Where Do I Live?

Kevin Drum at Moth­er Jones has a blog post up about the “vot­er fraud” that South Car­oli­na is try­ing to fight with I.D. require­ments. It turns out that there is no evi­dence of the claimed fraud. Dis­crep­an­cies are invari­ably the result of sim­ple cler­i­cal error (although one dead per­son did man­age to vote by cast­ing his or her bal­lot ear­ly and then sneak­i­ly dying before elec­tion day.)

This leads Kevin to:

Despite Newt Gin­grich’s infat­u­a­tion with hav­ing Mas­ter­Card run our coun­try’s immi­gra­tion pro­gram, any­one who’s ever worked in the pri­vate sec­tor knows that keep­ing cus­tomer and prospect mail­ing lists clean is a huge pain in the ass. If you man­age to stay even 95% accu­rate, you’re a genius. That’s dou­bly true for vot­er reg­is­tra­tion rolls, which are a night­mare of peo­ple mov­ing, dying, get­ting mar­ried, reg­is­ter­ing twice by mis­take, pro­vid­ing incor­rect address­es, and so forth. After any elec­tion, you can always find thou­sands of dis­crep­an­cies if you look hard enough.

Twen­ty years ago I met my wife and moved in with her. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, we nev­er stopped get­ting mail for her ex. But it was weird when my ex start­ed get­ting mail there! Two years ago we moved to anoth­er city an hour away. I do not believe that we have received any mail from my ex here, but we have received mail for my wife’s ex.

The White Pages Neigh­bors site (a cool or fright­en­ing site depend­ing on one’s per­spec­tive) lists as res­i­dents in our home my wife, her son and her ex. I’m not list­ed. This is despite the fact that the phone num­ber is in my name.

Keeping the Process Legitimate

I have not been read­ing Kevin Drum for long, but I enjoy his blog. His post on the Cal­i­for­nia Supreme Court’s rul­ing on Prop 8 is an excel­lent exam­ple. Yes, Prop 8, which bans same sex mar­riage, is loath­some, but it needs to be thrown out on the basis of being uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, not on a technicality.

I appre­ci­ate Kev­in’s will­ing­ness to cheer a prop­er result that is good for a ter­ri­ble law, at least (hope­ful­ly!) in the short term.