Daily Archives: 15 November 2011

Do Progressives Think Americans are Stupid?

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The Daily Caller describes a conversation one of their reporters had with Representative Jerrold Nadler (D, NY) concerning photo IDs for voters.  Nadler says, with a completely straight face, that requiring photo IDs prior to voting in an American election is a “deliberate plot by conservatives and Republicans to suppress votes.”

Let’s look at the Progressive reasoning he offers in support of this thesis.

He says

It doesn’t have to be photo ID.  You get Social Security with Social Security cards and, by the way, plenty of voter IDs—you have a photo ID issued by a state university as a student or as a teacher, and those—in a lot of states, those aren’t valid.

However, none of these require proof of citizenship, as Congressman Nadler knows.  Social Security is for anyone who works in the US and earns wages—explicitly including non-citizens.  Additionally, our higher education system welcomes citizens from other nations (for very good reason), and the universities’ photo IDs are for their internal purposes: access to university facilities.  Finally, these documents don’t require any sort of background check, for instance to see whether even a US citizen is eligible to vote in the particular election: is the person a resident of the jurisdiction in question, for instance, is the person not a felon, and so on.

He continues

And there’s no valid reason why those shouldn’t be valid for voting purposes….

Except for the above, unless there’s concern that Chicago-style ballot box stuffing might be reduced with a photo ID.

Congressman Nadler also says

People generally have voter IDs because they drive cars, but lots of people don’t drive cars….

But as Nadler knows full well, states are happy to issue photo IDs to people who don’t drive.  It takes about as much time as it does to get an actual driver’s license.

He does address this, though.

A lot of these states that are passing these laws are making it very difficult to get the underlying document so it will take you a lot of time; it will cost you a lot of money to get it.

What laws, exactly, in what states?  Certainly, it’s easy enough to toss off these accusations without substantiating them.  Furthermore, while there is some time expenditure required, that simply means an adult American citizen needs to plan ahead a little bit and get the documentation and then the photo ID in advance of the election.  Some years ago, I needed to get a copy of my birth certificate from California pursuant to getting my passport (another of those photo IDs that would be accepted at a polling place, and also one of those photo IDs that’s required to fly or to reenter our country after having traveled abroad—is Congressman Nadler suggesting the DHS is deliberately throwing roadblocks in the way of honest Americans wanting to come home?).  That copy would cost me $21 today (so much for “a lot of money”) and a couple of weeks.  It took six more weeks for State to issue my passport.  Perhaps Congressman Nadler would like to address that “lot of time” with State.

Congressman Nadler finishes with this:

We don’t have 5 million cases of voter fraud. You don’t have 50 cases of voter fraud in the country of the kind of voter fraud that an ID card might deal with.

Again, he offers no evidence that the small number he tosses out is an accurate one.  However, stipulating that the number of voter fraud cases is small, what might happen, anyway?  In 2004, a Washington Governor was elected by a 129-vote margin out of 2.6 million votes cast, and in 2008, a Minnesota Senator was elected by 312 votes out of 2.4 million votes cast.  And in 2000, some might remember that a state’s electoral votes were awarded on the basis of 537 votes out of nearly 6 million cast.  It wouldn’t have taken much fraud at all to have swung those outcomes.  And accusations of such fraud were (and are) widespread.

Yet Congressman Nadler assures us that requiring photo IDs in order to vote is nothing less than a “deliberate plot by conservatives and Republicans to suppress votes.”

Hmm….

GPS, Privacy, and the Government, Revisited

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I wrote here on the subject; today I’d like to revisit it.  Gordon Crovitz wrote on the subject yesterday, and there are still some misconceptions that need to be addressed.

To recap, this question arises from the case of U.S. v. Antoine Jones that is currently before the US Supreme Court.  In this case, a man, Antoine Jones, was suspected of involvement in the drug trade, and as part of an investigation of Jones, the police obtained a warrant to place a GPS tracker on Jones’ car.  The proximate reason the case has come up is that the tracker wasn’t planted until after the warrant had expired, and when it was planted, it was done so outside the jurisdiction of the court that had issued the warrant.

The misconceptions, though, aren’t directly related to these facts; they center on the nature of individual privacy, the relationship between an individual and the government vis-à-vis that privacy, and the need for a warrant at all in this sort of case.

One misconception, surprisingly, is demonstrated by Justice Antonin Scalia, who is no slouch concerning the principle of limited government.  During oral arguments for this case, the following exchange occurred:

MR. LECKAR [STEPHEN C., ESQ, representing Jones]: …because what you have here is society does not expect that the police, the human element would be taken out of — would be taken out of the surveillance factor.

JUSTICE ALITO: You know, I don’t know what society expects and I think it’s changing. Technology is changing people’s expectations of privacy.

Suppose we look forward 10 years, and maybe 10 years from now 90 percent of the population will be using social networking sites and they will have on average 500 friends and they will have allowed their friends to monitor their location 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, through the use of their cell phones. Then — what would the expectation of privacy be then?

Justice Alito’s question is valid if put into a proper context, but he does not do that.  His question relates solely to a man’s personal business, his personal relationship with his neighbors and friends (in every sense of that term).  Alito needs also to ask this question in an additional context: what is, and what would, the expectation of privacy be with respect to the government?  This is a very different expectation.  While technology may* reduce the degree of privacy expected in the man’s personal life, it is utterly irrelevant to his expectation with respect to his government.  We still expect government snooping to be held under strict controls.

Justice Alito goes on:

You don’t even see it [the GPS tracker]. It’s just a little wafer, they put it under the car, it does nothing.

If the wafer does nothing, why have the police planted it?  The fact is, this little wafer does quite a lot, and it does so by invading a man’s privacy.

Justice Anthony Kennedy also misunderstands the situation:

…it seems to me what you’re saying is that the police have to use the most inefficient methods.

Not at all, as I said in the earlier post (in fairness to Kennedy, Leckar misses this point, also).  The police should use the most current technology, the most current training, available to them in the conduct of their investigations.  As they recognized in the present case (but let expire before acting), they just need to get a warrant before they conduct a search and/or seizure.  Perhaps with an app that gives them a Web presence with a judge, so less time is spent on getting the two together in the same room for the discussion and issuance.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor shows a different misconception, addressing Leckar’s response to a preceding Kennedy question about video surveillance.

What an unworkable rule tethered to no principle.  A thousand video cameras may or may not be OK, depending on how large the city is?

You bet.  Additionally, the principle is quite plain: every man has a reasonable expectation of, a right to be free from, the prying eyes of government, absent a legitimate reason for the prying—which legitimacy is demonstrated by convincing a judge to issue a warrant.  Furthermore, each person, each case, is unique: we’re not cookie cutter products, or clones.  Finally, the government’s convenience is never an excuse for abridging individual liberties.

In the end, however public a man’s life might be from the perspective of his neighbors and friends, it must remain private from the government’s perspective.  Get the warrant.  This is, by far, a lesser hardship on the government’s men than warrantless invasions of Americans’ individual liberties are on Americans.

*As I pointed out in that earlier post, the very great expectation of privacy still extant in our personal lives is demonstrated by the hue and cry extant over the various social media’s invasions of that privacy.