32 Scott Farmelant, “Dead Men Can Vote: Vote Fraud is Alive and Well in Philadelphia,” Philadelphia City Paper, October 12-19, 1995.
33 Ibid., and Mark Fazlollah, “Workers Apparently Broke Residency Rules,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 17, 1995.
34 Jingle Davis, “Even death can’t stop some voters,” Atlanta Journal and Constitution, November 6, 2000.
35 Jim Boulet Jr., “Commission Creation,” National Review, February 26, 2002.
36 Deborah M. Phillips, Testimony on Election Issues, Senate Rules and Administration, March 14, 2001.
37 Tim Collie, “Florida’s Flawed Election Process,” Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Florida), December 10, 2000.
38 John Fund, Stealing Elections (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004), 62-64. Nearly a third of jurisdictions in Missouri have more registered voters than people. See Bill Lambrecht and Virginia Young, “U.S. Sues Missouri over Voter Lists,” St. Louis Post Dispatch, November 23, 2005. See also Jeremy Hagen, “Photo IDs protect one-person, one-vote ideal,” Springfield News-Leader (Missouri), April 5, 2006, and “Inflated voter rolls complicate election turnout percentages,” Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, October 4, 2005.
39 John Fund interviewed on the Dennis Prager radio show on November 8, 2006, first hour (http://boss.streamos.com/download/Townhall/audio/mp3/7d23b263-65b5-4c19-9ac8-67ebd7cdc3f6.mp3?siteid=PodCast).
40 Editorial, “Voter Suppression in Missouri,” New York Times, August 10, 2006.
41 Chuck McCutcheon, “Absentee Voting Fosters Trickery, Trend’s Foes Say,” Times-Picayune, October 24, 2006.
42 Fund, Stealing Elections, 44.
43 John Fund, “Absent Without Leave,” OpinionJournal.com, October 30, 2006 (http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110009167).
44 Rick Montgomery, “Questions abound in voter push,” Kansas City Star, October 12, 2006, and Jeff Douglas, “Voter Registration Fraud Alleged in St. Louis,” Kansas City Star, October 11, 2006.
45 Both these measures were supported by the bipartisan Carter-Baker Commission on election reform. Such rules are also supported by an overwhelming majority of Americans. A survey by Rasmussen Research indicated that 82 percent of all Americans, including 75 percent of Democrats, agree with the statement that “people should be required to show a driver’s license or some other form of photo ID before they are allowed to vote.” See Fund, Stealing Elections, 5.
46 Deroy Murdock, “Cleaning up America’s Election System,” Scripps Howard News Service, September 28, 2006.
47 David Lieb, “Missouri Voter ID Law Latest in National Test Cases,” Associated Press, August 20, 2006 (http://www.belleville.com/mld/belleville/news/state/15320528.htm) and “Supreme Court Allows Arizona Voter ID Law,” Reuters News Wire, October 20, 2006 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2006/10/20/AR2006102001203.html).
48 “Mexican Senate approves mail-in absentee ballots for Mexicans living abroad,” Associated Press, April 28, 2005 (http://www.azcentral.com/specials/special03/articles/0428mexicovote-ON.html). Absentee ballots are the source of fraud in many different countries. The United Kingdom also faced claims of widespread vote fraud from “postal votes” during the 2005 parliamentary election. See Zoe Hughes, “Reform call after postal votes row,” The Journal (Newcastle, UK), May 21, 2005.
49 Curiously, however, the election reforms resulted in only a trivial increase in voting rates for Mexican congressional elections. Comparing the four congressional elections prior to the reforms with the four afterward produces only a one percent increase, from 56 to 57 percent. For the turnout data up through the 2003 elections see Joseph L Klesner., “The Not-So-New Electoral Landscape in Mexico,” Working Paper, Department of Political Science, Kenyon College, September 15-16, 2003.
50 John R. Lott, Jr., “Evidence of Voter Fraud and the Impact that Regulations to Reduce Fraud Have on Voter Participation Rates,” SUNY Binghamton Working Paper, July 29, 2006.
51 Provisional ballots allow people to vote even if their names do not appear on voter rolls, while no excuse absentee ballots allow any registered voter to receive an absentee ballot without having to provide a reason for needing one.
52 John R. Lott, Jr., “Evidence of Voter Fraud and the Impact that Regulations to Reduce Frand have on Voter Participation Rates,” SUNY Binghamton Working Paper, July 29, 2006.
53 “Vote Fraud, Intimidation, and Suppression in the 2004 Presidential Election,” American Center for Voting Rights Legislative Fund, Washington, D.C., August 2, 2005. If there is another report, I haven’t been able to find it.
54 John R. Lott, Jr., “Evidence of Voter Fraud.”
55 Since the study follows states both before and after they either adopt or stop the practice, the result can’t simply be attributed to low voter participation in states adopting the rule.
56 Much of this discussion is based on John R. Lott, Jr., “Non-voted Ballots, The Cost of Voting, and Race,” Public Choice, forthcoming.
57 “Poll: Voter Interest Highest in Decade,” Associated Press, October 11, 2006 (http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/10/11/motivated.voters.ap/index.html). Nor are these concerns new. Nationally, as many as 18 percent of African Americans and 20 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds claim they don’t believe their votes are counted accurately. See Rad Sallee, “Voters lose some faith in election accuracy,” Houston Chronicle, July 9, 2004.
58 Kimball Brace, “69 Million Voters will use Optical Scan Ballots in 2006,” Election Data Services, February 6, 2006 (http://www.electiondataservices.com/EDSInc_VEStudy2006.pdf#search=%22PUnch%20card%20machines%20million%20voters%22), and US Census Bureau, “Voting and Registration in the Election of November 2000,” US Census Bureau, February 2002 (http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/p20-542.pdf).
59 These data are for presidential elections from 1988 to 2000. See “Residual Votes Attributable to Technology,” Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, March 30, 2001.
60 John R. Lott, Jr., “Non-voted Ballots.”
61 This pattern has held true for decades. Even an expert hired by the ACLU, Professor Herb Asher at Ohio State University, found that punch card machines overall had much lower rates of non-voted ballots than other machines during the 1978 election. After this became clear, the ACLU declined to call on Asher to testify in a voter fraud court case.
62 Susan King Roth, “Human Factors Research on Voting Machines and Ballot Design: An Exploratory Study,” Virginia Commonwealth University working paper, undated. See also Bederson, Benjamin B. Bongshin Lee, Robert M. Sherman, Paul S. Herrnson, and Richard G. Niemi, “Electronic Voting System Usability Issues,” University of Maryland working paper (ftp://ftp.cs.umd.edu/pub/hcil/Reports-Abstracts-Bibliography/2002-23html/2002-23.html).
63 Ibid. Bradley Smith, then chairman of the Federal Election Commission, suggested to me in a telephone interview that older people’s eyes may have a harder time focusing on computer screens, especially for longer periods of time.
64 And even then, the race of voters only explains 0.4 percent to 3 percent of the variation in non-voted ballot rates, itself an already small number.
65 This compares voters in households making under $15,000 annually with those in households with income of over $500,000.
66 John R. Lott, Jr., “Hacker Hysteria,” Washington Times, May 11, 2004.
67 Michael I. Shamos, Testimony before the Maryland General Assembly House Ways & Means Committee, December 7, 2004 (http://euro.ecom.cmu.edu/people/faculty/mshamos/WaysMeansTestimony.htm). Shamos went so far as to wager a bet at 2 to 1 odds that such tampering could not occur (http://www.votingmachinesprocon.org/tamperingchallenge.pdf).
68 Michael I. Shamos, Testimony before the Environment, Technology, and Standards Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Science, June 24, 2004 (http://euro.ecom.cmu.edu/people/faculty/mshamos/HouseScience.htm).
69 Zev Chafets, “Florida Got Bad Rap in Vote Mess,” New York Daily News, June 10, 2001.
70 By comparison, it took
an additional 125 African Americans of all party affiliations in the average precinct to generate one spoiled vote. All these results control for a wide range of factors that influence spoiled-ballot rates, including education, gender, income, age, number of absentee votes, voting-machine type, ballot type, and whether votes are counted at the precinct or centrally. In other words, it is the isolated fact of being a Republican that makes an African American vastly more likely to have his or her ballot declared as not showing a vote. John R. Lott, Jr., “Non-Voted Ballots and Discrimination in Florida,” Journal of Legal Studies, vol. 32, no. 1, January 2003: 181-220.
71 Ibid.
72 For example, listing the candidates’ names in a straight line produces fewer problems than printing them on different pages or in separate columns.
73 The discussion in this section is based upon John R. Lott, Jr., “Documenting Unusual Declines in Republican Voting Rates in Florida’s Western Panhandle Counties in 2000,” Public Choice, vol. 123, June 2005: 349-361.
74 Reagan Coast-To-Coast, Time, Nov. 17, 1980.
75 A Field Institute survey indicated that 10 percent of Democratic voters blamed the media projections for their failure to vote. U.S. Representative Billy Tauzin, House Energy and Commerce Committee Hearing on Election Night 2000, February 14, 2001.
76 There was even one congressional race that spanned the two time zones, so half the district still had polls open when the Senate and presidential elections were called for the Democrats. After the early call, turnout dropped by several percentage points in the precincts that remained open.
77 Lott, “Documenting Unusual Declines,” 349-361.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid.
80 Throughout election day, Florida counties report to the State Secretary of State on the voter turnout rate in their counties. It was only during the last part of the day that the turnout fell in the Western Panhandle counties relative to the rest of the state.
81 Lott, “Documenting Unusual Declines,” 349-361.
82 John Stossel and Bill Ritter, “Where the Boys are,” ABC News, March 16, 2001; Robert J. Vickers, “Tinsel Town’s Glitter Factor a Challege for Delegates,” Plain Dealer, August 18, 2000; Jim Hopkins, “More Women Flex Muscles in Politics,” USA Today, September 16, 2003; “Interview with Bill Maher,” CNN Larry King Live, January 20, 2004; Editorial, “The Angry Left,” Calgary Herald, January 8, 2004; and http://www.newsmeat.com/billionaire_political_donations/.
83 Ryan S. King, “A Decade of Reform: Felony Disenfranchisement Policy in the United States,” The Sentencing Project, October 2006 (http://www.sentencingproject.org/pdfs/FVR_Decade_Reform.pdf).
84 Michelle Chen, “Felon Voting Rights Conflict Hits Federal Courts,” The New Standard, June 24, 2005.
85 John R. Lott, Jr. and James K. Glassman, “The Felon Vote,” New York Post, March 1, 2005.
86 Dick Gordon, “Voting Rights for Felons.” April 7, 2004.
87 Interview with the Assistant for Clemency for the Governor of Virginia for 1994 and 1995 (Voting Rights for Felons, National Public Radio’s The Connection , April 7, 2004).
88 Ibid.
89 The implications for Senate races after the mid-1990s are based upon extrapolating their results. See Jeff Mana, Christopher Uggen, and Marcus Britton, “The Truly Disfranchised: Felon Voting Rights and American Politics,” University of Minnesota working paper, January 3, 2001 (http://www.northwestern.edu/ipr/publications/papers/manza.pdf).
90 Survey conducted in Washington State by Venture Data L.L.C. on May 22-23, 2005 for Public Opinion Strategies.
91 While the effect isn’t statistically significant for Hispanics, non-felon Hispanics fall between “independent” and “a few more Democrats than Republicans,” while felon Hispanics fall between “a few more Democrats than Republicans” and “mostly Democrats.”
92 Brian Faler, “Election Turnout in 2004 Was Highest Since 1968,” Washington Post, January 15, 2005.
93 Pauline Jelinek, “Election Turnout Rate Tops 40 Percent,” Associated Press, November 8, 2006 (http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/ELN_TURNOUT?SITE=7219&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTME=2006-11-08-18-54-03).
94 John R. Lott, Jr., “A Review Article on Donald Wittman’s The Myth of Democratic Failure,” Public Choice, vol. 92, no. 1-2 (July 1997): 1-13.
95 Http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=40862.
96 For example, in 2004, 55 percent of journalists at national media outlets claimed that the media was “not critical enough” of President Bush, while only 8 percent believed that the media has been “too critical.” By contrast, a similar poll during 1995 found that 48 percent of the press believed that “too little” coverage had been given to President Clinton’s accomplishments, while only 2 percent thought that “too much” coverage went to his achievements. See the Times Mirror Survey, see MRC’s June, 1995 edition of MediaWatch. Pew Research Center for the People and the press, Survey of Journalists, March 10 - April 20, 2004. Patterson and Donsbach’s survey of journalists lead them to conclude that “there is . . . a perceptual gap between journalists’ self-image and their actions, and it leads them to reject any suggestion that they are politically biased.” Thomas Patterson and Donsbach Wolfgang, “News Decisions: Journalists as Partisan Actors,” Political Communication (1996): 466.
97 This discussion is based upon John R. Lott, Jr. and Kevin Hassett, “Is Newspaper Coverage of Economic Events Politically Biased?: Reagan to Bush II,” AEI working paper 2004 (http://ssrn.com/abstract=588453). Hassett and I assembled a list of dates on which important economic news was released for most newspapers from 1991 to 2004. We also followed four major papers and the Associated Press for a slightly longer period—from 1985 onward. We then used Nexis—a computer database of news stories from 389 newspapers—to gather all 12,620 headlines that ran in America’s newspapers covering economic news stories on those dates. We looked at headlines the day of and the day after the data were announced but excluded follow-up and feature stories in order to link the headlines directly with the economic numbers.
98 For example, unemployment fell by 2 percentage points during Reagan’s second term and by 1.5 percentage points during Clinton’s second term, while GDP growth was similar (3.8 and 4.0 respectively) during both periods. Yet, Reagan received 7 percent fewer positive headlines than Clinton even after accounting for the slight differences in economic conditions. Unsurprisingly, during Reagan’s second term, those who believed the economy was getting worse exceeded those who thought it was improving. The difference was almost 17 percentage points. During Clinton’s second term, the reverse was true - optimists about the economy outnumbered pessimists by 6 percentage points.
99 There have been a few other attempts to measure systematically media bias. One interesting paper by Groseclose and Milyo developed an index of how conservative or liberal media coverage was by counting the number of times that a media outlet cited various think tanks and comparing that with the number of times that members of Congress cited the same think tanks in speeches on the floor of the House and Senate. By comparing the citation patterns between politicians and media, they constructed an Americans for Democratic Action score for each media outlet, and thus ranked it on the same scale that politicians are ranked from liberal to conservative. They found that “Most of the mainstream media outlets that we examined . . . were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than they were to the median member of the House.” This may indicate bias, but since an article may also quote an academic or a business, government, or union official, examining only think tanks could give a mistaken picture of any bias. Most reporters interview both sides for a story (though the vast majority of news stories in their data set only mention one of the 200 think tanks that they categorize as conservative or liberal), and any bias is likely to be much more subtle.Another paper by DellaVigna and Kaplan claims that FOX News is conservative because people in particular areas tended to vote more conservatively after their cable systems
started carrying FOX News. Even if one accepts their test and results, this does not constitute evidence that FOX is “conservative,” only that it is not as liberal as the other media that it was replacing. See Tim Groseclose and Jeff Milyo, “A Measure of Media Bias,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2005, 1191-1237, and Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan, “The FOX News Effect: Media Bias and Voting,” University of California at Berkeley, March 30, 2006.
100 The discussion in this section is based upon: John R. Lott, Jr., “Public Schooling, Indoctrination, and Totalitarianism,” Journal of Political Economy , vol. 107, no. 6, part 2, December 1999: S127-S157; John R. Lott, Jr.,”An Explanation for Public Provision of Schooling: The Importance of Indoctrination,” Journal of Law and Economics, vol. 33, no.1, April 1990: 199-231; John R. Lott, Jr.,” Why is Education Publicly Provided?: A Critical Survey,” Cato Journal, vol. 7, no. 2, Fall 1987: 475-501; John R. Lott, Jr., “The Institutional Arrangement of Public Education: The Puzzle of Exclusive Territories,” Public Choice, vol. 54, no. 1, 1987: 89-96; and John R. Lott, Jr.,”Alternative Explanations for Public Provision of Education,” UCLA Dissertation, 1984.
101 J. Bruce Amstutz, Afghanistan: The First Five Years of Soviet Occupation, (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1986). Another example of Soviet opposition to the family is the official propagation of the tale of Pavlik Morozov in the 1930s. According to the story, the twelve-year-old Morozov denounced his own father to the authorities for allegedly assisting efforts by private farmers to resist the state’s collectivization of their farms. Pavlik, who was later killed by his own family members, was immortalized as a martyr for communism in songs and stories taught to Soviet children until the regime’s collapse. The moral of Morozov’s story was to trust the state, not one’s own family.
102 Charles Glenn, Educational Freedom in Eastern Europe, (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1995) 52.
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