Author: RB

Emergent Democracy advocate Mitch Ratcliffe explains his objection to the Davis recall in an effort to deal with my claim that the recall was in fact a model of democratic action:

There’s nothing wrong with recalls or the initiative process in a widely informed society. When there are very few sources of news and they militate with political groups to elect someone who reads scripts but doesn’t speak extemporaneously, they leave something to be desired.

So Arnie is another moron, like that Bush fellow who stole the 2000 election from that smart Gore fellow, and the voters are uninformed owing to our paucity of news sources, which today include just about every news outlet on the planet, and the blogs, etc. Fine. Now what would we ignorant citizens know if we were as well-informed as the Emergent Davis boosters? This:

…the budget crisis is the result of Pete Wilson’s misguided energy deregulation policies and collusion by the Bush Administration with the energy industy, not to mention the Bush Administration’s general failure in domestic policy leading to the bankrupting of the states

Now to Ratcliffe’s credit, he didn’t make this up; rather, he’s citing a well-traveled meme that you can find on any number of far-left blogs, news organs, and talk radio shows. The only trouble with it is that it’s complete crap. The State of California did sign $8B in long-term electricity contracts after Davis finally stepped in and tried to deal with the rolling blackouts of 2001. But these contracts were financed by bonds to be paid off my utility rate-payers. So when the legislature dealt with a $38B budget deficit, these bonds weren’t part of it – they’re off the books.

So yeah, if Ratcliffe were “informed” he probably wouldn’t have voted for Davis as he did, and if everyone were informed, it would have passed by acclamation.

On his other point, I haven’t noticed any states going bankrupt. California’s budget deficit exceeded the total deficits of all other states, and you clearly can’t blame that on Bush. Unless you’re “uninformed”, of course.

Last August, I joined Watchblog, a group blog put together by left-winger Cameron Barrett that was supposed to represent the two major points of view on the 2004 election, and put out a call for other moderates and conservatives to join up. I was warned that Barrett’s politics are pretty extreme, but I decided “hey, what’s the worst thing that could happen?” and did it anyway. So I’ve just found out what can happen.

Barrett morphed the blog into a tri-partisan effort and then ran off to join the Wesley Clark campaign as captive blogger (no doubt thanks to his freshly-minted political credentials) and left the keys to the Watchblog in the hands of fairly loopy Green Party weirdo named David Remer. Remer promptly kicked one of the regular Republicans off the blog, and when the other two complained about it, he kicked us off too. That left him with no Republican voices so he started a stealth campaign to back-fill the blog, making no public announcement of the massacre. My posts are still up on the blog, and you would get the impression that I’m still posting there and that I endorse it.

Well, I’m not and I don’t. I’ve asked for my posts to be removed, and I want to encourage Republicans to boycott Watchblog. The basic setup is to give two-thirds of the space to a group of Republican-haters who post as both Democrats and Third Party (that means “Green Party” really) members, so they can drown out the Republicans with the same stuff. This is no way to run a group blog, a political blog, or any other kind of blog that claims to offer a fair and balanced perspective.

Friends don’t let friends support Watchblog.

BTW, it’s kind of interesting in a coincidental way that the Clark campaign has fallen prey to the same kind of heavy-handedness that’s destroyed Watchblog. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

Dan Gillmor offers a few suggestions for California’s next governor:

* Schwarzenegger should ask the Legislature to take all of the fiscally relevant propositions of the past several decades…and put every one on the table for an overall reform.

* Make California the showcase for wide-open, taxpayer-friendly e-government.

* Reform the state’s utility regulation.

* Make data privacy a centerpiece.

* Schwarzenegger should also call his pal in the White House on several matters of interest to Californians (and everyone else).

These are generally sound recommendations, but I do have some quibbles (hey, this is a blog, after all). California is the national leader in e-government, and has been for several years – all the bills are on-line, and many committee hearings are broadcast on cable TV and on the Internet in Real Audio. The legislature offers a service that automatically sends you e-mails when the status of bills changes, and most of the legislators publish e-mail addresses. So we’re actually in good shape on this front.

Arnie is already making strides on utility de-regulation, although I’m not sure Dan is going to like them. Dan wants a competitive market for telecom, but not for electricity, and I suspect Arnie wants to see more competition on both areas.

The fiscal area is probably the most interesting, and I don’t expect Arnie to go after Prop. 13. It gets a bad rap, as does Prop. 98, but these are things the voters are very proud of, and they’re not going to change in any meaningful way. Nor should they, as they place limits on government spending that are important in a state whose legislature is far to the left of the citizenry.

Recommendations to the Governor is an interesting exercise, though. Got any?

You know how the left wants to ban guns, right? I’ve got something I want to ban, and I think the benefit to society would be greater: the use of statistics by lawyers. Lawyering isn’t a science that seeks truth, it’s a form of advocacy that seeks victory at any price, so when lawyers are given a pile of numbers they invariably sift through them in order to find the ones that bolster their case, at the expense of truth, objectivity, and anything else that gets in the way, like the rest of the numbers.

We had a good object lesson in this tendency in the arguments put by Tribe and Rosenbaum to the Ninth Circuit on voting machines, and in the amici by Rick Hasen, the textbook author who never fails to mention his book titles in the briefs he files.

The ink isn’t dry in the California Recall and these masters of obfuscation are already jumping up and down screaming that the election was flawed by punch-card voting systems. The evidence: fewer votes were cast on question 1, the go/no go on Davis, than in question 2, the 135 possible replacements.

Excuse me, but this argument is ridiculous on its face. If there was something defective about the system, question two should have had fewer votes cast than question 1, since it was much harder to find your candidate among the six pages and much easier to over-punch. Question 1 was right at the top, with “Yes” and “No” plainly marked.

The way they get themselves into this tizzy is remarkable. See Mickey?Kaus:

The Brady Hunch: Punch-card foe Henry Brady of Berkeley now claims that 176,000 votes were lost in the recall election due to punch-card balloting systems.

Or Michael McDonald:

… touchscreen voters had smaller undervote rates than the punchcard and optical scan voters, and also had a rate smaller than the exit poll indicated.

Or Steven Hertzberg:

Our preliminary calculations show that Question #1 was either not marked by the voter or recorded by the equipment in 7.7% of the ballots cast on these machines. The average “not counted/marked” rate for the remaining voting systems is 2.3%, with the next highest rate being the Optech optical scanner at 4.35%.

Or Textbook Hasen:

Mickey Kaus comes down hard here on Henry Brady’s most recent statistics regarding the extent of unintentional undervotes caused by punch cards, but other preliminary analyses have reached the same conclusion:

Of course, it’s not too surprising that multiple advocates using the same flawed method would reach the same conclusion. In this case, the advocates, all predisposed to believe that The Man uses punch cards to deprive minorities of their voting rights, all compared the “undervote” on question 1 with a statewide exit poll, and found that the voters in punchcard counties recorded fewer votes than the statewide exit poll predicted they should.

Duh. Voters in punch card counties voted against the recall and for Bustamante more than the statewide exit poll predicts they should, but I don’t see anybody complaining about that. Why is that?

One form of polling — such as an exit poll — is only useful as a calibration on another form of polling — the election — if it’s more accurate. Certainly, a statewide poll doesn’t tell us anything about the propensity of voters in particular areas to vote one way or another. A county-by-county exit poll would be more useful, but none of the critics offers one. Instead, we get an analysis that lumps all counties with similar voting systems together:

Percentages	Punch card	Touch Screen	Optical scan
a) Actual missing votes	6.3%	1.5%	2.7%
b) Intended non-votes (exit poll)	2.9%	1.4%	2.5%
Estimate of “missing vote” (a minus b)	3.4%	0.1%	0.2%

Blumenthal, according Hasen, reasons that punch card voting system denied 160,000 people of their voting right on recall question 1.

I think this is erroneous. According the exit poll, 57% of the voters intended to vote Yes on the recall, and 43% No. But the statewide totals, according to the Sec’y of State, are 55.3% Yes, and 44.7% No.

Now I’d be willing to bet that the election results are more accurate overall than the exit polls, given the methods and all that. Exit polls are face-to-face, and people in that situation are inclined to say what they’re supposed to say, not what they really did.

On a statewide basis, if we’re to take the exit poll as god, then the voting equipment must have had a pro-Davis bias built into it across the state, and if there really was an anti-Davis bias built into the punch card systems, that would simply help to balance the whole system out overall. But nobody claims that.

So don’t believe any analysis of the election results that doesn’t do these things:

1) Discuss the inaccuracy of exit polling.
2) Make a county-by-county comparison of exit polls and actual polls.
3) Compare voting rates on question 1 with question 2.
4) Fully disclose the author’s bias.
5) Discuss the county demographics and party registration.

If they’re not all there, you were swindled.

A good analysis would go county-by-county comparing exit polls with actual polls, with correction for the bias in exit polls. It’s not that hard to do this kind of an analysis, but I’m willing to bet that Brady, Hasen, Blumenthal, et. al., won’t do it; they’ll be too busy screaming “Bias!” to get to the point of proving any.

Lawyers and numbers; they don’t mix.

(By the way, I voted for the recall and for Arnie.)

UPDATE: Hasen’s article on the recall in Findlaw is pretty light on specifics, and long on exaggeration (“Issa poured millions into the recall”). The one specific claim he makes about voting equipment is wrong:

…Los Angeles and Alameda counties are fairly comparable counties in terms of political leanings and ethnic makeup, yet nearly 9 percent of voters in Los Angeles did not cast a recordable vote on the first part of the recall, compared to less than one percent of voters in Alameda, which used an electronic touch screen system.

In LA County, 49.1% voted for the recall, vs. 30% in Alameda county. These two counties are clearly not comparable in any meaningful way.

SOME MORE UPDATES: Neither Calblog nor xrlq is very impressed with Prof. Hasen’s analysis of the recall election.

One of the most egregious acts Governor Gray Davis committed in California was to veto a bill that would have allowed men wrongly identified as fathers escape the obligation to support other people’s children and girlfriends. He did this for the children. The Harvard Crimson Online :: Opinion ran a good op-ed piece on this problem back in May:

According to U.S. Citizens Against Paternity Fraud, as many as 30 percent of “fathers” paying child support nationwide may not be the actual fathers. Often, child-support agencies bamboozle them into signing paternity declarations, or the mother fraudulently names a father to qualify for welfare assistance. In some cases, judges are prohibited from overturning default rulings despite clear DNA evidence. The problem is so out of hand that in 1998 the California Court of Appeals had to rebuke overzealous L.A. officials for having “lost sight of the paramount duty to seek justice” in child-support cases.

This is why Sheila Kuehl was so upset about the recall — she urged Davis to veto the bill. Apparently “ignorance” is OK when, as in her case, it’s willful.

BTW, it’s interesting that the loudest opposition to Gov. Arnie in the legislature, from Kuehl, Mark Leno, and John Vasconcellos, comes from gay legislators. I don’t know why that should be. Leno is the guy who wrote the Anti-Cross-Dresser Discrimination Act, for which he argued for a genetic requirement for certain men to wear women’s clothing. Vasco is still in the closet after 30 years in Sacramento, but everybody under the dome knows he’s gay so my outing him here is no big shock. Since he’s the big self-esteem guy, certainly he should realize that his hateful remarks about Arnie have to hurt the governor-elect’s self-esteem and therefore hurt the whole state.

It’s probably just hypocrisy, not really a big gay thing. What’s more remarkable is the increasing use of the argument that “the voters are too stupid to decide elections” from the left. I’ve thought for a long time that Democrats are generally anti-democratic, and it’s getting pretty hard to hide from that fact any more.

While Lessig and Searls accept the legitimacy of the democratic recall, some of our Emergent Democracy advocates are having a hard time with the people’s judgment.

Ross Mayfield tries to convey an untenable distinction between Emergent Democracy as an exercise of the pure of heart in contrast to the Big Money pollution that envelopes government in a capitalist economy:

Emergent Democracy should differ from Direct Democracy. Self-organization, deliberation, and citizen driven initiatives — where the constraint is equal interest of the people — is in stark contrast to modern direct democracy. Dean’s decentralized organization is in contrast to professional pertitioners.

Joi Ito beats the tom-toms in favor of grass-roots elitism as an alternative to the rule of the unwashed masses:

Emergent democracy is about leadership through giving up control, activating the people to engage through deliberation and action, and allowing emergent order to grow from the grass roots. It’s the difference between a couch potato clicking the vote button and a group of people starting their own Dean coalition group.

And Mitch Ratcliffe chimes in with some loud clucks against The Politicians:

The question in emergent democracy is how to make everyone a politician, again. In early democracies, every citizen–a narrowly defined group of patricians, in most cases–was expected to be involved. The problem we have today is that most citizens leave politics “to the professionals” and then complain that they feel alienated from the system.

This is an awfully pure and austere model, where the people have to each and every one take the time out of their busy days to study each and every issue for themselves in order to govern without representatives, or at least without paid ones.

The question that it raises following the recall is, of course, how the people — even when armed with super-fantastic blogware — can make detailed policy decisions if they can’t be trusted by the technical elite to make basic personnel decisions as we did in the recall.

And if a Dean Meetup is an example of Emergent Democracy and good, how can it be that a group of grass-roots volunteers lead by Ted Costa organizing a petition drive is bad? When Ted Costa let Darrell Issa pay some signature gatherers a pittance ($1.5M, compared to the $10M Davis spent warping the Republican primary) wasn’t that an example of leading by giving up control?

Obviously, Emergent Democracy is any process that defeats the Republican Party, whether it’s in Sacramento, Washington, or Baghdad, and the process is utterly unimportant.

UPDATE: Ratcliffe says I’ve got him all wrong. What he really wants is:

…citizens should be able to organize to address specific issues without having to embrace the top-down plans of government. That means organizing to have their own representatives on specific issues, figuring out ways to pay them (enough money flows in politics–it’s an industry) to hive off some portion of a living from being involved in one’s community.

It appears to me he’s just described the Recall. Citizens organized to address the problem of Gray Davis’ lack of honesty and leadership, and rather than relying on his top-down leadership style (“the legislature is here to implement my vision”) they replaced him with a man who represented their values. They figured out how to pay for the recall by putting their own money up, and they hired campaign consultants and attorneys to remove the barriers erected by the ACLU, the Casinos, the labor unions, and the other anti-democratic forces in California.

If you like democracy, of any kind, you have to love the recall.

Larry Lessig and Doc Searls have both come forward and very graciously acknowledged that their worst fears about the recall didn’t materialize. Lessig says:

total(ly wrong about the) recall

I was, at least. The recall provision is still stupidly crafted. But the results last night are as a democracy should be. A clear majority voted to recall the governor. And more people than supported Davis voted to elect Arnold Schwarzenegger.

He wasn’t my first choice. But it is interesting that the two top candidates “started” their life in the US in poverty. Anyone who gets as far as either did deserves our respect. And we Californians can hope that some of the benefit of the hard work and luck that has marked Mr. Schwarzenegger’s life might now pass to California.

And Doc says:

Well shit, maybe I was (and still am) wrong about “direct democracy,” California style. I guess we’ll see. Richard’s certainly right about MoveOn, which has lost the common touch, if it ever had one.

Comments on Lessig’s post indicate a deep well of hostility remains on the Left, with a “stupidity” meme replacing the “anti-democratic” meme that preceded the election. I don’t see much in the way of the VRWC hi-jacking another election except in two curious sources on the East coast, the always arrogant George Will and doddering David Broder. (via Kaus). The East Coast establishment was annoyed to have the national spotlight shining in a place where they don’t know their way around, apparently. Neither has the basic facts right. Will says:

California’s recall — a riot of millionaires masquerading as a “revolt of the people” — began with a rich conservative Republican congressman, who could think of no other way he might become governor, financing the gathering of the necessary signatures.

And Broder agrees:

The misguided effort to convert the broadly shared public discontent with economic stagnation and political gridlock into a recall effort against Democratic Gov. Gray Davis was made possible only because Republican Rep. Darrell Issa pumped almost $2 million of his own fortune into a commercial signature-collection campaign.

In point of fact, the recall was initiated by Ted Costa, a Sacramento small government gadfly who’s anything but rich. Darrell Issa’s money – about a dime per voter – sped up the process, but it would’ve happened anyway. The only thing worse than a fool is an arrogant fool.

Doc calls me out on a question about the End-to-End stuff by Grant Henninger, to wit:

As long as the underlying protocols on the net are open and all servers accept packets of information from all other servers, the higher order protocols can be proprietary without breaking end-to-end.

My argument about this is that the important principles in Internet design are open standards and any-to-any connectivity, not the end-to-end structure of control in a certain version of the core protocols*. So as long as the datalinks and packet links are willing and able to move data from anyone to anyone, it doesn’t matter whether they do retransmissions, billing, and flow control solely at the end points or at each individual hop. For A/V applications, it’s necessary to do these things hop-to-hop instead of end-to-end, so the Internet will inevitably move to that kind of architecture as it becomes more of an A/V network and less of an e-mail network.

This is progress and we should embrace it.

It probably is true that the Internet would have had a slower ramp if it had been hop-to-hop in the old days, because that kind of architecture is more demanding of routers than the simplistic architecture, but technology has improved and we can now use the net – or soon use the net – for more interesting things.

*this sentence revised for clarity

Matt Welch likes a little Marc Cooper piece on the people’s revolt called Dissonance: Jonestown for Democrats. Here’s a cute part:

If you think it odd that Schwarzenegger and the California Republican Party should be able to effortlessly assume the posture of populist slayers of special interests, then you are normal. But if you can’t figure out that it’s Gray Davis’ coin-operated administration and the liberals’ refusal to divorce themselves from it that allows such a comic-opera, then you’re, to be polite, na?ve.

And this is from a liberal.