Fjóla > Recent Status Updates

Consider two recent events that occurred within just a four-month span. In November 2018, Donald Trump presented Sheldon Adelson's wife, Miriam, with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. In February 2019, President Trump's Justice Department reversed a long-standing policy enabling online gambling -- the single greatest threat to Sheldon Adelson's brick-and-mortar casino business.

The 18 largest donors to Republican candidates gave a total of $205 million in 2016.That's a lot. But thanks to the tax cuts President Trump passed two years later, they are set to receive $68 billion in return. That's a lot more. With a return on investment of 33,000 percent, buying votes for Trump in 2016 turned out to be abetter bet than buying Apple stock in 2002.

According to one New York Times poll, 87% of Americans agree our campaign-finance system either needs to be fundamentally changed or rebuilt completely. In another poll taken around the same time, however, 86% of Americans said they didn't know much about how our campaign finance system works.

A conservative estimate is that 12,000 eligible, registered Florida voters were taken off the rolls, about half of them African-American. Al Gore, as you'll remember, lost by just 537 votes. ... keeping eligible voters from voting helps you win. Techniques like the one von Spakovsky helped implement in 2000, and would pioneer in the coming years, are now known among many Americans as "voter suppression".

Like voter registration, voter purges have long been used as an excuse to shrink the electorate. In 1959, for example, the White Citizens' Council of Washington Parish, Louisiana, conducted what it claimed was a routine cleanup of voter lists. As it just so happened, 85% of Black voters were kicked off the rolls compared to just .07% of whites.

... starting around the year 2000 ... they broadened their focus beyond unregistered Americans. They began booting registered Americans from the electorate as well. This they accomplished through something called a "voter purge."... a voter registration drive in reverse... getting voters signed up is the responsibility of civic-minded volunteers, while kicking them off is done at the taxpayer expense.

We've now been able to register by mail and at the DMV for decades. The total number of states reporting an allegation of widespread fraud as a consequence is zero.

Yet the fact that voter fraud is essentially nonexistent hasn't stopped some of our country's most poowerful people from obsessing over it. Before he became president, Ronald Reagan cautioned that letting Americans mail in completed voter registration forms would trigger a surge of phony applications. In the 1990s, Mitch McConnell warned that fraud would sweep the nation if registration was permitted at the DMV.

According to the most recent, nonpartisan studies, impersonation tarnishes approximately on ballot out of every 32,250,000... (For fans of very small numbers, it's .0000017 percent.)

in some states the tax accumulated, making it harder and harder to pay. If you went a decade without voting, you had to pay ten years' worth of tax to cast a single ballot... But as opposed to, say, Florida's felon disenfranchisement laws, the poll tax wasn't technically stripping anyone of their voting rights... The poll tax was upheld.

After the Civil War, literacy tests and residency requirements were easily repurposed to target Black voters. To these, southern lawmakers added repressive new tools of their own, including one so pernicious and well-crafted it would take a constitutional amendment to defeat it. It was known as the poll tax.

Almost immediately, laws [...] were used to block eligible voters from the polls... In Louisiana, you were removed from the voting rolls if you left your home parish for longer than 90 days. In other states, lawmakers devised literacy tests to weed out the poor and uneducated, or English-language tests to block recent immigrants from the polls.

... Lemuel Shaw was the first to explicitly uphold voter registration as constitutional. More important, the principle he laid out is still in use today. We'll call it the Shaw Test: so long as politicians believe, or can plausibly claim to believe, that they're protecting the integrity of our elections, they can pass laws making it harder to vote.

As we've already seen, the simplest way to banish your neighbors from the electorate is to rescind their voting rights. But if you can't make voting illegal, you can make voting impossible. And that's what countless officials -- not just in Texas, but across the country -- are working hard to do.

Texas's voter registration laws are doing exaactly what they were designed to. It's no coincidence that signing up a voter in the Lone Star State is so difficult. Nor is it an accident that holding a registration drive, which in most states feels like planning a bake sale, in Texas feels like planning a heist.

When it comes to voter registration, however, those county lines might as well be made of barbed wire. A licensed deputy registrar in Dallas, for example, can legally sign up a voter at 4010 Midway Road. But if she crosses the street and registers a voter at 4013 Midway, she's committing a crime.... Even apartment complexes can be split down the middle by county borders ...

Fail to submit your registration forms on time? Take a photo of a completed form, even with a voter's permission? Register a voter who lives outside the county in which you're deputized? You could go to jail. The last crime on the list -- the one restricting VDVRs to individual counties -- is yet another way registration forms are more carefully managed than guns.

As it turns out, there are lots of ways helping people vote can make you a criminal in Texas. As a non-Texan, if I so much as handle a completed registration form -- not to fill it out, not alter it, just touch it -- I'm breaking state law. Even qualified deputy registrars face the constant threat of legal repercussions.

a Texas gun license lasts 5 years and can be easily renewed onlin, a VDVR card expires every two years and must be renewed in person. ... if you register voters for a midterm election and a presidential election, and you fail to take a refresher course in between, you're a criminal.

In Texas it's hard -- confoundingly hard, devilishly hard -- to register your fellow citizens to vote. In most states, you just grab a clipboard and ask around. ... Not so in Texas. ... Only after you pass [a test] do you get a "certificate of appointment" with your name, adress, and a 5-digit number identifying you as an official Volunteer Deputy Voter Registrar, or VDVR.

Deprived of one way to disenfranchise their constituents, Republicans in Florida's legislature are trying another. Under a new Florida law ... former felons can have their rights restored only after they've paid all fines and fees associated with their arrests. Thanks to another set of defects in Florida's justice system, these fees can easily run into the tens of thousands, making them essentially unpayable.

between 1978 and 2000 -- a period when we withheld voting rights from a far smaller percentage of Americans than we do today -- felon disenfranchisement gave one of our two parties a major advantage. Stripping citizens of the ballot flipped 7 Senate seats, all of them from blue to red. Among those lucky senators was Mitch McConnell, who won his first term in a nailbiter.

Scott's predecessor, a fellow Republican, had [restored voting rights to 39,000 citizens per year... Then Rick Scott took office. During his 8 years as governor, he restored voting rights to just 3,000 people, cutting the rate of restorations by 99%. ... If RS had restored his fellow citizen's rights at the rate of his predecessor, he would not be a senator today.

In 2010, when RS first ran for governor, fewer than 1/10 of Black voters supported him. He prevailed by just 61K votes. It's not hard to see how adding 1.5 M disproportionately Black and low-income to the electorate might have made a difference. In fact, if just 25% of those disenfranchised voters had actually participated, and just 2/3 supported Scott's opponent Florida would have elected a different governor.

When Ronald Reagan was elected president, 9 states disenfranchised more than 5% of their Black populations because of a past felony. When DT was elected president, 23 states did. In Florida, more than 20% of Blacks could not vote in 2016. Mitch McConnell's Kentucky was even worse. 40 years ago, the Bluegrass State barred just 3% of Black voters from the ballot. [Last time] more than 25% of Black Kentuckians were not

The demographics of the disenfranchised have changed as well. Specifically, they've become less white. This is not, I hasten to add, because nonwhite people are especially felonious. Instead, it's because "tough on crime" policies that began in the 1970s had very different impacts on different racial groups. Just as the lion's share of 19th century Floridians arrested for wandering and strolling were Black ...

In the forty years before Donald Trump was elected president, America's population grew by 50 percent. But the number of Americans barred from voting because of felony convictions grew by 500 percent.

thanks to Florida's laws and laws like them, the number of people legally barred from votin because of a felony conviction stood at 6.1 million. Only one quarter of these non-voters were actually in prison. Half of them -- a population roughly the size of Iowa -- weren't even on probation or parole. They had done their time.

the description of "felony" varies wildly by state. Florida, for example, still has one of the strictest criminal codes in the nation. ... Florida counts 533 different infractions as felonies, including crimes like disturbing a lobster trap and trespassing on a construction site. [It] also has dome of the country's strictest drug laws.

in America, felonious behavior is not at all uncommon. According to reputable estimates, 70 percent of Americans have done something that would technically warrant jail time, mainly involving drunk driving or possession of marijuana. Most of us just never got caught.