When it comes to the widening “post-fact,” “post-truth” and “fake news” landscape supposedly foisted on naïve Americans by the alt-right, it would be hard to outdo the progressive narrative of how Wisconsin’s voter ID law “suppressed” turnout and handed Donald Trump the state’s ten electoral votes.
Desperate to prove that the ID rules “blocked vast numbers” of minority and poor Democrats from voting, the left has created its own alt-reality, using Milwaukee and Wisconsin turnout as a case study. Uncertainties, deceptions, errors and exaggerations mar their efforts.
The Los Angeles Times‘s “race and justice” reporter, Jaweed Kaleem provided the most jarring example when, in an article attempting to cast doubt on the Wisconsin outcome, he wrote: “In a state [Wisconsin] that saw its lowest turnout in 20 years, nearly 3 million people voted in Milwaukee, roughly 41,000 fewer than in the last presidential election.” [Emphasis added.]
The 3 million figure should have been a red flag for even half-asleep copy editors. Milwaukee’s entire population in 2015 according to the Census Bureau was 594,833 people—hardly a state secret that can’t be verified on the Internet. The newspaper fixed it later with this unapologetic notice: “For the record; An earlier version of this story said nearly 3 million people voted in Milwaukee. That was the number who voted in the entire state. In Milwaukee, nearly 248,000 people voted.”
End of story. No regrets expressed. It’s not even called a correction. No telling how many copy editors’ hands this story traversed without anyone noticing the glaring—let’s be charitable—lapse. Was it the results of incompetence, an overworked staff or an inclination of left-leaning journalists to not question even the most obvious errors?
But there’s something even more telling than this, err, slipup. Kaleem’s story extensively quotes academics and assorted experts who either conclude a priori that requiring an ID suppresses turnout or who are determined to turn over every rock to prove that it is so. No mention is made of the possibility that any reduction in turnout is evidence that some people were deterred from voting because—gasp—they were ineligible. It’s a common sense hypothesis that requires the same energetic and determined research. But gathering from Kaleem’s glaring omission of this possibility, he doesn’t seem to think such a thing is remotely possible.
Wait, it gets better. The left has circulated the fiction that 300,000 “qualified” Wisconsin voters were turned away—”disenfranchised”—at the polls because they didn’t have the prescribed ID.
Even before the election, the excitable Nation magazine warned that “Wisconsin’s Voter-ID Law Could Block 300,000 Registered Voters From the Polls.” It bulletined that “noted voting-rights expert” Allan Lichtman apocalyptically forewarned that the Wisconsin ID law “represents the first time since the era of the literacy test that state officials have told eligible voters that they cannot exercise their fundamental right to vote—not in the next election, probably not ever.” Welcome back, Jim Crow.
After the election, that 300,000 figure has doggedly hung around, cited hither and yon among progressives looking for any reason to explain why Trump stole the election from Hillary Clinton. Dan Arel, a freelance columnist for the Huffington Post and others, flatly Tweeted: “Trump won Wisconsin by 27,000 votes. 300,000 voters were turned away by the states (sic) strict Voter ID law. There is your ‘rigged’ election.” The assumption being that 300,000 voters actually were turned away and they were overwhelmingly Clinton supporters who would have easily erased Trump’s victory.
Baloney. After someone apparently clued him in, Arel later admitted that the 300,000 figure—amounting to about 9 percent of registered voters—was an estimate of how many voters were “potentially impacted” by the voter ID law. In other words, it’s not an actual headcount of qualified voters turned away. In fact, no one knows how many were turned away because no one was actually counting.
Nevertheless, that 300,000 figure of “potentially impacted” voters still is getting tossed around as if it were fact. So, where did it originate and what exactly does it mean? In Ruthelle Frank et al. v. Scott Walker, U.S. District Judge Lynn S. Adelman endorsed the number based on “expert testimony” from Leland Beatty, a statistical marketing consult hired by the plaintiffs. In tossing out Wisconsin’s ID law in 2014 (the decision later was overturned by a federal appeals court) Adelman relinquished his jurisprudence to the dodgy soft science of sociology—the favorite tool of progressives.
To fully appreciate how risky it is to rely on such squishy evidence requires you to wade through 19 pages of Appendixes A, B and C of Adelman’s decision that attempts to explain the “science” behind the conclusion. Because no one counts the actual numbers, the researcher faces a number of conundrums: How do you calculate the number of people who are registered to vote, but who don’t have the documents you need to vote? To come up with a number you somehow must accurately match voter registration rolls and, say, a Department of Motor Vehicle dataset. Then you have to comb through other databases to verify the race, ethnicity and incomes of those registered voters who don’t have “proper” IDs. From this stew magically emerges the 300,000.
Merging separate databases from different sources hardly inspires confidence, which is why the appendixes are packed with so many caveats, qualifiers and reservations. Suffice to say that Adelman’s “finding of fact” was somewhat less than actual fact, but sufficient enough to be passed around among the aggrieved left as established fact.
This is much more than an academic question. Conflicting decisions about voter ID laws are marching to the U.S. Supreme Court, including a recent one that approved a Virginia law. Whoever the new president appoints to the high court, the critical question to be faced is whether the law has a disparate impact on minority or other voters in violation of the Constitution’s equal protection clause and the Voting Rights Act.
Proving the existence of disparate impact should demand—from the courts and the media—a more stringent and persuasive test than the murky marketing hocus pocus that is taken by progressive ideologues as fact and truth.
Chicagoan Dennis Byrne is writing a book about how the corrupt Chicago Way made a mess of O’Hare International Airport.
