Mark Twain Is Right. Again.

Mark Twain has already been lauded by Curmie for his observation that “In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.”  Of course, he’s not the only luminary who, despite having been dead for decades (or even millennia), has been cited for offering more incisive commentary on America in the 2020s than the vast majority of contemporary pundits have been able to generate.  Other folks in that category include Euripides, Luigi Pirandello, George Orwell, Martin Niemöller, and Gertrude Stein.  There are others, no doubt, who will be added to the list in the weeks and months ahead.

But ol’ Mark (or “Sam,” if you prefer, Gentle Reader) gets a second nod today for his observation that “there are three kinds of lies: regular lies, damned lies, and statistics.”  Curmie could have written about that line years ago in reference to, say, border security.  If administration X turns away more unauthorized migrants than administration Y does, does that mean there were more illegal crossings during the X administration or that the Y administration didn’t do as good a job of identifying wrong-doers?  Probably a little of both, one supposes.

Some statistics relating to crimes actually matter.  If there’s a dead body with bullet holes in it, there’s a really good chance a murder has been committed, whether someone is ultimately arrested, tried, and convicted or not.  But if the crime in question is, say, sneaking across the border, we generally don’t know of the existence of the offense until someone is caught. 

And this brings us to the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act.  Cutesy title notwithstanding, the bill is an abomination, but we’ll get nowhere arguing statistics.  There’s a meme out there that says the Cleveland Browns have started more quarterbacks since 1999 than non-citizens have voted in that time period.  Curmie actually fell for that one, but it’s a lie… not just an untruth, a lie.  More to the point, that claim wasn’t justified even by the statistics supposedly cited: its evidence was that there were fewer convictions than Browns quarterbacks.  That’s different than the number of illegal votes cast by a factor of…what? 2? 10? 100? 1000?  Who knows?

One side claims that prosecutions and convictions are extremely rare; the other side points to tens of thousands of names of non-citizens on voter lists.  They’re both right.  And they’re both exaggerating.  The following statements are all true, as far as Curmie can determine: 1). The majority of cases of illegal voting involve convicted felons, false impersonations, or registering in multiple constituencies, not non-citizens.  2). Some locales allow non-citizens to vote in local elections (school board, mayor, etc.).  3). Motor/voter programs may give non-citizens the impression that they can legally vote, especially if, say, they have a green card, have petitioned for asylum, etc.  4). A significant number of people who were about to have their registrations revoked were in fact citizens, and a disproportionate percentage of them were either black or Hispanic. 

Curmie made similar points 14 years ago when Texas was about to purge thousands of voters from the rolls.  It’s actually a pretty good essay.  You should read it in its entirety, Gentle Reader, but here are a couple of selections:

This all boils down to a simple illustration: if someone named Carlos Martinez, a registered Democrat, shows up to vote, too many Republicans want to say “no,” and too many Democrats want to say “yes.” The correct answer, of course, is “yes, if…”: if you’re a citizen, if you’re registered in this district and nowhere else, if you have some sort of reasonable proof that you are who you say you are….

We need to establish some system of presumption. You can’t register to vote unless you can prove citizenship; once registered, however, the government must prove you should be removed. None of this reliance on motor vehicle registrations or jury exemption lists: they’re notoriously unreliable. And the presumption rests always with the status quo. Once you’re registered, the burden of proof shifts to the government to demonstrate to a high standard of proof that you shouldn’t be….

As regards increased demand for appropriate identification, perhaps requiring a photo ID: yes, by all means, if and only if there is a full-scale, well-funded campaign to make sure that prospective voters know not only that the laws have changed, but how they’ve changed, and how to secure, without undue hassle, a legally sufficient, free, identification card.

The same argument about presumption re-appeared a few years later when Curmie was discussing a different xenophobic exercise in a different Trump administration: literally incarcerating and rescinding passports from honest-to-God born-in-the-USA citizens who happen to be… you know… of Hispanic heritage.  Curmie concluded that piece with this: “Yes, there are leftie commentators who are comparing this issue to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II or even the worst excesses of Nazi Germany. Is that really where we are? Of course not. But have we taken far too many steps down a road towards a very nasty, xenophobic, and unjust nation? Oh, yes.”

So there’s no guarantee, on the one hand, that even having a US passport will in fact mean anything to the Mad King of Trumpistan.  But even if that particular strategy doesn’t re-appear, there’s plenty to hate about the SAVE Act.  No, we shouldn’t yammer on about how few violations there actually are (we can’t prove those assertions beyond the general observation that there aren’t many), but we sure as hell need to keep pounding the fact that this bill is all about voter suppression. 

Curmie remembers citing a quotation generally attributed to Benjamin Franklin in a blog post from four years ago: “That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved.”  Unfortunately, however, Curmie also noted that a 2016 study by the Cato Institute found that a “terrifying 52% of Donald Trump’s ‘early core supporters’ responded to the question of which is worse, ‘having 20,000 people in prison who are actually innocent; or, having 20,000 people not in prison who are actually guilty’ by selecting the latter.”  There’s something fundamentally psychotic about that mindset, but… Trump supporters.  (Curmie antiphrastically refrains from suggesting to them that anyone whose name appears in the Epstein files should therefore be imprisoned immediately.)

The idea that it is somehow worth disenfranchising legitimate voters if by doing so we catch a few bad guys is, of course, the best case argument for supporting the SAVE Act.  The other rationales are even worse: that people who have changed their names for whatever reason—because they are trans or women who took their husband’s surname when they got married, for instance—ought to have to jump through more hoops than the rest of us just to be able to vote.  Oh, sure, a passport would work (assuming it hadn’t been arbitrarily revoked for spurious reasons) but those things cost a fair amount of money and take weeks or even months to get (especially since the Trump administration has initiated staff cuts in the agency charged with processing applications).  

Place the presumption with the status quo (if you’re currently registered to vote, you stay that way until and unless the government can prove that you should be disenfranchised) and make the process for new applicants fast, simple, and free, and we can talk.  Otherwise, it’s a poll tax intended to suppress the votes of women and poor people: those who would be more likely to vote against Republicans, in other words.

Of course, liberals are more likely to have passports than conservatives are, and liberal women are less likely to change their names when they get married, so it’s possible that this little stratagem would blow up in the smug faces of the Trumpistanian minions.  They’d certainly deserve it.  A better alternative, however, would be to have a couple of Republican Congresscritters care more about their country than about Dear Leader’s latest power grab.  As of this writing, there may just be a large enough handful of them to prevent this absurdity from becoming law.  We can but hope.  (Oh, and write, and call, and…)

Curmie Goes Contrarian (again): Don't Blame the Jury

Curmie is about to break with personal tradition and just rant. The key word here, of course, is “just.” Curmie rants a lot, but this time there are no links to news sources or other blogs, because you, Gentle Reader, either already know the relevant facts or don’t care.

It’s been well under 24 hours since the verdict in this month’s Trial of the Century, but everyone and his great-aunt Tillie has by now weighed in on the George Zimmerman acquittal. Most of Curmie’s left-leaning friends (which is to say most—not all—of Curmie’s friends) have opined about “justice” and the “racist society” and similar high-sounding but ultimately hollow catch-phrases.

No one—correction: none of the principals—looks good in this case. Curmie’s netpal Jack Marshall over at Ethics Alarms has repeatedly called this an “ethics train wreck”; sometimes Jack errs on the side of understatement. (I promised you no links—you are adept with net browsers, Gentle Reader: employ one at your discretion.) Trayvon Martin was not the angelic youth he was portrayed as being. His girlfriend lied before changing her story (or, possibly, told the truth and then lied because it was more efficacious to do so). Martin’s parents politicized the case, suggesting with little evidence that the lack of prosecutorial vigor was purely based on race, and far too many politicians—up to and including the POTUS—rose to that bait.

The police who first investigated the case glanced at a dead teenager and released his admitted killer after a few perfunctory questions, failed to conduct an appropriate investigation, and generally screwed up at every conceivable opportunity. Their stupidity, sloth, and general lack of commitment may or may not have been grounded in racism. There are racist cops. But not every case involving people of different races—or religions, or sexes, or whatever—is specifically about that difference. And racism is only one of many forms of stupidity.

The media incompetently and quite likely intentionally distorted the case—remember when the doctored tape of Zimmerman’s call to the police made it seem like he volunteered information about Martin’s race, when in fact he was responding to a question? There are other examples, but that one, to me, was the most egregious.

The DA’s office dithered, punted, and was ultimately over-ruled by authorities who, it could be readily and credibly be argued, were at least as interested in advancing either their own political careers or at least their political agendas. The prosecution in the actual trial appears to have been roughly akin to that in the O.J. Simpson trial: utterly incompetent. (I say “appears to be” because, frankly, I do not share CNN’s obsession with this case. I’d look at news reports suggesting that the prosecution had lost ground on a particular day, but, frankly, there are a lot more important things in the world than whether one guy in Florida “gets away with murder.”) Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it: it’s an emblem for a larger problem. I’m not arguing that point. But comparisons to Emmett Till and Medgar Evers? Give me a damned break.

On the other side, there are the idiotic post-trial pronouncements by the lead defense attorney that Zimmerman wouldn’t have been prosecuted had he been black. Even if true (and I doubt it), this is in an utterly irresponsible thing to say, one which aggravates an already tense situation with no concomitant upside unless we think of lawyerly narcissism as a good thing.

All of which leads us to George Zimmerman. Was the death of Trayvon Martin directly attributable to his actions? Definitely. Could this situation have been avoided if Zimmerman weren’t such a jerk? Yep. Did Zimmerman’s actions stem from some combination of racism, arrogance, paranoia, and self-entitlement rather than conscientiousness? Almost certainly. Did he profile Martin, stalk him, precipitate the confrontation, and aggravate the situation on numerous occasions when he could have released rather than increased the pressure? Again, almost certainly.

OK, now the big questions. Is George Zimmerman morally and ethically responsible for the death of Trayvon Martin? I think so, yes. Is he legally, under Florida law, guilty of a felony? Probably. And the distance between “probably” and “yes” is known as “reasonable doubt.”

The cops were inept. The DA’s office was nearly as bad. The prosecution couldn’t convict a roast beef sandwich of containing meat. But the jury? From where I sit, they got it right. (Side note: when I wrote about the Casey Anthony trial—you can look that one up, too, Gentle Reader—I said I’d never question an acquittal. I meant it.) The foundations of the criminal justice system are the presumption of innocence and the abiding belief that it is better to free the guilty than to convict the innocent. Is George Zimmerman “innocent”? Nope. Is he “not guilty”? Yes. Yes, he is: legally, at least.

The howls of my friends are largely about “justice” for Trayvon Martin. He certainly deserves it, but his chance for that disappeared over a year ago, with the bumbling of every authority figure involved. To suggest that the verdict yesterday confirms anything is silly. The acquittal was simply the result of the jury’s doing the job they were charged to do. The legitimate resentment of those who believe that Martin was denied justice is properly channeled elsewhere. George Zimmerman deserves justice, too, simply by being a human being. He will probably—à la OJ—face a civil rights charge and a civil suit. Chances are, with a lower burden of proof in the latter, he won’t escape scot free. Does that constitute justice? No, but it’s as good as we’re going to get. And that is not an indictment of the system.