Month: May 2021

Over the weekend, the Virginia Republican Party held its convention at which it was supposed to choose its candidates for the off-year election this fall. The three top candidates for governor have been described as “Trumpy, Trumpier and Trumpiest,” so you can easily see where Virginia Republicans are positioning themselves in the GOP circular firing squad. In their zeal to model their allegiance to their Ultimate Leader, Republicans went out of their way to restrict the voting process to assure “the integrity” of the vote. According to NBC News’ Alex Seitz-Wald it didn’t go very well:

At issue is a decision to quietly allow voters to participate in their complicated primary process even if they left blank parts of the application, including required fields that asked for their state-issued voter ID number and a signature, according to documents and an audio recording of a call obtained exclusively by NBC News. Republicans in the state say the nominating contest has been a logistical nightmare.

Their own activists couldn’t traverse all of the GOP’s newly-imposed “voter integrity” verifications. Evidently, a whole bunch of people didn’t know how to do fill out the necessary paperwork so they left it whole portions blank which, under the new strict vote-counting rules the Republicans are pushing, should result in throwing out the ballot or registration form.

The right-wing gubernatorial candidate who calls herself “Trump in heels,” (and is widely considered the Trumpiest of the lot) Amanda Chase is not standing for it. She wrote this to her supporters:

“DO NOT TRUST THE PARTY TO DELIVER ACCURATE RESULTS. Who should you go to for the proper results? Me and my campaign! My campaign will be monitoring the voting and data entry on election night. If they are accurate, we will tell you. If they are not, I will be prepared to sue in court to force a public count.”

She means it:

Radical right-wing Virginia state senator Amanda Chase says that if she does not emerge from the GOP's nominating convention today as the Republican candidate for governor, she'll demand an audit of the vote. pic.twitter.com/xSrxunOnlu

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) May 8, 2021

They don’t expect the vote to be fully tabulated for some time and since it’s a ranked-choice voting process, there will undoubtedly be a runoff. Is there any doubt that Chase will deny the validity of the vote count if she doesn’t make the runoff? After all, she is the Trumpiest and we know what that means:

He won that year. And we all know what happened when, four years later, he didn’t.

So judging from what’s going on with election laws around the country and the lockstep belief among the faithful, I think it’s fair to assume that we can expect more of it. As you can see from the Virginia example, one problem with these draconian voting restrictions is that they will affect Republican voters the same way they will affect the Democrats. It’s possible they’ll affect them even more since the GOP has been pushing absentee voting for years for their older constituents, the very people who may be most confused by the changes. Perversely, that will provide even more fodder for the losers to contest the election results and further degrade their own voters’ faith in the system. After all, the last election results were certified by Republican officials and Republican judges all over the country, yet Republican voters still believe it was fraudulent. It won’t matter in 2022 and 2024 that it was Republicans who instituted the rules that disadvantage their own voters.

Keep in mind that the new voting restrictions are not where this ends.

Republicans are also doing their usual tricks of “purging” voters from the rolls and “caging.” But there are some newer very troubling moves, starting with the new expansive rules in 20 states for “poll watchers” which basically means that fanatical Republican extremists will be free to harass and intimidate voters as they are trying to cast a vote. This technique is thought to be more effective in precincts with more minority voters but Republicans may be surprised. Everyone knows what they’re up to now so Democrats are highly unlikely to be intimidated by MAGA yahoos at the ballot box.

Because we are also seeing the entire party from Ted Cruz, R-Tx., and Marjorie Taylor Green, R-Ga, to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., all buying into the notion that Trump’s Jan. 6th gambit to overturn the election was legitimate, it’s clear that’s become conventional wisdom in the GOP as well. At this point, it appears that they have all decided to treat the insurrection itself as a somewhat overzealous but nonetheless valid response to having had the election “stolen.”

Trump made a serious run at getting the election overturned. He cared nothing for legitimacy, openly and blatantly threatened, cajoled and intimidated state and local elections officials to refuse to certify the results based upon sloppily made-up evidence and conspiracy theories. For months he bellowed that mail-in votes were fraudulent and 6 weeks before the election he stated outright that he wanted Amy Coney Barrett confirmed because he expected the court to decide the election and he needed that extra vote just in case.

As it happened those local officials and judges around the country refused to cooperate. Today those officials are all being purged from the party. All these voter “integrity” bills will eventually be challenged and we’ll see if the courts are still independent or if conservative jurists are now on the Trump train as well. After all, it all seemed like a stunning assault on our tradition of a peaceful transfer of power at the time. Something like this had never happened before. Will they feel the same way if it happens again?

pretty clear at this point that if Republicans control Congress in 2024 a Democrat will not be allowed to win the presidential election. simple as that https://t.co/ujMm5ifn3U

— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) May 10, 2021

Even more unnerving is the growing perception that all this supposed “rigging” leaves the GOP with no choice but to refuse to vote to certify any more presidential elections if they have the power to do it. There is unfortunately a decent chance that McCarthy might just be the Speaker of the House in 2025 and if Trump is on the ballot, as he probably will be, does anyone believe he would dare defy him again?

It is almost inevitable that “stop the steal” will be an ongoing GOP rallying cry.

Whatever misgivings the Republican establishment may have had about Donald Trump’s strategy to usurp democracy, they have rapidly come around to being his servile minions once again. With three more years of banging this drum, the Trump cult will be thoroughly convinced that it is literally impossible for them to legitimately lose elections. And GOP officials will be happy to let them believe that as long it means they can stay in power.

Update — Here’s Dear Leader hitting the drum this morning:

Salon

CNN’s Brian Stelter takes on Foxitis. (via Susie Madrak at C&L):

“Is the USA suffering from a bad case of Foxitis? And is it hurting America’s pandemic recovery? That word, Foxitis, it was coined by a lawyer defending one of the suspects in the pro-Trump riot. It’s almost a ‘Fox News made me do it’ kind of defense. Fox-mania, the lawyer said. He said his clients lost his job due to the pandemic and then watched Fox constantly for next six months,” Stelter said.

“ ‘He believed what was being fed to him.’ Indeed many Fox viewers came away with a distinct impression that President Trump was robbed, that the election was rigged. But that is just one of the symptoms of Foxitis.

Other possible symptoms are fear of the unknown, fear of a diversifying America, anger about cancel culture, but only when conservatives are affected, belief that news outlets and tech firms are all radical villains. Perhaps one of the symptoms is even the ablity to forget what you’ve seen with your own eyes.”

Carlson should be writing grade C horror movies instead of purporting to inform viewers.

“When I’ve tuned in, I’ve heard complains about triple masking, “three masks!” even though that’s not a real thing. And we’re told that we’re well past herd immunity even though most experts say the opposite.

He said worst of all, he’s heard Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson repeatedly say that many Americans are dying after getting the shot.

“And he said it with the implication that the shots are to blame with no evidence at all. He’s scaring his audience so recklessly that even some of his own colleagues called him out for it on Twitter.

“Carlson acts like he knows some secret truth that’s been covered up by some shadowy enterprise. You know what? Maybe you should be writing some junk movie of the week for Netflix or Tubi, or write horror novels for a living, because he’s clearly not responsible enough to have a show that purports or pretends to be news.

A lot of people say there is one born every minute. A lot of them were raised conservative 65 years or so ago.

Restaurants here are allowed to seat at 75 percent capacity (w/social distancing, etc.) per the governor’s order. The neighborhood brew pub, however, has not yet opened for indoor seating at all. They are playing it safe. And smart. One must say the experience loses something when eating pizza at a picnic table in the parking lot and drinking craft beer from plastic cups. The owners are waiting for Gov. Roy Cooper to lift all restrictions before opening inside after well over a year of mostly takeout. Currently, that target date is June 1.

The New York Times publishes reopening plans and mask mandates for all 50 states this morning. Washington state, however, is experiencing a fourth wave of infections. Reopening plans there are on hold.

Globally, the coronavirus pandemic is far from over.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Reuters reports, “will set out on Monday the next phase of lockdown easing in England, giving the green light to ‘cautious hugging’ and allowing pubs to serve customers pints inside after months of strict measures.”

Infections in India, unfortunately, stand at record highs with “increasing calls for the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to lock down the world’s second-most populous country.”

Pleas for oxygen, hospital beds, ventilators and access to intensive care units have inundated Twitter feeds in India since the crisis worsened in April – as all of the essentials for fighting COVID-19 have been in short supply across the country https://t.co/OhYX4Ydmit pic.twitter.com/u1HaM1iD4O

— Reuters (@Reuters) May 9, 2021

The Washington Post reviews the Biden administration’s plan to reestablish U.S. global leadership on pandemic planning. Biden’s announced vaccine-patent waiver is clearly insufficient:

Diplomatic experts say the worsening outbreak offers Biden his greatest immediate opportunity to help the United States regain the global stature lost under his predecessor. Both China and Russia have pursued “vaccine diplomacy” — leveraging their homegrown vaccine supplies in donations and deals — in bids to boost global public health but also to win favor with dozens of countries.

“We have to acknowledge that the Trump administration was a disaster for America’s image in the world, and for our soft power in the world,” said Bruce Stokes, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, arguing that the United States should become “the foundry of vaccines” for the globe, riffing off a similar goal laid out by Biden. “If we can do that, it seems to me we can re-win people’s confidence in America, which will redound to the benefit of America across a whole spectrum of issues,” such as climate change and competing with China, he said.

But inside the Biden administration, there is confusion over which agency is leading the effort to craft the country’s global vaccination strategy, which has led to a fragmented rather than strategic approach. While Jeff Zients, the covid-19 coordinator at the White House, has been the person in charge of setting and executing the domestic fight against the virus, five administration officials say there are too many players addressing the worldwide challenge, with not enough direction.

The effort to date appears piecemeal, say several anonymous sources.

That would not surprise Michael Lewis (“The Big Short,” “Moneyball,” “The Fifth Risk”). His new book, “The Premonition: A Pandemic Story,” weighs the U.S. response to the pandemic and finds it wanting. There are heroes and villains in his tale, says The Guardian’s Andrew Anthony, but Donald Trump is not the principle one, no matter how poorly suited he was for the task.

“There is a national institutional desire to sort of bury what just happened and say, ‘Oh it was all Donald Trump’. And I don’t think anyone who’s close to the thing believes that,” Lewis says.

Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher had developed a federal pandemic response plan under the George W. Bush administration. They stayed on under Obama only to be sidelined under Trump.

The official within the Trump administration whom he does identify as a major culprit is the former national security adviser John Bolton, who now does the media rounds as a voluble Trump critic. The day after he was appointed to the position in April 2018, Bolton sacked Tom Bossert, a veteran of the Bush administration. Bossert was the homeland security adviser who oversaw the biological threat team that was even then still influenced by the Hatchet and Mecher pandemic plan.

“From that moment on,” Lewis writes, “the Trump White House lived by the tacit rule last observed by the Reagan administration: the only serious threat to the American way of life came from other nation states.” So ingrained was this perspective within the administration that when he finally began to acknowledge the danger that Covid presented to America, Trump could only speak of it in nationalistic or xenophobic terms, continually referring to the “China virus”. Yet Lewis believes there was an opportunity for Trump to have been seen as the saviour of the day.

As for villains, there are many others, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with an international reputation as “one of the places in the government that America can be proud of.” That reputation was perhaps overblown.

In the book, they are mostly not doing very much and a lot of their energy seems to go into preventing others from doing anything either. Back in the 1970s, the then head of the CDC, David Sencer, called for nationwide vaccination after a swine flu outbreak. Two hundred million doses of vaccine were ordered and 45m administered, only for the outbreak not to materialise. Sencer was blamed for overreacting and sacked. Henceforth, the CDC tended to err on the side of cautious inaction. “I think the CDC had virtues but it was not battlefield command. It had become a place where the generals had no experience fighting a war,” says Lewis.

Both England and the U.S. looked as if they were well prepared for a pandemic. On paper. Their actual responses have not been world-inspiring. “Prevention does not pay,” Lewis says. “Disease pays.” Societies given over to market fundamentalism do not incentivize preventing illness. Corporations make more from treating illness than from preventing it.

Anthony writes, “The lesson of the book is that there are people who spend their lives readying those in power for bad outcomes. Rather than being treated as tiresome Cassandras, simply because bad outcomes more often than not don’t occur, they ought to be involved at the centre of decision-making, not just for strategic purposes but economic ones.”

That may make sense to most citizens, but not to The Market. And The Market speaks louder.

Just like they may have accidentally made it harder for their own voters to vote, they may have cheated themselves out some new House seats:

Everyone knew Hispanics were at risk of being undercounted in the 2020 Census, because the Trump administration gave every indication of wanting them undercounted. The administration’s hard-line anti-immigrant policies, after all, extended to the census. As commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross attempted to get a citizenship question added to the survey, but the effort was blocked by the Supreme Court. Still, election-data experts and advocacy groups warned that no matter what the outcome, the battle would have a chilling effect on response rates among Hispanics.

The reapportionment numbers released this week seemed to confirm this fear. To be sure, nationally, census counts came in remarkably close to pre-census predictions. (Those predictions were made using birth and death records, data on international migration and Medicare records.) The total count, nearly 332 million, exceeded pre-census estimates by a mere 0.7 percent. That suggests a high degree of accuracy, especially considering the difficulties of counting under pandemic conditions. But the degree of accuracy was not the same everywhere. The greatest underperformance, relative to projections, occurred in three Sun Belt states — Texas, Florida and Arizona — where head counts fell short of projections by 177,000, 163,000 and 262,000, respectively. These three states also have some of the highest proportions of Hispanics in the country: 40 percent in Texas, 26 percent in Florida and 32 percent in Arizona.

Given that two of those states, Texas and Florida, are red and Arizona is a closely divided purple state, Republicans did not do themselves any favors: Their actions may have suppressed census responses in places where they would benefit from more seats in Congress.

In the moment it was more important for them to pander to their racists than it was to secure those House seats. Seems short-sighted to me but the magical Dear Leader knows best so …

I don’t pretend to understand what these people are thinking but if they can be persuaded to try to help save lives (potentially including their own) by offering them a free beer then do it!

The idea of getting vaccinated had been rolling around in the back of Tyler Morsch’s mind for weeks. As a 28-year-old, he didn’t feel in any particular danger, but he finally decided he should start looking for a Covid-19 vaccination clinic this week. Then he heard the magic words.

“Free beer,” he said.

Saturday was the first day that Erie County worked with a local microbrewery to host its Shot and a Chaser program, offering individuals who got their first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine at Resurgence Brewing Company a free pint glass and coupon for the vaccinated person’s drink of choice.

Under normal circumstances, it would be beyond strange for a brewery to host a vaccination clinic in the shadow of 1,000-gallon fermentation tanks, with a brick wall separating a bustling bar service from health care professionals handling syringes filled with the Moderna vaccine. But these are not normal times.

“Given the world we live in right now, it’s not so weird,” said Ben Kestner, Resurgence Brewing’s director of taproom operations.

County Executive Mark Poloncarz, who was nursing his own drink in one hand while directing vaccine recipients to open table with the other, was happy to see the county’s first Shot and a Chaser effort going so well. Before the vaccinations started at 11 a.m., there was a line out the door.

As demand for the Covid-19 vaccine continues to fall, the county is taking a new approach. It’s offering free beer.

Programs like the Shot and a Chaser program are among the more creative outreach efforts to try and attract individuals who would otherwise not consider vaccination a priority, especially younger adults. New Jersey and Suffolk County have picked up on the idea, offering free drink vouchers at participating breweries for those who agree to get vaccinated.

Poloncarz said he’s happy to see others pick up the idea.

“We’re going to do more people today at our first-dose clinics than most of our first-dose clinics in the last week combined,” Poloncarz said. “It’s been a success. We figured it would be pretty good, but now we’re seeing the results.”

That’s not a very high bar, given that many of the county’s first-dose clinics have had less than two dozen people show up. At one site, only one person showed up, Poloncarz said. Comparatively, more than 100 people had been vaccinated at Resurgence by mid-afternoon, including some walk-ups and restaurant patrons who decided to get the vaccine at the spur of the moment.

Health Commissioner Dr. Gale Burstein, who was also on site to vaccinate individuals, said she walked from table to table earlier in the day to recruit people who hadn’t gotten vaccinated yet. At one table, one woman who hadn’t been vaccinated agreed to get a shot after everyone else at the table told her she should.

I noted this response in a story I saw last weekend about offering free tickets to a museum in NY City. A huge number of people in this country are apathetic, uninformed and uninvolved in any kind of civic activity. Many of them are young and healthy and they are just living their lives without much regard to anything outside their immediate bubble. It’s not that they’re against the vaccine or are even “hesitant” They just don’t see any urgency and they don’t really care or understand that they can be vectors for the virus so they just go about their lives.

These people can be reached by offering them something they want in return for getting vaccinated. And as this shows, it doesn’t have to be expensive. A free beer, some free tickets, a coupon for something, whatever. They just need something to spur them to get it that has nothing to do with being a responsible citizen, which just isn’t on their radar screen.

Radical right-wing Virginia state senator Amanda Chase says that if she does not emerge from the GOP's nominating convention today as the Republican candidate for governor, she'll demand an audit of the vote. pic.twitter.com/xSrxunOnlu

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) May 8, 2021

Blue Virginia reports on the latest from the woman who calls herself “Trump in heels”. It sounds like it an appropriate description:

Is this the anti-democracy Trump Republican Party’s attitude to a “t” or what? So basically, any time they don’t like the result of an election, they will rant, rave, claim it’s fraudulent, demand an “audit,” etc. As Amanda Chase puts it, in her inimitable “logic”:

“Well Frank, I have been the frontrunner of all seven candidates in every single poll that has been done, every single independent poll…So if I come out of this election as anything other than the victor, of course we are going to have a full audit. You know, I’m hoping for the best. We have demanded a hand-count vote…cameras, full transparency…”

Note, by the way, that the polls in which Chase led were all of Virginia Republican *primary* voters, while the one polls she did NOT lead was of Virginia Republican *convention* attendees. However, that latter poll – by the Trafalgar Group – was done for the Youngkin campaign, so Chase is claiming it’s not valid, basically. And sure, that’s theoretically possible, but it’s also par for the course with Chase to claim that *anything* which doesn’t fit her narrative, self interest, etc. *must* be fake, false, etc. It’s the epitome of the Trumpist mindset, and it’s VERY dangerous.

Lol. Actually, I shouldn’t laugh because it portends nothing good for the country. But still, it is such a delicious irony that this attitude has even permeated the GOP primary politics.

Dr Ashish K. Jha on the horror unfolding in India:

India reports another 400,000+ cases, 4000+ death day

A sustained level of horribleness

And its not correct

True number surely closer to 25,000 deaths, 2-5 million infections today

Lots of ways to estimate but here’s a simple one

Look at the crematoriums

During non-pandemic year 2019

About 27,000 Indians died on typical day

Crematoriums handle that level of deaths every day

Additional 4,000 deaths won’t knock them off their feet

Crematoriums across the country reporting 2-4X normal business

So best estimate 55K to 80K people dying daily in India

If you assume baseline deaths of 25-30K

COVID likely causing additional 25K to 50K deaths daily

Not 4,000

What about infections?

Lets start with Infection Fatality Ratio (IFR)

In India, at least 1% right now

You might say — woah, that’s high

In US its about 0.6% and India has a younger population

BUT

Indian healthcare system has collapsed,

People dying for lack of oxygen

So IFR of 1% is reasonable, may even too low

Which would put daily infections at 2.5 to 5M / day

So here’s the bottom line

India can’t be experiencing 4K deaths a day

If it were, it would barely be blip in the background

Instead, seeing crematoriums running 24/7 and running out of firewood

Means the # of deaths from COVID at least closer to 25K, may be much more

There’s an old saying in global health

You can ignore, fail to test for, or undercount whatever disease you want

But you can’t ignore the dead

In India, the dead are telling us the disease is much worse than the official statistics

And we have to listen

Fin

Originally tweeted by Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH (@ashishkjha) on May 9, 2021.

We’re not listening.

I thought this was nice

“I want to reiterate how incredibly lucky to get this time off paid for by my company to both be with my baby and to recover myself. I am heartened to know that in the two years since I came back from my last maternity leave, Federal employees now have 12 weeks of paid time off. That’s great news. But it is still unbelievable that the same does not apply to every single person in this country, parents and caregivers alike. Everyone.”

Watch the whole thing. She is so right.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Yahoo has an interesting piece about the Soleimani assassination. It was quite an operation. But it was made more dangerous and provocative by Donald Trump:

Given the CIA’s long history of tracking Soleimani — and the Pompeo-led discussions about eliminating him — the decision to use special operations forces rather than agency operatives to oversee the killing led to some “hard feelings” at Langley, which had been almost entirely marginalized from the planning process, said former officials. Agency officials felt “cut out” of the decision making, says a former senior CIA official, who was told the agency “had other options” that were “more discrete.”

But the administration’s compressed timeline for killing Soleimani likely precluded the CIA’s plans from being viable, if indeed they were viable. “Conspiracy is hard, and it takes a lot of time to do it right,” said the former senior official.

Senior NSC officials had extensive discussions about overt and covert options for killing Soleimani, and settled independently on the recommendation that the strike be carried out overtly, said Coates, the top NSC official for the Middle East at the time of the operation. While “the Pentagon was worried about being blamed,” says Coates, “my perspective was, we’re going to be blamed anyway,” so “if the president is going to take action this dramatic, you kind of need to own it.”

President Trump, however, may have had different calculations. A covert strike by Joint Special Operations Command was “doable all the way to the end,” said a former senior intelligence official familiar with discussions preceding the killing, but “the thing that pushed Trump over the top was for him to take credit for it,” said this person. He “wanted it for his reelection.”

Of course he did. He thought it would even out Obama’s big success at killing bin Laden and make him into a military hero. It didn’t because 99% of Americans had never heard of Soleimani and he quickly remembered that his rabid cult prefers to fight the libs.

But it had some consequences.

Killing Soleimani covertly may also have led to some type of lethal Iranian response down the road, particularly if Iran were able to privately confirm the U.S. role. But the Trump administration’s decision to eliminate the Iranian general so brazenly forced Iran’s hand, says Mulroy, who served in the Pentagon from 2017 to 2019.

“We’re obsessed with using drones and such, but there are lots of things we could have done to obstruct U.S. fingerprints,” Mulroy said. If the U.S. had declined to take credit for the operation, the Iranians “wouldn’t have felt the need for overt retaliation, and to shoot missiles at our embassy and military.”

Since the killing, Iran’s plans for revenge seemed to have multiplied. Last fall, U.S. officials picked up intelligence that Iran was plotting an assassination of the U.S. ambassador to South Africa. In January, U.S. officials intercepted communications between Quds Force operatives discussing a plot to attack Fort McNair, an Army base in Washington, D.C., and try and assassinate the Army’s vice chief of staff.

Apparently, Pompeo is at the top of their list which isn’t surprising. He’s is the worst Iran hawk in the GOP. But apparently, the government is going to have to provide protection forever to a whole bunch of former officials.

I don’t think it helped Trump’s election prospects. So, the big question is, what good did any of this do?

“Not that long ago, the Supreme Court would have struck down laws that target trumped-up allegations of voter fraud,” reads a subhead in Ian Millhiser’s Vox column on how the Supreme Court enabled the undermining of voting rights:

Though the right to vote is the essential building block of any democracy, not all laws that make it more difficult to vote are unconstitutional. As the Supreme Court recognized in Storer v. Brown (1974), “as a practical matter, there must be a substantial regulation of elections if they are to be fair and honest and if some sort of order, rather than chaos, is to accompany the democratic processes.”

States may legitimately require voters to cast their ballots at a particular location, and it may require these voters to do so by a particular time and date. They may impose reasonable restrictions on who may qualify as a candidate whose name appears on the ballot. And states may require voters to use a standardized ballot rather than, say, simply writing a bunch of names on a blank sheet of paper and dropping it off at a polling place.

Yet while many election rules are permissible even if they prevent some small cohort of voters from casting a ballot, the Supreme Court as recently as 13 years ago forbade states from enacting laws that serve no purpose other than to restrict the franchise. As the Court held in Anderson v. Celebrezze (1983), when confronted with a law that makes it harder to vote, federal courts must weigh “the character and magnitude of the asserted injury” to the right to vote against “the precise interests put forward by the State as justifications for the burden imposed by its rule.”

Laws that imposed minimal burdens on the right to vote, while serving legitimate state interests, were typically upheld. But laws that burdened the right to vote without achieving any other real purpose would be struck down under the Anderson framework.

Anderson is technically still good law. But the Supreme Court watered down Anderson’s balancing test so severely in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board (2008) that it’s unclear whether Anderson still provides any meaningful safeguard against laws enacted primarily to disenfranchise voters.

Crawford was an early challenge to what was, at the time, a cutting-edge method of restricting the franchise: strict voter ID laws. Proponents of such laws, which require voters to show a photo ID before they can cast a ballot, typically claim that they are necessary to prevent anyone from impersonating a voter at the polls. But this kind of voter fraud is so rare that it barely exists.

A study by Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt, who led much of the Justice Department’s voting rights work in the Obama administration, uncovered only 35 credible allegations of in-person voter fraud among the 834 million ballots cast in the 2000-2014 elections. A Wisconsin study found seven cases of any kind of fraud among the 3 million votes cast in the 2004 election — and none were the kind that could be prevented by voter ID. In 2014, Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz, a Republican, announced the results of a two-year investigation into election misconduct within his state. He found zero cases of voter impersonation at the polls.

The primary opinion in Crawford was only able to identify one case of in-person voter fraud at the polls in the preceding 140 years.

Perhaps some election lawyer can answer this question. In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration from including a citizenship question on the 2020 census. The court ruled against the administration because the question’s “‘sole’ voting-rights-related reason” for adding it was “pretextual.” Given that precedent and the evidence Millhiser presents (there is plenty more where that came from), why could that pretextual standard not apply to a raft of voting restriction bills now floating around Republican-controlled legislatures? And to others already in place?

There’s a whole lotta pretext goin’ on.