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There’s a conspiracy theory going around the right-wing blogosphere that says that Obama “stole” votes in heavily Democratic precincts in heavily Democratic cities in heavily Democratic states. Why he’d do this isn’t clear — the electoral college chooses the president, so a few extra votes in states that are in the bag aren’t going to change the outcome — but the drum is being beaten louder and louder. It’s “evidence of massive voter fraud” that “could have impacted the election.” It’s “statistically impossible.” It’s proof that he stole the presidency.
And what’s this evidence? That in certain precincts in certain cities, Mitt Romney received no votes.
Now, let’s note at the outset that we’re talking about overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhoods populated overwhelmingly by people of color here. With Obama winning upwards of 95% of the black vote nationally, you’d expect his support in black areas of Democratic cities to be even higher. So the broad trends aren’t cause for alarm.
What’s curious, the conspiracists say, isn’t the landslide. It’s the unanimity — the fact that in 37 precincts in Chicago, 59 in Philadelphia, and about a hundred in Cleveland, Obama won every single vote cast. Here’s Mark Steyn of the National Review, quoting a commenter at a Chicago news station’s website:
Statistically, even if among 10′s of thousands of voters all wanted to vote for Obama, it would not be possible to receive 100% of the vote because at least a few would make a mistake and vote incorrectly for Romney.
A commenter at National Review picks up that ball and runs with it:
It’s not statistically probable that hundreds of thousands of voters in a single sample, would cast votes in such a homogeneous way, particularly when you account for the fact that voters aren’t infallible.
One of two things happened: Either there is some yet undiscovered process error that “accidentally” cast all votes for Obama, or there was intentional fraud or deceit Now, I know what direction I lean, but whatever the case is, there needs to be a robust and thorough investigation to determine if the failure was accidental or intentional.
But, to pretend there wasn’t some kind of failure, is anti-science.
So what’s the deal here? Was there a pool of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of urban voters in which not a single vote was cast for anyone but Obama?
Simply put, no.
Let’s take Chicago’s 6th Ward as an example.
Ward 6 went for Obama by an overwhelming margin this year. He received more than 99% of the votes cast, holding Romney to just 0.53% of the total. (Jill Stein and Gary Johnson did even worse.) But even in the 6th, Romney managed to get on the board in nearly every precinct.
There are 48 precincts in Ward 6, and Obama took the whole vote in just three of them. Romney managed to pull a single vote in another eight, and multiple votes in the remainder.
The thirty-seven Chicago precincts in which Obama won unanimous victories are scattered across thirteen wards, and the amount to less than 1.5% of the city’s more than 2,000 precincts. And if you have a guy regularly taking 99% of the vote in big swaths of a big city, there are going to be a few places where he hits 100%.
That’s it. That’s the whole story.
Sorry, guys.
On this day in 1939, the Nazis shut down Czechoslovakia’s colleges and universities, executing nine student and faculty leaders and sending another 1200 to concentration camps.
On this day in 1973, the Greek junta staged a tank attack on Athens Polytechnic university to put down a student uprising, killing least two dozen people.
It’s International Students’ Day. Follow along with what’s happening on the #N17 Twitter hashtag.
A few weeks back, the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the question of whether it’s constitutional to allow affirmative action in college admissions. That decision, in the case of Fisher v. Texas, will likely come down next spring.
Yesterday, however, a federal appeals court ruled on the related — but distinct — question of whether it’s constitutional to ban affirmative action in college admissions, and the differences between the two cases are fascinating … and revealing.
The issue of affirmative action’s constitutionality is usually framed as it is in Fisher v. Texas, as a matter of whether states can take race into account in admissions. In the past, the Supreme Court has ruled that they can, in limited circumstances, and the question at hand in Fisher is whether that will remain the law of the land. But in yesterday’s case out of Michigan, the court approached the issue from another perspective.
Michigan’s public higher education system employed affirmative action in admissions from the 1960s until 2006, when a state referendum banned the use of race as a factor in the selection of students. What the appeals court ruled yesterday is that this referendum, and the resulting constitutional amendment, uniquely harms students of color.
“No other admissions criterion,” the judges wrote, not “grades, athletic ability, geographic diversity, or family alumni connections,” is barred from consideration in the selection process. And “Proposal 2 entrenched this prohibition at the state constitutional level, thus preventing public colleges and universities or their boards from revisiting this issue — and only this issue” in the absence of a constitutional amendment.
The court’s ruling in this case recognizes that affirmative action is an uncontroversial reality in the United States for all sorts of students. If you’re from a poor and/or remote part of the state, you’re welcome to a leg up. If you’re a great point guard applying to a school with a lousy basketball team, that’s wonderful. If your grandfather was a dean or your mom donated a million dollars, the school is welcome to take that into consideration. But in a state like Michigan, the college can’t give you the same consideration because you’re a member of a racial or ethnic group with a history of discrimination and a resultant underrepresentation in the student body.
The “simple but central principle” at stake here, as the court recognized, “is that the Equal Protection Clause prohibits requiring racial minorities to surmount more formidable obstacles than those faced by other groups to achieve their political objectives.”
Kudos to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. They got this one exactly right.
A new North Carolina law makes it a crime for any student to, “with the intent to intimidate or torment a school employee,”
a. Build a fake profile or Web site.
b. Post or encourage others to post on the Internet private, personal, or sexual information pertaining to a school employee.
c. Post a real or doctored image of the school employee on the Internet.
Story time.
When I was in tenth grade, my school’s principal ordered the installation of several video cameras at the school’s entrances (and, if memory serves, in certain hallways). The year was 1984, and I was pretty bookish for a juvenile delinquent, so I ran off a handful of 8.5 by 11 posters bearing her photo and the message “BIG SISTER IS WATCHING YOU,” and taped them up around the school.
Did I intend to torment her with these posters? You bet I did.
Which means that if I’d done this today, in North Carolina, and I’d put a photo of one of the posters on Tumblr, I’d have been guilty of “cyber-bullying” under section 14-458.2(b)(1)c of the General Statutes of the state. My act would have been a Class 2 misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of up to one thousand dollars along with possible community service or house arrest.
Just for making fun of my principal on Tumblr.
When incoming Cal State system chancellor Timothy P. White takes office at the end of the year, he’ll be making about $40,000 less than his predecessor.
That’s because White, in a letter to the CSU trustees, requested a 10% pay cut as his contribution to balancing the system’s books.
White’s salary reduction doesn’t apply to other top administrators in the CSU system, of course, and amounts to just one fifty-thousandth of the system’s state appropriations for the coming year, so assessing whether it’s a worthy step in the right direction of a meaningless bit of PR work is left as an exercise for the reader.
Here’s another stat worth contemplating, though: The pay cut took White from a salary amounting to 105% of that of the President of the United States to one amounting to 95% of the president’s.
In fairness, though, POTUS does have a nicer airplane.
studentactivism.net 
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