It OUGHTA Be A Crime!

Yesterday, our press-hungry, tea-party-base-pandering, 2012 Presidential-candidate-wannabe Governor, Tim Pawlenty, proclaimed that he "suspected" that felons would more likely have voted for Al Franken than Norm Coleman.
He didn't have any proof, but he suspected it. And because he suspected that felons would have voted democratically, he suggested that election was illegally tipped to Franken.

Now, having begun to dig into the reports that are being touted to support these 2 claims, I would first point out that the word 'felon' is being used fast and loose. "Felon" is more often correctly used to refer to those who have been convicted, and are still serving out some form of their punishment - either in jail, or on probation - and are disenfranchised (meaning not legally allowed to vote).

EX-felons are the individuals being cited in these studies, individuals who are no longer disenfranchised and who can now vote legally. TP, and Fox News, and a certain right-wing blogging friend of ours, uses FELONS and EX-FELONS interchangeably from studies, when they are NOT in fact interchangeable. There are no studies which I could find which document how felons, who are not voting legally, vote. The assumption, which is not supported by any of these studies is that individuals will vote illegally the way these re-enfranchised people do, because they used to be felons. There is no proof of that, and the evidence is that there are so few felons voting illegally that they couldn't do a study if they wanted to do one - too few people!


That makes a big difference in how they spin these studies that have the pols and pundits orgasming all over the political sphere. They are in fact, either intentionally twisting the truth into a lie, to their benefit; or, unintentionally through carelessness, stupidity, and laziness, ignorantly misrepresenting the content of these studies. Shame on them!

Minnesota Majority claims that as many as 1,000 felons or more may have voted in the 2008 Minnesota Senate election (which Franken won by 312) votes. But is that pattern, which is widely discredited supported by these studies? IT IS NOT!

Quoting from the study waived around by our confreres from the right, the one written by a professor from the U of MN, "Third, our analyses have assumed that felon disenfranchisement laws are well enforced, and that felons and ex-felons do not attempt to vote in disregard of these laws. Surely some disenfranchised felons have cast ballots, although occasional charges of fraudulent voting have not, upon further investigation, produced significant evidence of illegal voting." (italics added for emphasis)

There is a phrase for dishonestly picking out information from a study that supports your position, and intentionally omitting information that does not, so as to present the information in a misrepresentative way. That is called CHERRY PICKING. These studies do NOT support the widely discredited position of the Minnesota Majority that large numbers of felons - or disenfranchised ex-felons -vote illegally. They say the opposite. Every conclusion of the right hinges on the plausibility of disenfranchised felons - not EX-felons - voting illegally. It is dishonest of them not to point out that these studies they are quoting say that does not happen significantly. It is highly dubious that 1,000 felons voted, and indications are that fewer former felons participate in the political process. Preliminary reviews have already thrown out about half of the cases on their face.

But where it got the most interesting was this part near the end, "There is also some evidence that state authorities have improperly purged ex-felons from the rolls, thereby off setting or perhaps eclipsing the number of votes cast fraudulently. (Palast2000; cf. Stuart 2002)." And the interesting thing is, that this IS a conclusion that IS supported by other sources, that there are more individuals being denied the right to vote who ARE legally entitled to do so, who are 'sinned against', both ex-felons and non-felons, than there are 'sinners', illegally voting current felons. Want to take a flying guess at who it is that is preventing lawful voters from voting, pretty much solely on the basis that the voters being denied their rights would vote for the other side? The Republicans, as demonstrated by a long laundry list of successful court cases.

Now that really IS a crime.

There's another issue; the time for arguing this is long past.

Norm Coleman had every opportunity during and after the election to make claims of voting fraud, and yet his attorneys, at the conclusion of that six-month trial affirmed they "had no evidence of substantial voter fraud." I'd bet a tip to Emmer the next time he waits tables, that the reason this wasn't pursued at the time is that they didn't have ANY studies, or other factual sources that would hold up in court, that backed up illegal voting claims -- certainly not in numbers that would have changed the election. If they had them, they would have used them.

The larger issue is that Pawlenty makes such an assertion. There is one study done in 2001 to which the Republicans are pointing, one which does point out that ex-felons vote for Democrats, and at that in a huge proportions. That same report, the Uggen study noted below, also points out that it is entirely to be expected given the vastly disproportionate share of the most poor and of minorities who make up the population of ex-felons. Yet, Mr. Pawlenty cannot reasonably know how each ex-felon may have voted. Also, this is only one study, albeit a very comprehensive one. He also is forgetting that these ex-felons are allowed to vote (unless they are still felons, and at this point there is little to substantiate such an allegation). As such, they are simply another group. A group which shares demographic profiles with the poor and those most likely to experience police activity in their neighborhoods, and those most likely to receive help from the government to keep from starving, meaning perhaps there are understandable reasons for their voting patterns which have nothing whatsoever to do with their past conviction.

Also, Mr. Pawlenty fails to be concerned about the voting patterns of other groups - because remember, if these are ex-felons, rather than felons, that's just what they are, another group, voting legally. He fails to talk about how skin-heads vote, he fails to talk about how Neo-Nazis, or extremist militia groups vote too. I wonder how their voting records break? These ex-felons are, as far as we know, people who aren't engaging in extremist activity, yet Mr. Pawlenty gin's up their conduct to attempt to indict the lawful election of a person with whom he should be seeking a strong relationship, but instead choses to besmirch the election's outcome, and Franken's legitimacy, yet again. It is the completely inappropriate rant of someone looking for headlines and trying to drum up support in this brave new world of Tea Party mentality extremism.

Pawlenty knows full well that the has no proof any court would accept (as they certainly would never accept one report), he cannot possibly know the votes of any group, which is the bar over which he (and any challenge) would have to leap/reach, and he knows full well the time for filing that kind of appeal is long past. It is irresponsible for the sitting Governor to question the legitmacy of a Senator after such a lengthy and meticulous legal process. He slanders and defames our state officials, our courts, and our election laws which are very highly regarded.

Where does he get this stuff? Is he making it up himself, or does he have help?

He has help. Fox news (news, sort of) appears to be in on circulating this stuff along with T-Paw. Flatulent news cites three studies as evidence the claim that current felons are democrats is factual. I doubt that T-Paw - maybe if he keeps making this excrement up, we'll have call him 'TP' as in toilet paper- read any of the studies. The primary report Fox (and TP) point to is one done by (among others) Christopher Uggen (U of MN). Mr. Uggen's study, in 'Democratic Contraction Political Consequences of Felon Disenfranchisement in the United States" does in fact point to very high proportions of ex-felons voting for Democrats, but had Fox and TP read further, they would have also seen the primary thrust of the study, the one for which it is in fact titled. This study points out one fact, over and over again with crystal clarity, namely, "Because felons are drawn disproportionately fromthe ranks of racial minorities and the poor, disenfranchisement laws tend to take more votes from Democratic than from Republican candidates." Consequently, while it is possible that ex-felons voted for Al Franken, the larger truth, just like we witnessed in Florida where 14,000 people had their names improperly striken from voter roles, 14,000 people who should have been able to vote, and who "we suspect" would have voted more for Gore than Bush, weren't allowed to.

This study points out that improper disenfranchisement of lawful voters, ex-felons in the study, and more broadly in Florida, occurs far more predominantly against voters who would otherwise have voted for Democrats. Thus, voter disenfranchisement is a boon to Republican candidantes when looked at on a macro-scale. Small wonder TP and other Republicans are looking to create new rules for preventing people from voting. In fact, this study points out the irony and hypocrisy of TP's complaint - namely that if those lawfully entitled to vote but otherwise disnenfranchised, were allwoed to have voted, their votes most likely would have dramatically outweighed any improper votes, and Franken would have won by a wider margin. So the study suggests that the report TP bases his claim that he suspects Franken would have lost, in fact would lead someone who read it carefully to "suspect" exactly the opposite, namely, that Franken would have won more handily.

However, in this particular case though about these supposedly illegally cast votes, there simply is no way to know how they might have voted assuming at all that they did, which is almost certainly untrue. The study says clearly that while a population may tend to vote a certain way, there is no gaurantee whatsoever that the trends hold true in every case. TEND. There is no mathematical basis to believe that a trend indicated by larger numbers of people providing a statistic would translate to a few people voting in the pattern of that trend. They might, but they might not. Trends do not predict specific individual behavior; they predict the general behavior of groups. If you have ten thousand people voting, studies and statistics will tell you how the overall numbers are likely to result - but not guarantee the result. If it says 60 percent will vote one way and 40 percent another, your final tallies should be similar. But if you have only five or ten? You could as easily have all of them vote one way, or another, or a different mix than 60/40.

But there is more!! From one of the footnotes, "Note that in many local races, especially in

mostly black urban districts, the partisan impact of felon disenfranchisement might be diminished
because Republican candidates are already uncompetitive in these districts." What does that mean? It means that in some areas Republicans could not possibly win regardless of disenfranchisement, because they are so widely disliked and distrusted. You can't blame anyone else for that but the Republicans themselves in light of this kind of blatant misrepresentation of facts.

No, this is simply a politician making an ugly, derogatory and unprovable claim, and therefore one which can't be disproved, to play to the biases and bigotry of potential voters. From a pundit like Ann Coulter, it's just more ugliness, from someone seeking the Presidency, it's a crying shame, an embarassment to the state of Minnesota.

The article referred to in this post is "Democratic Contraction? The Political Consequences of Felon Disenfranchisement in the United  States" 2002, published in the American Sociological Review by Christopher Uggen and Jeff Manza,  link here:  http://www.soc.umn.edu/~uggen/Uggen_Manza_ASR_02.pdf

Heck, you might even say, it ought to be a crime.