Tag Archives: voting

A Bit on the Citizenship Question

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The Electronic Privacy Information Center sued Commerce and the Census Bureau in Federal court over the inclusion of a citizenship question in the upcoming census.  EPIC centered its case on the premise that these agencies must explain the impact on privacy of such a question prior to

initiating a collection of new information

when that collection involves electronically stored, personally identifiable information.

The DC Circuit correctly tossed the case on the grounds that EPIC had suffered no harm, so it had no standing to sue.

That’s too bad, though, because EPIC also was wrong on the facts.  Between 1970 and 2010, the Census Bureau, in addition to a short-form census form sent to everyone present in the US, sent a long-form census form to a significant subset of that population, and that long-form version contained the citizenship question.  As recently as 1950, the census included the citizenship question on every form sent out.  As recently as 1960, the census asked after place of birth—which clearly is a citizenship question, since being born under US jurisdiction (vis., in the US, on a US military installation on foreign soil, etc) makes one a citizen.

The conclusion is obvious.  Nor Commerce nor the Census Bureau have any obligation to conduct a “privacy impact” assessment and publish any statement of that impact: Census isn’t collecting new information; it’s merely attempting to resume collecting information it routinely had collected in the recent past.

Separately, I won’t go far into how the 14th Amendment makes the question an absolute necessity, except to point out the following.  Section 2 of the 14th says this [emphasis added]:

But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

While representation is apportioned according to the number of persons present in each State, the sanction for abridging the right to vote is based on citizenship, not mere presence.  (Lest anyone get their panties in a bunch over that “male citizens” part, the 19th Amendment cleared that.)  It’s impossible to carry out that sanction without knowing the number of actual citizens in each State.

And with Progressive-Democrats constantly bleating about voter suppression, the ability to apply that sanction clearly is necessary.

Pick One

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Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill that returns the ability to vote to felons when certain conditions are met.  However, in his piece at the link, Arian Campo-Flores wrote

Under the bill, the state doesn’t automatically restore rights to felons who completed their sentences but have outstanding fines, fees, or restitution—common for many released from prison.

That’s a misunderstanding of the law and of the Florida Constitutional Amendment that prompted it. Either the felon has completed his sentence, or he has not. If he still has outstanding fines, fees, or restitution, he hasn’t completed his sentence.

Being released from prison is an important milestone, but it in no way signifies completion of anything. Here is Florida’s Voting Restoration Amendment as it appeared on the ballot:

Constitutional Amendment Article VI, Section 4. Voting Restoration Amendment This amendment restores the voting rights of Floridians with felony convictions after they complete all terms of their sentence including parole or probation. The amendment would not apply to those convicted of murder or sexual offenses, who would continue to be permanently barred from voting unless the Governor and Cabinet vote to restore their voting rights on a case by case basis.

The Amendment passed, and this is how it appears in the Florida Constitution [non-italicized emphasis added]

Article VI, Section 4. Disqualifications.—
(a) No person convicted of a felony, or adjudicated in this or any other state to be mentally incompetent, shall be qualified to vote or hold office until restoration of civil rights or removal of disability. Except as provided in subsection (b) of this section, any disqualification from voting arising from a felony conviction shall terminate and voting rights shall be restored upon completion of all terms of sentence including parole or probation.
(b) No person convicted of murder or a felony sexual offense shall be qualified to vote until restoration of civil rights.

All terms of their sentence means all terms, not some of them.

Felons Voting

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That’s what Democratic Socialist and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (I, VT) thinks ought to happen.  He couches this as all citizens having a right to vote, “even terrible people.”

Unfortunately, though, Sanders has misunderstood the nature of the social compact, and the Lockean nature of our American social compact.

Certainly, all American citizens ought to be able to vote in American elections.  However, felons, by dint of their voluntarily done criminal acts, have placed themselves outside the bounds of our social compact—they’ve made themselves outlaws in several senses of that term.  As felons under the terms of our social compact (Locke’s terms went a bit farther), these persons have surrendered a number of their citizen rights: freedom of movement, of keeping/bearing weapons, of association, of communication, and from search and seizure, among others.  Felons still can do many of these things, but they are severely restricted in the doing (and in some, completely barred) by the requirements of law and the strictures of the prison in which they’re held as those requirements are executed.

Since felons are outlaws, also, though, they’ve surrendered one more right of citizenship: the right to vote.

Heads in the Sand

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There is a Defcon computer security conference in progress at which a Voting Village hackers collection is busily hacking various voting machine manufacturers’ machines.  As McMillan and Volz put it in their Wall Street Journal piece about the Village,

These hacks can root out weaknesses in voting machines so that vendors will be pressured to patch flaws and states will upgrade to more secure systems, organizers say.

Sadly, many of those manufacturers are upset over it, even to the point of warning about voting software license abuse.  Even State government representatives don’t like the idea of testing this software’s and these machines’ security.  Here’s Leslie Reynolds, National Association of Secretaries of State Executive Director:

Anybody could break into anything if you put it in the middle of a floor and gave them unlimited access and unlimited time[.]

To a small extent, that’s a valid beef.  But only to a small extent: that direct access “in the middle of a floor.”  However, malicious hackers—for instance, Russian hackers, to say nothing of Iranian, People’s Republic of China’s, northern Korean’s, each of whom also have an interest in sowing doubt and causing outright disruption—have lots of time between now and our November elections, and they’ve had the last couple of years (at the least) already—a good approximation of unlimited time relative to the evolution of software and hardware.

In addition, Reynolds’ argument is a bit of a strawman.  No one is representing this hack-athon as the last word in the security investigation.  It is, though, a highly useful step in the process of locating security failures (vulnerabilities being a too-soft term) so they can be patched.

Election Systems & Software LLC, a leading manufacturer of voting equipment, was reluctant to have its systems tested at the conference. … Hackers “will absolutely access some voting systems internal components because they will have full and unfettered access to a unit without the advantage of trained poll workers, locks, tamper-evident seals, passwords, and other security measures that are in place in an actual voting situation.”

Sure.  Our stuff don’t stink, so there’s nothing to see here.  Move along.  Don’t investigate because we don’t want to know the problems.  They’d be invalid, anyway.

Jeanette Manfra, a senior cybersecurity official at DHS, actually sympathized with concerns that Village hackers could unintentionally lower Americans’ confidence in our election systems.  She’s wrong, though.  Responsible persons’ hiding their heads under their pillows, chanting, “La la la, I don’t hear you” are the ones lowering our confidence.  Pretending problems don’t exist is a thin shield, indeed, against those problems’ exploitation.

No.  The more objections there are to investigating and testing the security of our voting system, the more badly we need those investigations and tests.