On MSNBC, Morgan State University professor Jason Johnson discussed the end of the Michigan recount requested by Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
Professor of Political Science. Politics Editor for The Root. Latest Book: Political Consultants and Campaigns: One Day to Sell
On MSNBC, Morgan State University professor Jason Johnson discussed the end of the Michigan recount requested by Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
Throughout election night, the Clinton campaign comforted themselves with the belief that her “blue wall” would ultimately secure her presidential victory. Then, one by one, to the surprise of just about everyone in America, including the Trump campaign, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin all went red. These are states that not only were polling in Clinton’s favor 24 hours before the election but also hadn’t voted for a Republican since Swatch watches, Jordache jeans and the “Showtime” Los Angeles Lakers.
Some political analysts and computer programmers are calling foul and begging for a recount. Unfortunately, the political candidate sounding the alarm is Green Party candidate Jill Stein, which might be the peak irony of the 2016 election season.
A loose coalition of journalists, political analysts and computer programmers say that the election of 2016, especially in the “blue wall” states, was influenced by outside hacking. This is not some throwaway storyline from Scandal or even some throwback cold war storyline. Tampering with voting machines has been a serious concern among poll watchers for decades, with books like Black Box Voting detailing how easy it is to tamper with election results in what are often antiquated and poorly monitored machines.
In Georgia, for example, many districts’ voting machines are still running on Windows 2000, a system so antiquated that it would be almost impossible to decipher if a system were hacked or simply malfunctioned. As early as this spring, the Department of Homeland Security was offering assistance to states that they deemed potential targets for hacking by foreign or domestic agents.
Parts of Georgia, Pennsylvania and other competitive states from the election season don’t have universal paper trails for voting machines, which makes recounts almost impossible and hacking much harder to detect. Given that the Russians were all but directly managing the campaign of Donald Trump, and that Vladimir Putin had a vested interest in a Trump presidency, it’s not unreasonable for some concerned citizens to want to check under the hood for what happened in three very reliable blue states.
However, there are two very real, much more obvious problems that should be addressed before cracking open a bunch of dusty, old vote-counting Teletraan Ones—one legal and the other political.
Trump’s margin of victory in the state of Wisconsin is 0.7 percent; in Michigan it’s 0.3 percent, and in Pennsylvania it’s a measly 1.2 percent. In other words, these are margins small enough to trigger automatic recounts in most cases. However, a legal fight over the overall voting rights in those states might be just as good an idea as digging through voting machines.
In Wisconsin, Republican Gov. Scott Walker purged over 300,000 likely Democratic voters from the roles. When this purge was overturned by the courts, the state of Wisconsin was required to provide free IDs to those areas most likely affected by their new voting laws. They didn’t. The result was the lowest voter turnout in Wisconsin in over 20 years, a 13 percent drop in metro Milwaukee, where over 70 percent of the population is African American and where Trump won the state by only 27,000 votes. If you want to assess the integrity of the elections, you need look no further than the glacially slow pace at which voter-suppression practices can be overturned; no need to look for Russian hackers under the covers.
Which brings us to the next irony of this call for an examination of votes in these critical battleground states. Why is this effort being led by Jill Stein and not Hillary Clinton? Many on the left would argue that this is typical Democratic behavior, not standing up to the GOP’s dirty tricks, like Al Gore folding in 2000 or John Kerry declining to wait out Ohio absentee ballots in 2004. As of this writing, Clinton is now 2 million votes ahead of Trump in the popular vote. The total margin of Trump’s victories in the “blue wall” states—12,000 (Michigan), 27,000 (Wisconsin) and 68,000 (Pennsylvania)—is roughly the size of a well-attended football game at the University of Michigan, certainly worth looking into. Perhaps Clinton wants to “go high while Trump goes low,” or maybe she feels she can’t make up those margins in the states; perhaps we’ll never know.
What is less difficult to determine is why Stein is involved in this process. If she is really concerned about a Trump presidency, she’s a little late to the game. Had Stein not been on the ballot, it’s likely her voters would have gone to Clinton. That alone would have been the margin in all three states. Stein knows that she won’t win any more votes in most of these states, and voter integrity has never been her cause célèbre. It is, in all likelihood, a cash grab by the Stein campaign, since she is attempting to raise money off of running vote analysis and recounts in each of these states. Anyone foolish enough to give her that money deserves everything they’ve got coming to them from the Trump regime.
It will likely take months to figure out exactly why Trump won, why Clinton lost and what role various forms of electoral malfeasance by Republicans played in that outcome. In the meantime, political leaders will grasp at straws and random theories to explain what happened. While Russian or domestic hacking in three important states is possible, there are much easier and more pervasive explanations, like voter suppression, that Democrats or voting-integrity experts should be focused on. In fact, if they had been more aggressive about those problems before Nov. 9, none of these calls for investigation would have been necessary.
This article originally appeared online at The Root.
On The Place for Politics on MSNBC, Dr. Jason Johnson previews the Democratic presidential primary debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in Flint, Michigan with MSNBC host Joy Reid and Mildred Gaddis of Radio One Detroit.
On The Place for Politics on MSNBC, The Root Politics Editor Jason Johnson discusses the campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders as the Democratic presidential primary heads into Michigan.
Republican Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder is in hot and highly contaminated water. Residents in Flint, Mich., have been drinking, bathing in and cooking with contaminated water for over a year, and all signs indicate that Snyder has known about it since Spring of 2015.
To make matters worse, on Wednesday morning, teachers in the Detroit Public School system staged a massive “sick-out,” shutting down over 88 schools. The city’s schools are crumbling, the buildings have rats and mold, there are classes that have 40 or more students in them, and the system is in a mountain of debt. How did these situations get so bad? How has no one been held accountable before now?
It all goes back to the day democracy ended in the state of Michigan, when the Emergency Manager Act was passed in 2012. The Flint water crisis and the problems in Detroit public schools didn’t just start in the second week of January 2016. Republicans will blame local mayors (in this case Democrats), and Democrats will blame the governor (a Republican), but to be fair, many of these are long-term, systemic infrastructure and budgeting problems that go back many decades and are beyond the power of any single government entity. However, what can’t be disputed is Snyder’s desire to gut democracy and replace elected accountable officials with his political friends and cronies, which has brought these crises to the tipping point.
All of this began in 2011 when Snyder first took office as a Tea Party darling vowing to shrink government and make Michigan more business friendly. He decided that the best way to do this was to zap an old law with gamma rays and turn it into a monster that he could smash public institutions with. The Emergency Financial Manager Act, as it is commonly referred to, was passed in 1990, ostensibly to rescue small Michigan cities and school systems from financial ruin. If a city owed creditors too much money, or failed to make payroll, or school systems were on the brink of going bankrupt after third period, it could trigger a state takeover of the municipality. If the governor’s board and the local government couldn’t come to an agreement to settle debts, the state would appoint a financial manager with the power to clean things up over the course of 18 months.
This was meant to be a temporary fix, only used in emergencies when all other options failed. Snyder saw a chance to pounce. He first tried to pass a hulked-up version of the bill in 2012, but voters repealed it by referendum. So he employed some legislative gymnastics to pass the bill without public approval, with the backing of the Republican-controlled Michigan State House. The result? Under the new law the governor had broad powers to declare almost any municipal situation “a crisis” and consequently appoint an emergency financial manager to take over.
These new managers had the power to remove elected officials, suspend pay, cut pensions, throw out union contracts (but not banking contracts, of course) and suspend local government as long as it was under the guise of “fiscal responsibility.” Since 2012, Snyder has become the Oprah of emergency-manager appointers, with Flint getting a financial manager and Detroit getting a financial manager and Highland Park getting a financial manager.
Every time public school students look under their crumbling desks, they’re getting a brand-spanking-new financial manager to “clean up their schools.” Every time Flint residents turn on the tap and it looks like well water from Little House on the Prairie, they can thank their financial manager. Out of the 25 times that emergency financial managers have been appointed in Michigan since 1990, Rick Snyder has appointed 15 of them, in less than six years in office. How is he getting away with this?
Even though emergency managers are only supposed to serve for 18 months, Snyder has repeatedly had managers resign after 17 months and 29 days, which allows him to appoint another financial manager and keep cities under state control with no chance of removal. Which brings us back to Flint’s water crisis.
Darnell Earley was assigned as an emergency manager for the city of Flint’s finances in October of 2013. As part of a plan to save money, he switched the city’s water supplier from the city of Detroit to the Flint River, despite the fact that the city river is horribly polluted. This decision is the genesis of the current water crisis that’s got the whole nation involved. Earley left Flint in April of 2015 and was immediately reassigned to run the Detroit Public School system, which has only become worse under his control as well.
However, it’s not only Earley. Snyder has basically been recycling the same cabal of political cronies as financial managers throughout the state, simply moving them from one mostly black, mostly poor municipality to the next, effectively denying a vast swath of the Michigan public any semblance of representative democracy.
So what’s the solution for people living in Michigan? Should voters listen to Snyder’s crocodile tears at the State of the State address and trust him to fix the pipes in Flint? Pray that Cher decides to send more bottled water for the next two years that it takes to repair the poisonous pipes in the city of Flint? How about this? Hit ’em up at the voting booth. Don’t wait until 2018, when the next governor’s race happens.
Dump Snyder, dump Earley and dump this whole austerity-loving statehouse as a staff, label and organization. Voters in Michigan should recall every single legislator who voted for the stealth Emergency Manager bill in 2012. Then and only then will there be some accountability in the state of Michigan. That may not solve the school crisis or fix sick kids in Flint, but it will certainly stop this from happening again.
This article originally appeared online at The Root.
Dr. Jason Johnson is a professor, political analyst and public speaker. Fresh, unflappable, objective, he is known for his ability to break down stories with wit and candor. Johnson is the author the book Political Consultants and Campaigns: One Day to Sell, a tenured professor in the School of Global Journalism & Communication at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland and Politics Editor at TheRoot.com. Dr. Johnson has an extensive public speaking and media background ranging from … [Read More...] about About Jason Johnson