The 2016 US Election (Part III)

[Soontir C'boath]

Graphics in the link.

Brooklyn Voter Purge Hit Hispanics Hardest

Ever since New York State’s presidential primary in April, officials from the city Board of Elections have been
trying to explain what led to two illegal voter purges that removed more than 120,000 voters from the rolls.
Board officials have said repeatedly that the purges were a mistake. The two top clerks at the Brooklyn office
have been suspended without pay since shortly after the primary. Executive Director Michael Ryan announced
earlier this month that the board would return all the purged voters to the rolls in time for Tuesday's
congressional primary.
Ryan has apologized publicly, but he's also tried to debunk claims that any specific group of voters was unduly
effected by the purge. Testifying under oath at a City Council hearing last month, Ryan said that “a broad crosssection
of voters [was] removed from the voter rolls.”
But a WNYC analysis found something very different. Under the state Freedom of Information Law, WNYC
obtained the list of every voter the board says was removed from the books in a major purge over two days last
summer. When mapped by election district, our analysis shows that Hispanic voters were disproportionately
purged from the rolls when compared to all other groups.
The election districts with the largest number of purged voters are heavily concentrated in the neighborhoods of
Sunset Park, East New York, and parts of Bushwick and Williamsburg — largely within the bounds of the 7th
congressional district, whose incumbent, Democrat Nydia Velázquez, faces a primary challenge later this month
from two candidates.
According to New York State election law, there are legitimate reasons why voters should be removed from the
rolls — they move, they die, they are convicted of felonies. But the distribution of these voter purges raises a
series of troubling questions about how the board performs some of its most basic and essential functions, and
whether the weakening of the federal Voting Rights Act in 2013 allowed the board's misconduct to slip under the
radar.
WHERE PEOPLE WERE PURGED
Before the purge, as of November 2014, there were 1,308,871 voters registered in Brooklyn. The distribution of
registered voters, by individual election district, looked like this:
On two dates — June 18 and July 5, 2015 — a total of 122,454 voters were removed from the rolls of
registered voters in Brooklyn. This map shows the percentage of registered voters purged in each election
district:
The concentrations of purged voters generally align with election districts where the majority of the population is
Hispanic, based on the population of individual blocks that make up each election district in the 2010 Census.
In fact, 13.9 percent of voters in Hispanic­majority election districts were purged, compared to 8.7 percent of
voters in all other election districts. That means voters in Hispanic­majority election districts were removed at a
rate about 60 percent greater than everyone else.
THE NAMES OF THOSE PURGED
Public voter roll records, and the list of purged voters obtained by WNYC, include each voter’s name. To
estimate the racial and ethnic makeup of that list, we worked from a U.S. Census Bureau analysis that
calculated the way people who used each surname identified themselves in the 2000 Census.
By our calculations, 15.2 percent of people with last names that are used mainly by Hispanic people were
purged from the Brooklyn rolls, compared to 9.5 percent of everyone else. That means those with typically
Hispanic last names were purged at a rate 60 percent greater than everyone else — about the same as the
rate geographically.
HOW IT HAPPENED: RYAN’S INITIAL EXPLANATION
So far, Executive Director Michael Ryan of the Board of Elections has placed blame squarely on the staff at the
Brooklyn borough office. In response to a scathing city Department of Investigation report that criticized the
board’s failure to remove ineligible people from the rolls, Ryan said the Brooklyn staff took it upon themselves to
clean up the rolls.
That report was published in December 2013. A few months later, staff at the Brooklyn office began a process
of flagging people who had not voted since 2008 or earlier, Ryan said. Then, he said, the board mailed all the
people on that list a notice telling them the board was going to cancel their registration, a so­called “intent to
cancel” notice. Voters who did not contact the board after receiving the notice were purged on two dates in
2015 — June 18 and July 5.
Ryan has been clear that the Brooklyn staff made a critical error. No voter should have been removed from the
rolls before that voter was first designated “inactive” ­ a classification strictly delineated by election law. A voter
is classified as inactive only if the post office returns the annual notice, and then the voter does not participate in
two subsequent federal elections. The board is only supposed to send an intent to cancel notice to voters who
are already on the inactive list. The Brooklyn staff skipped the inactive voter step when it conducted the 2015
purge, Ryan has said.
Testifying before the City Council, Ryan called the staff’s decision to pick an arbitrary date “improper” and
stressed that staff at the Brooklyn office took these actions on their own without informing the executive
management.
“Look, what happened in Brooklyn should not have happened,” Ryan told reporters after the hearing. But he
also sought to dismiss concerns raised specifically by supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, some of whom were
protesting New York’s closed primary system, which requires voters to be registered either as a Democrat or
Republican up to six months ahead of the primary election.
"Although there was an otherwise political narrative out there and that fire was already stoked, by the action in
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Brooklyn, we added gasoline to that fire and we contributed to the lack of confidence on our own," said Ryan.
"That is regrettable. It will not happen again on my watch, and quite frankly, I understand why people are
concerned.”
WOULD A STRONGER VOTING RIGHTS ACT HAVE PREVENTED THE PURGE?
Rep. Velázquez has been asking her own questions about the purge for weeks. She held a town hall meeting in
Manhattan’s Chinatown last month, along with Reps. Grace Meng and Hakeem Jeffries. The event was billed as
a chance to talk about election administration in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2013 decision
in Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down portions of the federal Voting Rights Act requiring localities to get
"pre clearance" for changes in certain election operations.
She asked Ryan if the board would have been required to clear the purge with the Justice Department if Section
4(b), which made Brooklyn a protected jurisdiction, were still intact. Ryan equivocated.
“With respect to the purge, there was clear employee error on a misinterpretation of the law, and it’s difficult for
me to say whether 4(b) was still intact whether that mistake still would have occurred,” Ryan said. “A mistake is
a mistake.”
The Voting Rights Act prohibits practices or procedures that disproportionately affect a minority group, whether
those actions are intentional or not. But that "mistake" shows up starkly when the Brooklyn purge is mapped
according to election district. The purge is heavily concentrated in Velazquez's 7th Congressional District, where
large numbers of Brooklyn's Latino voters live.
“That’s [my] congressional district, almost exclusively,” Velazquez said when WNYC shared the map during an
interview at her district office in Williamsburg last week. “It’s Sunset Park, both the Latino and the Asian
communities. Then East New York, going into Cypress Hill.”
Velázquez’s district saw a larger purge than other congressional districts in Brooklyn, both by raw percentage
and, more starkly, when weighted by the district’s proportion of total Brooklyn voters.
As Velazquez studied the map, her reaction shifted from shock to outrage.
“I do not want to think that it was deliberate, you know, because that would be voter suppression, and at a time
when the Voting Rights Act is under attack in Washington, to have this type of action in a city and state like New
York, a Democratic city, it’s just beyond any comprehension,” she said.
Velazquez has been in Congress since 1992 and faces two long­shot challengers in the congressional primary
on June 28 — Yungman Lee, a businessman, and Jeff Kurzon, a lawyer. The winner will face Republican and
Conservative Allan Romaguera in the general election in November.
“How could they purge 120,000 and no one knew that this was happening?” she said. “It’s just, by looking at
that map I could say, ‘Hey, I’ve been targeted or my district has been targeted,’ just by looking at it. By looking at
the numbers. We’ll see. But it’s not going to end here.”
Velázquez said she wants her staff to corroborate WNYC’s findings, “because I will ask for the Department of
3
Justice to look into this.”
We need to get to the root cause," she added, noting that she has frequently fought with the Brooklyn
Democratic party machine without explicitly accusing her opponents of having a hand in the purge.
"I am not satisfied with an explanation or an acknowledgement on the part of the executive director that this was
a mistake. This is serious business. This is about democracy and about the voting rights of individuals to
participate.”
VOTING RIGHTS FIGHTS
Back in 1981, shortly before another New York City primary, advocates scored a major court victory arguing that
the city was in violation of the Voting Rights Act. The primary for Mayor, Comptroller, City Council and a handful
of other offices was scheduled for Sept. 10. But the night before the primary, a panel of federal judges ruled that
the city had failed to secure the necessary clearance from the Justice Department before drawing new Council
district lines and changing poll site locations.
“The Board of Elections was in disbelief that the Voting Rights Act could really affect them and make them do
things differently,” said Esmeralda Simmons, executive director for the Center for Law and Social Justice at
Medgar Evers College, and one of the attorneys on that case.
The primary was rescheduled for later in the month.
In 1989, Simmons and her colleagues used another argument based on the Voting Rights Act on behalf of
some 300,000 voters the Board of Elections had purged because they hadn’t voted in the previous four years.
The plaintiffs argued the purge was discriminatory “because the process disproportionately affected minoritygroup
members,” according to The New York Times.
A federal court judge ordered the board to return all the purged voters to the rolls. “I note that the Voting Rights
Act does not require a finding of intent to discriminate against minorities to be operative here,” Judge Charles J.
Sifton was quoted saying in The Times after his ruling. “It simply requires an adverse racial impact.”
Since the 2013 Supreme Court ruling in Shelby, Simmons said it’s fallen on advocates and watchdogs to appeal
to elected officials and the Board itself to act in the best interest of voters. “I don’t think it’s working,” she said.
In the case of the most recent purge, the board never told the Justice Department that it was removing names
based on new criteria, a step that might have caught the fact that the Board was following its own process
incorrectly.
When Simmons reviewed WNYC’s maps of the the purged voters, she observed, unprompted, “That looks like
Nydia Velazquez’s district....Wow.”
She said the map also made it look like the purge targeted Asian and Hispanic voters, adding of Velazquez, “I
do not want to be in a room with her right now.”
HOW TO FIX IT
“I am personally aggrieved. I feel like I’ve been purged,” Simmons said. She also said that simply returning the
purged voters to the rolls may not fix the problem. “It’s not something that is so easily corrected. When people
are turned away from the polls once, what makes you think they are going to go back?”
That question will be answered partially next Tuesday, when voters head to the polls for the congressional
primary. But it will only be a partial test — unlike the presidential primary, turnout in congressional primaries
tends to be far lower.
When WNYC shared its analysis with Board of Elections chief Ryan, he said, “Anytime there is a problem with
the voter registration system, I’m alarmed and we’re not happy about it.”
But Ryan would not comment on the specifics. “I can’t speak to a demographic analysis that I didn’t participate
in and, quite frankly, we don’t know what the real effect of that is,” he said.
Ryan also said there may be an honest explanation for why Hispanic voters were caught up in the purge at a
rate so much higher than any other group. He said some neighborhoods may be better organized for voter
registration, even if those new voters don't plan to participate. So if aggressive efforts added people to the
rolls who then did not vote, they would then have fallen victim to the inappropriate purge.
He also said the board has taken steps to ensure nothing like this ever happens again. Besides returning all the
purged voters to the rolls, Ryan said the board has disabled the manual function that allowed staff to flag voters
one by one to be removed from the system.
“All of that said, it should have never happened,” Ryan added, “and whomever it affected, it should not have
affected those individuals.”
EXPLORE THE PURGE MAP
17,392 of the purged voters fall into majority Hispanic districts, 102,593 of the purged voters fall into all other
districts. 125,420 of registered voters were in majority Hispanic districts and 1,183,451 were in all other other
Brooklyn election districts as of November 2014. About 2,500 people on the purged list, or about 2 percent,
could not be matched to a Brooklyn election district.
Using the Census analysis, we counted as “Hispanic” any last name where 80 percent of the people in the
U.S. who used that name identified as Hispanic in the 2000 Census. By that measure, 23,012 Brooklyn
registered voters with typically Hispanic last names were purged, compared to 151,654 registered voters in
Brooklyn with typically Hispanic last names. 79,679 of the purged voters had other names, and 789,587
Brooklyn registered voters had other names. We weren't able to match last names to the Census study
for about 16 percent of people on the purged list and about 20 percent of people on the Brooklyn registered
voter list, so they are not included in the calculations. 27,586 of the purged voters were in Congressional
District 7, representing about 11 percent of the 253,107 registered voters there as of November 2014. That’s
the highest percentage among the six congressional districts that include Brooklyn, and a rate about 25 percent
greater than the rest of Brooklyn, which had 8.8 percent of voters purged.

[Purple]

I am a bit confused. How does anyone justify just removing people in large groups from the list of registered voters? Isn't this something that just should not be legally possible?

[Soontir C'boath]

I am a bit confused. How does anyone justify just removing people in large groups from the list of registered voters? Isn't this something that just should not be legally possible?

It's a few paragraphs in.

So far, Executive Director Michael Ryan of the Board of Elections has placed blame squarely on the staff at the
Brooklyn borough office. In response to a scathing city Department of Investigation report that criticized the
board’s failure to remove ineligible people from the rolls, Ryan said the Brooklyn staff took it upon themselves to
clean up the rolls.

Management blamed underlings.

Edit:This however as later written later in the article does not explain why it was dis-proportionally in a Hispanic Congresswoman's district who apparently has not exactly been friendly with the establishment and of Hispanics in Brooklyn in general.

[The Romulan Republic]

I am a bit confused. How does anyone justify just removing people in large groups from the list of registered voters? Isn't this something that just should not be legally possible?

As the article notes, it is completely illegal.

Some assholes took it upon themselves to violate the law, weather out of malice or incompetence.

[Dalton]

Whoa, has anyone seen Donny Jingles' pathetic May fundraising numbers? His campaign is fucking broke and he's been funneling campaign funds into companies he owns.

[Borgholio]

Whoa, has anyone seen Donny Jingles' pathetic May fundraising numbers? His campaign is fucking broke and he's been funneling campaign funds into companies he owns.

This quote stood out at me:

Even more revealing is the fact that Trump has been using a huge amount of campaign expenditures to cycle money back through his own businesses. According to an analysis by the AP, through the end of May Trump had plowed $6.2 million into various Trump companies, which is to say, back into his own pocket.

Maybe I'm reading it the wrong way, but that sounds like misuse of campaign funds. Isn't that a crime?

[bilateralrope]

Whoa, has anyone seen Donny Jingles' pathetic May fundraising numbers? His campaign is fucking broke and he's been funneling campaign funds into companies he owns.

This quote stood out at me:

Even more revealing is the fact that Trump has been using a huge amount of campaign expenditures to cycle money back through his own businesses. According to an analysis by the AP, through the end of May Trump had plowed $6.2 million into various Trump companies, which is to say, back into his own pocket.

Maybe I'm reading it the wrong way, but that sounds like misuse of campaign funds. Isn't that a crime?

I doubt it's that clear cut.

Imagine that you own media companies. You're running for an election and those companies would be useful. Would you pay your companies for their services or would you pay one of their competitors ?

[Purple]

Especially since those being your companies you know exactly what level of quality you are getting and have extra leverage over them to ensure they do their job bloody well or else. I really see no problems with that.

[Elheru Aran]

The problem is, though, that even if you lose the election, those companies that you own have benefitted directly from the election, and some of those benefits could well fall upon you. It's essentially a roundabout way of directing money your own way. Financial self-interest is not an ethical nor moral reason to enter politics.

[Purple]

But it is a perfectly legal reason. And let's be honest it is the only real reason anyone gets into high level politics.

[MKSheppard]

Yeah, but what can they realistically do? Trump rode into the nomination largely on the backs of people who think that the Republican Elites are a bunch of corrupt liars and mealy-mouthed politicians. And they propose to nullify that feeling of betrayal and grievance by...betraying the Republican electorate and giving them new (and newly realistic) grievances? How's that shit gonna work?

[Elheru Aran]

But it is a perfectly legal reason. And let's be honest it is the only real reason anyone gets into high level politics.

Legal does not mean right. Legal does not mean correct. Legal does not mean moral or ethical.

The only thing that 'legal' means is that, for whatever reason, such a thing is not illegal.

It absolutely does not mean that it is something that people should do. Especially when it has the potential, and in this case that potential is quite vast, to affect others in a negative fashion.

[bilateralrope]

The problem is, though, that even if you lose the election, those companies that you own have benefitted directly from the election, and some of those benefits could well fall upon you. It's essentially a roundabout way of directing money your own way. Financial self-interest is not an ethical nor moral reason to enter politics.

True.

But if you decide to enter politics for a good reason, which companies would you use ?
- Your companies. Which indirectly put money into your pocket even while you get a better deal than you could get elsewhere.
- Competitors to your companies. Which indirectly hurts you and might hurt your campaign when your opponents notice and start talking about how your companies are so bad that you don't trust them.

Now if he's being charged more than normal for the services his companies provide, or if he's getting a service that they don't normally provide and/or isn't relevant to his campaign, that would be dodgy.

[Elheru Aran]

The problem is, though, that even if you lose the election, those companies that you own have benefitted directly from the election, and some of those benefits could well fall upon you. It's essentially a roundabout way of directing money your own way. Financial self-interest is not an ethical nor moral reason to enter politics.

True.

But if you decide to enter politics for a good reason, which companies would you use ?
- Your companies. Which indirectly put money into your pocket even while you get a better deal than you could get elsewhere.
- Competitors to your companies. Which indirectly hurts you and might hurt your campaign when your opponents notice and start talking about how your companies are so bad that you don't trust them.

Now if he's being charged more than normal for the services his companies provide, or if he's getting a service that they don't normally provide and/or isn't relevant to his campaign, that would be dodgy.

Without knowing further details and working on a hypothetical premise that Candidate X has to choose between Company A (which he has a stake in) and Company B (which is a competitor) for publicity:

If campaign finances are by law prohibited from benefitting the candidate directly, only his actual campaign to be elected, then the ethical thing to do is go with Company B, as it will not benefit the candidate even indirectly regardless of whether he wins or loses. If he goes with Company A, he still derives a benefit one way or another-- if he wins, he can put the profits away for another day; if he loses, he can still use the money anyway, though the campaign failed.

A candidate using the money that has been raised to line their own pockets rather than working towards actually winning the election is essentially committing fraud because the money was given with the purpose of helping him win the election. It's a matter of false pretenses.

[Purple]

Legal does not mean right. Legal does not mean correct. Legal does not mean moral or ethical.

The only thing that 'legal' means is that, for whatever reason, such a thing is not illegal.

However the initial argument here that I was responding to was not about morality but, and allow me to quote:

Maybe I'm reading it the wrong way, but that sounds like misuse of campaign funds. Isn't that a crime?

Emphasis mine.

The whole morality thing is a tangent only you care about.

[bilateralrope]

If campaign finances are by law prohibited from benefitting the candidate directly, only his actual campaign to be elected,

Are campaign laws written that way ?

I'm going to assume that they aren't until I see some proof otherwise.

[Elheru Aran]

If campaign finances are by law prohibited from benefitting the candidate directly, only his actual campaign to be elected,

Are campaign laws written that way ?

I'm going to assume that they aren't until I see some proof otherwise.

As I noted, I don't know further details.

However, Federal law prohibits candidates from *profiting* from their own campaigns.

The Donald Trump case is very much a strong grey area, largely because it's never really happened before on this kind of scale. Part of the issue is he's spending a lot of his own money, making payments... to his own companies. The real question is how much of it is his own money and how much of it is *contributed* money.

This article may be illuminating:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... ident.html

Personally, I don't know if Trump is actually profiting... but I half think it's a massive ass-pull to create some truly incredible tax rebates next year.

[Khaat]

Personally, I don't know if Trump is actually profiting... but I half think it's a massive ass-pull to create some truly incredible tax rebates next year.

What? Loaning himself money, to pay himself, to eventually default on the loan (since the entity taking the loan is a one-shot), then writing off the loss of the loan and all the money he gave himself? Shucks! That's just good business! [/sarcasm]

[Napoleon the Clown]

Romney is a past loser (by a considerable margin), and that was before the current cluster fuck that is the Republican Party.

Hence "vaguely" electable. He'd almost definitely get destroyed, too. But he'd be destroyed less hard than anybody else they could possibly beg to displace Trump. They had exactly zero good contenders this cycle, they just got saddled with the most hated of the bunch because GOP primary voters are insane.

[bilateralrope]

They had exactly zero good contenders this cycle, they just got saddled with the most hated of the bunch because GOP primary voters are insane.

Which makes me wonder how the Republican party members plan to deal with it for the next election cycle. How do they get rid of the influence of the insane primary voters ?

[Flagg]

They had exactly zero good contenders this cycle, they just got saddled with the most hated of the bunch because GOP primary voters are insane.

Which makes me wonder how the Republican party members plan to deal with it for the next election cycle. How do they get rid of the influence of the insane primary voters ?

Become Democrats.

[The Romulan Republic]

Word is that Clinton has narrowed her potential VPs list to three people: Elizabeth Warren (Senator from Massachusetts), Julian Castro (Secretary of Housing and Urban Development), and Tim Kaine (Virginia Senator).

http://www.people.com/article/hillary-c ... candidates

Hillary Clinton is narrowing her list of candidates to run alongside her as vice president in November, according to reports.

The Clinton camp is currently in the final stages of vetting, leading up to the former Secretary of State's big decision, expected to come in less than a month, CNN reports.

According to the Associated Press, Clinton is now down to a short list of just three potential running mates, including Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, and Texas Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro.

Each of the three reportedly possesses different desired traits that would make them strong complements to Clinton.




Warren, a progressive favorite is adamantly against Republican nominee Donald Trump, aligning her directly with Clinton's view of the billionaire businessman, while Kaine is a reportedly favorable candidate in an important swing state, the AP reports. Meanwhile, the news organization describes Castro as an up and coming star in the Democratic Party, despite being from a primarily conservative state.

Clinton's vetting process includes extensive checks into the backgrounds of the candidates, including their positions and financial dealings, the Washington Post reports.

While the politics world is buzzing with talk about who may or may not be Clinton's VP choice, Clinton, herself, has reportedly said that the thing she's looking for most in a running mate is someone who could run the country immediately if something were to happen to her.

Other important factors for the presidential hopeful include someone who she personally feels comfortable with, as well as someone who can energize the party, while rallying Democrats in Congress, the Post reports.

However, Clinton's campaign is staying quiet regarding reports of vice president potentials.

"Those who talk don't know, and those who know don't talk," a senior Clinton official told the newspaper.

[LaCroix]

Personally, I don't know if Trump is actually profiting... but I half think it's a massive ass-pull to create some truly incredible tax rebates next year.

What? Loaning himself money, to pay himself, to eventually default on the loan (since the entity taking the loan is a one-shot), then writing off the loss of the loan and all the money he gave himself? Shucks! That's just good business! [/sarcasm]

Donald Trump has pretty much written the book (a couple of, actually) on how to "good business"...

But most of them end rather abrubt at Chapter 11, for some reason...

[Purple]

For those of us not familiar with what ever that is supposed to mean could you explain what that is supposed to mean? What is the significance of the number 11 in regard to chapter numbering?

[Thanas]

bankruptcy filings