Month: November 2018

Two years ago, pop star Justin Timberlake posted a photo of his 2016 election ballot—and ushered in a wave of warnings about the potential dangers of snapping pics in the voting booth. Back then, “ballot selfies” were definitely illegal in 19 states and potentially illegal in 11 others, according to an Associated Press analysis. But some things have changed since then.

Last year, laws legalizing ballot selfies took effect in two states. Residents of California and Colorado are now in the clear.

Lawmakers in several other states attempted to legalize ballot selfies but were unsuccessful. In Oklahoma, for instance, a bill passed both chambers of the legislature but was vetoed by Gov. Mary Fallin. Elsewhere, such as Illinois and New Jersey, legislation simply stalled.

Meanwhile, several lawsuits concerning ballot-selfie bans are still winding their way through federal courts. Joel Crookston of Michigan, for example, sued to stop his state’s ballot-selfie ban in 2016.

“Is this the most important free speech case under the sun? No,” Crookston’s lawyer, Stephen Klein, tells the AP. “But it’s a simple act that allows people to be involved in the electoral process. It’s not a threat to democracy. It’s a celebration.”

The rationales for the bans vary, but they generally relate to fears about voter intimidation and vote selling. “Photographing a marked ballot is illegal in part because such photographs could be used as proof of a vote for a particular candidate in a vote-buying scheme,” explains the North Carolina State Board of Elections & Ethics Enforcement.

The severity of the crime varies wildly by state. In Tennessee, where Timblerlake voted two years ago, taking a ballot selfie is a misdemeanor punishable by up to 30 days in jail and a $50 fine. In Illinois, it’s a class four felony, punishable by up to three years in prison and a fine of up to $25,000.

In Ohio, taking photos of completed ballots is also a felony. Yet the Cincinnati Enquirer tells readers that while “legally” ballot selfies are a no, “practically, no one is going to stop you….[T]here are no records of Ohio police ever enforcing the prohibition.” It seems Ohio is one of several states (including its western neighbor, Indiana) where the current legal status of ballot selfies is murky.

Ohio’s law against photographing ballots was passed in 1997; in other states, various statutes used to ban ballot selfies (under a more general ballot-privacy rubric) are much older. New Hampshire became the first state to add a more modern twist to these rules in 2014.

“Like many states, New Hampshire already prohibited voters from disclosing their marked ballot,” notes the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). “The 2014 legislation (HB 366) took it a step further by explicitly prohibiting voters from taking a digital image of a marked ballot and distributing or sharing it on social media.”

A federal court would soon strike down the New Hampshire law as an unconstitutional restriction on free speech. “The court concluded that the ballot selfie is constitutionally protected political speech that can be restricted only by meeting the highest standard of constitutional scrutiny,” the NCSL reports.

And the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court ruling, saying banning ballot selfies to stop voter fraud was like “burning down the house to roast the pig.” New Hampshire officials appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but SCOTUS declined to hear the case.

Not every federal court concurs. Last year a federal judge in Manhattan permitted a New York law banning ballot selfies.

CNN just released a state-by-state breakdown of ballot selfie laws—but beware. At least several states seem to be listed incorrectly:

• Iowa is included in CNN’s “don’t even think about it” category, but the secretary of state’s office there recently said, explicitly, “yes, you can take a ballot selfie.”
• Oklahoma is listed as a gray-area state, but its governor just vetoed a law legalizing ballot selfies.

As far as I can tell, ballot-selfie bans of some sort persist for at least 18 states in 2018: Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah. In some of these states, taking photographs anywhere within or near a polling site is illegal; others permit pictures inside voting booths and pictures of blank ballots but not ballots that have been completed.

At least 19 states (and D.C.) allow pictures inside polling stations regardless of whether a ballot has been filled out yet. These include California, Colorado, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Are you ready for the next 30 hours or so of political hysteria, spoiler-hunting, and supremely confident innumeracy? Then you’re in the right place! Today’s editor-roundtable midterms-preview edition of the Reason Podcast includes, thank Jeebus, Managing Editor Stephanie Slade, who has forgotten more about polling than most of us will ever know. Slade leads us in walking through the numbers and potential meanings of massive early-voting turnout, shaky state-level polls, and the built-in uncertainty of (justifiably!) basing this year’s election forecasts on last cycle’s voter behavior. It’s unknowable out there, kids, so don’t fall for early exit polls.

The usual crew of Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and yours truly also pick out races of note, discuss the implications of President Donald Trump’s hard pivot to caravan/immigration politics in the homestretch, talk smack about Daylight Saving Time, and in open defiance of Slade make a series of probably disastrous predictions for Election Day.

Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

‘Three Stories’ by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0

Relevant links from the show:

“Tomorrow Is the Most Important Election of Our Lifetime. Don’t Let Trump Denialists Tell You Otherwise,” by Shikha Dalmia

“This Isn’t the Most Important Election of Your Lifetime. Not Even Close,” by David Harsanyi

“The Most Important Election of Our Lives?” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“It’s OK Not to Vote,” by Katherine Mangu-Ward

“Control of the Senate Could Depend on These 10 Races,” by Joe Setyon

“10 House Races Libertarians Should Watch on Election Night,” by Eric Boehm & Zuri Davis

“Donald Trump Fails to Confront the Truth About the Migrant Caravan,” by Shikha Dalmia

“Trump’s Executive Order Ending Birthright Citizenship Is All About the Midterms,” by Eric Boehm

“Republicans Whip Up Pre-Midterm Fears With Lies About Invading Migrant Caravan,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“How Third Parties Are Getting Screwed This Election Season,” by Matt Welch & Alexis Garcia

“Indiana Democrats Encourage Conservatives to Vote for Libertarian Lucy Brenton for Senate,” by Matt Welch

“4 More States Could Legalize Medical or Recreational Marijuana Next Week,” by Jacob Sullum

“Let Daylight Saving Time Die Already,” by Zuri Davis

“Why We Have Daylight Saving Time and Why We Should Scrap It,” by Andrew Heaton

Don’t miss a single Reason Podcast! (Archive here.)

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The Washington, D.C., City Council is rapidly advancing a measure that would lower the voting age to 16. On Thursday, the council’s Judiciary and Public Safety Committee unanimously passed the Youth Vote Amendment Act, which would allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in all elections, from local races to the presidency.

This would be a national first. A number of D.C. suburbs in Maryland let 16- and 17-year-olds vote, but ony in local races. In Berkeley, California, this same age bracket is allowed to vote in school board elections.

The sponsor of the measure, Councilmember Charles Allen, praised Thursday’s outcome, arguing that 16-year-olds are already making weighty decisions and thus can be trusted with participating in elections.

“They’re caretakers of parents or siblings. They’re helping their family by working a job (or two). Some may be parents themselves. And they’re engaged in the issues of our city just like everyone else,” he says on Twitter. “They deserve to have their voice heard.”

Allen’s not wrong that 16- and 17-year-olds are trusted with a number of decisions associated with adulthood, from holding down a job to getting a driver’s license to—in D.C., though not in every state—sexual consent. It’s odd, therefore, that we restrict their right to vote.

It’s also odd that Allen would be the one making this argument, given his past support for other laws that restrict these same young people from making decisions about their own lives.

Back in 2016, when a proposal was floated to increase D.C.’s smoking age to 21, Allen voted in favor of taking this choice away from young people. He was joined by Councilmembers Elissa Silverman and Mary Cheh, both of whom support his measure to lower the voting age.

It’s remarkably inconsistent to advocate that 16-year-olds are responsible enough to do things like raise a child and participate in the democratic process, yet too irresponsible to decide whether they want to smoke a cigarette.

Yet this increasingly is our lot. Our marginal impact on choosing the leaders and laws that govern us is treated as sacrosanct, while the decisions we might make about our lives, and only our lives, are subject to an endless degree of regulations, restrictions, or prohibitions.

By all means, we should let 16-year-olds vote. We should let them do a lot of other things, too.

Deploying thousands of American soldiers to the southern border because of a caravan of Central American migrants: It’s an outrageously expensive solution to a problem that doesn’t even exist.

The military said it was sending more than 5,000 troops to the border last week in anticipation of the caravan’s arrival. That number now seems to have gone up to 7,000, and President Donald Trump has said he could deploy as many as 15,000.

All those troops will come at a high cost: $220 million, according to CNBC, which cites two anonymous defense officials. And it’s not exactly money well spent. CNBC reports:

A Pentagon risk assessment found that the caravan did not pose a threat to the United States, according to a person with direct knowledge of U.S. intelligence. This person also said that the caravan would take about a month and a half to get to the U.S. border.

CNBC’s report was published two days after The Washington Post claimed the deployment could cost more than $200 million, depending on how long they stay and whether more are sent.

So what are the troops up against? There are actually up to four migrant caravans making their way north. The first, which originated in Guatemala last month, used to have about 7,000 people; it has dissipated considerably since then, and now appears to have somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000.

Unclassified U.S. military documents obtained by Newsweek and published this past Thursday estimate that of roughly 7,000 migrants heading toward the U.S. border as of October 25 , just 20 percent “will make [the] entire journey.” As the Post points out, this would equate to five U.S. troops for each migrant who makes it to the border.

The most likely course of action, the documents say, is that the “caravan dwindles as it nears” the border with “limited” exploitation from transnational criminal organizations. However, there might be a “balloon effect on smuggling.”

In the most dangerous course of action, the assessment says, the “caravan grows markedly” and is exploited by terrorists. And if those transnational criminal groups are “upset” by the U.S. military’s involvement, there could be an increase in “cross border engagements.”

But even this worst-case scenario doesn’t justify Trump’s obsession with the caravan. The president has previously claimed—without evidence—that “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in” with the other migrants. He has also, as Reason‘s Scott Shackford notes, released a “grossly misleading ad about immigration” in a clear attempt “to paint the migrants in the caravan as invaders, terrorists, violent threats to our civil life that must be stopped before they disrupt society.”

Trump is trying to justify his deployment of troops to the border by overplaying the threat posed by the caravan. But even those who do make it to the border probably aren’t criminals. Immigrants—including those in the country illegally—are actually less likely to commit crimes than American citizens are. Are they really a reason to send thousands of troops to set up some barbed wire?

“Economic losses caused by climate-related disasters have soared by about two and a half times in the last 20 years,” reported Reuters citing a new United Nations report last month. The report, Economic Losses, Poverty & Disasters 1998-2017, cited direct losses of $2.9 trillion, of which 77 per cent were attributed to extreme weather events amounting to $2.25 trillion in losses. The report notes that this is a “dramatic rise” of 151 per cent compared with losses reported between 1978 and 1997, which amounted to $895 billion. That sounds bad and it is; after all hundreds of thousands of people were killed or injured in these disasters plus losing their houses and businesses.

But is toting up annual absolute losses really the best way to measure how disaster trends are affecting humanity? Actually, the United Nations doesn’t think so. The U.N.’s General Assembly endorsed in 2015 the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction which sets as a global target the reduction of “direct disaster economic loss in relation to global gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030.” This target recognizes that as the world grows wealthier that people are building much more stuff that can to be exposed to natural disasters.

The U.N. report observes that with the notable exception of Puerto Rico (due to the destruction of Hurricane Maria) that the top 10 countries that have lost the highest proportion of their GDPs to disasters are all poor countries including places like Haiti, Honduras, Mongolia, and North Korea.

In a new study in Environmental Hazards, University of Colorada political scientist Roger Pielke, Jr. reports that while absolute disaster losses have been increasing since 1990, percentage losses have been declining. Using loss data from reinsurance companies Munich Re and Aon Benfield, the study finds that in constant 2017 US dollars, both weather-related and non-weather related catastrophe losses have increased, with a 74 percent increase in the former and 182 percent increase in the latter since 1990. However, since 1990 both overall and weather/climate losses have decreased as proportion of global GDP.

Eyeballing the graph suggests that the annual disaster losses have trended downward from 0.3 to about 0.25 percent of global GDP since 1990. That means that some progress has been made toward meeting the Sendai Framework’s global target of reducing direct disaster economic loss in relation to global gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030.

Pielke does warn that “extending this trend into the future will require vigilance to exposure, vulnerability and resilience in the face of uncertainty about the future frequency and magnitude of extreme events.” Mother Nature never gives up trying to kill us and wreck our things.

The Supreme Court has declined to get involved in the debate over limiting the use of money bail to control who is freed from jail prior to trial.

The court has turned away a lawsuit challenging New Jersey’s nearly two-year-old bail system. New Jersey’s system has all but eliminated the use of money bail. Instead, defendants are evaluated via risk assessment tools and freed under various levels of monitoring or detained if prosecutors make a case to a judge that there’s no other way to make sure the defendant shows up for court or is a public threat. People are no longer being jailed in New Jersey simply for lack of money.

These reforms represent a huge financial threat to the bail bond industry and the insurance companies that underwrite it. So they’ve been trying to find ways to block these changes. One insurance underwriter assisted a defendant, a man named Brittan Holland, arrested in 2017 over a bar fight. Holland attempted to fight the reforms because it denied him the opportunity for cash bail and instead forced him into home detention and electronic monitoring as a condition of release. He and the insurance company argued that this violated his Fourth and Eighth Amendment rights. Essentially he was claiming that he should be allowed to pay the money and not be subjected to additional monitoring.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third District rejected these arguments, stating that the Eighth Amendment didn’t obligate the use of cash or money bail as a mechanism for prerelease and that his pretrial monitoring was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. Holland petitioned the Supreme Court to hear his argument, but last week the justices turned him away.

That shouldn’t necessarily be taken as a Supreme Court stamp of approval for New Jersey’s reforms. These changes to the court system are still very new. There may be future court rulings, from New Jersey or elsewhere, that could push the Supreme Court to weigh in on the issue.

Keep an eye on what’s happening in California. The Golden State just passed a bill this fall that eliminates cash bail entirely and will force the implementation of similar pretrial assessments and evaluations for people charged with crimes. There’s an important difference between what New Jersey has and what California is building. New Jersey’s system operates on the presumption that defendants are going to be released under the least restrictive measures needed to make sure they show up and stay out of trouble. The bill California passed gives the court systems in the state much more discretion in setting up their pretrial mechanisms and doesn’t insist on that same presumption of release.

Because of the leeway that California’s law grants to judges, civil rights and criminal justice reform groups turned against the bill, though they had previously supported and even helped craft it. They worry that if poorly implemented, California’s pretrial reforms could actually lead to more people stuck behind bars while they wait for trial, not fewer.

California’s Supreme Court is taking up a case about judges’ tendency to use extremely high bails to deliberately keep defendants behind bars. Eliminating money bail doesn’t necessarily mean that problem will go away—we could just end up with the same people stuck in jail and not offered any release conditions at all. If that happens, we may see more cases heading to the Supreme Court for consideration.