Raising barriers to voting, with predictable consequences

What happens to the electorate when you tighten up rules for voting? Does everyone have a harder time voting, or are some groups of voters affected more than others?

We got some evidence on this question in Colorado recently. For several election cycles, Colorado has provided mail-in ballots automatically to those who have registered as requesting mail-in ballots in previous cycles. In late 2011, Secretary of State Scott Gessler announced that the state's mail-in ballots would henceforth only be sent out automatically to those who were "active" voters, meaning they had voted in the last general election. This led to a dispute between Gessler's office and the counties of Denver and Pueblo, with the Brennan Center and Colorado Common Cause getting involved. I was brought in as an expert witness to help determine the effect that the change would have on the electorate, specifically with regards to race.

With the help of University of Denver geographer Paul Sutton, I compared voting precincts in Denver, Pueblo, and throughout the state based on their racial breakdowns and on the percent of voters listed as IFTV ("Inactive - failed to vote," meaning they did not vote in the last general election). Below is a scatterplot showing the percent of residents who are Latino compared to the percent who are IFTV status, by precinct within Denver:

That's a very strong relationship, suggesting that the rule change would have a disproportionate impact on Latinos, making it less likely that they'll receive a mail-in ballot. Basically the same trend was found among African American residents:

I found these same patterns within Pueblo County and across the state as a whole.

Sutton then made these maps for Denver County, showing roughly the same trends geographically (click to expand):

Again, the trend is quite consistent: the higher concentration of a racial minority group within a precinct, the more people in that precinct who did not vote in the previous general election, and the more people who would be deprived of an automatic mail-in ballot.

Now, there is an ecological inference issue here: I'm making individual-level interpretations using precinct-level data. To try to get around this, I employed the ecological inference program Eco to make some approximations of the individual-level behavior. The results estimated that roughly 10 percent of eligible white voters were IFTV status, but roughly a third of Latinos and African Americans were IFTV status. The change in the rule on mail-in ballots would have meant racial minorities having a harder time voting by mail than whites.

Based partially on this analysis, the judge in the case ruled against Gessler, and the change in mail-in voter policy is not being implemented. But given partisan voting patterns among different racial groups, it's not hard to imagine how this would have played out electorally had it been enforced.

(Cross-posted from Mischiefs of Faction)

The complex racial views of Jess Robin

As far as I know, "The Jazz Singer" (1980) is the only mainstream Hollywood film that can be considered Yom Kippur-themed. (No, "Atonement" doesn't count.) Thus I find myself thinking about the Neil Diamond film every year on Yom Kippur. Just FYI, despite the fact that the film is broadly labeled a bomb and that Lawrence Olivier himself derided it as a "piece of shit," it is considered a classic in my family and can be quoted from liberally by my relatives just as easily as "Godfather" and "Princess Bride."

This year, I found myself stewing over the film's bizarre racial message. To wit:

• Jess Robin's (Neil Diamond) best friend in the film is an African American singer named Bubba, who is trying to make a living as a member of an all-black band called the Four Brothers. When one of the Brothers gets arrested, Robin fills in at a gig at an all-black nightclub by wearing blackface (see picture above). Yes, blackface. Now, I know this is a shout-out to the 1927 Al Jolson version of the film, but still, blackface.
• In this same scene, an audience member outs Robin as caucasian. He notices this not from the fact that it's Neil Freaking Diamond on stage wearing shoe polish on his face (no, that was apparently convincing enough), but because the singer doesn't have any pigment on the back of his hands. The audience member (a pre-"Ghostbusters" Ernie Hudson) shouts, "He ain't no brother; he's a white boy!" A riot ensues. Yes, a riot. This was 1980. Every person in that audience could remember race riots in the 1960s fought over things like poverty, injustice, bigotry, assassinations.... This riot occurred because someone discovered that Neil Diamond was white.
• Robin later moves to L.A. (where Bubba has already gone) to try to break into popular music. His first audition is a big failure, so he, the Four Brothers, his manager Molly (Lucie Arnaz), and others decide to throw a really lame party. This involves Robin singing an idyllic song about the postbellum South ("The Robert E. Lee") right in Bubba's face.
• Later, after a taste of success, Robin freaks out and hitchhikes to the Deep South, where he fronts a country/western band in local honky-tonk. While he's told no one where he went, Bubba nonetheless finds him, presumably due to some magical negro powers or something.

Yeah, it's a weird movie. It's also ripe for a remake. Maybe they should mix things up a bit and cast Natalie Portman as the cantor longing to stray from her Brooklyn roots. Streisand could play her cantor mother. Just a thought.

Voting one's race

The Denver Post's map of the early May Denver mayoral election showing which of the top three candidates received the plurality in each precinct. The candidates were Hancock (who is African American), Mejia (who is Latino), and Romer (who is white):

And now, the Census Bureau's map of the distribution of racial and ethnic groups in Denver, courtesy of the New York Times:

The culture of poverty

The film "Trading Places" (1983) presents us with the amusing and comforting notion that street smarts can be an asset in the business world.  Eddie Murphy's character, a panhandler from a broken home, when given a modicum of training and a chance to lead an investment firm, thrives.  His understanding of the concerns of common people gives him insights that blue blood investors miss.

Of course, the real world doesn't work that way, and few have better explained why this is so than Ta-Nehisi Coates (h/t Yglesias).  As Coates explains, the skills you need for surviving poverty are frequently at odds with the skills you need to succeed in the professional world:

It defies logic to think that any group, in a generationaly entrenched position, would not develop codes and mores for how to survive in that position. African-Americans, themselves, from poor to bourgeois, are the harshest critics of the street mentality. Of course, most white people only pay attention when Bill Cosby or Barack Obama are making that criticism. The problem is that rarely do such critiques ask why anyone would embrace such values. Moreover, they tend to assume that there's something uniquely "black" about those values, and their the embrace.

If you are a young person living in an environment where violence is frequent and random, the willingness to meet any hint of violence with yet more violence is a shield. Some people take to this lesson easier than others. As a kid, I hated fighting--not simply the incurring of pain, but the actual dishing it out. (If you follow my style of argument, you can actually see that that's still true.) But once I learned the lesson, once I was acculturated to the notion that often the quickest way to forestall more fighting, is to fight, I was a believer. And maybe it's wrong to say this, but it made my the rest of my time in Baltimore a lot easier, because the willingness to fight isn't just about yourself, it's a signal to your peer group.

And yet a willingness to use violence is obviously shunned in the professional world and can easily lead to one losing one's job.  So to leave the street and get a real job involves an ability to change languages and demeanor in a very stark way.  But it's more than that.  To succeed, one must abandon the language, demeanor, and sometimes the friends of one's youth -- an act that is often defined in terms associated either with prostitution or treason.  In a real sense, succeeding in one realm almost requires failing in the other.

Please read the whole thing.

sweaty guitar rock, bro-on-bro comedies, things with engines, and dystopias

The OkCupid dating service decided to do a study of the profiles of half a million of its subscribers, looking at which terms and phrases subscribers use to describe their interests and breaking down the results by race and gender.  They provide some wonderful word-cloud analyses.  The results are amusing, if not terribly shocking.  White guys, the study summarizes, are into "sweaty guitar rock, bro-on-bro comedies, things with engines, and dystopias," while white women seem to be into "bonfires, boating, horseback riding, thunderstorms."  They further summarize these two categories as "frat house" and "escapism."  Pretty interesting interactions of race and religion in there, as well.

Are we post-racial yet?

Brendan Nyhan:

I was struck by how small a role race has played in Barack Obama's presidential campaign and time in office relative to what we might have expected a few years ago. His popular vote total in 2008 was very close to what the leading models forecast, and his approval trajectory in office is very similar to his predecessors.

All true.  But what do we make of this?  Does it mean that race just doesn't matter anymore, at least in our voting decisions?  That's possible.  But here's another interpretation.  Let's just imagine a scenario in which all the white racists in the electorate were members of just one political party.  (I know full well this is not the case, but bear with me for a moment.)  And let's further stipulate that race matters in this scenario -- voters vote based on their racial sentiments.  All the members of the non-racist party, plus a healthy portion of the unaffiliated, would have voted for Obama in 2008, with nearly all the members of the racist party voting against him.  Once in office, Obama would have near-unanimous support from members of the non-racist party and near-unanimous disapproval from the racist one.

Would such a universe appear very different from our own?  This would mean that race still mattered a great deal in politics, but we're at a point in the intersection of race and party where it's almost impossible to distinguish between racial sentiment and partisanship.

I'm not saying this is the case, and I'm certainly not saying that all racists are Republicans or vice versa.  I'm just suggesting that race might well still matter, even if Obama's election and trajectory in office appear similar to those of his predecessors.

Obictus

I finally saw "Invictus."  I thought it was quite good, although I'm really no closer to understanding rugby.

I can't be the first person to comment on this, but wasn't this film basically about Obama?  I mean, here's the first black president elected to lead a divided nation with a shameful history of white-on-black racial oppression.  Whites are expecting the worst, and blacks are itching for payback.  But the new president decides that it's more important to heal his nation than deliver to the people who put him in office, so he spends a lot of time trying to get blacks to swallow their desires and tolerate the whites who were oppressing them just a few years earlier.  It almost seems like director Clint Eastwood's fantasy for what Obama should have been doing after his inauguration.