Friday, January 23, 2009
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Social Security
ULTRACON: meaner than a junkyard dog.
Inauguration Day
Ultracon is pleased that STAR BUSINESS WEEKLY, an organ of The Kansas City Star, is running his commentary today, which can be found HERE. But the article appears below, too, as the shelf life of The Star’s online side isn’t all that long. This may be the case with all but the biggest of newspapers, like The Wall Street Journal. That’s because newspapers make a tidy sum by selling their content to Lexis-Nexis. So they’re obliged to take it down from their websites. Or so I’m told. As usual, my title got changed. But this title probably needed to be changed. I was thinking of The Fonz, i.e. Fonzi.
(Don Porter (to whom I refer in my article) also states in his letter to the editor that Social Security “is social insurance”. The Star ran my treatment of that issue about 4 years ago, and it’s still up at the Public Program Testing Organization: But is it Really Insurance?)
Yo, Ponzi
By Jon N. Hall
January 20, 2009
In the wake of the Bernard Madoff scandal, folks have chimed in that the Mother of All Ponzi Schemes is none other than Social Security.
Inasmuch as Ponzi schemes are illegal and Social Security is a government program, that claim might not hold up in court.
In “Social Security is not Ponzi scheme” (12/31, Letters, THE KANSAS CITY STAR), Don Porter and Lloyd Hellman have their say. Porter claims: “From the beginning it has been a pay-as-you-go government system and never an “investment””. (One doubts that investors in Mr. Madoff’s hedge fund think it’s much of an investment, either.)
The issue here is whether Social Security operates like a Ponzi scheme.
In a Ponzi, income from new investors is used to pay off old investors. In this respect, a Ponzi is identical to the “pay-as-you-go” aspect of Social Security, where the payroll taxes (FICA) of current workers pay for the benefits of retired workers.
The reason a Ponzi is financed like this is because the dollar difference between income and outgo isn’t fully invested, so there aren’t adequate profits to meet the demands of investors. Here, too, Social Security is identical to a Ponzi – except that Social Security is purer.
Whereas a Ponzi, like Mr. Madoff’s hedge fund, must at least make some investments – if for no other reason than to escape notice from the Securities and Exchange Commission – the Social Security Administration invests none of its surplus. Yes, Social Security does have a so-called trust fund, said to contain more than $2 Trillion. But the treasuries in the “trust fund” differ from “regular” treasuries in that they are not marketable; they’re IOUs. In reality, there is no Social Security trust fund – the government spent the surplus.
Also, the “pay-as-you-go” aspect of Social Security will end – in 2017, it is estimated – when payroll taxes are no longer adequate to pay benefits. At that point, the treasuries in the “trust fund” will be “redeemed” to continue paying benefits at the same pace. And where will the money for those redemptions come? Why, from the general fund of the U.S. treasury. Which means: Social Security benefits paid for out of the trust fund are paid for twice, first by payroll taxes and second by other taxes that go into the general fund.
If the federal government wants Social Security to escape the stigma of being a Ponzi, then it must either limit payroll taxes to being no more than benefits or it must invest the surplus in real income-producing investments, not U.S. treasuries or securities. It should also do away with the accounting fiction known as the “unified budget”.
So, Ponzis and Social Security are operationally identical. The difference between the two is in how their surpluses are used.
In a Ponzi, we’re talking simple grand larceny. But in Social Security, the surplus goes into the U.S. treasury’s general fund. And since money is fungible, the Social Security surplus is used to pay for everything in the federal budget. Which includes the pork and earmarks incumbent Congressmen use to bribe the electorate into re-electing them.
So, dear reader, if you benefit from pork or earmarks and you re-elect these guys, are you a party to a Ponzi scheme?
In Mr. Hellman’s letter to the editor, he asserts: “Social Security is not and never was a Ponzi scheme…I am not only entitled to the return of the money I paid in, but the interest I earned for 64 years”.
Not so fast. We’ve already been here.
In Flemming v. Nestor (1960), the Supreme Court “established the principle that entitlement to Social Security benefits is not contractual right”. In other words, taxpayers have no property rights to Social Security benefits whatsoever.
Moreover, in Section 1104 of the 1935 Act: “The right to alter, amend, or repeal any provision of this Act is hereby reserved to the Congress.” Which means: Congress can end Social Security whenever it so chooses.
Folks might comfort themselves by thinking: Congress isn’t going to kill Social Security. And they’d be right – it would be political suicide.
But America is entering uncharted waters. The population is aging. The deficit is skyrocketing. We’re at war. And Congress is on a spending spree like no other and wants to “give” health-care and Lord knows what else to every last one of us including illegal aliens. The question isn’t just whether Social Security will be there for you, but whether the good ole U.S. dollar will still be worth anything.
So as you survey your family’s future security, social or otherwise, think about how the government finances things.
Jon N. Hall is a programmer/analyst from Kansas City.
Inauguration Day
Ultracon is pleased that STAR BUSINESS WEEKLY, an organ of The Kansas City Star, is running his commentary today, which can be found HERE. But the article appears below, too, as the shelf life of The Star’s online side isn’t all that long. This may be the case with all but the biggest of newspapers, like The Wall Street Journal. That’s because newspapers make a tidy sum by selling their content to Lexis-Nexis. So they’re obliged to take it down from their websites. Or so I’m told. As usual, my title got changed. But this title probably needed to be changed. I was thinking of The Fonz, i.e. Fonzi.
(Don Porter (to whom I refer in my article) also states in his letter to the editor that Social Security “is social insurance”. The Star ran my treatment of that issue about 4 years ago, and it’s still up at the Public Program Testing Organization: But is it Really Insurance?)
Yo, Ponzi
By Jon N. Hall
January 20, 2009
In the wake of the Bernard Madoff scandal, folks have chimed in that the Mother of All Ponzi Schemes is none other than Social Security.
Inasmuch as Ponzi schemes are illegal and Social Security is a government program, that claim might not hold up in court.
In “Social Security is not Ponzi scheme” (12/31, Letters, THE KANSAS CITY STAR), Don Porter and Lloyd Hellman have their say. Porter claims: “From the beginning it has been a pay-as-you-go government system and never an “investment””. (One doubts that investors in Mr. Madoff’s hedge fund think it’s much of an investment, either.)
The issue here is whether Social Security operates like a Ponzi scheme.
In a Ponzi, income from new investors is used to pay off old investors. In this respect, a Ponzi is identical to the “pay-as-you-go” aspect of Social Security, where the payroll taxes (FICA) of current workers pay for the benefits of retired workers.
The reason a Ponzi is financed like this is because the dollar difference between income and outgo isn’t fully invested, so there aren’t adequate profits to meet the demands of investors. Here, too, Social Security is identical to a Ponzi – except that Social Security is purer.
Whereas a Ponzi, like Mr. Madoff’s hedge fund, must at least make some investments – if for no other reason than to escape notice from the Securities and Exchange Commission – the Social Security Administration invests none of its surplus. Yes, Social Security does have a so-called trust fund, said to contain more than $2 Trillion. But the treasuries in the “trust fund” differ from “regular” treasuries in that they are not marketable; they’re IOUs. In reality, there is no Social Security trust fund – the government spent the surplus.
Also, the “pay-as-you-go” aspect of Social Security will end – in 2017, it is estimated – when payroll taxes are no longer adequate to pay benefits. At that point, the treasuries in the “trust fund” will be “redeemed” to continue paying benefits at the same pace. And where will the money for those redemptions come? Why, from the general fund of the U.S. treasury. Which means: Social Security benefits paid for out of the trust fund are paid for twice, first by payroll taxes and second by other taxes that go into the general fund.
If the federal government wants Social Security to escape the stigma of being a Ponzi, then it must either limit payroll taxes to being no more than benefits or it must invest the surplus in real income-producing investments, not U.S. treasuries or securities. It should also do away with the accounting fiction known as the “unified budget”.
So, Ponzis and Social Security are operationally identical. The difference between the two is in how their surpluses are used.
In a Ponzi, we’re talking simple grand larceny. But in Social Security, the surplus goes into the U.S. treasury’s general fund. And since money is fungible, the Social Security surplus is used to pay for everything in the federal budget. Which includes the pork and earmarks incumbent Congressmen use to bribe the electorate into re-electing them.
So, dear reader, if you benefit from pork or earmarks and you re-elect these guys, are you a party to a Ponzi scheme?
In Mr. Hellman’s letter to the editor, he asserts: “Social Security is not and never was a Ponzi scheme…I am not only entitled to the return of the money I paid in, but the interest I earned for 64 years”.
Not so fast. We’ve already been here.
In Flemming v. Nestor (1960), the Supreme Court “established the principle that entitlement to Social Security benefits is not contractual right”. In other words, taxpayers have no property rights to Social Security benefits whatsoever.
Moreover, in Section 1104 of the 1935 Act: “The right to alter, amend, or repeal any provision of this Act is hereby reserved to the Congress.” Which means: Congress can end Social Security whenever it so chooses.
Folks might comfort themselves by thinking: Congress isn’t going to kill Social Security. And they’d be right – it would be political suicide.
But America is entering uncharted waters. The population is aging. The deficit is skyrocketing. We’re at war. And Congress is on a spending spree like no other and wants to “give” health-care and Lord knows what else to every last one of us including illegal aliens. The question isn’t just whether Social Security will be there for you, but whether the good ole U.S. dollar will still be worth anything.
So as you survey your family’s future security, social or otherwise, think about how the government finances things.
Jon N. Hall is a programmer/analyst from Kansas City.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Trillion dollar deficits -- PART 2
ULTRACON: the blogger who refers to himself in the third person.
The following article appeared at the now-defunct DissectingPopCulture.com, RIP. Ultracon then disseminated the thing through the ether via email in the hope of infusing the electorate with some sense before the election, alas. The fears expressed have all come to pass…and in spades: Trillion dollar deficits for years to come.
The Budget Deficit: Deflecting Blame, Abdicating Responsibility
By Jon N. Hall
October 16, 2008
One of the disadvantages of being the majority is occasionally you have to act like one.
When Democrats captured Congress in 2006, fiscal 2007 became the last year the Republican Congress could be held responsible for the budget. Total federal revenue for fiscal 2007 was a record $2.56 Trillion. The last year Democrats had produced a budget was fiscal 1995, when total federal revenue was $1.35 Trillion.
So, the new Democratic Congress had about $1.21 Trillion MORE with which to balance the budget than they had had 12 years earlier in their last attempt.
Would it be enough?
For the first 6 months of fiscal 2008, the federal deficit hit an all time record high of $311.4 Billion, up 20.5 percent from the previous year (also here, and for wonks here). The 2008 budget is the Democrats’ first budget since regaining control, and its deficit can’t be blamed on low revenue—federal revenue for the period also set a record.
There’s your Democrat Congress for you, the all time worst performance on the deficit for the first half of a fiscal year despite record high revenue. Not to rest on their laurels, the Democrat Congress went on to set the record for an entire fiscal year with a deficit of $455 Billion for 2008. This comes immediately after 3 solid years of progress by the Republicans, during which they reduced the on-budget deficit by $224 Billion—all wiped out by the spendthrift Democrat Congress’ first budget.
And remember, this Democrat deficit comes before the addition of universal health-care, universal pre-kindergarten and universal you-name-it. And it comes before the recent bailouts and rescues. Some predict a $1 Trillion deficit for fiscal 2009. (A trillion here and a trillion there and pretty soon you’re talkin’ real money.)
After 12 years in the minority—far longer than any other stretch since 1932—the Democrats immediately revert right back to their old playbook. The Democrats just can’t help themselves; they are genetically incapable of spending restraint. When confronted with what has been called a financial Pearl Harbor, they couldn’t resist larding up the $700 Billion bailout/rescue with pork—in what they themselves described as one of the most important votes of their careers, they couldn’t produce a clean bill.
The Democrats’ answer for everything is to raise tax rates on business and the wealthy, all the while demonizing them.
So how could the economy NOT be faltering? Investors and businesses are looking straight into the jaws of massive Democrat tax rate hikes. For the economy’s sake, wouldn’t it be better to leave the capital with the capitalists?
The Party of Taxes “needs” your money, nonetheless. And you should gladly fork it over to them, because Democrats know so much better how to spend your money than you do. After all, they’re the Keepers of Civilization.
July 13 on Meet the Press Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Mo) said: “and, and it was interesting that Carly [Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard] referred to the boom years. That's when we had a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress. Those were the boom years. And that's the, the years we want to get back to.”
Whatever could Sen. McCaskill be referring to? When were these halcyon days of yore? The 1990s? Didn’t we have a Republican Congress in those “boom years”? She certainly can’t be referring to the Carter years. The last time a Democratic Congress produced a “real” balanced budget—that is, without an on-budget deficit [1]—when a Democrat was in the White House was fiscal 1951. The last time a Democratic Congress produced a “real” balanced budget under a Republican president was fiscal 1960.
Record deficits, soaring tax rates, rampant spending: This is what GOP Congressional candidates should run against this fall. They should ask America: Are you better off now than you were—2 years ago?
But Republicans are allowing Democrats to deflect blame for the record deficit onto the President, as when Speaker Pelosi spoke at the Democrat Convention of “the failed Bush policies that has [sic] weakened our economy and taken us from the Clinton surplus to reckless Bush deficits”.
“Clinton surplus?” “Bush deficits?”
When did Congress lose its responsibility for the budget? When was the Constitution amended to throw out Article I, Section 9 (7), which states: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time” [emphasis added].
Budgets are legislation. Legislation is Pelosi’s area. This is Pelosi’s deficit. The predicted $750 Billion deficit for fiscal 2009 belongs to Democrats—they’re the majority now.
But Democrats seem to want to campaign this fall as though they were still the minority. And well they should, for what have they accomplished since capturing the majority? Nonetheless, the word from the media is: 2008 is a Democrat year.
But why, this Democrat Congress has performed abysmally. Even Democratic voters think so. Congress’ approval ratings are in the toilet; 11% in the Reuters/Zogby poll, which was taken before their “miserable failure” with the budget. Congress’ approval ratings have since plunged to an all time low of 9 % in the Rasmussen poll.
Under the current crop of Democrats, Congress has become the branch of government that folks hold in the most contempt.
If John McCain is to lead Washington back to fiscal sanity, he’ll need help. And that can mean only one thing—real conservatives in Congress. But ending earmarks, cutting pork, and rooting out waste won’t be enough; McCain, a genuine fiscal hawk, will need to reform entitlements. And that will be impossible without a GOP Congress.
To retake Congress, Republicans must create a compelling new vision of what they abandoned in 2001—the Contract with America. Republicans must tell America exactly how, if given the majority, they will balance the budget. And America should listen up, because the GOP is the only party to have actually balanced the budget since 1960.
Forget the barbarians at the gate for a second. If Congress doesn’t soon get a handle on its infernal spending of money it doesn’t have, Congress itself will be quite enough to bring about the End of America as We Know Her.
It’s the spending, stupid.
Jon N. Hall is a mainframe programmer/analyst from Kansas City.
[1] Democrats like to cite fiscal 1969 as having had a balanced budget. But there was an on-budget deficit of $507 million that year. If you doubt my budget figures, check out the latest budget history from the feds, toggle Bookmarks on the left and click on the third item: Table 1.1—SUMMARY OF RECEIPTS, OUTLAYS, AND SURPLUSES OR DEFICITS (–): 1789–2013. You’ll be on page 25 of Adobe Acrobat, but page 21 of the document itself. (Dial-up users: This 342-page PDF is almost 2.5 megabytes and might take 5+ minutes to download.)
The following article appeared at the now-defunct DissectingPopCulture.com, RIP. Ultracon then disseminated the thing through the ether via email in the hope of infusing the electorate with some sense before the election, alas. The fears expressed have all come to pass…and in spades: Trillion dollar deficits for years to come.
The Budget Deficit: Deflecting Blame, Abdicating Responsibility
By Jon N. Hall
October 16, 2008
One of the disadvantages of being the majority is occasionally you have to act like one.
When Democrats captured Congress in 2006, fiscal 2007 became the last year the Republican Congress could be held responsible for the budget. Total federal revenue for fiscal 2007 was a record $2.56 Trillion. The last year Democrats had produced a budget was fiscal 1995, when total federal revenue was $1.35 Trillion.
So, the new Democratic Congress had about $1.21 Trillion MORE with which to balance the budget than they had had 12 years earlier in their last attempt.
Would it be enough?
For the first 6 months of fiscal 2008, the federal deficit hit an all time record high of $311.4 Billion, up 20.5 percent from the previous year (also here, and for wonks here). The 2008 budget is the Democrats’ first budget since regaining control, and its deficit can’t be blamed on low revenue—federal revenue for the period also set a record.
There’s your Democrat Congress for you, the all time worst performance on the deficit for the first half of a fiscal year despite record high revenue. Not to rest on their laurels, the Democrat Congress went on to set the record for an entire fiscal year with a deficit of $455 Billion for 2008. This comes immediately after 3 solid years of progress by the Republicans, during which they reduced the on-budget deficit by $224 Billion—all wiped out by the spendthrift Democrat Congress’ first budget.
And remember, this Democrat deficit comes before the addition of universal health-care, universal pre-kindergarten and universal you-name-it. And it comes before the recent bailouts and rescues. Some predict a $1 Trillion deficit for fiscal 2009. (A trillion here and a trillion there and pretty soon you’re talkin’ real money.)
After 12 years in the minority—far longer than any other stretch since 1932—the Democrats immediately revert right back to their old playbook. The Democrats just can’t help themselves; they are genetically incapable of spending restraint. When confronted with what has been called a financial Pearl Harbor, they couldn’t resist larding up the $700 Billion bailout/rescue with pork—in what they themselves described as one of the most important votes of their careers, they couldn’t produce a clean bill.
The Democrats’ answer for everything is to raise tax rates on business and the wealthy, all the while demonizing them.
So how could the economy NOT be faltering? Investors and businesses are looking straight into the jaws of massive Democrat tax rate hikes. For the economy’s sake, wouldn’t it be better to leave the capital with the capitalists?
The Party of Taxes “needs” your money, nonetheless. And you should gladly fork it over to them, because Democrats know so much better how to spend your money than you do. After all, they’re the Keepers of Civilization.
July 13 on Meet the Press Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Mo) said: “and, and it was interesting that Carly [Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard] referred to the boom years. That's when we had a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress. Those were the boom years. And that's the, the years we want to get back to.”
Whatever could Sen. McCaskill be referring to? When were these halcyon days of yore? The 1990s? Didn’t we have a Republican Congress in those “boom years”? She certainly can’t be referring to the Carter years. The last time a Democratic Congress produced a “real” balanced budget—that is, without an on-budget deficit [1]—when a Democrat was in the White House was fiscal 1951. The last time a Democratic Congress produced a “real” balanced budget under a Republican president was fiscal 1960.
Record deficits, soaring tax rates, rampant spending: This is what GOP Congressional candidates should run against this fall. They should ask America: Are you better off now than you were—2 years ago?
But Republicans are allowing Democrats to deflect blame for the record deficit onto the President, as when Speaker Pelosi spoke at the Democrat Convention of “the failed Bush policies that has [sic] weakened our economy and taken us from the Clinton surplus to reckless Bush deficits”.
“Clinton surplus?” “Bush deficits?”
When did Congress lose its responsibility for the budget? When was the Constitution amended to throw out Article I, Section 9 (7), which states: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time” [emphasis added].
Budgets are legislation. Legislation is Pelosi’s area. This is Pelosi’s deficit. The predicted $750 Billion deficit for fiscal 2009 belongs to Democrats—they’re the majority now.
But Democrats seem to want to campaign this fall as though they were still the minority. And well they should, for what have they accomplished since capturing the majority? Nonetheless, the word from the media is: 2008 is a Democrat year.
But why, this Democrat Congress has performed abysmally. Even Democratic voters think so. Congress’ approval ratings are in the toilet; 11% in the Reuters/Zogby poll, which was taken before their “miserable failure” with the budget. Congress’ approval ratings have since plunged to an all time low of 9 % in the Rasmussen poll.
Under the current crop of Democrats, Congress has become the branch of government that folks hold in the most contempt.
If John McCain is to lead Washington back to fiscal sanity, he’ll need help. And that can mean only one thing—real conservatives in Congress. But ending earmarks, cutting pork, and rooting out waste won’t be enough; McCain, a genuine fiscal hawk, will need to reform entitlements. And that will be impossible without a GOP Congress.
To retake Congress, Republicans must create a compelling new vision of what they abandoned in 2001—the Contract with America. Republicans must tell America exactly how, if given the majority, they will balance the budget. And America should listen up, because the GOP is the only party to have actually balanced the budget since 1960.
Forget the barbarians at the gate for a second. If Congress doesn’t soon get a handle on its infernal spending of money it doesn’t have, Congress itself will be quite enough to bring about the End of America as We Know Her.
It’s the spending, stupid.
Jon N. Hall is a mainframe programmer/analyst from Kansas City.
[1] Democrats like to cite fiscal 1969 as having had a balanced budget. But there was an on-budget deficit of $507 million that year. If you doubt my budget figures, check out the latest budget history from the feds, toggle Bookmarks on the left and click on the third item: Table 1.1—SUMMARY OF RECEIPTS, OUTLAYS, AND SURPLUSES OR DEFICITS (–): 1789–2013. You’ll be on page 25 of Adobe Acrobat, but page 21 of the document itself. (Dial-up users: This 342-page PDF is almost 2.5 megabytes and might take 5+ minutes to download.)
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Trillion dollar deficits
With Trillion dollar deficits “for as far as the eye can see”, Ultracon trots out an article from April of 2007 that appeared in the STAR BUSINESS WEEKLY, page D8. (One slight alteration from the STAR is the dropping of “ic” from “Democratic”, done for Mr. Howard Dean’s sake.)
If you doubt Ultracon’s budget figures, check out the latest budget history from the feds, toggle Bookmarks on the left and click on the third item: Table 1.1—SUMMARY OF RECEIPTS, OUTLAYS, AND SURPLUSES OR DEFICITS (–): 1789–2013. You’ll be on page 25 of Adobe Acrobat, but page 21 of the document itself. (Dial-up users: This 342-page PDF is almost 2.5 megabytes and might take 5+ minutes to download.)
One might quibble with Ultracon’s positing of a better than 50% rating for the GOP. This was based on not counting 1931, 1932 and the first 6 years of the Reagan terms. Although the GOP won the House in 1931, the House was organized, if memory serves, by Democrats due to GOP death(s). Also, during the first 6 years of Reagan, the House was in Democrat control, but cooperation from conservative Democrats, Blue Dogs, coupled with a GOP Senate allowed the GOP to have its way. But go ahead and count those 8 years for the GOP and the GOP still has a 40% rating at balancing the budget as opposed to the Democrat’s less than 10%. However, Ultran was counting 2001 and 2002 for the GOP, but the defection of Senator Jeffords in 2001 put the Senate under Democrat control. In any event, no matter how you look at it, the GOP has a better record at balancing the budget than Democrats. That is, if you think Congress is responsible for budgets.
Now it’s the Democrats’ turn to balance the budget
By Jon N. Hall
Back in 2002, Howard Dean told Greta Van Susteren on her Fox News Channel show: “No Republican president has balanced the budget in this country in 34 years. It seems only Democratic presidents do that.”
Dean was referring to fiscal 1969, the first year of the so-called Unified Budget. The Unified Budget mixes general fund revenue with off-budget revenue from dedicated taxes, such as Social Security. It allows off-budget surpluses to offset (and mask) on-budget deficits. And indeed, 1969 saw an on-budget deficit of $507 million.
But who are these “Democratic presidents” Dean refers to? Certainly not Carter, LBJ or JFK. The last president before Clinton to preside over a balanced budget was Eisenhower, and the last Democrat was Truman.
The biggest problem with Dean’s statement is this: NO president—neither Democrat, nor Republican, nor Whig—has ever balanced the federal budget. “It seems only [Congress does] that.”
Budgets are legislation. Bills. Presidents don’t vote on bills. Presidents only sign bills, which makes them laws. Or they veto them. Which is why Clinton needs to accept at least half of the responsibility for the government shutdown in 1995—he vetoed a budget that would have kept the government going.
The responsibility for the budget rests with Congress, as is illustrated by the current calls to cut funding for the Iraq war. No Congress should rubberstamp any president’s proposed budget. Congress has it within its power to reject any of a president’s budget proposals. Folks should direct their unhappiness over the return to deficits at Congress.
The Democrat establishment has for years laid responsibility for the budget at the feet of the president, crediting Clinton and blaming Republicans. But if Congress has the ultimate responsibility for the budget, why do Democrat congressmen deflect attention elsewhere?
It is because the only balanced budgets during the last 47 years occurred when Republicans controlled Congress.
That’s right. The last balanced budget produced by a Democrat Congress was in fiscal 1960. And going back to 1920, the only other times Democrats balanced the budget were in fiscal 1947, 1951, 1956 and 1957. And since Democrats controlled both houses of Congress for 52 of those years, it means their record is below 10 percent.
The Republicans have certainly disappointed fiscal hawks lately, but they balanced the budget in the 11 years from 1920 through 1930, and in 1948, 1999 and 2000. They controlled Congress for 27 of the years in question and so are averaging above 50 percent.
Democrats might object to the exclusion here of fiscal 1969. But we’re not including any years with Unified Budget surpluses if they ran on-budget deficits. That means we’re also not including 1949, 1998 and 2001, which would accrue to the Republicans’ record.
What does it take for a Democrat Congress to balance the budget? The top tax rate during the period when Democrats balanced the budget was 91 percent. When the top rate was lowered in the 1960s to 70 percent, Democrats never again balanced a single budget.
But now, after 12 years, the Democrats have another shot at balancing the budget. And they have a Trillion dollars more revenue to work with than in their last budget. They’re not used to such large sums. Will it be enough for them to balance the budget? Or will they launch more programs, more entitlements, and just spend it?
Democrat congressmen who continue to lay the responsibility for the budget on the president are doing nothing less than abdicating their own responsibility. And since Congress can pass rescission bills, the Democrats are, as of now, responsible for all the waste, fraud and abuse in the federal budget. (At least the Republicans killed the “bridge to nowhere”.)
Should the Democrat Congress be unsuccessful at balancing the budget, it will be interesting to see if they blame President Bush for it.
[This article originally appeared April 17, 2007 in STAR BUSINESS WEEKLY, put out by The Kansas City Star newspaper.]
Jon N. Hall is a programmer/analyst form Kansas City.
ULTRACON: the blog for Real Americans.
If you doubt Ultracon’s budget figures, check out the latest budget history from the feds, toggle Bookmarks on the left and click on the third item: Table 1.1—SUMMARY OF RECEIPTS, OUTLAYS, AND SURPLUSES OR DEFICITS (–): 1789–2013. You’ll be on page 25 of Adobe Acrobat, but page 21 of the document itself. (Dial-up users: This 342-page PDF is almost 2.5 megabytes and might take 5+ minutes to download.)
One might quibble with Ultracon’s positing of a better than 50% rating for the GOP. This was based on not counting 1931, 1932 and the first 6 years of the Reagan terms. Although the GOP won the House in 1931, the House was organized, if memory serves, by Democrats due to GOP death(s). Also, during the first 6 years of Reagan, the House was in Democrat control, but cooperation from conservative Democrats, Blue Dogs, coupled with a GOP Senate allowed the GOP to have its way. But go ahead and count those 8 years for the GOP and the GOP still has a 40% rating at balancing the budget as opposed to the Democrat’s less than 10%. However, Ultran was counting 2001 and 2002 for the GOP, but the defection of Senator Jeffords in 2001 put the Senate under Democrat control. In any event, no matter how you look at it, the GOP has a better record at balancing the budget than Democrats. That is, if you think Congress is responsible for budgets.
Now it’s the Democrats’ turn to balance the budget
By Jon N. Hall
Back in 2002, Howard Dean told Greta Van Susteren on her Fox News Channel show: “No Republican president has balanced the budget in this country in 34 years. It seems only Democratic presidents do that.”
Dean was referring to fiscal 1969, the first year of the so-called Unified Budget. The Unified Budget mixes general fund revenue with off-budget revenue from dedicated taxes, such as Social Security. It allows off-budget surpluses to offset (and mask) on-budget deficits. And indeed, 1969 saw an on-budget deficit of $507 million.
But who are these “Democratic presidents” Dean refers to? Certainly not Carter, LBJ or JFK. The last president before Clinton to preside over a balanced budget was Eisenhower, and the last Democrat was Truman.
The biggest problem with Dean’s statement is this: NO president—neither Democrat, nor Republican, nor Whig—has ever balanced the federal budget. “It seems only [Congress does] that.”
Budgets are legislation. Bills. Presidents don’t vote on bills. Presidents only sign bills, which makes them laws. Or they veto them. Which is why Clinton needs to accept at least half of the responsibility for the government shutdown in 1995—he vetoed a budget that would have kept the government going.
The responsibility for the budget rests with Congress, as is illustrated by the current calls to cut funding for the Iraq war. No Congress should rubberstamp any president’s proposed budget. Congress has it within its power to reject any of a president’s budget proposals. Folks should direct their unhappiness over the return to deficits at Congress.
The Democrat establishment has for years laid responsibility for the budget at the feet of the president, crediting Clinton and blaming Republicans. But if Congress has the ultimate responsibility for the budget, why do Democrat congressmen deflect attention elsewhere?
It is because the only balanced budgets during the last 47 years occurred when Republicans controlled Congress.
That’s right. The last balanced budget produced by a Democrat Congress was in fiscal 1960. And going back to 1920, the only other times Democrats balanced the budget were in fiscal 1947, 1951, 1956 and 1957. And since Democrats controlled both houses of Congress for 52 of those years, it means their record is below 10 percent.
The Republicans have certainly disappointed fiscal hawks lately, but they balanced the budget in the 11 years from 1920 through 1930, and in 1948, 1999 and 2000. They controlled Congress for 27 of the years in question and so are averaging above 50 percent.
Democrats might object to the exclusion here of fiscal 1969. But we’re not including any years with Unified Budget surpluses if they ran on-budget deficits. That means we’re also not including 1949, 1998 and 2001, which would accrue to the Republicans’ record.
What does it take for a Democrat Congress to balance the budget? The top tax rate during the period when Democrats balanced the budget was 91 percent. When the top rate was lowered in the 1960s to 70 percent, Democrats never again balanced a single budget.
But now, after 12 years, the Democrats have another shot at balancing the budget. And they have a Trillion dollars more revenue to work with than in their last budget. They’re not used to such large sums. Will it be enough for them to balance the budget? Or will they launch more programs, more entitlements, and just spend it?
Democrat congressmen who continue to lay the responsibility for the budget on the president are doing nothing less than abdicating their own responsibility. And since Congress can pass rescission bills, the Democrats are, as of now, responsible for all the waste, fraud and abuse in the federal budget. (At least the Republicans killed the “bridge to nowhere”.)
Should the Democrat Congress be unsuccessful at balancing the budget, it will be interesting to see if they blame President Bush for it.
[This article originally appeared April 17, 2007 in STAR BUSINESS WEEKLY, put out by The Kansas City Star newspaper.]
Jon N. Hall is a programmer/analyst form Kansas City.
ULTRACON: the blog for Real Americans.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Health-care Reform
It has come to our attention that there may be a TownHall.com blog operating under the name Ultracon. Do not be deceived: This is the home of the one, true and only Ultracon—ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES.
Since America is soon to be overrun by progressives—that is, we’re gonna have an all-Democrat federal government—and since they seem intent on delivering “universal health-care” no matter the cost, it’s time to revisit some old articles of mine on health-care reform:
Our 1st article appeared at the Public Program Testing Organization, which is run by Joe Fried. (Joe’s new book garnered an interview at FrontPageMag.) Anyway, PPTO ran a longish piece of mine a while back; I don’t know if all the links are still operative. In hopes of getting readers to keep on, I tried to leaven the dry subject matter with a little humor. But I still tried to address the serious problems of the feds “giving” us healthcare: A Cold Eye on Healthcare Reform.
Our 2nd article appeared at TCS Daily. TCS was the brainchild of James K. Glassman, but is now under different management, Nick Schulz. TCS sports a fine array of writers; I discovered Johan Norberg there. I had wanted to come up with a short article for a newspaper by excising a bit of the long piece above. I don’t believe any newspaper ran it, but TCS did: What Healthcare and Higher Education Have in Common.
And our 3rd piece appeared at FrontPageMag. For current affairs, FPM is one of our most vital websites. So I was right pleased to get something accepted by them. I don’t believe they edited a word of the article, but they gave it a new title, an audacious title, full of HOPE and CHANGE: Hillary Taxes Breathing.
(In my oh-so-lucrative career as a “citizen journalist”, I’ve noticed that re-titling is the order of the day. I’d wager that this is more common in print, such as newspapers, where they’re also more likely to edit your articles (I guess so your article will conform to their Style Book). They even seem to do this with syndicated columnists, which I find beyond the pale. I once caught a big-city newspaper changing a single word of a Tom Friedman column, which reversed its meaning. I notified them and they issued an erratum. American newspapers are in dire straits. They need to come up with a different business model and move exclusively to the Internet, like the Christian Science Monitor.)
Oh yeah, don’t forget to read my pieces on health-care reform (above).
Since America is soon to be overrun by progressives—that is, we’re gonna have an all-Democrat federal government—and since they seem intent on delivering “universal health-care” no matter the cost, it’s time to revisit some old articles of mine on health-care reform:
Our 1st article appeared at the Public Program Testing Organization, which is run by Joe Fried. (Joe’s new book garnered an interview at FrontPageMag.) Anyway, PPTO ran a longish piece of mine a while back; I don’t know if all the links are still operative. In hopes of getting readers to keep on, I tried to leaven the dry subject matter with a little humor. But I still tried to address the serious problems of the feds “giving” us healthcare: A Cold Eye on Healthcare Reform.
Our 2nd article appeared at TCS Daily. TCS was the brainchild of James K. Glassman, but is now under different management, Nick Schulz. TCS sports a fine array of writers; I discovered Johan Norberg there. I had wanted to come up with a short article for a newspaper by excising a bit of the long piece above. I don’t believe any newspaper ran it, but TCS did: What Healthcare and Higher Education Have in Common.
And our 3rd piece appeared at FrontPageMag. For current affairs, FPM is one of our most vital websites. So I was right pleased to get something accepted by them. I don’t believe they edited a word of the article, but they gave it a new title, an audacious title, full of HOPE and CHANGE: Hillary Taxes Breathing.
(In my oh-so-lucrative career as a “citizen journalist”, I’ve noticed that re-titling is the order of the day. I’d wager that this is more common in print, such as newspapers, where they’re also more likely to edit your articles (I guess so your article will conform to their Style Book). They even seem to do this with syndicated columnists, which I find beyond the pale. I once caught a big-city newspaper changing a single word of a Tom Friedman column, which reversed its meaning. I notified them and they issued an erratum. American newspapers are in dire straits. They need to come up with a different business model and move exclusively to the Internet, like the Christian Science Monitor.)
Oh yeah, don’t forget to read my pieces on health-care reform (above).
Friday, December 26, 2008
Boxing Day
In the Age of Bailouts, remember economist Allan Meltzer's sage observation:
"Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin."
Are you worried about the right things??? If EMP is not at the top of your list of worries, then check out this piece at the Wall Street Journal and this one by Mark Steyn.
I've written 5 articles on "election fraud"; you might start HERE and follow the links.
JERUSALEM
AND did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
William Blake (1757-1827)
True blue Ultracons follow these sites religiously:
FrontPageMag and National Review Online (NRO)
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
A Quick Fix for America’s Elections
By Jon N. Hall
On March 12 before the Senate Rules Committee, Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan testified on voter fraud and her opposition to photo ID laws. “A dog has never voted in Missouri, nor has a dead person come from the grave and voted…I think this shows the system is working,” [1] she said. Carnahan went on to assure the committee that there are few election problems and little voter fraud in Missouri. One might doubt her assurances: What are dogs doing on Missouri voter registries?
What’s really disheartening about America’s election problems is that the solution is so very obvious—technology. But few seem willing to seriously consider technological solutions to our election woes. Some states are even regressing back to paper ballots.
In the information technology profession we sometimes describe certain fixes in computer programs as “quick and dirty”. Well, I wanted my fix to be quick and clean. And I wanted it to be as simple and easy on folks as I could make it. My solution is not high-tech, but then it’s not low-tech, either. It’s probably middle-tech, and it’s something that could have and should have been done decades ago.
What I’ve tried to fix is the problem of corrupted voter registries. Because the states have been doing such a poor job of vetting voter registrants—verifying their eligibility—my solution takes that responsibility away from the states. I also wanted to satisfy the demands of those concerned about voter participation. And I wanted to make the process of registration as painless as possible. So my solution does 2 nifty things: It takes away the requirement to register, and yet registers everybody (citizens, that is).
However, the most important feature of this solution vis-à-vis fraud is this: The entire Social Security Number (SSN) is used to create the registries. Currently, this isn’t done. In Missouri, for instance, only the last 4 digits of the SSN are asked for.
(Incidentally, I don’t flatter myself that my solution is particularly brilliant. In fact, it’s the kind of solution that any competent computer programmer worth a hoot would think of between sips of coffee on an early Monday morning while he’s slowly letting up on the clutch trying to ease his brain into gear. In the parlance of the day, it’s “a no-brainer”. It’s a typical data processing type of solution, which I imagine has occurred to other computer programmers, causing them to wonder: Why aren’t we doing this?)
HOW TO FIX AMERICA’S BROKEN VOTER REGISTRATION SYSTEM:
Whenever a dog, a cat, a dead person, a person in a coma or in a persistent vegetative state or in a nursing home suffering from Alzheimer’s, a felon, an illegal alien, or any otherwise ineligible “voter” appears on a voter registry, or whenever anyone appears on more than one voter registry, an eligible voter is in jeopardy of having his vote cancelled out. And if anyone uses someone else’s registration or a registration established by fraud to actually cast a vote in an American election, an American citizen will have been effectively disenfranchised. His vote will have been nullified, his birthright stolen.
Throughout America, the flimsiest of IDs can get just about anyone put on a voter registry, allowing ineligibles to vote. Also, voter registries are not kept current. For instance, the dead are often not purged from voter registries for years, allowing the living to use their registrations to vote “for them”. And then there’s the failure to purge those who have moved to another state, such as Faye Buis-Ewing, which makes it possible to vote twice.
If voter registries are corrupted, how can we be assured of clean fair elections, the cornerstone of democracy?
If you are a taxpaying law-abiding American citizen, you should have little doubt that the government knows your whereabouts. If you fail to pay your income tax on time, you can be assured that the IRS will descend upon you; come to your house; perhaps even seize it. And if you run afoul of the law, the FBI, despite its computer problems, will most likely find you. (That is, unless you’re part of the criminal underworld. In which case, who cares if you can’t vote.) And you’d better hope the feds know where to send your tax refunds and benefit checks.
Certain politicians have long insisted that voter registration should be easier. But if the government already has all your data, including your address, why do they require you to register? Isn’t the requirement to register a bit like a retailer making you scan your credit card for each and every item you’re buying, rather than just once?
Friends, I’m here to tell you: You shouldn’t have to register to vote—the government should do it for you. Here’s how: The feds would write computer programs to extract each eligible citizen’s data from the Social Security Administration (SSA) database, and then send the data to the states, which would use it to create the voter registries.
The primary virtue of this method is: Only citizens would be registered. And furthermore, each citizen would be on one and only one state registry, unlike today. You could think of the SSA database as the “National Voter Registry”.
And another thing, all those volunteers laboring to get folks registered would be free to volunteer for some other noble work—everyone would be automatically registered.
BUT IS THERE A FLY IN MY OINTMENT?
If you question the feasibility of this reform, don’t feel like the Lone Ranger—I did, too. I had no doubts about my idea; it’s pretty simple. But we’re talking about the federal government here; perhaps there was some obscure something I didn’t know about. Also, I’d never worked for the feds, nor was I familiar with their databases. So I thought I better rummage through federal websites just to be sure all the information was where I thought it should be—on the SSA database.
But first, what is this information? It’s actually precious little (example here). To place an American citizen on his correct voter registry requires just 3 pieces of information: personal identification, date of birth, and address. (Incidentally, the data is so tiny the entire U.S. electorate could fit on an iPod.)
The SSA places folks on the SSA database soon after birth and naturalization, which includes name and date of birth. So the entire issue of feasibility seemed to boil down to this question: Does the SSA keep our addresses current (updated) on its database? If so, my reform would seem quite doable.
I knew that employers were already accessing the SSA database through the Department of Homeland Security’s internet-based E-Verify system to validate data on Form I-9, required of all new hires. And one of the items of information on Form I-9 is—address.
So I went to the SSA website, and there in the upper right of the screen was QUESTIONS, a drop-down menu containing Change of Address. But I discovered that the SSA doesn't carry addresses for folks who aren't receiving benefits.
There appeared to be a fly in my dang ointment—I had hit a snag. But I would not be denied; perhaps the screen was wrong and needed updating. So I telephoned USCIS, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, to see if their E-Verify system allows employers to verify the address on Form I-9 in addition to the SSN. A polite helpful federal employee told me it did not.
Then it occurred to me that I myself regularly receive notices via snail-mail from the SSA, even though I’m not receiving benefits. Poking around a bit more in the SSA website, I read that the SSA gets the addresses for those notices from the IRS.
Bottom line: My reform needs something besides the extract program. There are many ways to skin a cat, but here’s what I think the feds could do:
The SSA database should “carry” the residential addresses for ALL citizens, not just those receiving benefits. The SSA would get this information from the IRS database. For many Americans, our address on the IRS database is identical to our voter registration address. These folks would be set, and wouldn’t need to do anything. But others would need to change their address on the IRS database, using IRS Form 8822.
Under my reform, “voter registration” devolves into nothing more than keeping the feds informed of your residential address. This would be the citizen’s only responsibility in “voter registration”. And you’re already doing this when you file your 1040 tax return. But if you relocate just before an election, you would use Form 8822. (The SSA even allows folks to change their address online.)
However, under my reform, even if you failed to inform the feds of your new address in time for an election, you’d still be registered to vote, albeit at your old address.
(A possible side benefit of having the addresses of all citizens on the SSA database is that it might help employer’s detect stolen SSNs when using E-verify. It would provide one more datum to triangulate on. Since identity theft has become such a big issue, America would approve.)
COMPARE MY REFORM WITH THE CURRENT SYSTEM:
The whole point behind my reform is this: Voter registries should be derived from a single centralized database. Computer professionals understand the necessity of this. Anything less leaves our elections wide open to fraud and error. Insofar as data about American citizens is concerned, the SSA database is the Holy of Holies. At least, it better be. If you can’t trust it, you can’t trust anything. The SSA database is the font from which our national identities flow.
The absurdity of our current voter registration system isn’t just that American citizens are required to give government information it already has. It’s that it demands a tremendous amount of extra work and expense, all of which is unnecessary.
What’s even more ridiculous is the requirement to sign affidavits affirming that we are citizens and that we aren’t felons. Doesn’t government know whether we’ve been through its judicial system or not? The absurdity is compounded because registrars don’t have the means to verify our affidavits. That would entail the SSN. But the registrars are forbidden to ask for that. Voter registration is entirely on the “honor system”, except without the honor and the system. (Sí, Se Puede, amigo mio.)
And then to top it off, we end up with registries they are unreliable, corrupted. Wouldn’t it be better to have computers create our registries for us? All it would involve is a few dinky little computer programs that could probably be written before lunch.
So why is government making the citizenry jump through all these hoops? Why is government dumping so much work on unpaid volunteers? (Might these volunteers someday up and quit?) Why does government persist in its backward ways? The least uncomplimentary explanation is: the inertia of Congress.
Congress is great when it comes to doing the really heroic things, such as changing the light bulbs in the Capitol to compact fluorescents. But for lesser things, like bringing integrity to America’s elections, Congress needs a committee, and a study, and a report, and…well, we really need to see how they do things in Europe. Mustn’t be precipitate.
I’m not a lawyer, but I do believe my reform would require federal legislation. This is because election law is a state matter. So my reform would have to be imposed on the states by the feds. This is the real snag in my reform: getting the Do Nothing Congress to do something. This is where the “quick” part of my “quick fix” might break down. The rest of it is pretty simple stuff.
The federal government has within its means the wherewithal to create voter registries that are correct. Will it do so?
My reform actually hands the states their voter registries—on a silver platter. When the states receive their registries, they would then apply state law to them. This would mainly consist of identifying the voters who are ineligible due to state law, such as felons, and deleting them from their registry. After this is done, the states would have finalized their registries; they then would create signature rosters for each precinct, and their election could proceed.
THE NEW VOTER ID LAWS:
Arizona is currently the only state to require proof of citizenship to register to vote. Arizona is also the only state to require all employers to use E-Verify. (Arizona is also home to one of America’s finest law enforcement officers: Sheriff Joe Arpaio.) Arizona seems to be more sophisticated and more advanced on these issues than other states. But then it has to be; Arizona is on the front lines of an invasion from the South.
But Arizona’s new requirements don’t do anything about those already registered. Shouldn’t Arizona require those registrants to come back and present proof of citizenship? With my reform, Arizona, along with the rest of the nation, could be assured of the citizenship of its voter registrants.
The new voter ID laws are inadequate; they go only so far. They don’t identify those already registered who shouldn’t be; they don’t correct registries; they’re just concerned with new registrants. With my reform, the states would receive new registries just before their elections, and these registries would reflect all the changes in address and eligibility since the last election.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE SSN:
If we really want to ensure the integrity of our elections, not only would we use the SSN to create our voter registries, we’d require the voter to produce his SSN when voting.
But can you imagine the hubbub from the American Civil Liberties Union if polling stations started demanding the SSN to vote? The ACLU is apoplectic over even a photo ID requirement. (The ACLU doesn't like E-Verify, either.)
On January 9 during oral arguments in the Indiana photo ID case before the Supreme Court, Justice Alito pointedly asked, “Is it your position that a state can’t require any form of identification and can only require a signature?”
The photo ID is the most minimal form of ID, yet the ACLU objects to it. (By the way, are polling stations in Indiana going to carry photos of their registrants? You know, so they can match them to the voters’ photo IDs?)
The SSN is a far more powerful form of identification than a photo. Requiring the SSN to vote would obviate the photo ID requirement. And seniors, whom the ACLU cares so much about, are the ones most likely to actually know their SSN, since they’re receiving social security benefits. Of course, requiring the voter to produce his SSN to vote would entail having his SSN at the polling stations, so the 2 can be matched. Which means the feds would have sent the SSN to the states along with the other registration data.
The NYTimes recently related the case of 78-year-old St. Louis resident Lillie Lewis and her difficulty in obtaining a photo ID. “I have voted in almost all of the presidential races going back I can’t remember how long, but if they tell me I need a passport or birth certificate that’ll be the end of that”, she said. How can government place such burdens on senior citizens? With my reform, the only ID Ms. Lewis would need to present at the polls would be her SSN. With my reform, the difficulty folks are having in obtaining the documents needed to get a photo ID would just float away.
If America were ever to migrate to a fully computerized, state-of-the-art system which allowed folks to vote at home or from abroad using the internet, I can assure you: The SSN will be required to vote. Until such time, we should require the SSN be written on any and all paper ballots, especially provisional and absentee ballots, the source of so many of our woes.
I’m always amazed when I encounter someone who hasn’t memorized his SSN. The reason the SSN is so important is that it is a “unique identifier”; no one else can share it. Unique identifiers are used throughout contemporary America for all manner of things. They’re what allow businesses to keep track of their inventories, and brokerages and banks to balance accounts down to the penny. Even banks themselves have their own unique identifiers: the routing number you enter on your 1040 form. The necessity of unique identifiers for life as we know it requires no discussion. Yet, we do not currently demand that voters produce their unique identifiers, even though they all have them.
Do you do online banking? The only online banking I do is transfer money between my accounts, and I don’t logon to the net to do so. I just pick up the phone and start punching numbers, and the first number I punch in is my dear old SSN. Then I have to punch in my PIN number and the numbers of the accounts from which and to which I’m transferring money. Such a transfer is done in real time, so I have access to the money immediately. Try that with a photo ID.
How concerned would you be if every monthly statement you received from your bank had errors on it, or showed other folks using your account? You’d be outraged. You’d drop your account pronto and sue the bums. Yet that is exactly the sort of thing the American People countenance with their elections. Elections should be more like banking and other enterprises that strive for data perfection.
The thing is: You can’t pay your taxes, nor get a job, nor even open a checking account without surrendering your SSN. But the ACLU seems to think you should be allowed to vote for the Leader of the Free World with a utility bill. (Why not a laundry ticket?)
The SSN is the de facto national ID. So the unauthorized creation of an SSN and, especially, the theft of an SSN are very serious crimes, and should be punished by very serious hard time. (I’d prefer such perps be drawn and quartered, but that’s just me.)
As long as we re-use the numbers of deceased citizens in a timely fashion, the SSN will be sufficient as long as our population stays below 1 Billion. So the SSN won’t present any Y2K-type problems for a good while.
If you were really obsessive-compulsive about ensuring election perfection, you’d not only require the SSN at the polls, you’d require fingerprints and a retinal scan, as well.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves; first we must fix the registries.
MORE TECHNOLOGY, PLEASE:
Creating voter registries by the method just outlined would by no means end all voter fraud, but it would make it harder to commit. Also, this method would render irrelevant such things as the Motor Voter act of 1993, which is reason enough to adopt it.
So much of what Congress and the states have done in recent years has exacerbated the problems in our elections. In trying to make registration and voting easier and more convenient, they’ve made a mountain of extra work for registrars and poll workers. In short, our elected officials have actually flung open the doors to voter fraud, made it easier to commit. They’ve complicated things, but provided no means by which to ensure that our elections are right. And again, the means by which to ensure that our elections are right is technology.
As someone who has worked on computers for years, I can see absolutely no technological reason why our elections cannot have the same precision and reliability that our banking, securities, and other computer-based enterprises have. There’s nothing to keep us from having perfect elections; elections where we know what the correct vote counts are and can prove it. We just have to get up to snuff on our technology.
However, there doesn’t seem to be much will on the part of our elected officials to move toward complete computerization of our elections, nor much interest in it. It’s easy to think that our elected officials have contempt for the voter.
But regardless of whether we upgrade to a 21st century system anytime soon or not, we still need to derive our voter registries from a single centralized database. Even if all the states were to regress back to paper ballots, this reform would still be sorely needed, even more so. It would help prevent fraud, and compared to other reforms, fixes and upgrades would be much cheaper and far quicker.
Jon N. Hall is a mainframe programmer/analyst from Kansas City.
[1] David Goldstein, “Voter I.D. debate centers on pooch”, THE KANSAS CITY STAR, March 13, 2008, B2 (The pooch in question was the infamous Ritzy Mekler)
On March 12 before the Senate Rules Committee, Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan testified on voter fraud and her opposition to photo ID laws. “A dog has never voted in Missouri, nor has a dead person come from the grave and voted…I think this shows the system is working,” [1] she said. Carnahan went on to assure the committee that there are few election problems and little voter fraud in Missouri. One might doubt her assurances: What are dogs doing on Missouri voter registries?
What’s really disheartening about America’s election problems is that the solution is so very obvious—technology. But few seem willing to seriously consider technological solutions to our election woes. Some states are even regressing back to paper ballots.
In the information technology profession we sometimes describe certain fixes in computer programs as “quick and dirty”. Well, I wanted my fix to be quick and clean. And I wanted it to be as simple and easy on folks as I could make it. My solution is not high-tech, but then it’s not low-tech, either. It’s probably middle-tech, and it’s something that could have and should have been done decades ago.
What I’ve tried to fix is the problem of corrupted voter registries. Because the states have been doing such a poor job of vetting voter registrants—verifying their eligibility—my solution takes that responsibility away from the states. I also wanted to satisfy the demands of those concerned about voter participation. And I wanted to make the process of registration as painless as possible. So my solution does 2 nifty things: It takes away the requirement to register, and yet registers everybody (citizens, that is).
However, the most important feature of this solution vis-à-vis fraud is this: The entire Social Security Number (SSN) is used to create the registries. Currently, this isn’t done. In Missouri, for instance, only the last 4 digits of the SSN are asked for.
(Incidentally, I don’t flatter myself that my solution is particularly brilliant. In fact, it’s the kind of solution that any competent computer programmer worth a hoot would think of between sips of coffee on an early Monday morning while he’s slowly letting up on the clutch trying to ease his brain into gear. In the parlance of the day, it’s “a no-brainer”. It’s a typical data processing type of solution, which I imagine has occurred to other computer programmers, causing them to wonder: Why aren’t we doing this?)
HOW TO FIX AMERICA’S BROKEN VOTER REGISTRATION SYSTEM:
Whenever a dog, a cat, a dead person, a person in a coma or in a persistent vegetative state or in a nursing home suffering from Alzheimer’s, a felon, an illegal alien, or any otherwise ineligible “voter” appears on a voter registry, or whenever anyone appears on more than one voter registry, an eligible voter is in jeopardy of having his vote cancelled out. And if anyone uses someone else’s registration or a registration established by fraud to actually cast a vote in an American election, an American citizen will have been effectively disenfranchised. His vote will have been nullified, his birthright stolen.
Throughout America, the flimsiest of IDs can get just about anyone put on a voter registry, allowing ineligibles to vote. Also, voter registries are not kept current. For instance, the dead are often not purged from voter registries for years, allowing the living to use their registrations to vote “for them”. And then there’s the failure to purge those who have moved to another state, such as Faye Buis-Ewing, which makes it possible to vote twice.
If voter registries are corrupted, how can we be assured of clean fair elections, the cornerstone of democracy?
If you are a taxpaying law-abiding American citizen, you should have little doubt that the government knows your whereabouts. If you fail to pay your income tax on time, you can be assured that the IRS will descend upon you; come to your house; perhaps even seize it. And if you run afoul of the law, the FBI, despite its computer problems, will most likely find you. (That is, unless you’re part of the criminal underworld. In which case, who cares if you can’t vote.) And you’d better hope the feds know where to send your tax refunds and benefit checks.
Certain politicians have long insisted that voter registration should be easier. But if the government already has all your data, including your address, why do they require you to register? Isn’t the requirement to register a bit like a retailer making you scan your credit card for each and every item you’re buying, rather than just once?
Friends, I’m here to tell you: You shouldn’t have to register to vote—the government should do it for you. Here’s how: The feds would write computer programs to extract each eligible citizen’s data from the Social Security Administration (SSA) database, and then send the data to the states, which would use it to create the voter registries.
The primary virtue of this method is: Only citizens would be registered. And furthermore, each citizen would be on one and only one state registry, unlike today. You could think of the SSA database as the “National Voter Registry”.
And another thing, all those volunteers laboring to get folks registered would be free to volunteer for some other noble work—everyone would be automatically registered.
BUT IS THERE A FLY IN MY OINTMENT?
If you question the feasibility of this reform, don’t feel like the Lone Ranger—I did, too. I had no doubts about my idea; it’s pretty simple. But we’re talking about the federal government here; perhaps there was some obscure something I didn’t know about. Also, I’d never worked for the feds, nor was I familiar with their databases. So I thought I better rummage through federal websites just to be sure all the information was where I thought it should be—on the SSA database.
But first, what is this information? It’s actually precious little (example here). To place an American citizen on his correct voter registry requires just 3 pieces of information: personal identification, date of birth, and address. (Incidentally, the data is so tiny the entire U.S. electorate could fit on an iPod.)
The SSA places folks on the SSA database soon after birth and naturalization, which includes name and date of birth. So the entire issue of feasibility seemed to boil down to this question: Does the SSA keep our addresses current (updated) on its database? If so, my reform would seem quite doable.
I knew that employers were already accessing the SSA database through the Department of Homeland Security’s internet-based E-Verify system to validate data on Form I-9, required of all new hires. And one of the items of information on Form I-9 is—address.
So I went to the SSA website, and there in the upper right of the screen was QUESTIONS, a drop-down menu containing Change of Address. But I discovered that the SSA doesn't carry addresses for folks who aren't receiving benefits.
There appeared to be a fly in my dang ointment—I had hit a snag. But I would not be denied; perhaps the screen was wrong and needed updating. So I telephoned USCIS, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, to see if their E-Verify system allows employers to verify the address on Form I-9 in addition to the SSN. A polite helpful federal employee told me it did not.
Then it occurred to me that I myself regularly receive notices via snail-mail from the SSA, even though I’m not receiving benefits. Poking around a bit more in the SSA website, I read that the SSA gets the addresses for those notices from the IRS.
Bottom line: My reform needs something besides the extract program. There are many ways to skin a cat, but here’s what I think the feds could do:
The SSA database should “carry” the residential addresses for ALL citizens, not just those receiving benefits. The SSA would get this information from the IRS database. For many Americans, our address on the IRS database is identical to our voter registration address. These folks would be set, and wouldn’t need to do anything. But others would need to change their address on the IRS database, using IRS Form 8822.
Under my reform, “voter registration” devolves into nothing more than keeping the feds informed of your residential address. This would be the citizen’s only responsibility in “voter registration”. And you’re already doing this when you file your 1040 tax return. But if you relocate just before an election, you would use Form 8822. (The SSA even allows folks to change their address online.)
However, under my reform, even if you failed to inform the feds of your new address in time for an election, you’d still be registered to vote, albeit at your old address.
(A possible side benefit of having the addresses of all citizens on the SSA database is that it might help employer’s detect stolen SSNs when using E-verify. It would provide one more datum to triangulate on. Since identity theft has become such a big issue, America would approve.)
COMPARE MY REFORM WITH THE CURRENT SYSTEM:
The whole point behind my reform is this: Voter registries should be derived from a single centralized database. Computer professionals understand the necessity of this. Anything less leaves our elections wide open to fraud and error. Insofar as data about American citizens is concerned, the SSA database is the Holy of Holies. At least, it better be. If you can’t trust it, you can’t trust anything. The SSA database is the font from which our national identities flow.
The absurdity of our current voter registration system isn’t just that American citizens are required to give government information it already has. It’s that it demands a tremendous amount of extra work and expense, all of which is unnecessary.
What’s even more ridiculous is the requirement to sign affidavits affirming that we are citizens and that we aren’t felons. Doesn’t government know whether we’ve been through its judicial system or not? The absurdity is compounded because registrars don’t have the means to verify our affidavits. That would entail the SSN. But the registrars are forbidden to ask for that. Voter registration is entirely on the “honor system”, except without the honor and the system. (Sí, Se Puede, amigo mio.)
And then to top it off, we end up with registries they are unreliable, corrupted. Wouldn’t it be better to have computers create our registries for us? All it would involve is a few dinky little computer programs that could probably be written before lunch.
So why is government making the citizenry jump through all these hoops? Why is government dumping so much work on unpaid volunteers? (Might these volunteers someday up and quit?) Why does government persist in its backward ways? The least uncomplimentary explanation is: the inertia of Congress.
Congress is great when it comes to doing the really heroic things, such as changing the light bulbs in the Capitol to compact fluorescents. But for lesser things, like bringing integrity to America’s elections, Congress needs a committee, and a study, and a report, and…well, we really need to see how they do things in Europe. Mustn’t be precipitate.
I’m not a lawyer, but I do believe my reform would require federal legislation. This is because election law is a state matter. So my reform would have to be imposed on the states by the feds. This is the real snag in my reform: getting the Do Nothing Congress to do something. This is where the “quick” part of my “quick fix” might break down. The rest of it is pretty simple stuff.
The federal government has within its means the wherewithal to create voter registries that are correct. Will it do so?
My reform actually hands the states their voter registries—on a silver platter. When the states receive their registries, they would then apply state law to them. This would mainly consist of identifying the voters who are ineligible due to state law, such as felons, and deleting them from their registry. After this is done, the states would have finalized their registries; they then would create signature rosters for each precinct, and their election could proceed.
THE NEW VOTER ID LAWS:
Arizona is currently the only state to require proof of citizenship to register to vote. Arizona is also the only state to require all employers to use E-Verify. (Arizona is also home to one of America’s finest law enforcement officers: Sheriff Joe Arpaio.) Arizona seems to be more sophisticated and more advanced on these issues than other states. But then it has to be; Arizona is on the front lines of an invasion from the South.
But Arizona’s new requirements don’t do anything about those already registered. Shouldn’t Arizona require those registrants to come back and present proof of citizenship? With my reform, Arizona, along with the rest of the nation, could be assured of the citizenship of its voter registrants.
The new voter ID laws are inadequate; they go only so far. They don’t identify those already registered who shouldn’t be; they don’t correct registries; they’re just concerned with new registrants. With my reform, the states would receive new registries just before their elections, and these registries would reflect all the changes in address and eligibility since the last election.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE SSN:
If we really want to ensure the integrity of our elections, not only would we use the SSN to create our voter registries, we’d require the voter to produce his SSN when voting.
But can you imagine the hubbub from the American Civil Liberties Union if polling stations started demanding the SSN to vote? The ACLU is apoplectic over even a photo ID requirement. (The ACLU doesn't like E-Verify, either.)
On January 9 during oral arguments in the Indiana photo ID case before the Supreme Court, Justice Alito pointedly asked, “Is it your position that a state can’t require any form of identification and can only require a signature?”
The photo ID is the most minimal form of ID, yet the ACLU objects to it. (By the way, are polling stations in Indiana going to carry photos of their registrants? You know, so they can match them to the voters’ photo IDs?)
The SSN is a far more powerful form of identification than a photo. Requiring the SSN to vote would obviate the photo ID requirement. And seniors, whom the ACLU cares so much about, are the ones most likely to actually know their SSN, since they’re receiving social security benefits. Of course, requiring the voter to produce his SSN to vote would entail having his SSN at the polling stations, so the 2 can be matched. Which means the feds would have sent the SSN to the states along with the other registration data.
The NYTimes recently related the case of 78-year-old St. Louis resident Lillie Lewis and her difficulty in obtaining a photo ID. “I have voted in almost all of the presidential races going back I can’t remember how long, but if they tell me I need a passport or birth certificate that’ll be the end of that”, she said. How can government place such burdens on senior citizens? With my reform, the only ID Ms. Lewis would need to present at the polls would be her SSN. With my reform, the difficulty folks are having in obtaining the documents needed to get a photo ID would just float away.
If America were ever to migrate to a fully computerized, state-of-the-art system which allowed folks to vote at home or from abroad using the internet, I can assure you: The SSN will be required to vote. Until such time, we should require the SSN be written on any and all paper ballots, especially provisional and absentee ballots, the source of so many of our woes.
I’m always amazed when I encounter someone who hasn’t memorized his SSN. The reason the SSN is so important is that it is a “unique identifier”; no one else can share it. Unique identifiers are used throughout contemporary America for all manner of things. They’re what allow businesses to keep track of their inventories, and brokerages and banks to balance accounts down to the penny. Even banks themselves have their own unique identifiers: the routing number you enter on your 1040 form. The necessity of unique identifiers for life as we know it requires no discussion. Yet, we do not currently demand that voters produce their unique identifiers, even though they all have them.
Do you do online banking? The only online banking I do is transfer money between my accounts, and I don’t logon to the net to do so. I just pick up the phone and start punching numbers, and the first number I punch in is my dear old SSN. Then I have to punch in my PIN number and the numbers of the accounts from which and to which I’m transferring money. Such a transfer is done in real time, so I have access to the money immediately. Try that with a photo ID.
How concerned would you be if every monthly statement you received from your bank had errors on it, or showed other folks using your account? You’d be outraged. You’d drop your account pronto and sue the bums. Yet that is exactly the sort of thing the American People countenance with their elections. Elections should be more like banking and other enterprises that strive for data perfection.
The thing is: You can’t pay your taxes, nor get a job, nor even open a checking account without surrendering your SSN. But the ACLU seems to think you should be allowed to vote for the Leader of the Free World with a utility bill. (Why not a laundry ticket?)
The SSN is the de facto national ID. So the unauthorized creation of an SSN and, especially, the theft of an SSN are very serious crimes, and should be punished by very serious hard time. (I’d prefer such perps be drawn and quartered, but that’s just me.)
As long as we re-use the numbers of deceased citizens in a timely fashion, the SSN will be sufficient as long as our population stays below 1 Billion. So the SSN won’t present any Y2K-type problems for a good while.
If you were really obsessive-compulsive about ensuring election perfection, you’d not only require the SSN at the polls, you’d require fingerprints and a retinal scan, as well.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves; first we must fix the registries.
MORE TECHNOLOGY, PLEASE:
Creating voter registries by the method just outlined would by no means end all voter fraud, but it would make it harder to commit. Also, this method would render irrelevant such things as the Motor Voter act of 1993, which is reason enough to adopt it.
So much of what Congress and the states have done in recent years has exacerbated the problems in our elections. In trying to make registration and voting easier and more convenient, they’ve made a mountain of extra work for registrars and poll workers. In short, our elected officials have actually flung open the doors to voter fraud, made it easier to commit. They’ve complicated things, but provided no means by which to ensure that our elections are right. And again, the means by which to ensure that our elections are right is technology.
As someone who has worked on computers for years, I can see absolutely no technological reason why our elections cannot have the same precision and reliability that our banking, securities, and other computer-based enterprises have. There’s nothing to keep us from having perfect elections; elections where we know what the correct vote counts are and can prove it. We just have to get up to snuff on our technology.
However, there doesn’t seem to be much will on the part of our elected officials to move toward complete computerization of our elections, nor much interest in it. It’s easy to think that our elected officials have contempt for the voter.
But regardless of whether we upgrade to a 21st century system anytime soon or not, we still need to derive our voter registries from a single centralized database. Even if all the states were to regress back to paper ballots, this reform would still be sorely needed, even more so. It would help prevent fraud, and compared to other reforms, fixes and upgrades would be much cheaper and far quicker.
Jon N. Hall is a mainframe programmer/analyst from Kansas City.
[1] David Goldstein, “Voter I.D. debate centers on pooch”, THE KANSAS CITY STAR, March 13, 2008, B2 (The pooch in question was the infamous Ritzy Mekler)
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
VOTERS: The Movie
Caution: this page under construction
Table of Contents
ULTRACON’s articles have appeared elsewhere:
Archive at TCS Daily
Archive at American Thinker
Archive at Front Page Mag ... and ... David Horowitz's NewsRealBlog
Archive at Tenth Amendment Center
These articles appeared at GOPUSA:
The Presidential Primary System And What To Do About It
The New Electorate
The Tea Party’s Big Worry
These articles appeared at PPTO (Public Program Testing Organization):
But is it Really Insurance?
Privatization: the real "nuclear option" for Social Security (2nd article)
Privatization and the deficit
A Cold Eye on Healthcare Reform
Ultracon’s articles at STAR BUSINESS WEEKLY, put out on Tuesdays by the Kansas City Star newspaper, stay up on the Internet for only a short while. Try Lexis-Nexis.
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Jon N. Hall is a programmer/analyst from Kansas City.
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Table of Contents
ULTRACON’s articles have appeared elsewhere:
Archive at TCS Daily
Archive at American Thinker
Archive at Front Page Mag ... and ... David Horowitz's NewsRealBlog
Archive at Tenth Amendment Center
These articles appeared at GOPUSA:
The Presidential Primary System And What To Do About It
The New Electorate
The Tea Party’s Big Worry
These articles appeared at PPTO (Public Program Testing Organization):
But is it Really Insurance?
Privatization: the real "nuclear option" for Social Security (2nd article)
Privatization and the deficit
A Cold Eye on Healthcare Reform
Ultracon’s articles at STAR BUSINESS WEEKLY, put out on Tuesdays by the Kansas City Star newspaper, stay up on the Internet for only a short while. Try Lexis-Nexis.
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Jon N. Hall is a programmer/analyst from Kansas City.
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Friday, December 12, 2008
Election Fraud: Detection and Quantification
By Jon N. Hall
Without the vote, Democracy is nothing. The franchise is the core of America’s system. Universal suffrage, political campaigns, casting ballots, counting votes: These are at the very center of what we as a nation are all about. It follows then that anything that thwarts the will of We the People by compromising the integrity of an election is a dagger in the heart of Democracy itself.
But some folks contend that allegations of widespread election fraud are themselves a fraud. For them, election fraud is a "myth", a “witch hunt”; like looking for “Sasquatch”. They maintain that the evidence for election fraud is “painfully skimpy”.
One little problem for these folks is the successful prosecutions—people are in jail for election fraud. Since we know election fraud occurs, the question should be: How prevalent is it? But nobody knows the answer to that, and for reasons that will become “painfully” clear.
So, how would you go about demonstrating the true size of our election fraud problem? Here’s just some of what you would have to do:
To begin with, you would need to verify voter eligibility. Yes, this was supposed to have been done when folks registered. But voter registries throughout America carry listings for those who are NOT eligible, including pets, literary characters, and illegal aliens. But not only do we have registrations created by fraud, we also have registrations due to error and to election officials simply not getting all their work done on time. By which I mean the failure to purge those who have died, become incapacitated, moved to another state, or become ineligible due to felony conviction. Some registries even have more registrants than residents of voting age.
So here at the very outset of your task you run into a major snag: The means by which you must prove your claims, the registries, are what we in the data processing profession would call “corrupted”, i.e. bad data, unusable data. But wait, it gets better.
Not only must you verify the eligibility of the registrants on each registry, you must show that each registrant is registered on no other registry. So for each registrant you’d need to look at all the other registries—in the nation. Multiple registrations, such as those for Faye Buis-Ewing, make it possible for a voter not only to vote for a presidential candidate more than once, but also to vote for several senators and representatives, and ballot propositions and initiatives in several states, and so on. They can do this by means of absentee and provisional ballots.
Because the voter registries are corrupted, you’d have to do what the registrars should have done in the first place: You’d have to register everybody—again. And this will be one very difficult chore, as so many states operate on the honor system. For example, to vote in America one must be a citizen; but only one state, Arizona, requires proof of citizenship to register. So you’ll need to go well beyond the “trust but [don’t] verify” standards of the states to determine if a registrant is a foreign student, a foreign tourist, a foreign jihadist, or just your garden-variety illegal alien.
So you’ll need to contact the registrants. This happened to me here in Missouri when the Jackson County Board of Election Commissioners, pursuant to the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, asked for the last four digits of my social security number (despite my regular voting in the same precinct for 10 years). The 4 digits were to be used to triangulate with other info, such as name. But since you’re trying to detect all fraud, the better route is to get the registrants’ full social security numbers and then look them up on the social security administration’s database, where you’ll find birth dates, as well.
And why must you go through all this rigmarole? It’s those iffy registries. The voter registries can’t be trusted because the registrars are forbidden to ask for the documents that would confirm a registrant’s U.S. citizenship. (Sí, Se Puede, indeed.)
Even when you’ve identified the legitimate registrations, you’ll still have lots of work ahead of you. For it isn’t registrations that do the electing, it’s ballots. So you’ll be moving on to the next phase of your project: an examination of the elections for which the registries were created. (Are we having fun yet?)
If more ballots had been cast than there were registrants, anyone could infer that fraud has occurred. You, however, are armed with your corrected voter registries, and are thereby able to detect which unlawful registrations were used to vote. So you’ll examine the “signature rosters” to see if someone signed in using one of the unlawful registrations you identified. Your corrected registries allow you to quantify voter fraud. But how voter fraudsters affected the vote counts would be quite beyond anyone’s capabilities. This is because of another snag: There's nothing on the ballots to link them to the voters who cast them. Consequently, the vote counts can’t be corrected.
(NOTE: To protect the integrity of the vote counts, voter fraud must be detected when the voter is checking in at the polls, before he’s given a ballot. To apprehend unlawful voters, we must catch them in the act (in flagrante delicto), or not catch them at all. The means by which we can catch them is the registry. Which means the vetting of registrants must be completed by Election Day. Afterwards is too late. So if we’re really serious about nabbing voter fraudsters, Election Day becomes one giant nationwide dragnet or sting operation, rather than the spirited celebration of Freedom it was meant to be.)
But it’s not only registrants and voters who commit election fraud; poll workers and other election functionaries can commit it, as well. So it wouldn’t be enough to just examine the tallies and signature rosters after elections, you’d need to be an election observer, too, so you could check out any hanky-panky on the part of election officials. Which means you’d be conducting your fraud detection right alongside the poll workers conducting the election, bringing into play the observer effect (not to be confused with the Uncertainty Principle). Also, if there were a recount, you’d need to observe that, too. But would the authorities allow such intrusions into their elections?
There are 3 types of election fraud: registration fraud, voter fraud, and other. This last phase of your project—observing elections and recounts—falls under type 3, and it is murky and does not lend itself to definitive answers. Unlike registration and voting, where there’s a surefire means to establish eligibility and detect fraud—if only the government would use it—shenanigans by poll workers can go undetected. Because you verified the registrants earlier in your project, you will be able to verify those mysterious ballots found in the trunk of a car. But will you be able to prove that some poll worker created them? We’re not expecting you to prove a negative, so we can’t expect you to completely resolve the question of poll worker and recount fraud. But this is an arena of election fraud, so try you must.
Since election law is a state matter and procedures and hardware vary from state to state, you would need to conduct your election fraud detection project in all 50 states.
So far we’ve only been talking about “regular voters”, those who trek to the polls on Election Day to vote. But after vetting Election Day voting, you would enter a new phase of your project; vetting what is perhaps the biggest factor in voter fraud: the absentee and provisional ballots. You’d also need to “scrub” the registries for those who had died or become otherwise ineligible after the cut-off date when the registrars stopped taking applications, and see if those registrations had been used to vote. And then there’s always the possibility of a recount, which could go on for weeks and involve whole armies of “counters”. But Inauguration Day is fast approaching and we need to get this election decided—so if you could just step aside while we count these votes, thank you.
The above is only a taste of what your project would entail. And notice that we don’t really get into the logistics and the nitty-gritty of how any of the above tasks would be accomplished. We’ll leave that to you.
Now, given the enormity of your project, do you think you’d be able to complete it? Would you even be willing to undertake it?
Debates about how much election fraud occurred in this or that election are just so much jibber-jabber. It’s all speculation, as silly as trying to divine the intent of a voter from a dimpled, hanging or pregnant chad. And it’s a national embarrassment. If the amount of fraud is anything other than zero, then it is uncertain, indeterminate. Given our current systems, the exact size of election fraud is unknowable. So if we don’t know how much fraud was perpetrated, then we don’t know what the correct vote counts were, either. And in contests like Minnesota’s still-undecided 2008 race for U.S. Senate, any fraud at all can swing an election.
If the detection and quantification of election fraud isn’t doable with our current systems, then what we should be trying to do in These United States is create systems that will make election fraud as impossible to commit as we can. That, or give up on Democracy.
(This writer has tried to devise systems that would make it far harder to commit election fraud. You can read about them HERE, HERE and HERE.)
Jon N. Hall is a mainframe programmer/analyst from Kansas City.
Without the vote, Democracy is nothing. The franchise is the core of America’s system. Universal suffrage, political campaigns, casting ballots, counting votes: These are at the very center of what we as a nation are all about. It follows then that anything that thwarts the will of We the People by compromising the integrity of an election is a dagger in the heart of Democracy itself.
But some folks contend that allegations of widespread election fraud are themselves a fraud. For them, election fraud is a "myth", a “witch hunt”; like looking for “Sasquatch”. They maintain that the evidence for election fraud is “painfully skimpy”.
One little problem for these folks is the successful prosecutions—people are in jail for election fraud. Since we know election fraud occurs, the question should be: How prevalent is it? But nobody knows the answer to that, and for reasons that will become “painfully” clear.
So, how would you go about demonstrating the true size of our election fraud problem? Here’s just some of what you would have to do:
To begin with, you would need to verify voter eligibility. Yes, this was supposed to have been done when folks registered. But voter registries throughout America carry listings for those who are NOT eligible, including pets, literary characters, and illegal aliens. But not only do we have registrations created by fraud, we also have registrations due to error and to election officials simply not getting all their work done on time. By which I mean the failure to purge those who have died, become incapacitated, moved to another state, or become ineligible due to felony conviction. Some registries even have more registrants than residents of voting age.
So here at the very outset of your task you run into a major snag: The means by which you must prove your claims, the registries, are what we in the data processing profession would call “corrupted”, i.e. bad data, unusable data. But wait, it gets better.
Not only must you verify the eligibility of the registrants on each registry, you must show that each registrant is registered on no other registry. So for each registrant you’d need to look at all the other registries—in the nation. Multiple registrations, such as those for Faye Buis-Ewing, make it possible for a voter not only to vote for a presidential candidate more than once, but also to vote for several senators and representatives, and ballot propositions and initiatives in several states, and so on. They can do this by means of absentee and provisional ballots.
Because the voter registries are corrupted, you’d have to do what the registrars should have done in the first place: You’d have to register everybody—again. And this will be one very difficult chore, as so many states operate on the honor system. For example, to vote in America one must be a citizen; but only one state, Arizona, requires proof of citizenship to register. So you’ll need to go well beyond the “trust but [don’t] verify” standards of the states to determine if a registrant is a foreign student, a foreign tourist, a foreign jihadist, or just your garden-variety illegal alien.
So you’ll need to contact the registrants. This happened to me here in Missouri when the Jackson County Board of Election Commissioners, pursuant to the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, asked for the last four digits of my social security number (despite my regular voting in the same precinct for 10 years). The 4 digits were to be used to triangulate with other info, such as name. But since you’re trying to detect all fraud, the better route is to get the registrants’ full social security numbers and then look them up on the social security administration’s database, where you’ll find birth dates, as well.
And why must you go through all this rigmarole? It’s those iffy registries. The voter registries can’t be trusted because the registrars are forbidden to ask for the documents that would confirm a registrant’s U.S. citizenship. (Sí, Se Puede, indeed.)
Even when you’ve identified the legitimate registrations, you’ll still have lots of work ahead of you. For it isn’t registrations that do the electing, it’s ballots. So you’ll be moving on to the next phase of your project: an examination of the elections for which the registries were created. (Are we having fun yet?)
If more ballots had been cast than there were registrants, anyone could infer that fraud has occurred. You, however, are armed with your corrected voter registries, and are thereby able to detect which unlawful registrations were used to vote. So you’ll examine the “signature rosters” to see if someone signed in using one of the unlawful registrations you identified. Your corrected registries allow you to quantify voter fraud. But how voter fraudsters affected the vote counts would be quite beyond anyone’s capabilities. This is because of another snag: There's nothing on the ballots to link them to the voters who cast them. Consequently, the vote counts can’t be corrected.
(NOTE: To protect the integrity of the vote counts, voter fraud must be detected when the voter is checking in at the polls, before he’s given a ballot. To apprehend unlawful voters, we must catch them in the act (in flagrante delicto), or not catch them at all. The means by which we can catch them is the registry. Which means the vetting of registrants must be completed by Election Day. Afterwards is too late. So if we’re really serious about nabbing voter fraudsters, Election Day becomes one giant nationwide dragnet or sting operation, rather than the spirited celebration of Freedom it was meant to be.)
But it’s not only registrants and voters who commit election fraud; poll workers and other election functionaries can commit it, as well. So it wouldn’t be enough to just examine the tallies and signature rosters after elections, you’d need to be an election observer, too, so you could check out any hanky-panky on the part of election officials. Which means you’d be conducting your fraud detection right alongside the poll workers conducting the election, bringing into play the observer effect (not to be confused with the Uncertainty Principle). Also, if there were a recount, you’d need to observe that, too. But would the authorities allow such intrusions into their elections?
There are 3 types of election fraud: registration fraud, voter fraud, and other. This last phase of your project—observing elections and recounts—falls under type 3, and it is murky and does not lend itself to definitive answers. Unlike registration and voting, where there’s a surefire means to establish eligibility and detect fraud—if only the government would use it—shenanigans by poll workers can go undetected. Because you verified the registrants earlier in your project, you will be able to verify those mysterious ballots found in the trunk of a car. But will you be able to prove that some poll worker created them? We’re not expecting you to prove a negative, so we can’t expect you to completely resolve the question of poll worker and recount fraud. But this is an arena of election fraud, so try you must.
Since election law is a state matter and procedures and hardware vary from state to state, you would need to conduct your election fraud detection project in all 50 states.
So far we’ve only been talking about “regular voters”, those who trek to the polls on Election Day to vote. But after vetting Election Day voting, you would enter a new phase of your project; vetting what is perhaps the biggest factor in voter fraud: the absentee and provisional ballots. You’d also need to “scrub” the registries for those who had died or become otherwise ineligible after the cut-off date when the registrars stopped taking applications, and see if those registrations had been used to vote. And then there’s always the possibility of a recount, which could go on for weeks and involve whole armies of “counters”. But Inauguration Day is fast approaching and we need to get this election decided—so if you could just step aside while we count these votes, thank you.
The above is only a taste of what your project would entail. And notice that we don’t really get into the logistics and the nitty-gritty of how any of the above tasks would be accomplished. We’ll leave that to you.
Now, given the enormity of your project, do you think you’d be able to complete it? Would you even be willing to undertake it?
Debates about how much election fraud occurred in this or that election are just so much jibber-jabber. It’s all speculation, as silly as trying to divine the intent of a voter from a dimpled, hanging or pregnant chad. And it’s a national embarrassment. If the amount of fraud is anything other than zero, then it is uncertain, indeterminate. Given our current systems, the exact size of election fraud is unknowable. So if we don’t know how much fraud was perpetrated, then we don’t know what the correct vote counts were, either. And in contests like Minnesota’s still-undecided 2008 race for U.S. Senate, any fraud at all can swing an election.
If the detection and quantification of election fraud isn’t doable with our current systems, then what we should be trying to do in These United States is create systems that will make election fraud as impossible to commit as we can. That, or give up on Democracy.
(This writer has tried to devise systems that would make it far harder to commit election fraud. You can read about them HERE, HERE and HERE.)
Jon N. Hall is a mainframe programmer/analyst from Kansas City.
Friday, November 21, 2008
Votes: Accounting for the Counting
Of all the problematic
American elections in recent years, the 2004 gubernatorial election in the
state of Washington is the clear winner in the fraud category.
What makes that election stand
out is not just that it was probably stolen, but rather the volume and sheer
audacity of its irregularities.
The loser, Dino Rossi, won 2 of the 3 vote counts, and won the count with the
widest margin, 261. But no one knows what the lawful correct vote count was,
nor can anyone demonstrate it.
That, however, can be said of
just about every American election ever held. So, why can’t we know the correct
vote counts in our elections? Here are the 2 main reasons:
Reason #2: There is no “linkage” between the voter and his
ballot. Which is to say, there is nothing ON a ballot to tie it to the voter
who cast it.
Now, folks will say that’s
the way it has to be because of the right to a “secret ballot”. OK, but what
that means for our elections is: The vote counts aren’t correctible.
The lack of “linkage” between
voter and ballot means that when an election official knows that an unlawful
registration has been used to cast a ballot, he cannot then identify that
fraudulent ballot so that he can subtract its votes from the vote totals. What
he will most likely do is just let the election stand, warts and all, even
though the votes of legitimate voters will have been canceled out by the
fraudulent votes.
Some pooh-pooh the idea that
voter fraud is a problem in America. But in contests with exceedingly close
margins, like that 2004 election in Washington, any fraud at all can tip the
outcome. Take Unity, New Hampshire, where Obama and Clinton each received 107
votes. If you can’t back out the fraudulent ballots, then you can’t know the
correct vote counts. And therefore in close elections you can’t know the
winner.
So what we have here is a
head-on collision of 2 fundamental rights: The right to a secret ballot versus
the right to a fair election, where only legitimate votes are counted. For me,
the interest of fair elections trumps the right to a secret ballot.
However, if “linkage” cannot
pass constitutional muster, then it is incumbent upon Congress to make fraud as
close to impossible to commit as they possibly can. If we aren’t going to be
able to back out fraud that has been committed, then we must do everything we
can to prevent fraud from happening in the first place. Which means we must fix
the “front end” of our election systems. And that brings us to the other reason
why we can’t know what the correct vote counts are:
Reason #1: America’s voter registries are unreliable.
But no registry on this earth
can be totally correct—at least not for long. That’s because eligible voters
become ineligible—they die, slip into comas, become felons, become
incapacitated, etc. The finalization of a voter registry doesn’t stop any of
this.
So there is always a “lag”
between changes in eligibility and when those changes get reflected in a voter
registry. The “lag” means that even at the moment of its finalization, a
registry can already be out of date, as changes that have already happened may
not yet have been reported. Even if a registry were online and could be updated
during the voting on Election Day, it would still be impossible to keep up with
the march of change.
Bottom line: Regardless of
how carefully engineered a voter registry might be, almost invariably there
will be more folks on it than there should be.
Of course, after an election
we could “scrub” the registries to account for changes in eligibility. For
instance, an election official could read the obituaries and create a list of
recent deaths. Then he could look at the signature rosters to see if anyone had
signed in using the registrations of those recent decedents. That would allow
him to detect fraud, but it would do nothing about correcting the vote counts.
To adjust the vote counts—perhaps changing the winners—would require the
aforementioned “linkage”.
But, if the Constitution
forbids “linkage”—forbids us, say, to put a unique identifier on the voter’s
ballot and his signature roster entry—then I’m afraid this situation where we
can’t back out fraudulent votes and correct the counts is going to persist.
So far, we’ve only been
considering the voter fraud that comes to light because of public
announcements, such things as deaths and felony convictions. (Again, if
“linkage” were allowed we could fix this type of fraud.) But there is a 2nd
category of voter fraud that we wouldn’t be able to fix even if we had
“linkage”, and that’s because we wouldn’t even know it’s happened.
This undetectable fraud is
due to people who should never have been registered—but were. If, say, a
foreign student or an illegal alien manages to get on a voter registry and then
actually votes, the chances are it’ll never be detected. Unlike the 1st
type where we have a tip-off from public notices, we must go looking for the 2nd
type of fraud. And that would be one monumental chore, as you’d need to vet
each and every voter, essentially re-registering them. And this is all due to
the failure of registrars to fully vet registrants. (Currently, only one state,
Arizona, requires proof of citizenship to register.)
Since the 2nd type
of voter fraud is undetectable, the extent of it is unknowable.
This sorry state of affairs
is why fixing our voter registries should be the first order of business in any
serious election reform.
Recently, representatives of
ACORN—the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now—have downplayed
the significance of the problems in their registration drives. They say it’s
only a registration problem, NOT actual voter fraud. But once an ineligible
gets on a voter registry, the game is up—all the ineligible need do is show his
ID and off to the voting booth he goes. Mail-in voting can be even simpler.
Voter registries are the
gateway to voting. Fix voter registries, and whole species of voter fraud
become extinct.
The good news is: We have the
means to fix voter registration so that the 2nd type of voter fraud
can’t happen. That is, we have the means to keep those who aren’t eligible OFF
our voter registries. (I’m talking about those who register fraudulently, not
those whose registrations should have been purged, like decedents.) Also, we
can easily ensure that citizens aren’t doubly registered. All we have to do is
adopt my plan. Its features:
·
ALL eligible U.S.
citizens will be registered
·
ONLY U.S.
citizens will be registered
·
Each U.S. citizen
will be registered in ONE state only
·
Automatic
registration—citizens needn’t do anything to be registered
·
Voting won’t
require a photo ID
·
The maintenance
of voter registries will entail much less work
If I do say so myself, my method
of establishing voter registries may be the cleanest, quickest, cheapest and
most correct method out there. And not only that, it puts the voter
registration arm of ACORN and similar outfits out of business.
Nonetheless, there may well
be resistance to it. Not from the voters, they’ll love it, but from the
professionals. I’m talking about the little empires of the secretaries of state
and the election boards. My plan won’t make them obsolete, but it will diminish
their duties. They will no longer be in charge of maintaining the registries.
Instead, they will receive a pristine new registry before each election. The
professionals would, however, retain the responsibility for purging those who
had become ineligible. But with fewer duties, they’ll be able to devote more
time to that chore.
You can read my plan HERE.
Jon N. Hall is a mainframe
programmer/analyst from Kansas City.
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