Category: Voting

Two Worlds: Urban and Rural

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June 15, 2025

By Stephen Stofka

Happy Father’s Day to the Dads out there. Even though it is Father’s Day, Cain and Abel have their usual Sunday breakfast together.

This is part of a series on persistent problems. The conversations are voiced by Abel, a Wilsonian with a faith that government can ameliorate social and economic injustices to improve society’s welfare, and Cain, who believes that individual autonomy, the free market and the price system promote the greatest good.

Abel settled down in his seat opposite Cain. “There is so much that is happening every week, it’s hard to keep up with it. LA demonstrations, the troops being called out in addition to the guard.”

Cain adjusted the window blinds to reduce the sunlight. “Yeah, there were ICE agents running after migrants in the field in the Central Valley. Imagine having all that gear on and running around in 90 degree heat. But, the farmers were complaining. About 40% of their workers are illegal (Source). Imagine if the crops rot in the ground and voters find empty vegetable displays at the grocery store. On Friday, Trump announced that ICE would no longer target farm workers (Source).”

Abel shook his head. “A 12-year old was left alone when his parents were grabbed and taken away (Source). Talk about a rotten Father’s Day. Then Trump made up some B.S. that criminals who were let in by Biden were applying for the jobs left vacant by the farm workers.”

Cain nodded. “The real battle in this country is between the moderates on either side of the political aisle and the nutjobs on the left and right wings. When I heard that the radical lefties had called Waymo taxis, then lit them on fire, I wondered if I was in a Twilight Zone episode (Source).”

Abel smirked. “Playing right into the hands of the MAGA crowd and the nutjob in the White House.”

Cain chuckled. “I don’t know if Trump is a nutjob. Remember, he outcompeted sixteen rivals in the 2016 race.”

Abel sighed. “It’s the primary voters in either party who are the extremists.”

Cain raised his eyebrows. “Another change ushered in by the Democratic reformists in 1972 (Source). A primary system would let the voters speak. Yeah, right. Often, it’s less than a quarter of eligible voters that turn out for a primary.”

Abel argued, “Wait, so it’s only wackos that vote in primaries? I vote in them.”

Cain made an equivocating hand gesture. “I didn’t say only wackos voted in primaries. But, they are a greater percentage of the small primary turnout. They influence primaries and each party caters to their interests and perspectives. The parties have drifted to the extremes in the past decades.”

Abel sighed. “Ok, let’s call them motivated voters spurred on by interest groups.”

Cain laughed. “You can call them that. I’ll call them wackos. Anyway, back to Trump. He reminds me of the Mule in Asimov’s Foundation series. A person who can control the emotions of others.”

Abel smiled. “Asimov was one of my favorite authors. I loved the Foundation series, the robot books. What, you think Trump is a mutant? I mean, that was science fiction.”

Cain looked into the distance for a moment. “He has a singular personality that draws some people. Do I think he has some emotional telepathic power like the Mule? No. But remember that the Mule assumed the guise of a clown to infiltrate the Foundation, then take it over. A lot of mainstream Republicans looked at Trump as a political buffoon in the 2016 race. He’s taken over the Republican Party just like the Mule did the Foundation.”

Abel raised an eyebrow. “Magnifico was the name the Mule assumed? Some hyperbole there. That’s Trump’s favorite tool.”

Cain nodded. “Magnifico Giganticus. I had to look it up a while ago when the similarity struck me. Physically, there’s little resemblance between Trump and the Mule.”

Abel replied, “In Asimov’s story, he was the anomaly that psycho-historians could not foresee. God, that was great stuff to read when I was a teen.”

Cain smiled. “I remember hearing that Paul Krugman loved the series as well. He said that the whole idea of psychohistory made him interested in studying economics (Source).”

Abel laughed. “If only economists had as much accuracy as the predictions of the psycho-historians. A hologram of Hari Seldon would appear at crisis moments. With his mathematics of history, he had been able to predict when a galactic crisis would occur, so he pre-recorded them before his death.”

Cain mused, “He couldn’t predict the Mule, though. That shook everyone’s faith in Seldon’s wisdom. The Democrats must be feeling like that about now.”

Abel frowned. “The second President in history to be elected in two non-consecutive elections. Cleveland was the first (Source). Until the 2024 election season, I didn’t think anyone had done that before. It’s funny. We had to memorize a succession of Presidents in grade school, but they were just names to me.”

Cain nodded. “Yeah, we often don’t appreciate the story of history until we’re older. I hated all that memorization when I was a kid, but it was good training for our brains.”

Abel sighed. “I get down on some of the kids working in stores because it seems like they can’t remember stuff. They gotta look up everything on their phone or the information gadget that the store gives them. Then, this week, I’m at Home Depot and ask this guy in his mid-twenties for something and he tells me the aisle and the location on the shelf.”

Cain chuckled. “Why do we stereotype people? Saves us time and effort, I suppose. It’s like we have a little theater, a Punch and Judy show playing in our brains. ‘Here’s how the world works,’ we say. People become characters in our internal play.”

Abel set his fork down. “Hey, talk about stereotypes. I meant to tell you about the American Communities Project. They classify the thousands of counties in this country into 15 groups. They have a color-coded interactive map so people can locate their local community (Source). This guy, Michael Bahareen, at The Liberal Patriot on Substack wrote three posts about the characteristics of each group (Source).”

Cain asked, “How do they distinguish the different groups?”

Abel replied, “Voting patterns, that’s one. Their ages, ethnicity, population, dominant industry and values. A lot of data that the Census Bureau gathers every year. Some of the data surprised me. Some didn’t. Like Native American Lands. I knew that the Indians struggled with poverty. I was surprised that counties classed as ‘Working Class Country’ had incomes that were just a few thousand dollars higher than people in Indian country.”

Cain asked, “Where are those counties?”

Abel shrugged. “Funny. All of them except one are in the eastern half of the country. Rural counties in Arkansas, West Virgina, eastern Oklahoma. In the past twenty years, those counties have become solid Republican.”

Cain argued, “So you were surprised at their low incomes? Their cost of living is a lot lower too (Source). I wish these government agencies would quote household incomes in terms of living costs.”

Abel interrupted, “Yeah, but there are a lot of things that don’t have local prices. Like life insurance, computers, cars.”

Cain agreed, “Ok, good point, but local pricing plays a huge part in a family’s finances. Let’s say a family makes $120,000 a year in Los Angeles. They might be paying $60,000 a year in housing costs. That’s $5,000 a month. Heck, it’s 50% of their income. Their income tax bite is higher than the family living in rural Arkansas or Missouri. Let’s say that family makes only $52,000 a year, but their housing costs are $12,000. Which family is more stressed out? The LA family. One of them loses their job and they can’t sleep at night.”

Abel nodded. “Ok, I get your point. But families in urban areas classified as Big Cities are generally healthier than those in Working Class Country. So why is that?”

Cain said, “Probably a lot to do with access to health care. I don’t know. I just wish we had data that allows us to do a better job at comparing incomes and living costs. Your point about computers and cars prices. An F-150 pickup starts at like $40,000 (Source). That’s like nine months of income for someone working in rural Oklahoma, but only five months for someone in L.A.”

Abel interrupted, “So housing costs might be a lot lower in rural areas, but not autos. Do you think that accounts for the political silos in this country? We talked about that last week, I think. Rural people and urban people live in different worlds in a lot of ways.”

Cain nodded. “Sure. Why is that pickup so expensive? Because of environmental and safety rules that the people in big cities voted for. The guy in Podunk, Oklahoma doesn’t want to pay for all that stuff but has no choice. Ford can’t build pickups without all those controls. Naturally, the guy in Oklahoma resents the voters in the big cities. Their priorities dominate and limit his choices and how he spends his money. Is that fair? No, of course not.”

Abel argued, “Well, you claim that the price system can allocate resources. Let’s say we got rid of mandates for environmental and safety controls. Would Ford build a new pickup for $25,000? Is there enough profit for the car manufacturer and dealer at that price? Probably not. What if we undid all the safety regulations? No more air bags or cars designed to absorb the impact of collision. Get rid of all those environmental controls while we are at it. What if you are wrong? Highway deaths skyrocket. Pollution in American cities starts to look like China cities. No one can see through the fog.”

Cain looked over his glasses at Abel. “You done? I’m not proposing anything that radical. I’m saying that we have enough car mandates. If people want air bags, they can pay for them. Let people decide. Let the car makers decide. We don’t need fat cats in Washington forcing their ideologies and priorities on us.”

Abel smirked. “We need some uniformity. Sure, this a diverse country. Geographically, culturally. That’s always been a challenge in this country. But the whole point of the Constitution was a bedrock of uniform laws that would apply to everyone.”

Cain replied, “Yeah, a bedrock, a foundation. The Constitution is only a few pages long. Why? Because the states were supposed to do the bulk of the lawmaking. What do we have now? Lawmakers in Washington, particularly the Democrats, want to keep imposing uniform regulations on all the states. Circumstances are not uniform. Incomes and cost-of-living standards are not uniform. Democratic politicians just don’t get that anymore. They look down on rural counties as they fly from the coast-to-coast. In the 2016 campaign, Clinton called them a ‘basket of deplorables‘ (Source).”

Abel shrugged. “That was just plain stupid politicking. Romney made the same mistake in the 2012 election campaign with his remark that 47% of people voted Democrat because they were dependent on government (Source). I mean, politics is mostly performance, not policy. Stupid remarks are bad performance, but not policy.”

Cain argued, “I agree with you about performance. A bunch of peacocks puffing up their tails.” Abel snorted with laughter and Cain paused. “You all right?”

Abel took a moment. “I started laughing while swallowing. I got this picture of the aristocracy in the French court dressed up in their frills and powdered wigs.”

Cain smiled. “That’s how it seems to working class people and farmers in rural counties. All those mandates. It’s disrespectful, disdainful.”

Abel argued, “A lot of regs are meant to address serious concerns that affect a lot of people. I mean, automobile fatalities averaged 36,000 per year in the 2010s (Source). That was the same as in the 1950s, even though the population doubled. Yeah, those safety features cost money but they save a lot of lives. I mean, I get your point that mandates have a disparate impact on some folks in lower income counties, but this doesn’t help your argument.”

Cain asked, “What about environmental controls? Those mandates addressed the concerns of people in urban areas. People living in a county with fewer than 10,000 people are going to be more concerned with the cost of emission controls, not the effect of those controls.”

Abel sighed. “Look, everyone has a right to breathe fresh air. Lawmakers couldn’t let automakers build two different sets of cars. Those with controls. Those without. I mean, people would just go to a rural county, buy a car without controls and drive it back to the city where they lived. How are the cops going to tell the difference? Cars need uniform laws set in Washington.”  

Cain shook his head. “There could be different license plates. Boom. Someone driving a car without controls in a county that requires them gets pulled over by the cops and their vehicle impounded.”

Abel sighed. “People with low incomes are going to get hit the worst by that policy. What if some farmer in a rural county wants to visit his family in the city? Let’s say his car doesn’t have controls. What is he supposed to do? Rent a car? I know you’re into local autonomy, but this just isn’t suited to it.”

Cain settled back in his seat. “We got by for decades without all these mandates and controls. Then the Democrats started to rewrite all the rules in the 1960s. The Big Daddy economy. Johnson’s Great Society, Medicare, Medicaid and a bunch of rules dictating production decisions.”

Abel argued, “Remember, for the first half of the century, there were a lot more car manufacturers. Wait, hold on a minute. I took a screenshot of a chart about a week ago. Here it is.

The vertical axis of the graph is marked from zero to 100 percent market share. The horizontal axis is marked in decades from 1900 to 2020. The yellow line depicts the changing share of the automobile market for the Big Three automakers. It rises from 55% in 1910 to 90% in 1950, then declines gradually to 40% in 2020. The orange line shows the changing share of other automakers. It declines from 45% in 1910 to 10% in 1950, then rises to 60% in 2020. The two lines cross in 2007, when the share of other automakers begins to rise over that of the Big Three.

Abel continued, “The dominance of the Big Three was already starting to decline in the 1960s and 1970s. It wasn’t the new mandates but foreign competition coming into the U.S. market.”

Cain whistled softly as he looked at the chart. “I didn’t realize that the majority of cars on the road are now foreign brands.”

Abel interrupted, “Some might be Teslas.”

Cain nodded. “Right. But this shows why a lot of people want to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. What got you into this?”

Abel replied, “I was sitting in traffic and noticed that there were no American brand cars around me. I wondered if that was a trend.”

Cain shook is head. “Our economy is too open to foreign competition, if you ask me.”

Abel argued, “America’s dominance in manufacturing was just the post-war period. The war crippled the industries of Europe and Japan. As they recovered, they began to compete with American autos. My daughter drove a used Honda Civic for like ten years when she was younger. Hardly any repairs. What American car in the 1990s could make a claim like that?”

Cain replied, “Dodge Dart. Slant-6 engine. I drove that thing for over 200,000 miles without putting much money into it. Well, we got to do something. There’s too much difference in incomes between the urban areas and rural counties.”

Abel argued, “A revival in manufacturing won’t help these rural areas. Manufacturing needs supply chains, good roads that are built for truck traffic and well maintained. Infrastructure like cable and fiber. That’s the stuff Biden wanted to build, and Trump wants to cancel.”

Cain looked through the steam rising from his coffee cup. “Well, government is not too efficient at building stuff. They are good at shuffling ones and zeroes, taking money from one person and giving it to someone else. There should have been better incentives for private companies to build infrastructure. More fiber optic in rural areas, for example.”

Abel frowned. “Rural counties with older populations, what ACP categorizes as ‘Graying America,’ make up a small percentage of voters, about 5%, according to the analysis at ACP (Source). Political advertising may pay them lip service and feature them in videos, but they don’t have much power. You talked about counties with less than 10,000 people. That’s like less than a quarter of the counties and less than 2% of the population (Source).”

Cain argued, “I want to look at the research this American Communities Project is doing. It seems to me that there’s like a $25,000 to $30,000 difference in incomes between rural and urban areas. Rural counties are becoming like second or third-world countries. They don’t like it.”

Abel nodded. “I know. Their kids are leaving for better opportunities in more populous areas. I don’t know what the solution is. Democrats have come up with needs based programs to help lower income families in urban areas, but they have ignored rural areas. Of course, Social Security is progressive and that helps older people in rural counties. They earn lower incomes and get proportionately higher benefits. Their Social Security income goes a long way in a rural area.”

Cain interrupted, “It’s not that progressive. Besides, they don’t have easy access to doctors or dentists.”

Abel shrugged. “Right. There’s not enough to attract young talent the way urban areas do. Local autonomy may have suited an 18th century economy based on farming and primitive means of travel. Urban areas permit more connections between goods and services, between people and institutions. Rural communities just don’t.”

Cain argued, “Come on. Rural communities are all about connections.”

Abel replied, “Yeah, among themselves, but not so much with other communities. Look, our society, our economy, it gets more multi-layered. Urban areas have the depth and scope to accommodate that complexity.”

Cain asked, “Well, for all that complexity, we still have to eat. Who is going to grow and harvest our food?”

Abel shrugged. “Robots. Tractors and harvesters become more automated every year. There’s a show called “Clarkson’s Farm” on Amazon Prime, I think. Jeremy Clarkson is big into cars. He did some worldwide tour. He writes. He’s a presenter. Anyway, he decided to take up farming. Great show if you haven’t seen it. Fourth season just finished, I think. Boy, the sophistication of these tractors and harvesters is amazing. That trend will continue.”

Cain asked, “You think AI agents will be driving tractors?”

Abel nodded. “Sure, they’ve already got GPS in these machines.”

Cain argued, “Yeah, but you still need people to repair the machines, to muck out the stalls, whatever else they do on a farm.”

Abel replied, “Robots are picking orders at Amazon (Source). Humans are still doing the packing. It’s happening everywhere.”

Cain laid his napkin on the table next to his plate. “It’s sad. There are already a lot of small farming towns that have too many closed up stores. It’s not just the destruction of capital in a big tech company. I mean, that’s part of progress. It’s the demise of those communities, their social relationships, their religious and cultural institutions.”

Abel sighed. “Ghost towns. Gold and silver mining towns are tourist attractions, a page in history. One day, people may visit main streets in small town, America, and gawk at mom and pop grocery and hardware stores.”

Cain slid out of his seat. “That’s an uncomfortable thought. Well, I gotta go. Something to think about.”

Abel smiled. “Ok, see you next week.”

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Image by ChatGPT

How We Choose

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October 27, 2024

By Stephen Stofka

This week’s letter is about our vote, our political perceptions and institutions. This past week, an NPR reporter asked an undecided voter in Pennsylvania which candidate they were leaning to. The voter responded that he did not like the way the Biden administration had handled inflation. Since Harris was part of that administration, he was leaning toward Trump. The NPR reporter did not present the voter with the information that it was Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, appointed by Trump, who had been chiefly responsible for the government’s response to inflation. Would this new information have an effect on the voter’s thinking? Would the voter hold Trump partly responsible for the surge of inflation during the pandemic recovery? That dialog was never developed. I have noticed that reporters from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) develop a more proactive dialog with those they interview. The resulting interviews are more lively and informative than those conducted by reporters in U.S. news media.

Candidates in presidential elections frame issues to elevate them from the temporary to the eternal. In The Commanding Heights, Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw (1998) tell the story of Samuel Insull, a tycoon in the electricity industry during the 1920s, who wanted to build a sprawling infrastructure that would supply electricity to every home and business in America. His empire collapsed during the Depression and investors lost 99% of their capital. Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) ran on a campaign that included a promise “’to get’ the Insulls” (p. 47). FDR had elevated a case of speculation and overreach into an eternal battle where the rich preyed on the poor. His administration pursued the tycoon as he sought refuge in various European countries. Finally, Greece extradited the man back to the U.S. where he stood trial for fraud. Prosecutors could not convince a jury that Insull was guilty of anything more than ambition. His investors were mostly professionals, people who hoped to capitalize on that ambition. The jury speedily exonerated Insull.

One voter in Pennsylvania explained to the same NPR reporter that he needed to sit down and study the issues. Political campaigns must craft an issue complicated by dense details and conflicting principles into a clear and simple tale that appeals to the emotions and morals of voters. There are four aspects of most issues: the practical, the moral, the intellectual and the emotional. Repeated studies of patients whose right and left brains have been separated by accident or surgery indicate that each of these aspects is processed by different parts of our brain. To reduce our “brain load” we use shortcuts in our reasoning process to guide us through a jungle of complexity. I will note that Nelson et al. (2013) found little biological evidence for the idea that the processing of various tasks are localized to either half of the brain.

Steckler et al. (2017) found that many of us determine an action’s morality based on intention rather than outcome. Their research indicated that we process those types of moral judgments with our right brain. Many researchers have concluded that emotional responses are mainly generated in the right brain (Gainotti, 2019). Sorting through the practical details and isolating the principles involved in an issue involve the left side of the brain. We don’t carry a handy little tool in our pocket to consider these various aspects to get to the heart of the matter. After a long day at work, it is tiring just to think about the more complex issues. To keep it simple, political campaigns play to just one aspect, but not to the practical details where the momentum of a campaign narrative can get lost.

Political campaigns are sales campaigns. Central to sales practice is the KISS principle – Keep it simple, Stupid. The lessons of history are too nuanced and contradictory for a sales campaign. Candidates try to hypnotize voters with one or two shiny issues. They target the right brain which has a prominent role in emotional and moral judgments. They make up details to support their emotional or moral argument. Anything to stoke outrage, anger and moral condemnation. Simple and short lies with little or no evidence work the best. Scapegoat a minority group. Immigrants eating pets. Jews sacrificing Christian children. Catholic voters wanting to make Catholicism the national religion. In southern states, many black men were lynched after a hasty accusation of  raping a white woman.

Voters are beset with distortions from opposing campaigns. Most of the evidence for or against a candidate overwhelms many voters so they concentrate on a few key details. They rely on their own party affiliation, a few key media sources, a family member or a friend. Campaign rules do not prohibit lying and candidates have little to gain from nuance or truth. A Congressional Research Service analysis found that 36% of current House members and 51% of Senate members are lawyers. They have learned how to shape facts and issues into a convincing argument.

America was founded by the wealthy to be a plutocratic republic with the trappings of a democracy. To preserve a plutocratic Constitution, the founders made it difficult to amend the rules. The Electoral College was designed to check the popular will. The rules of the Senate and House concentrate power in a small elite of party leaders and committee chairs. In a plutocracy, the wealthy find it easier to influence a small number of legislators holding the reins of public policy. Election campaigns in America are longer and more expensive than in any other democracy. An Open Secrets analysis found that total spending in the 2020 election surpassed $14 billion, doubling the money spent in the 2016 election. Much of that money comes from wealthy patrons who wish to align public policy to their priorities and principles. Candidates are the messengers of the rich, conveying a message from the upper echelon of our society to the rest of us. That hypnotic message is your vote matters.

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Photo by Victoriano Izquierdo on Unsplash

Keywords: Electoral College, Constitution, vote

Gainotti, G. (2019). The role of the right hemisphere in emotional and behavioral disorders of patients with frontotemporal lobar degeneration: An updated review. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnagi.2019.00055

Nielsen, J. A., Zielinski, B. A., Ferguson, M. A., Lainhart, J. E., & Anderson, J. S. (2013). An evaluation of the left-brain vs. right-brain hypothesis with resting state functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging. PLoS ONE, 8(8). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0071275

Steckler, C. M., Hamlin, J. K., Miller, M. B., King, D., & Kingstone, A. (2017). Moral judgement by the disconnected left and right cerebral hemispheres: A Split-Brain Investigation. Royal Society Open Science, 4(7), 170172. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.170172. Available

Yergin, D., & Stanislaw, J. (1998). The commanding heights: The battle between government and the marketplace that is remaking the modern world. Simon & Schuster.

Casting a Vote

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October 20, 2024

By Stephen Stofka

This week’s letter takes an economic perspective on our vote. Economists classify goods into four categories: private, toll, public and pooled. Two characteristics distinguish the four categories: whether a good is rivalrous and excludable. A quart of milk is rivalrous. My consumption of that quart precludes someone else from consuming it. We typically exclude goods by attaching a price to them. National defense is a non-excludable good because it is not possible to prevent a person from enjoying the benefits of national defense.

A private good is both rivalrous and excludable. A toll good is non-rivalrous but excludable. A toll highway is a clear example. One person’s use of the road does not prevent another person from using it. The entries to the highway are usually controlled in some way so that people have to pay to use the highway. A public good is non-rivalrous and non-excludable. Again, national defense is a clear example of this type of good. The last category are pooled goods which are rivalrous but non-excludable. Ocean fishing is an example. One person’s catch reduces the number of fish in the ocean so that the good is rivalrous. There is no practical way to limit or exclude access to the ocean. These classifications can help economists analyze the dynamics of a particular market (Fulton & Gray, 2007).

Given that background, what type of good is a vote? There are two aspects here: the vote itself, and the mechanics of voting. The vote itself is a toll good, excludable but non-rivalrous. One person casting a vote does not effectively reduce another person’s ability to vote. However, the mechanical act of voting in person is rivalrous. There are time restrictions when polling stations are open and only one person can use a voting machine at a time. Mail in voting removes the time restrictions of polling stations. Early voting expands time restrictions. Both give voters more freedom and convenience. Donald Trump and his allies in the Republican Party want to abolish mail in voting and restrict early voting to control access more effectively to the vote.

How does that work? Voters in rural and suburban areas, who are more likely to vote Republican, typically have fewer registered voters per polling place than voters in dense urban areas. In the 2016 election, the Election Assistance Commission reported that half of jurisdictions had fewer than 1000 registered voters per polling place. A quarter of jurisdictions reported twice that many voters per polling place (p. 4). Voters in those districts do not have equal access to the polling stations where they can cast their vote. Mail in voting and early voting help to equalize the mechanical effort of casting a vote.

Presidential elections in the U.S. are conducted in a variety of ways in the 10,000 voting districts in the 50 states. In a 2010 article in the Election Law Journal, Spencer and Markovits (2010) noted a few examples to show the breadth of that variety. In Wisconsin and Michigan, each local district controls their own election procedures. In Oklahoma and Washington, elections are managed by officials who are all state employees. The Election Assistance Commission reported nearly a 117,000 polling places in the 2016 election.

Many people might be surprised to learn that there is no right to vote contained in the language of the Constitution. In the 2004 Presidential election, voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida endured long lines to cast their vote. In some urban precincts in Ohio, voters waited ten hours to vote, and the long wait was especially prevalent in predominantly black districts (Powell & Stevin, 2004). The following year, Illinois, Ohio and Utah passed laws permitting early voting. Today early voting is permitted in all but three states – Mississippi, Alabama and New Hampshire. (See this map at CBS News). Many “red” states in the south permit early voting to all voters but restrict mail-in ballots. Thirty-seven states permit both early voting and mail-in ballots.

For decades, mail-in ballots were often used by Republican voters. Stalwart Trump supporters like Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin supported early voting. Trump and his allies now want to roll back state efforts to improve access to the vote. Why? Trump believes that early voting cost him the 2020 election. Winning is Trump’s only principle. Any election rule that advantages his supporters and disadvantages his opponents is a winning strategy. The Brennan Center for Justice tracks changes to election law in the states. Since the last election, states have passed more measures that expand access to voting than restrict access. Should Trump win the election this year, he will champion election integrity as a pretense to roll back laws that expand access to voting. Winning – and staying out of jail – is all that matters.

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Fulton, Murray, and Richard Gray. 2007. Toll Goods and Agricultural Policy Saskatoon, SK: Canadian Agricultural Innovation Research Network. issue brief.

Powell, M., & Stevin, P. (2004, December 15). Several factors contributed to “Lost” voters in Ohio. Washington Post.

Spencer, Douglas M., and Zachary S. Markovits. 2010. “Long Lines at Polling Stations? Observations from an Election Day Field Study.” Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics, and Policy 9(1): 3–17. doi: 10.1089/elj.2009.0046. Available at: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/epdf/10.1089/elj.2009.0046. The authors cite a field study of polling stations in California, a state with a strong Democratic majority. The study found that 11% of registered voters who did not vote in the 2008 election, indicated long lines as the primary reason for their not voting.

A Golden Age

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By Stephen Stofka

October 6, 2024

This week’s letter is about Golden Age voters. There are two types:

  1. those who think that the past was better than the current age,
  2. those who believe that the future will be better than the current age

The first type are deteriorationists. The more common term is pessimists. The second type is what 19th century writers called perfectibilians, or perfectionists. I will discuss the first type in this week’s letter and continue with the  second type in next week’s letter.

The concept of a Golden Age is a framework of interpretation. What’s that? Imagine two voters who witness an event, like the TV coverage of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. Let’s say that both voters have a similar recognition of the event, meaning that both voters acknowledge that the event happened. (Many times, voters do not share this critical first step, acknowledging that an event happened). Interpretation assigns context to an impression, the raw sensory data we receive, to provide an understanding of the event.

An impression like a sight or sound may happen in an instant. Through technology we can slow that instant down to a sequence of still pictures or an audio playback. It is here that we may reassess our initial impression. Director and writer Michael Antonioni explored this theme in his 1966 movie Blow Up (Spoiler alert in the notes).  In baseball, umpires may overturn a called out when slow motion instant replay reveals that the runner’s foot touched the base a microsecond before the baseball entered the baseman’s mitt.

Interpretation is the active construction of a story surrounding the impression. The sound of several sharp cracks in the air. That’s the impression. Fireworks or gunshots? That’s the story. We think it was fireworks and we relax. Then we hear screams following the sharp cracks. Fireworks or gunshots? The sequence of impressions causes us to change the story. We reinterpret the initial sounds as gunshots and look for cover. Many of can reach consensus over an immediate and short sequence of impressions. We are less likely to tell similar stories when there is a complicated sequence of events over time.

Three weeks ago, I wrote about the shortcuts we take to make decisions. Daniel Kahneman wrote an entire book Thinking Fast and Slow about our use of these heuristics. As related events unfold, our interpretations of events becomes a Tower of Babel, the Biblical origin story for the thousands of languages that humans have evolved. As interpretations multiply, interpretive frameworks help to coalesce the many into the few. Some frameworks like conspiracy theories satisfy our innate drive to understand the cause of a particular event like 9-11 or the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Central to many conspiracy theories are intention, design and collaboration. They do not include randomness, hubris and human folly.

Many popular love songs longingly remember a Golden Age in a couple’s relationship. Some older people look back with nostalgia on the 1950s as a time of American values and prosperity. The earliest writings of human history imagine an idyllic era in the past. A paradise was corrupted by humans and the result is a fallen world. In the 8th century BCE, the Greek poet Hesiod imagined human history as a succession of ages of decline after a Golden Age. Egyptian literature tells of a paradise where gods and humans lived together. Some accounts imagine an idyllic paradise ruined by a single human act. The Bible tells the story of a Garden of Eden where all wants were satisfied until Eve was tempted to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Her hubris and disobedience caused God to evict her and Adam from the garden paradise. The Greek myth of Pandora’s box echoes that theme. When Pandora disobeys and opens a box she is told not to open, all known evils are unleashed upon the world.

Some voters interpret current events within this context. There was a time in the past when certain values were cherished and practiced by many good people, they believe. New ideas have taken hold of the country’s institutions and corrupted people’s virtues. Someone gains prominence and power by promising to restore the country to a more virtuous or prosperous state. A key word is again. In 1979, Khomeini returned from exile to restore Islamic virtue and practice to Iran. In 1933, Adolph Hitler promised to restore dignity to the German people and restore the lands held by the Germanic tribes in antiquity. In 2016, Donald Trump promised to restore traditional American virtues and lead an army of supporters to make America great again. Three very different people and circumstances who used the appeal of again.

For this type of voter, restore and again are key words. They rally supporters of policies regarding hot button issues like abortion. Example: in 2016, Donald Trump had the support of legislators and religious groups who wanted to restore the abortion issue to the states. These key words help join a group of voters who share a similar outlook. Next week, I will look at those voters who look to the future as they interpret current events.

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Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

Spoiler alert!!!! – In the 1966 movie Blow Up, an expanded photo of a scene in a park reveals a murder taking place in the background.

Seniors Spend, Seniors Vote

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January 7, 2024

by Stephen Stofka

This week’s letter examines the spending habits of seniors and the effect of that behavior on the broader economy. The growth of spending in this age group surpasses all others. Seniors spend money and they vote their interests.

In 2020, the Census Bureau estimated the population 65+ at 55.8 million, almost all of them collecting Social Security. One in six people in the U.S. is older than 65 but made up 26% of the 154.6 million voters in 2020, making them overrepresented voters, according to the Census Bureau. They vote to protect their programs, their priorities and preferences. In 2000, Social Security income represented 4% of the country’s total income. Today, it is 5%. Their assets, incomes and spending habits affect the entire population.

In 2000, seniors aged 65+ were just 3% of the labor force, according to the BLS. The 2008-9 recession dealt a blow to the retirement plans of many older folks who continued working past their retirement age. In 2020, when the pandemic rocked the economy, seniors comprised 6.8% of the labor force. Many seniors did not return to the labor force and today, almost four years after the pandemic began, their share of the labor force has remained the same, about 6.8%. Had their share of the labor force continued to grow, seniors in the labor force would total about 13.2 million. The latest data from the BLS indicates an actual level of 11.5 million, a shortage of 1.7 million. Adding in that shortage would raise the unemployment rate above 4.5% from the current level of 3.7%. The chart below shows the approximate shortage.

The Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances shows that incomes taper off after middle-age (page 7). Senior workers were part of an age group that was particularly vulnerable to the Covid-19 virus. As many businesses shut down in March 2020, many seniors had few options except to file for Social Security to secure an alternative income source. Monthly payments to recipients rose sharply from $78.1 billion in February 2020, the month before pandemic restrictions, to $89.4 billion in February 2022, according to the Social Security Administration. Also, many seniors who had paid off their mortgages would have an “imputed” income generated by the investment in their house. Restaurants and gathering places reopened in the summer of 2020 then shut down again as Covid-19 cases surged. States reopened these venues on a gradual basis with staggered or outdoor seating only. As vaccines became available in the first quarter of 2021, seniors were the first to be eligible. Personal consumption expenditures jumped almost $1 trillion in March and April of that year and seniors led the spending surge.

Imagine feeling forced to retire and not being able to enjoy leisure activities like movies, golf, travel, museums or dining out. These activities were mostly shut down from March 2020 to the spring of 2021. The New York Fed conducts a triannual (3x a year) survey of household spending that reveals some interesting changes in spending habits in response to the pandemic. Those under age 40 had the highest rate of large purchases. People over age 60 increased their overall spending by the most – 9.1%. In the chart below, that senior age group is the dotted green line at the top. By the first quarter of 2023, seniors were still increasing their spending while the younger age groups had cut back. Notice that spending growth by seniors, the green dotted line in the graph below, were consistently the highest of all age groups.

According to an analysis by the Pension Rights Center, half of all senior households have income less than $50,000. That same household spending survey found that those with low incomes increased their spending by the largest percentage of the income groups. In the first quarter of 2022, households in this low income group increased their spending by almost 10%, as indicated by the red dashed line in the chart below.

In the first quarter of 2023, their spending came down along with all other income groups but then sprang up again during the spring of summer of this past year. This age and income group has contributed to the strength of consumer spending this past year.

This year promises to be one of the most contentious in our history. Elections are won by a coalition of groups and for the past decade, the voting coalitions are evenly matched. The voting rules in a democracy naturally allow some groups to command a dominant voice that is out of proportion to their numbers. One out of six Americans are seniors and one out of four voters are seniors. Their vote will advantage their own interests and priorities at the disadvantage of other groups. That’s democracy.

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Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Keywords: consumer finances, spending, voting, income, household income

Believing In Answers

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December 19, 2021

by Stephen Stofka

Over the next twenty-five years most of the Boomer generation, 1946-64, will pass into history, the last generation of the Age of Modernity that began four hundred years ago. Boomer children were taught by the Silent generation, 1928-45, that had endured the Depression of the inter-war period and World War 2. The Silents had emphasized a mechanical approach to learning, drilling Boomers in multiplication, diagramming sentences and the Pythagorean theorem. Boomers learned to salute the flag in recognition of the American values of democracy, freedom of speech, religion and markets. On the other side of the world were the Communists who were against these freedoms. The Boomers were taught that there were right and wrong answers, but the 1960s would challenge that Modernist mechanical view.

As the vanguard of the Boomer generation turned 65 in 2016, those of the Silent Generation voted for Donald Trump by a 19+ margin. He was the deal maker who offered a black and white version of a complicated world. Build a wall. Free markets. More oil, more coal. Make stuff again and Make America Great, a refrain from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election. Mr. Trump appealed to people who had learned to fit answers to questions like folding a carton or assembling a piece of furniture from Ikea. In a striking difference of opinion, only 50% of Boomers voted for Trump’s black and white vision.

This was the last election in which the Silent and Boomer generations had the dominant voice, falling to 44% of voters in the 2020 elections (Igielnik et al, 2021). More recent generations, the GenXers and Millennials were more tolerant of differing perspectives. In 1965, Congress revamped the restrictive immigration rules of the previous four decades to allow more immigrants from around the world. Educators taught the process of finding answers as well as the answers. Children learned that there might be more than one solution to a problem.

Although they grew up in an analog world, the GenXers and Xenials were the first generation to come of age in the digital world of the late 1980s and early 1990s (Wolfe, 2020). As earlier generations learned French or Spanish, some Millennial children learned a programming language so they could converse with a computer. A growing pluralism characterized this widening world and marked a transition from the modern to what is now called the post-modern. Later scholars may call this post-war period the beginning of the Age of Pluralism, marked by conflicting authorities, answers and solutions. Many people raised in a monoculture of similar assumptions are uncomfortable with more open perspective. Like all transitions, there is a political struggle to control the discourse.

We have put aside few of our past controversies. Despite a growing condemnation of slavery since the 19th century, the 2020 US Conference of Catholic Bishops estimated that there are still 40 million slaves in the world (2020, 4). Americans are still bound by a Constitution written in an age when people espoused equal rights in principle but believed in a natural supremacy of some races. Our laws and judicial precedents are imprinted with the beliefs and contradictions of that founding generation.

Shortly after the ratification of the Constitution, Jean Baptiste Lamarck (Famous Scientists, n.d.) formalized the evolutionary theory of acquired traits. A giraffe had a long neck because successive generations had stretched skyward to reach tree leaves and had passed this characteristic onto their offspring. For the same reason, some groups of people had evolved more even temperaments and better reasoning skills. To the founding generation, it was eminently reasonable that only men who owned property and demonstrated responsibility could vote.

In the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith (2009) wrote “by nature the philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter as a mastiff is from a greyhound.” This observation recognized the commonality of our species as human beings but distinguished people by breed or race. When Smith refers to segments of the British population as a “race of laborers” he does not distinguish race by color as we do today but by capability. Like different breeds of dogs, some races were better suited for certain tasks.

Each generation leaves a legacy of their aspirations, their beliefs and fallacies codified into the institutions that govern successive generations. In the next decade, most of the Silent Generation will have passed into history but their thirst for clear and simple answers will persist in our politics. The Boomers sit on the fence between the mechanical viewpoint of the modern and the fluid perspective of the post-modern. Although their influence will decline at the polls, they will continue to control a lot of the country’s wealth so politicians will court their favor.

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Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Igielnik, R., Keeter, S., & Hartig, H. (2021, September 30). Behind Biden’s 2020 victory. Pew Research Center – U.S. Politics & Policy. Retrieved December 18, 2021, from https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-bidens-2020-victory/

Famous Scientists. (n.d.). Jean Baptiste Lamarck. Famous Scientists. Retrieved December 18, 2021, from https://www.famousscientists.org/jean-baptiste-lamarck/

Smith, A. (2009). Wealth of Nations. New York: Classic House Books. (Book 1, Chapter 2).

USCCB. (2020). Anti-trafficking toolkit 2020 – USCCB. U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Retrieved December 18, 2021, from https://www.usccb.org/about/anti-trafficking-program/upload/Anti-Trafficking-Toolkit-2020.pdf

Wolfe, H. (2020, July 22). Millennials, baby boomers, gen X and gen Z: The cutoff years for each generation. Considerable. Retrieved December 18, 2021, from https://www.considerable.com/life/people/generation-names/

A Tug of War

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June 7, 2020

by Steve Stofka

Is grandma your enemy? An uncomfortable thought. Different generations have different concerns. Funding a solution to one generation’s problem may take resources from other generations. Grandma wants to protect her Social Security and Medicare. Grandma votes her interests.

The introduction of Social Security eighty years ago marked an extraordinary shift in federal policy. For the first time in the history of this country the government took money from one set of people – those who were younger and working – and gave it to other people. This transfer was not a reward for military service – an old soldier pension – but a reward for getting old.  

During the Great Depression thousands of banks failed and millions of people lost their savings. That crisis called for a solution. Instead of addressing the problem, FDR and a super-majority of congressional Democrats created a permanent program that transferred money from people raising families to retired people. No military or community service required. The combined tax contribution to fund the program was 2%. It is now more than six times that.

In 1965, Democrats again enjoyed a super-majority in Congress and a Democratic President. Never waste a super-majority. There are no checks and balances. They passed the Medicare program, funded by a tax on working families who were ineligible for benefits under the program. In every election, old people vote to keep their benefits, and are the largest demographic of voters (Census Bureau, 2019). 

Younger voters change addresses more often. In dense urban areas with multiple voting districts, they are more likely to have out of date voter registration. Voters in rural districts remain in the same voting district when they move a few miles. Rural voters are predominantly older, white and conservative. In the first half of the 20th Century, rural populations migrated from the farm to the city. Rural voters controlled political power in many states because one rural vote counted far more than one urban vote. In two decisions in the 1960s, the Supreme Court interpreted the Constitution to mean one person, one vote (Mosvick, 2020).

As the children of farmers continued to move away in the last half of the century, rural voters adopted other strategies to control electoral power. Less funding for polling places in urban areas, claims of voter fraud, lifetime restrictions against voting by convicted felons, and locating prisons in rural areas where the prisoners are included in the county’s population, but the prisoners cannot vote. Groups like Judicial Watch initiate hundreds of lawsuits in Democratic leaning counties to invalidate the registrations of many voters (Lacy, 2020).

In 1965, a year after passage of the Civil Rights Act, President Johnson hoped that the newly instituted Medicare program would help stem the defection of Southern voters from the Democratic Party. It didn’t. The Party had successfully stifled the voting power of black people in the south for a century. The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments which gave black people voting power and citizenship status had been forced on the Southern states after their defeat in the Civil War. Feeling that President Johnson and the party had betrayed them, voters sought a champion who could protect white voting power. 

Richard Nixon became their champion by default. In the 1968 race, the Republican candidate employed a “ southern strategy” that spoke to white voters worried that the recently passed Civil Rights Act would give blacks too much electoral power. In the spring, riots and demonstrations broke out after Martin Luther King’s assassination. At the Democratic Convention that summer, bloody conflicts broke out between Chicago police and anti-Vietnam War demonstrators. Nixon promised to be a law and order President, protecting the “old order,” older Americans and the white rural domination that had been the calling card of the Democratic Party in the South. When leading Democratic candidate Robert Kennedy was assassinated that summer, the party was too disorganized to mount a challenge to Nixon. He won by a convincing margin in the electoral college, but bested Hubert Humphrey by only ½% of the popular vote (Wikipedia, 2020). 9 million voters chose Independent Party candidate George Wallace, who appealed to disaffected conservative Democratic voters in the South (PBS, n.d.).

Some of us have supremacist attitudes, some of us condemn those attitudes. Some of us feel threatened at the sight of a black man and call the police. Some of us understand Black Lives Matter; others don’t. We all understand our point of view a lot better than our neighbor’s. We all want to be believed more than believe.

We grant police the sanctioned use of force but we require temperance in their use of it. Clearly, there are many officers who do not have a tempered behavior. The lie is that it is a few bad apples. Smart phones have become common only in the past decade and there are hundreds of videos of officers acting without restraint. In another ten years, there will be thousands.

 One person, one vote. This country has been engaged in a tug of war since its founding. Regional and generational interests pitted against each other. Rural against urban. Businesses vs workers. City governments vs. workers. States vs. citizens. Decide which end of the rope you are on and pull. Grandma grabs the rope. In every election, a lot of money and effort is spent to prevent people from voting. If you don’t vote you are doing those on the other end of the rope a favor and they thank you.

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Notes:

Photo by Arnaud Jaegers on Unsplash

Census Bureau. (2019, July 16). Behind the 2018 U.S. Midterm Election Turnout. Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/04/behind-2018-united-states-midterm-election-turnout.html

Lacy, A. (2020, May 28). Right-Wing Groups Aims to Purge 800,000 Voters in Pennsylvania. Retrieved from https://theintercept.com/2020/05/28/pennsylvania-voter-rolls-purge-judicial-watch/

Mosvick, N. (2020, March 26). On this day, Supreme Court reviews redistricting. Retrieved from https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/blog/on-this-day-supreme-court-reviews-redistricting.  Also, see Stahl, 2015.

PBS. (n.d.). Thematic Window: The Election of 1968. Retrieved from https://www.pbs.org/johngardner/chapters/5a.html

 Stahl, J. (2015, December 7). Baker v. Carr: The Supreme Court gets involved in redistricting. Retrieved from https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/baker-v-carr-the-supreme-court-gets-involved-in-redistricting

Wikipedia. (2020, June 06). 1968 United States presidential election. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_United_States_presidential_election

You Don’t Count

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April 12, 2020

by Steve Stofka

Wisconsin voters held their state’s primary this past week. At stake was an important state Supreme Court seat. The long lines at the few polling places open in urban areas highlighted the distinction in voting power between urban and rural communities. Voters in urban areas that are largely Democratic must wait for hours to vote while those in rural Republican leaning districts experience short wait times when they vote (NCSL, 2014).

Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi advocates a federal law requiring states to have a mail in ballot as an option in federal elections. Republicans from low population states want to protect the enormous power that their rural communities have over those in urban areas. They continue to resist mail in ballots.

The map below from the Census Bureau shows the population density per county (US Census Bureau, 2018). The light green and yellow areas have populations below the U.S. average, which is only 88 people per square mile. Western European countries have an average of 468 people per square mile, more than 5 times the density of the U.S.

I have numbered the 7 states that had not implemented stay at home orders as of April 6th (Silverstein, 2020). Each state is one of 21 states that have less than 1% of the nation’s population (List, 2020).

Twelve of those states have majority rural populations (HAC, 2011).  25 states have only 20% of the country’s population but each state gets two Senators, regardless of population. The Senate does not have proportional representation.  20% of voters control half of the Senate.

This outrageous discrepancy in voting power grew out of – stop reading and guess. Did you guess slavery? That’s right. At this country’s founding, the slave states in the south did not want the more populous states in the north to make slavery illegal in the southern states. In an age when most people grew their own food, the northern states guessed that the population of the southern states would grow more quickly because of the longer growing season. The Senate and the Electoral College were a compromise between slave and free states at the country’s founding.

Many of the plains and Rocky Mountain states have little population but have the same power in the Senate as states with twenty times their population. Why are there so many states with so few people? Stop reading and guess again. Did you guess slavery? Right again. There were 37 states in 1870, five years after the Civil War, but the western territories had already been formed during or just prior to the Civil War. So how did slavery lead to the formation of states?

Let’s look at the example of Colorado. The discovery of gold near Pikes Peak attracted a large influx of people into the region in 1859. In December 1860, a month after Lincoln was elected President, South Carolina seceded from the Union. In February 1861, two months before the formal secession of the other states, an act was introduced into the Congress to make Colorado a territory. Why? To secure mineral rights for the coming war. 15 years later, Colorado finally became a state.

In January 1862, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, recognized Arizona as a Territory. The population was sympathetic to slavery and Davis hoped to use Arizona as a launching point to capture California and it’s gold. Imagine the Confederate Army camped out on the Colorado River, in present day Lake Havasu, prepared to invade – yes, hundreds of miles of godforsaken desert. This was not a well thought out plan by Mr. Davis.

Tit for tat. A month later, the U.S. Congress, composed of only delegates from Union states, recognized Arizona as a territory along different borders to block the recognition of the Territory under the borders established by the Confederacy.  Because of its low population, the territories of Arizona and neighboring New Mexico did not become states until 1912, when progressives of both parties overcame persistent opposition in the Senate to pass the 17th Amendment (NCC, n.d.). That amendment gave voters in each state the power to elect their state’s two Senators.

 Wyoming used to have more sheep than people (USDA, 2018). People in the state now outnumber sheep almost 2-to-1. It was part of the Nebraska Territory that was created along with the Kansas Territory prior to the Civil War as part of the Kansas-Nebraska act. A month after S. Carolina’s secession in response to Lincoln’s election, Kansas entered the union as a free state in 1861. Both the Union and the Confederacy engaged in a concerted effort to secure territory and its resources in anticipation of war.  Nebraska became a state after the Civil War. The Union states wanted power in the Senate to secure the Civil War Amendments and other legislation passed after the war. Nebraska voters get 20 times more clout in the Senate than voters in New York. Why? Don’t pause. The answer is slavery again.

As part of the effort to secure the Civil War Amendments, Nevada was made a state a month after the 13th Amendment passed out of the Senate on its way to the states in 1864. As it is today, there were few people living in the territory. Congress wanted access to the silver mines in the territory and it mandated that Nevada outlaw slavery as a precondition to statehood.

The territories of Utah and New Mexico were created as part of the Compromise of 1850 to keep a balance between the slave holding states and the free states. Antipathy to Mormons delayed admission of the Utah Territory into the Union until 1896.

Will the Civil War continue to influence our everyday lives? During the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s we would read about animosities between Albanians and Serbs that dated back to the 14th Century (Geldenhuys, 2014). Shi’a and Sunni Muslims are still killing each other over a controversy about Mohammed’s successor following his death in the 7th century (McLean, n.d.). If America lasts a few more centuries, the Civil War’s legacy of injustice and bitterness will infect our descendants because it is baked into our institutions.

For a hundred years after the Civil War, Democrats fought to limit access to the vote and punished or killed those who fought for the rights of black voters in southern states. For the past fifty years, the baton of injustice has passed to the Republicans who deny people this fundamental right. Voting is a blood sport. Those who want greater access to voting will have to fight for it.

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Notes:

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

Geldenhuys, D. (2014). Contested States In World Politics. New York. Palgrave MacMillan. (p. 107-8)

Housing Assistance Council (HAC). (2011, November). Rurality in the United States. [PDF]. Retrieved from http://www.ruralhome.org/storage/research_notes/Rural_Research_Note_Rurality_web.pdf (p.4).

List of U.S. states by population (List). (2020, April 2). Retrieved from https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population

McLean, J. (n.d.). World Civilization. Retrieved from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-hccc-worldcivilization/chapter/muhammads-successors/

National Constitution Center (NCC). (n.d.). The Seventeenth Amendment. Retrieved from https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/interpretation/amendment-xvii/interps/147

NCSL. (2014, October). States and Election Reform. The Canvass (Issue 52). [PDF]. Retrieved from https://www.ncsl.org/Documents/legismgt/elect/Canvass_Oct_2014_No_52.pdf

Silverstein, J. (2020, April 6). 43 states now have stay-at-home orders for coronavirus. These are the 7 that don’t. [Web page]. Retrieved from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/stay-at-home-orders-states/

US Census Bureau. (2018, May 7). Population Density by County: 2010. Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2010/geo/population-density-county-2010.html

The Voting Market

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June 9, 2019

by Steve Stofka

One hundred years ago, Congress passed the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote (Note #1). Despite the ratification of the amendment, many African Americans and those from Asian countries faced barriers to voting (Note #2). During the 18th and 19th centuries, America and other developed nations denied women civil and legal rights through marriage and coverture laws (Note #3). Some Islamic nations like Saudi Arabia continue to exclude women from the rights enjoyed by men.

Two-hundred thirty years ago, the Declaration of Independence stated a natural right that all people are created equal.  Unlike our sentiments, 18th and 19th century Americans regarded natural rights as separate from legal and civil rights. When drafting the 14th Amendment following the Civil War, Republicans based their case for black citizenship on natural rights. Such a strategy, however, strengthened the claims of women who wanted the right to vote. Republican lawmakers added Section 2, which specified male persons (Note #4).    

Human societies have a long history of restricting the freedoms of some members of their society. Why? There’s a profitable payoff. The American Medical Society restricts the number of doctors who can be licensed. The result is that American general practitioners enjoy the highest earnings among all nations – double the average of developed countries (Note #5).

Established suppliers of a product or service enjoy less competition and greater profits if they can convince lawmakers to restrict entry into that market. Hundreds of occupational licensing laws reduce the threat of more competitive pricing and cost consumers billions of dollars (Note #6). Older people may remember the Blue Laws preventing the conduct of some business on Sunday (Note #7).  Most Blue Laws today concern the sale of alcohol on Sunday but some states, including Colorado and some Midwest states, prohibit the sale of automobiles on Sunday. Most banks are closed on Sunday, but some states have begun to relax those rules (Note #8). Post Office branches used to offer savings accounts, but these were discontinued in the 1960s (Note #9). To help those who are largely unbanked, post offices could start offering simple banking services again (Note #10).

Each vote is a lottery ticket to choose who has political power. Most votes cancel each other out so there is an incentive for those with similar voting preferences to join forces to make voting easier for their group and difficult for those with different preferences.  

The first debates between Democratic contenders for the 2020 election begin this month. In the coming year, watch for even more strategies designed to restrict or liberalize voting. The election officials in some counties will not operate enough polling places so that lines are long, and voting is inconvenient for some of its citizens, particularly for those who are likely to vote the Democratic ticket. Some states will have vigorous voter registration drives to draw in more voters for the Democratic ticket.

To counter these efforts, Republican lawmakers in some states have passed laws making it more difficult to validate last minute registrations (Note #11). They argue that the integrity of the vote is their only concern and they point out that many Republican led legislatures have implemented DMV registration to make registration easier. Several states are instituting registration at social agencies as well (Note # 12). Democratic organizations characterize any restrictions as voter suppression.

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Notes:

  1. Background on 19th Amendment
  2. Citizenship and voting restrictions in the first half of the 20th century
  3. Marriage and coverture laws denying women the right to own property separate from their husbands
  4. Drafting the 14th Amendment
  5. Comparison of doctors’ earnings
  6. Occupational Licensing laws
  7. Blue Laws
  8. Banks open on Sunday
  9. US Postal Service savings accounts
  10. Proposals to have postal service offer banking services
  11. Laws to restrict voter registration
  12. 36 states are taking steps to modernize voter registration