1) Roughly 1/4 of all eligible voters, about 51 million people, are not properly registered to vote. In 2008 this caused more than 2 million voters who either showed up to the poll or filled out ballots to not have had their vote counted. And that’s not counting the people who realized at the last minute that they wanted to vote, but didn’t because they hadn’t properly registered.

2) Roughly 1/8 of all active registrations are invalid, including 1.8 million dead people, 2.8 million people with active registrations in more than one state, and up to 12 million with incorrect contact information.

The biggest cause of these problems is that Americans move, often changing states. The report estimates that 25% of voters don’t know that when you move you have to update your voter registration information, and basically no one who moves to a new state cancels their voter registration in their old state. Moreover, most states still rely on hand-written forms which can be difficult to read and are expensive to process because they have to be hand-entered into an electronic database.

Why do we care? First because the current system is a lot less cost-efficient than it should be. More importantly, universal suffrage is a core component of our system of democracy, and these kinds of registration problem can undermine that suffrage. On the one hand, having people turned away from the polls for administrative reasons can cause a perception in bias or unfair processes, which if you’ve read our book you know can be dangerous to our democracy. On the other hand, making the registration process simpler and more intuitive should have the opposite effect of making our democracy appear more fair.

The problem with invalid and double registrations ought to be fairly easy to fix. First of all, state databases ought to talk to be able to talk to each other. It shouldn’t be too hard to design a system that automatically cancels my previous registration when I register in a new location, if the states had some systematization in their voter registration databases. And second, while I understand the potential security issues with on-line registration, there are ways of making printable forms that are machine-readable; which again, should cut-down costs and increase standardization across states.

The first problem is much harder to solve. Most states are worried, rightly or not, about voter fraud. Making voter registration easier will increase the opportunities for fraud. That being said, at the minimum states should do a better job of tracking and notifying eligible voters who are not properly registered–and giving them instructions on how to do so. At the minimum, that should at least cut back on the number of voters who think that they are properly registered who are turned away at the polls or who have their votes discarded.

Now, current law actually isn’t too unreasonable. Yes, the exemption gives members of Congress a huge advantage when constructing their stock portfolios. But having 535 people trading on insider knowledge does not substantially alter stock values, in most cases, and does virtually no damage to the health of the economy. Insider trading laws exist so that stock prices are determined by public information, and therefore uninformed people can participate and make money in the market. Having exemptions for a very small number of people doesn’t really change that.

Moreover, the new law will be horribly difficult to enforce. Actually, insider trading laws are already hard to enforce. After all, to find someone guilty of insider trading, it must be proven that:

A) They had non-public information about a company that they knew to be non-public (which means that if I overhear a conversation by two strangers I’m okay, but if I overhear a piece of information at a corporate board meeting I’m not)
B) They knowingly used that information to alter their stock portfolio before the information became public, OR in violation of trading disclosure laws.

Most successful prosecutions involve people who were executives at the company in question (which makes proving A trivial), and who failed to disclose their trades properly. If you aren’t an executive of the company in question, and you use a stock broker who has some independent authority, proving that you had influence on a particular stock trade is very difficult–which is exactly how you might describe most members of Congress. In practice, the new law will either a) never be enforced, or b) require that members of Congress use independently managed brokers or trusts to manage all of their assets and therefore eliminate the possibility of impropriety.

But let’s move beyond the practical significance of the new law to the symbolic significance. We argue in our new book that democracy is more successful in part because people believe in the fundamental fairness of our democratic institutions. It follows that any law which increases the perceived fairness of those institutions is probably a healthy thing for democracy. And having members of Congress play by the same rules as all other investors is certainly a move in the right direction from the perspective of fairness.

In fact, I hope that this is a sign of things to come. I want people to believe that our government, economy, and society are fair places. Fairness is it’s own reward. If Congress does nothing else this year (which, sadly, seems like a possibility) than pass a few symbolic laws meant to convince the American voter that the our economy, society, and government all operate on basic principals of fairness, then it will have been a good year.

So what happens? Voters choose their most preferred candidate who they think has the most likely shot of winning. The purpose of the Iowa caucus, the New Hampshire Primary, and the other early contests is simply to establish the focal points, or the favorites. The delegates being distributed so far are meaningless. But if a candidate can’t do well in Iowa or New Hampshire, voters in Texas and donors in California are likely to stop believing in that candidate’s ability to convince other voters and donors to support him/her. Bachmann lost Iowa and had no shot in New Hampshire or South Carolina–which meant that donors and voters who might have preferred her are going to believe that she cannot possibly win, and will therefore abandon her for other candidates.

That is the extent of the meaning of last night’s events. The press will talk a lot about exit polling and issues, and try to make a big deal out of perceived shifts in the liberal-ness or conservative-ness of the average Iowa voter who showed up. I would treat such analysis with plenty of skepticism. After all, only 120,000 people voted, almost all of them significantly more conservative and politically active even than the average American Republican. You’d get a better representative (and equally large) slice of the American populace if you polled everyone at an average Michigan vs. Ohio State football game.

So congratulations to Romney, Paul, and Santorum. Just don’t count your delegates until their hatched.

And yet Christmas, Hanukkah, and New Years are all holidays that, to one degree or another, celebrate hope and renewal. And so I thought it was a good time just to reiterate one of the central themes of Democracy Despite Itself: don’t panic. Democracy tends to work out pretty well. Things look pretty rough right now, but history says that we’ll get through it.

So I wish you all a happy, and optimistic, holiday season.

“Is what I said factually correct? Yes. Is it historically true? Yes. Are we in a situation where every day rockets are fired into Israel? While the United States, the current administration tries to pressure the Israelis into a peace process… Somebody ought to have the courage to tell the truth. These people are terrorists.”

So, because he asked, let’s look at the history. First of all, we need to acknowledge that ethnic groups are fluid entities that evolve over time. If you disagree, just ask your neighbor if his Visigoth heritage still drives him to hate the Romans. Moreover, people can and do belong to a number of different ethnic, racial, and national groups all at the same time. (For instance, personally I identify as a Christian, a Westerner, an American, a Caucasian-American, a Minnesotan, a Protestant, and a Baptist–depending on exactly who is asking and why.)

With those concepts as background, the ethnic group of the people who live in the West Bank and the Gaza strip is usually defined as Arab. “Arabs” as a people group evolved in the first couple of centuries after Muhammad died, when his followers spread Islam and the Arab language across the Middle East and North Africa. Arabs mostly live in modern-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, the Arabian peninsula, and North Africa, and are largely defined by two features: the Arab language and the Sunni Muslim religion. During the 20th century, as the Middle East was de-colonized and the countries we know today were built, the importance of the Arab nationality started declining, replaced by both newer country-based identities (Syrian, Jordanian, Saudi, etc.) and by a growing Islamic identity. This is not to say that being Arab isn’t still important, but it is now in most cases for most Arabs that particular identity is less important than being a Saudi (or Egyptian or Jordanian or Syrian) or being a Muslim.

That’s the context of the development of the Palestinian nationality. When Israel was formed after World War II, Jordan owned the territory that is now the West Bank, and Egypt owned what is now Gaza. Jordan, in particular, made a concerted attempt to incorporate the people who lived in the West Bank into the larger Jordanian identity that they were trying to create. The Six Day War in 1967, however, put a stop to that. I don’t want to get into the specifics or the debate around that conflict, but the result of that war was that Israel controlled all of the West Bank and the Gaza strip (along with a bunch of other territory, most of which they gave back eventually).

Many Arabs lived, and still live, on the Gaza and West Bank, but Israel never incorporated them into the Israeli state and identity. (Again, I’m not trying to pass judgement on that decision, merely mentioning it as historical fact.) Moreover, Jordan and Egypt continued to build their own national identities with the people who lived on the territory that they did control. The result was that the people who lived in the West Bank and the Gaza strip were largely left out. Instead, their mutual goals and interests caused them to start building their own national goals and interests; hence the Palestinians, as a people group, were born.

So are the Palestinians an invented people? Maybe, insomuch as any people group is invented–although I will note that, if you really want to think of it that way then you also need to acknowledge that Israel had a huge hand in that invention.

But, of course, Gingrich doesn’t stop there. Where Gingrich really goes wrong, is his implicit assumption that because the Palestinian people group is “invented” it does not have the same rights or standing as other ethnic groups. After all, Gingrich isn’t engaging simply in an anthropological investigation of Palestinian identity; he is trying to assert a fact that he sees as relevant to the current dispute between Israel and Palestine.

Oh, and then he makes this absurd notion worse with his patently false and offensive statement that “these people [Palestinians] are terrorists”. Yes, some Palestinians are terrorists. Some Christians are terrorists. Some Americans are terrorists. But to say “Christians are terrorists” is offensive, to say “Americans are terrorists” is offensive, and to say “Palestinians are terrorists” is offensive. Anyone who wants to be president should understand that distinction.

This problem is called Confirmation Bias, and it’s a huge problem for any voter who is trying to stay informed. At its essence, confirmation bias says that we tend to hear what we want to hear, and ignore what we don’t want to hear.

Of course, most people’s first reaction to this is “well, I wouldn’t have done that–I’m much more open-minded.” But keep in mind that Klein himself was obviously open-minded enough to run the second experiment, and is fully aware of the existence of Confirmation Bias. And yet Klein himself was falling victim to a form of confirmation bias by rushing to judgement on the first article: he took the data in front of him, and jumped to the conclusion that he, as a Libertarian, wanted and ignored alternate explanations. He wasn’t being intentionally closed-minded. The problem, as we note in our book, is that “being wrong doesn’t come with a warning label.” Our biases are so pernicious that they interfere with our ability to recognize that we are falling victim to them.

This is a huge problem for voters. Moreover, it is compounded by a simple fact of the news media: provocative statements sell papers, retractions do not. The author of the op-ed issued a public mea culpa. But by that time more than 16,000 people had “liked” the Wall Street Journal article on Facebook, and another 135 had Tweeted about it, not to mention the tens of thousands of people who read about the initial article. Klein did publish a retraction in the Atlantic several months later–although I expect that very few people who read the first op-ed read the retraction. Moreover, the Wall Street Journal website still has the first op-ed up, with no mention of the retraction unless you read to the very last of the 14 pages of comments.

I firmly believe that we each have a responsibility as citizens to attempt to educate ourselves. But keep in mind that no matter how often we read the newspapers or scour the latest scientific and social scientific findings, there will always be plenty of things that we don’t know–and that we can’t educate ourselves about because we are unaware of our own ignorance.

“These are never easy decisions, but when a school has failed to serve its students well year after year — even after receiving additional supports — we have a responsibility to provide students with better options. We are already hard at work creating the great new schools that these communities deserve.”

So, as far as I can tell, the logic goes like this: Some schools are better than others. If a school continues to fail, it must be an inherent characteristic to the school. Therefore, we should close that school and open new ones. (Although please note that the new ones are not fully in place yet–”already hard at work creating” implies that the creation is an ongoing process and not one that is very far down the path to success–which seems really dumb, assuming that we are trying to minimize the disruption of the transition.)

Personally, I have two problems with that logic. First, the assumption that schools fail because of inherent characteristics. It seems to me that schools can fail for all sorts of reasons, but usually because of a cocktail of factors. In no particular order: bad administrations, poor teachers, uninvolved parents and communities, the socio-economic distribution of the student body, and/or a poorly constructed or underfunded curriculum. Schools can and do overcome those problems, but pile enough of them on and the situation can become untenable.

In fact, often school choice, often seen as the balm for these problems, can make them worse. When some schools are chosen, other schools will not be chosen–and that tends to draw the best students and most involved parents within a district into a small number of schools. The best teachers and administrators follow. Meanwhile, the rest of the schools get stuck with the students, parents, teachers, and administrators who either don’t have another place to go, or are unmotivated to do anything about it.

So then someone comes through and closes those failing schools. But the bad students with their unmotivated parents have to go somewhere, and the district surely isn’t going to change things up at the successful schools. So you create new schools for those students. And then you need administrators and teachers–but skilled administrators and quality teachers don’t just grow on trees, and so you are stuck with the choice of hiring the same administrators and teachers that were at the closed schools, or hiring new people with no experience. But hey, if you wanted the same people teaching the same students, you could have done that at the old school. Or the old school could have fired those people and hired inexperienced ones. Opening a new school hasn’t gained you anything.

And sure, you can put a new curriculum into place at the new school–but you could have done that at the old school too. In fact, it isn’t clear to me that there is any benefit at all from opening a new school. Closing old schools and opening new ones makes it look like the school boards and education departments are doing something–when, in fact, they are accomplishing nothing at all.

The fact of the matter is that at a basic level there are only three ways for a district to improve its worst performing schools:

1) Reallocate resources internally, including teachers and students as well as funding, from top performing to lower performing schools.
2) Find ways to attract a better quality of teacher and administrator–or train the ones you already have to be better.
3) Find ways to motivate uninvolved parents and communities.

Closing old schools and opening new ones is a waste of time and money.