Dick Armey's on a bit of a tear of late. First he weighed in on Glenn Beck's impeccable scholarshipearning "Quote of the Day" from Kevin Drum at MoJo with this:
One of the things that we see as we look at Glenn Beck's work that's been fascinating to me, is we see a more true and accurate history of the United States, and we see it documented at levels of rigor that, in fact, one would expect out of Ph.D. dissertations - it is serious, scholarly work....[Liberal critics] don't have to argue with Glenn Beck. They have to argue with his documentation and they can't match that level of rigor.
Then a few days later, Think Progress noted, he weighed in with some heavy knowledge of his own;
Dick Armey Advances Bizarre Voter Fraud Theory: 3 Percent Of Democratic Voters Are Dead People
At a meeting with "well-heeled" Republicans at the GOP Lincoln Club in Irvine, CA yesterday, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) promoted his book, "Give Us Liberty - A Tea Party Manifesto," and outlined many of his familiar political arguments. But he also shared an odd conspiracy theory:
Armey bashed Barack Obama and Democrats even harder - the former economics professor said the president was "economically ignorant" and accusing Democrats of widespread voter fraud, saying it bad votes accounted for 3 percent of elections.
"I'm tired of people being Republican all their lives and then changing parties when they die," quipped Armey, 70.
The idea that dead people are voting Democratic is even more of a reach than popular and well-debunked ACORN conspiracy theories. While it's true that many states have dead people on their voter rolls, it's simply an administrative problem that is easily resolved by checking voter rolls against the Social Security Administration's national death list. While some far-right outlets like CNS News scare-monger over supposed "zombie voters" being used in fraud schemes, there has been no evidence of any widespread practice of voters pretending to be dead people.
Armey seems to believe that not only does this happen, but that it accounts for 3 percent of votes cast during elections. In the 2008 general election, 132,645,504 people cast a vote, which means that if Armey's theory is correct, almost 3.8 million of them were dead.
It's an instructive pairing: first collective ego inflation out the wazoo. Then collective victimology. Because, of course, if you are so brilliant and wonderful, the only way you can be beaten is by trickery and guile. But this particular form of victimology has a familiar ring to it: it's yet another example of conservative victimology that helps justify voter suppression, which I wrote about quantifying last January. And Armey has now added another data point.
Let me review.
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| Conservative Victimology Introduced in Quantitative Form: The Myth of Mass Martyrdom
My interest in quantifying conservative victimology first arose when Rick Warren responded to questions about his involvement in Uganda's proposed "kill the gays" law by claiming mass martyrdom by Christians under the rule of law, which I wrote about again here. Specifically, he released a press statement that said, in part:
There are thousands of evil laws enacted around the world that kill people (For instance, last year, 146,000 Christians around the world were killed because of their faith.).
I contacted his press person, but never did discover even a single law that killed Christian martyrs. I did, however, discover an entire little cottage industry of Christian martyrdom. But beyond the hoopla of wildly exaggerated claims--most notably from the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, I discovered a very revealing truth:
Open Doors is a decades-old organization identified as "Serving persecuted Christians worldwide." It produces an annual World Watch List of the 50 worst countries in terms of persecuting Christians world-wide, but its literature is remarkably free of any sorts of mass murders on the scale one would need to get anywhere near 146,000 martyrs
Indeed, Open Doors has a "Christian Martyrs" page, where one might expect to find hundreds, if not thousands of people listed. Or not:
But the "Christian Martyrs" page has links to five cases, of which only three happened last year, while one happened in 2007 and another in 2005. What's more, one case from 2009, from Colombia, contains no indication whatsoever marking it as a case of martyrdom.
So, even if I were extremely generous, and assumed that there really were five legitimate cases of martyrdom a year, the 146,000 figure would overstate the level of victimization by about 29,000--my first quantitative measure of conservative victimology.
Conservative Victimology & Voter Suppression
Minority, low income, and other groups of predominantly progressive voters are routinely suppressed from voting in a variety of ways from quite specific to simply incidental from the way that our system ignores their concerns. For decades, Republicans have openly engaged in some forms of voter suppression (even despite a court ordering them not to) and they do this partly by promoting a myth of massive voter fraud. I wrote about this in late January of this year.. In this case, actual election fraud is extremely rare, but we can generate a comparable measure of conservative victimology by comparing actual levels of electoral fraud to levels of potential progressive voters who are kept from the polls.
The reality of voter fraud, according to Barnard polisci professor Lorraine C. Minnite, in "The Politics of Voter Fraud", is eight convictions or guilty pleas per year from 2002 to 2005. In contrast to this very small reality of actual voter fraud, the statistics for voter suppression gained from various different approaches was staggering, producing victimology ratios (actual suppressed votes/actual voter fraud cases) ranging from the millions down to tens of thousands. I began with the broadest, most inclusive measures of how many people didn't vote who might ordinarily be expected to.
The first approach I took was to look at the declines in voting in presidential elections from the 1890s, when US voting levels were comparable to most other Western democracies today. I discovered:
For historical declines in voting participation in presidential elections:A conservative victimology ratio of 4.75 million to 1.
The second approach I took was to compare voter participation rates between states. I took the highest voter participation rate as my standard, and measured how many fewer voters actually voted in each of the states that fell short of the highest participation rate. I discovered:
For contemporary cross-state ratios of voter participation rates, depending on the benchmarks used:Conservative victimology ratios of 4.42 million to 1; 1.93 million to 1; and 633 thousand to 1.
The third approach I took was to look at shortfalls in implementing federal voting law. I discovered:
For resistance to implementing the National Voter Registration Act, depending on the benchmark used:Conservative victimology ratios of 89,360 to 1 and 98,909 to 1.
The fourth approach I took was to look at felony disenfranchisement, which has a long historical relationship to white supremacism. I discovered:
For black felony disenfranchisement, depending on the calculation method (state level vs. aggregate US):Conservative victimology ratios of 144,797 to 1 and 139,191 to 1.
For ex-felon disenfranchisement: A conservative victimology ratio of 173,875 to 1.
And finally, looking at just one of the various ways in which Democratic votes were suppressed in Florida in the 2000 election, I discovered:
For the faulty Florida felon purge list:A conservative victimology ratio of 22,010 to 1, resulting in the fraudulent election of George W. Bush as President.
And I concluded:
This is the initial statistical background against which conservative victomology claims about voter fraud should be judged by any objective observer.
Now we can add Dick Armey's claim to the list. Conceptually, his claim is directly parallel to that of Rick Warren's martyrship claim. We are not comparing actual electoral fraud to suppressed progressive votes, as in the other examples in this section. We are comparing actual electoral fraud to imagined electoral fraud by Democrats. Both are legitimate measures of conservative victimology, but it's important to recognize how they differ. As noted by Think Progress, Armey's imagined victimology level amounts to almost 3.8 million in 2008. Assuming the 8 case average held true, that would be a conservative victimology ratio of about 475,000 to 1
I'd like to personally thank Dick Armey for contributing to my research into conservative victimology ratios. He's been very helpful.
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