, Turnout Numbers Lag",

Commentary:

In the 2008 election, John McCain received 52.2% of the vote in Georgia with 62.5% turnout, giving him 32.6% of the eligible voters.  Using the same calculation, Gingrich received the votes in the 2012 primary in Georgia of 6.2% of the voters!  And newspaper after newspaper has headlines about Gingrich "winning" in Georgia!  Hey, journalists, the real winner was "none of the above"!

The 2008 vote and turnout figures are from "2008 General Election Turnout Rates" of the United States Election Project of George Mason University.

I know I'm preaching to the choir, but remember to vote.  If you don't vote, you give more weight to those voting for choices you wouldn't have made.

"The Media" is biased, but not the way many think it is

"The Media" is some mythical beast devouring the minds of people with slanted information.  Slanted is often in the mind of the complainant.  Too often the charge is "The Media" is "too liberal".  I've observed "too liberal" often means "The Media" doesn't emphasize a supposedly "conservative" view sufficiently according to the view of the complainants.

I think "The Media" gives too much coverage to views of all kinds that are based more on emotion than on fact, irrespective of where on the "political spectrum" they may be.

"The Media" reinforces the emotional impact of its coverage with a different, more worrisome bias.  A bias towards economy of words and away from nuance.  Just think of some of the headlines:

Angry voters
Consumers hold tight to their wallets
Investors were buoyed/dejected by …
Americans think…

These headlines convey "all voters", "all consumers", "all investors", or "all Americans" are acting as one.  What we rarely know is if the implied "all" should be replaced by "most", "many", or "some".  Sometimes we can read deep into an article that a poll claims that 45% of respondents answered with view A, 40% answered with view B, and 15% had no opinion.  That certainly doesn't justify a headline "People hold view A".

Oh, yeah!  It's probably even more problematic.  Few polls admit how many people hung up without responding.

For more of my rants on generalization, see "General Ization Battles Truth".

Political surveys

Both the Democrats and the Republicans think I'm one of theirs. I get surveys and requests for donations from both. They don't seem to realize that the title of my column in the Reader Weekly is "Party of One".

OK, OK, I may support with a check a candidate that I like now and then, but that doesn't mean I support the candidate's party.

Yesterday I received a survey from the Democratic National Committee. I don't plan to return it; see "Can You Believe the Polls Anymore". However, I do find this survey more meaningful than those I receive from Republicans. Recent Republican surveys have been full of leading questions; this Democratic survey has only three.

These are:
"Do you believe that John McCain's pledge to keep troops in Iraq for another 100 years will be a liability in the General Election?" McCain didn't "pledge" to stay in Iraq; he said troops would be in Iraq 100 years if necessary.

"How likely do you think it is that John McCain and his Republican allies will launch a "Swift Boat" style smear campaign against our presidential nominee?" We can be certain that allies of both parties will engage in distortion campaigns. Let's hope both presidential candidates stand above such nonsense.

"How concerned are you that Republican voter suppression schemes will disenfranchise Democrats and impact the outcome of the presidential race?" The best antidote to any " suppression schemes" is to get out the vote, massively. Remember more Democrats stayed away in Florida in 2000 than voted for Ralph Nader.

I might send in the survey anyway. Its last question is "If your could offer one piece of advice to the Democratic presidential nominee, what would it be?" I've thought of a couple over the past few weeks; if I can recall them and express one concisely, I might send the survey in.

Can you believe the polls anymore?

In the 1948 presidential election, many polls predicted that Thomas Dewey would beat Harry Truman. They were so wrong. The polls were made by telephone, but many Democratic voters had no telephone. So, they were not counted.

Now more people have telephones; and polls, except exit polls, are conducted by telephone. But two things make them inaccurate. Many polls are conducted by robo-dialer and a large number of people hang up when there is silence on the other end. Polls are conducted to numbers that are in some database, but many of those database are based on listed numbers. People with unlisted numbers might not be called. Cell phone numbers generally do not appear in listings. Many young people have cell phones only. So many young people will never be called by polls.

Barack Obama is attracting and energizing many young people. Will a representative number of his supporters be called? Some polls show him getting fewer votes than John McCain. Will John McCain be the 2008 version of 1948's Thomas Dewey?

Who should be president? Difficult choices for us

Actually, the choices aren't so much ours as they are the choices of editors and popular bloggers. See Making news or reporting news? They are the ones who choose the so-called front-runners and give more coverage to them.

So, being a not-so-popular blogger, I'll give my own list of front-runners. However, later I will give you an alternative for choosing a presidential candidate, by-passing all of us media know-it-alls.

My order does not reflect my current preferences. It's just as they pop into my mind.

Hillary Clinton has some good ideas and some bad ideas. From what I've read, she is the one coming up with concrete proposals for many domestic issues, like health care. On the other hand, she has cast votes in the Senate that have led us into the current mess in Iraq. I have not seen any concrete proposals for a smooth extrication from Iraq.

Bill Richardson, Governor of New Mexico, has experience in governance. That is, making government work to the benefit of most of the people. I favor this qualification for President over any other, including "foreign policy experience". The Current Occupant certainly didn't have any of that and still doesn't after seven years on the job. I would have to examine Richardson's record more to see how well he governed. It would be nice if the major newspapers gave him as much coverage as Clinton and Obama.

All the Republicans are more of the same Goofy Old Party that has gotten us into many of our current problems. The only Republican I might consider voting for is Ron Paul, but I have only two reasons. As a libertarian, he has an independent streak that is refreshing in the current "The President's way or the highway" mindset. He did vote against the Iraq War, my second reason for favoring him. However, libertarians minimize common good, something in short supply among Republicans.

What alternatives to we have, outside of getting involved in a party or an individual campaign? There is a group called Unity08 that will hold an online nominating convention in June 2008. Once the convention selects a candidate pair, Unity08 will endeavor to put them on the ballot in every state. Visit Unity08 for more details on participating in the convention.

My own quirky choices: Kathleen Sebelius, David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, or Olympia Snowe. The thinking of any of these is better than many who are currently more prominent in presidential politics. Any pairing from this selection of politician-politician or politician-journalist would give us a more serious discussion of the issues than is currently available.

The pH factor

When I heard a couple of guys in the fitness center mention a certain celebrity this morning, my stomach became acidic over such a base discussion. Even people who think she is non-news feel compelled to mention her, for example, Mallard Fillmore or current writer.

There is a certain herd instinct in people, in and out of the media, to make news where there is none or even provide more weight to certain people or ideas and less weight to other people or ideas, regardless of their true importance.

Political campaigns highlight this problem. The media reports on front-runners in polls and voters vote for front-runners. The polls become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I wrote about this in "Reporting News or Making News", Reader Weekly, Nov. 9, 2006.