Hoping Obama Fails

It is clear at this point that the Republican strategy is to hope for the failure of barack obama. If your doubting that i can point you to this. The general idea is that the republicans are going to obstruct as much as possible, declare everything is a horrendous mistake, hope it fails, and then run against it in 2010 and 2012. This they believe is the best way back into power without actually coming up with anything new that might actually solve the problem. Is this strategy correct or is there another way?

The obstruction strategy seems to be the easiest. Of course it has the drawback that it will fail spectacularly if obama is successful at turning things around. I believe their is a much better option for the republicans that has the added benefit of not endangering the future of the country. The Republicans should try to actually fix the situation along side Obama.

Ridiculous though it sounds there is actually a path back into power by helping obama. It requires that the republicans elevate the idea of bipartisanship to a level that makes them seem like coequal in any policy discussion, take visible credit when things that are popular pass, hope everything actually succeeds and the country returns to the point of "normalcy". At that point they can take credit for the return to better times and ague that they are the better stewards of prosperity than the democrats. Essentially they try and pull a second 2000 style election. Obama comes in fixes everything up and the american people decide at that point they can afford to go in another direction.

I mentioned the importance to the republicans of keeping the idea of bipartisanship as one of the most sought after policy hurdles. This allows for policy proposals to be framed in a gop centric manner. everything will be defined as how the republicans will respond or approve and this makes them seem like the final arbiters of policy, giving them more legitimate credit claiming in the future. The democrats think that by gaining republican support for bills they gain cover if the plan fails because they can say republicans voted for it too. However, republicans will simply charge that as the party in power the Dems crafted the failure and that they tried to improve it and were stopped etc. being bipartisan simply robs democrats of the credit while keeping them responsible for the failure.

this is not a short term plan. The key to this plan is the short attention span of the american people and the press. It might seem unimaginable that the american people would forget what happened the last time they turned a surplus and peace over to the republicans but this will be eight years down the road. By assisting in the recovery the republicans can argue they were just as responsible for the turn around and that the Bush years are long gone. The media of course would be more than happy to carry that "counter intuitive" type of story.

Kos has made the argument that if the democrats pass health care and the other aspects of their agenda that they will have a lock on the power structure for a generation. I think that this fundamentally misreads the long term appreciation for a universal health care system the american people will feel. If its done early enough in the new term it has eight years to become simply another part of the american landscape. If it becomes thought of as unremarkable the democrats running on the "but we brought you health care" platform could easily find themselves out of power. Elections are generally prospective rather than retrospective and counting on legislative achievements to carry us for a generation seems incorrect.

Several bloggers, which i cant recall off the top of my head, have made the point that voting for the stimulus and working with obama would mean acknowledging that their world view was incorrect. I dont think this is quite right. they could easily claim that they were trying to work within the system to minimize the damage done by the government and that a yes vote was simply the price for that minimization.

i think the odds of republicans adopting something like this are remote to say the least. this would require much more subtlety and long term planning than republicans seem interested in. also it requires a rather meek congress that allows the republicans to continue to dictate terms of the debate without asserting dem control. There is also the problem of facing whoever comes after obama and making the case against that person as the steward of prosperity. just something to think about.

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Ink Stained Hands

Reading the reports of the voting in Iraq one thing has become clear, the Iraqis have an excellent system for identifying those who vote and those who dont. Poli Sci research has shown that one of the most effective ways to get people to vote is social pressure and the possibility of being identified as the person who didnt vote. In Iraq the means of identifying those who have done their civic duty is far more effective than the "i voted" sticker handed out at american polling places.

If your not familiar with the Iraq ink system for identifying voters here is a description courtesy of the NYT

Next, each voter will place his or her ballot inside a locked box - and then the piece de resistance of Iraqi elections will take place: Voters will dip their index finger into a vat of indelible ink, which is done to try to prevent people from casting multiple ballots.

In the past, Iraq has used purple ink for this purpose. This time, the color is literally a state secret. Members of the election commission will only say the ink will come from outside the country.

While the design of the program is to increase the trust and legitimacy of the elections the side effect has been to create a point of pride for the iraqi citizenry. Some who dont vote have even tried to replicate the ink process so as to avoid being singled out as a nonvoter,

New York Times stringer in Mosul – HIS FAMILY VOTED.

As a journalist stationed in one voting center, I was not able to vote. It made me very sad at heart that I was sitting out these elections (especially after boycotting the last ones).

After work I rushed to my assigned voting center only to find it long closed. I started blaming myself for not voting before heading to duty. At home, I was overjoyed to see my family’s purple forefingers. I hid my hand in my pocket, slipped to my room and dipped my finger in a bottle of ink. Not out of fear but out of a desire to be part of this great experience.

People underestimate the importance of a social symbol like the ink stained fingers to the construction of a democratic society. It adds cohesiveness by linking the voting citizens to the national identity. In addition, the more prominent the symbol the more people will be driven to obtain it. In the case of an "i voted" display this can only increase participation in the democratic process, something needed in systems that lack legitimacy or where boycotts are common.

One issue with a system where the voter is physically marked in this manner is that it tends to discriminate against absentee voting. I am sure that if a similar ink based system was implemented here in the states that absentee voters would be taken into account. The Democrats have been trying to increase absentee voting as much as possible so it seems like they would want to alleviate any potential discouraging factors.

Looking that the turnout in Iraq there seems to have been a number of logistical problems that prevented turnout from reaching the point many thought it would. These problems include the curfew, failing to find your name on the voting registration and the inability to reach the polling place of registration due to displacement. These problems can be mitigated in future elections and that they indicate the desire to vote instead of apathy is a good sign.

If the Times is to believed the early returns from the election seem to indicate a strengthening of the secular parties and support for current prime minister al-maliki. An increase in the strength of secular parties is also something i would consider to be healthy for the future of an iraqi democracy. I am partial to liberal western rights and that conception and the freedoms that come with it for women, glbt, and minorities will not be likely under an islamic theocracy.

For voting stories from iraq read, here.

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Female Representation: Iraq

With our own major economic problems little has been said about the upcoming elections in iraq. Saturday is the provincial election in iraq and among the 14,400 candidates about 4,000 are women. I have written before on the rates of women in parliaments around the world. Surprisingly Iraq has a law that mandates at least 25% of the parliament consists of women.This law also exists to ensure 25% representation on local councils. This law has obscured the battle that women fight for political and legal rights in Iraq.

The provincial elections in Iraq will be a test for women because of the way the elections will be run in this cycle. Previously Iraq used a party list system where the voters picked a party who would then pick who occupied the council seats. Now the lists are being made public and this increased transparency has led to both advantages and disadvantages for the female candidates.

The first and most obvious issue is the possibility of assassination or other threats by hard line militias. This is a serious threat as an article in the NYT illustrates,

Some female candidates have had their posters splattered with mud, defaced with beards or torn up, but most have been spared the violence that has claimed the lives of two male candidates and a coalition leader since the start of the year. But on Wednesday, a woman working for the Iraqi Islamic Party was killed when gunmen burst into her house in Baghdad and shot her 10 times in the chest, according to an Interior Ministry official.
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Liza Hido sat on a municipal council but was forced to quit in 2006 after receiving threatening e-mail and text messages on her cellphone.

She is running again this year but, still concerned for her safety, she is keeping her campaigning discreet, putting up no posters and making no public appearances. Instead, she restricts herself to private gatherings.

The lives of these women in Iraq are under constant threat from the hard liners. For example in Basra for women were killed in 2007 for not wearing a veil. They also struggle against the dominant male culture who tend to view women as domestics, sex objects and child bearers. This makes election to public office difficult. The oppressive cultural issues have led some women like Bushra al-Obeidi, a law professor at Baghdad University to abstain from participating.

She feels the odds are stacked against women, starting with laws she views as discriminatory and derogatory toward women — one allows a rapist to largely escape punishment if he marries his victim. Ms. Obeidi also has little faith in the commitment to gender equality among the current political leadership, which is dominated by religious parties.

“I assure you,” she said, “they are against women. They are lying to us.”

Her views on the uphill struggle that the women face are justified. There are concerns over the women who will eventually come to sit on the council. Apparently the women chosen on the larger party lists, and are likely to receive the highest level of support, are largely chosen for their tribal connections and not for their merits as representatives. This has been the case to a large extent in the parliament where women are present but lack the ability to make an impact.

Despite the obstacles that these women face in running for election there are many devoted woman's rights activists who are attempting to fight against the the militias and culture. The Times tells the story of, Mahdiya Abed-Hassan al-Lami,Amal Kibash and the story of Suhaila Oufi and Halima Abdul Jabber Ismail is found here. They have adopted the mentality that the only way to change the situation for women in Iraq is by being active, by working within the system.

But even if they win, they face numerous hurdles, particularly the entrenched attitudes of most Iraqi men, who view women as either sex objects or child bearers who have no place in the rough-and-tumble arena of politics. “This is the mentality,” said Safia Taleb al-Suhail, a member of Parliament and the daughter of a prominent Shiite tribal leader assassinated by Saddam Hussein’s henchmen in Lebanon in 1994. “We have to change it. How can we change it? By fighting.”

I think that the only way for women to advance their rights inside iraq is to fight, to take part in the system. The principles of the social movements in america have made it clear that only through struggle and commitment to change will things get better. If the qualified women like al-Obeidi refuse to get involved because of the daunting obstacles then its hard to see things changing. I know that's easy to say since i live in America where i dont have to fear for my life for going out in public. I cannot condemn al-Obeidi but i can support the women who do risk the reprisals to fight for the woman's rights by getting elected.

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Making it easier to vote not always the best option.

When talking about American elections one of the most common lamentations is that we have poor turnout. The commonly held belief is that we need to make voting as easy as possible to increase turnout. To this end, a number of options have been considered including internet voting and entirely mail in elections. Is this really the right approach? Are the elections in which these options have been used actually showing higher rates of turn out, and if so is across the board or only among certain demographics? Several studies have been conducted to examine these questions and the answers are not as straight forward as might be expected.

There are two main obstacles to overcome when one wants to vote. The first obstacle is registration. Obama is currently working as hard as he can to register voters to increase his potential voting pool. The second is the act of voting itself. This entails acquiring, filling out, and submitting the ballot. Most people believe that if we make it as easy as possible we can increase voter turnout. This makes sense, as people generally believe that this act is a simple cost benefit analysis. If the cost is made low enough surely no citizen will have an excuse or reason to abstain from voting.

There are many different tracts being taken to reduce this cost of voting. They include same day registration, permanent absentee voting, mail in elections, mobile voting booths. No one has yet instituted internet voting at the federal level though that is another option being considered in the age of technology. It seems fair though that before we spend millions, possibly billions, of dollars to wonder whether these reforms, designed to increase turnout, will actually do that.

The first thing that should be addressed is the mail in voting. This is the method that was employed in Oregon since 1996. It is particularly relevant because it is a system that has very high support among the public at large polling consistently above the 75% level of support even after more than a decade in use. The data on the results of the law is decidedly mixed.

The initial research into whether voting by mail would increase turnout was positive. A number of studies found that the more lenient the absentee voting laws, the higher the turn out. The first instances to observe whether voting by mail would have a dramatic effect were in local elections and they did prove to boost turnout. However, the elections have notoriously low turnout and the increase there should not be generalized to larger more high profile elections like the current presidential race. In a paper published in 2000 on the VBM elections in Oregon, Karp and Banducci found that

Turnout in the presidential election, the special Senate election, and the two presidential primaries conducted was roughly equivalent to the average turnout in comparable elections held at the polling place.

… that the composition of the electorate changes in important ways that are consistent with our expectations that VOBM elections will not mobilize groups that traditionally participate at lower rates.

These two conclusions taken together would prove very troubling for the Dems. The groups that from the backbone of the Dem constituency are those whose participation is actually reduced at the same time as participation in traditionally strong Rep demographics increases.

A 2005 paper, published by James Madison’s Mary Fitzgerald, supports this finding. This paper examined multiple different voting reforms to see what effects they had on the turnout both in gross numbers and across socio-economic lines. Her conclusions were similarly disappointing for proponents of voter reform.

…this study sheds new light on the relationships between early voting procedures and electoral participation, demonstrating their inability to boost turnout in elections despite providing greater accessibility to the ballot. As a result, convenient voting procedures such as early voting do not effectively accomplish the goal of contributing to more widespread participation in U.S. elections and thereby do not enhance the representativeness of the American electorate.

These are two of the more recent studies conducted but they are by no means the only ones. There is conflicting data from earlier studies that do find increases in turn out. I chose to take the most recent ones as I felt the closer in time to the present the less likely is it that there have been major structural or social changes to influence the data. There is a recent survey conducted by Priscilla L. Southwell, University of Oregon that found an increase among self-reporting voters of 25%. This data seems specious to me as it is a well established fact that people lie about voting in numbers up to 25% of those who say they voted. Self reporting an increase in voting just is not sound enough.

Electoral reforms that do seem to have a positive impact on the number of people who vote seem to focus not on the last step of the chain but on the first. Specifically, making it easier to register to vote has a small but significant impact on the turnout. This is a boost of around 3% and does usually tend to favor Dem demographics like the young and the minority voter. This is enough to make a big difference in close races and is one of the reasons it is so opposed by GOP pols.

The other source of information on VOBM that I found very interesting is the research coming out of Switzerland on the issue. Now it is true that the Swiss are a very different civic culture than us and their voting behavior may tell us nothing about our own voting behavior or the effects of voting reform. Despite this I think the data and conclusions of Simon Luechinger, Myra Rosinger and Alois Stutzer from the University of Zurich and University of Basel is worth relating.

One of the most important facts in this case is that voting by mail was introduced into different Swiss cantons at different times. This allows the identification of the impact of postal voting separate from time, issue and canton-specific effects on turnout. The study covers postal voting participation in national ballots for Swiss elections that were held between 1970 and 2005. They concluded the following,

According to our econometric analysis, the average effect the change over had on turnout (in national ballots) was roughly 4.1% points with an average turnout of 43% during the last three and a half decades. According to our most refined estimation, with canton-specific time trends, unrestricted postal voting led to a one time constant shift. We neither find a gradual increase in the effect of postal voting, nor robust evidence that the initial effect is gradually getting weaker. Additional specifications study differential effects by canton and referendum characteristics.

They too found that the main benefit of VOBM was found in the less high profile local elections.

You can take those results how you like. It is possible that the difference in American civic culture and that of the Swiss is enough to make that data irrelevant, or not.

Even assuming it to be true though 4% is hardly the massive boost that people seem to envision when they picture voting reform. They seem to long for the civic utopia where every one votes and everyone pays attention. How realistic this is, is left to you. I personally believe that we can achieve much higher turnout rates in this country thought the methods employed may be politically unfeasible.

The fist is shame voting. Remember those people who falsely report voting? Well evidence suggests that we can shame them into voting by threatening to send a letter to their neighbors or publish in a newspaper the names of those people who voted and who did not vote. The controversial Gerber and Green study, Social Pressure and Voter Turnout: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment, published earlier this year, found incredible returns when social pressure is applied,

The control group in our study voted at a rate of 29.7%. By comparison, the “Civic Duty” treatment group voted at a rate of 31.5%, suggesting that appeals to civic duty alone raise turnout by 1.8 percentage points. Adding social pressure in the form of Hawthorne effects raises turnout to 32.2%, which implies a 2.5 percentage point gain over the control group. The effect of showing households their own voting records is dramatic. Turnout climbs to 34.5%, a 4.9 percentage-point increase over the control group. Even more dramatic is the effect of showing households both their own voting records and the voting records of their neighbors. Turnout in this experimental group is 37.8%, which implies a remarkable 8.1 percentage-point treatment effect.

This of course brings with it a whole host of new dilemmas. For instance, do we really want people to vote so bad that we condemn them publicly for failing to do so? Would these people take the vote seriously, conduct research; make an informed vote if threatened in this manner? While incredibly effective, this may be one tactic that is not feasible in our country.

Another possibility for increasing voter turnout is mandatory. The most commonly cited model for this is the Australian model. By law, all Australian citizens over the age of 18 must register to vote and show up at a polling place on Election Day. A citizen who misses the election is subject to a $15 fine. The Australian mandatory voting law is successful in increasing voter turnout above 90%.

Again as with the social pressure model, the Australian one has some drawbacks when applied to the United States. First question is whether we want to force people to vote. Is there a detriment to having voters who feel that it is a chore to vote, a punishment in effect? Is fining someone for failing to perform the duties of citizenship ok? We have severe consequences for those who do not perform jury duty so I do not see why voting should be very different. Moreover, with our deficit the way it is we could use the extra capital.

The final thing to consider is whether making voting harder might actually increase participation. Would denying people their right get them indignant enough so that they actually perform the act when they had no intention of doing so before? I do not have empirical evidence to support the idea that if people were faced with losing their ability to vote they would be more eager to exercise it. I can only offer the anecdotal evidence that is presented when felons lose their right to vote. Many of them struggle for years to have that returned to them. Maybe voting is a case of you don’t know what you got till its gone.

When people consider ways to increase voter turn out it is surprising to them when they find that making it easier to vote does not appear to have a drastic impact. It is counter intuitive to those who hold the practice of voting sacred that some choose to disdain it so. I believe that until we change the culture surrounding the perceptions of politics and public service we will not see high voluntary turnout in this country. The attitudes attached to it in many corners of our society just make it unlikely that those groups will be willing to put off their lives for the time it takes to do the research and to cast the ballot.

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