Update: About 14 hours after Rittenhouse shared his video explaining his support for Ron Paul, declaring that "you must stand by your principles," he announced that he spoke "with members of the Trump's [sic] team" and that he is now "100% behind Donald Trump."

"A lot of people are upset that I said I'm going to be writing in Ron Paul for president of the United States, and that is true. I will be writing in Ron Paul." So said Kyle Rittenhouse in a recent video posted to X. A lot of people, it appears, are indeed upset. Should they be?

Rittenhouse catapulted to national attention in 2020 when, at age 17, he armed himself, traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, during a night of riots and civil unrest, and shot three men, killing two. It was always Rittenhouse's contention that he'd acted in self-defense, and his arrest galvanized many in the conservative movement who said the prosecution was motivated not by justice but by the political moment. Supporters helped raise $2 million for Rittenhouse's bail, and he ultimately attracted the attention of former President Donald Trump, who defended him while in office and who hosted Rittenhouse at Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House.

So one of the primary reactions to Rittenhouse's choice for president is that he's guilty of betrayal. Trump and the MAGA movement had his back when his life took its most dire turn, the thinking goes, so Rittenhouse owes them his loyalty at the ballot box. That general sentiment is summed up aptly by the one-and-only Catturd: "I can stomach a lot of things—but backstabbing millions who supported you at your lowest point. Then turning on Trump right after he got shot," he said in a viral post. "Can't stomach it—won't put up with it—forgotten forever."

In other words, Rittenhouse is allegedly in debt to Trump and his followers for supporting his claims of innocence. He was acquitted in 2021 of all charges, including first-degree reckless homicide, two counts of first-degree recklessly endangering safety, first-degree intentional homicide, and attempted first-degree intentional homicide. That was the right decision. And it was the one the jury came to because that is what the evidence clearly supported. The right to self-defense is not selectively available to people with certain views. Rittenhouse owes no one a thing for not getting convicted of charges that prosecutors should not have brought to begin with.

So why did Trump fail to gain Rittenhouse's support? "Unfortunately, Donald Trump had bad advisers making him bad on the Second Amendment, and that is my issue," he said in his video. "If you cannot be completely uncompromisable on the Second Amendment, I will not vote for you." Trump's record includes a bump stock ban, which Reason's Jacob Sullum noted turned "peaceful gun owners into felons by fiat," and his support for red flag laws. Those moves may not be deal-breakers for many people, including other staunch supporters of the Second Amendment. They apparently are for Rittenhouse. It's his one vote, and he can do with it what he wants.

Yet his announcement also elicited what has become the predictable response, on both the left and the right, to similar defections from the mainstream: You're helping elect the other guy. For one, that vastly overstates the power of a vote—an unpopular thing to say, sure, but true nonetheless. And it's particularly true for Rittenhouse, who lives in the Dallas–Fort Worth area; if he's casting his vote there, I'm going to go out on a limb and assume it will not derail Trump's electoral victory in Texas, which is almost assured.

But even if it were true that Rittenhouse's vote would have some sort of Earth-shattering effect on the outcome of the 2024 election, a vote is earned. It's an expression of support. If neither mainstream option can produce a platform that is sufficiently palatable to someone, they certainly have the prerogative to make that known—by supporting someone else or, gasp, not voting altogether.

After all, no one is entitled to your vote. They're not entitled to it simply because they're a member of a particular political party, and they're not entitled to it for supposedly being less bad than the other side. And they're certainly not entitled to it just because they said supportive things about you in a time of need.

The post Nobody Owes Trump Their Vote. Not Even Kyle Rittenhouse. appeared first on Reason.com.

Today is the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. That ruling is one of the most famous decisions in the history of the Supreme Court, and probably the most widely praised. But many aspects of the ruling remain controversial, including elements of the Court's reasoning, and how the decision fits in with various types of constitutional theory.

In honor of the anniversary, the American Journal of Law and Equality is publishing a symposium on Brown. I am honored to be invited to contribute. A draft of my aricle, entitled "Brown, Democracy, and Foot Voting," is available on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Traditional assessments of Brown's relationship to democracy and popular control of government should be augmented by considering the ways it enhanced citizens' ability to "vote with their feet" as well as at the ballot box. Brown played a valuable role in reinforcing foot voting, and this has important implications for our understanding of the decision and its legacy.

Part I of the article summarizes the relationship between foot voting and ballot box voting, and how the former has important advantages over the latter as a mechanism of political choice. Relative to ballot box voting, foot voting offers individuals and families greater opportunities to make decisive, well-informed choices. It also has special advantages for minority groups, including Blacks.

Part II considers traditional attempts to reconcile Brown and democracy, through arguments that the decision was actually "representation-reinforcing." While each has its merits, they also have significant limitations. Among other flaws, they often do not apply well to the Brown case itself, which famously originated in a challenge to segregation in Topeka, Kansas, a state in which – unlike most of the South – Blacks had long had the right to vote.

Part III explains how expanding our understanding of Brown to include foot voting opportunities plugs the major holes in traditional efforts to reconcile the decision and democratic choice. Among other advantages, the foot-voting rationale for Brown applies regardless of whether racial minorities have voting rights, regardless of whether segregation laws are motivated by benign or malevolent motives, and regardless of whether the targeted ethnic or racial groups can form political coalitions with others, or not.

In Part IV, I discuss the implications of the foot-voting justification of Brown for judicial review of other policies that inhibit foot voting, particularly in cases where those policies have a history of illicit racial motivations. The most significant of these is exclusionary zoning.

As I note in the article, it is difficult to produce a thesis on Brown that is both original and useful. More has been written about this decision than almost any other Supreme Court case. Readers will have to judge whether I managed to succeed.

The post The 70th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education appeared first on Reason.com.

This year is the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, arguably the Supreme Court's most iconic decision. The American Journal of Law and Equality is publishing a symposium on the topic, and I am one of the participants. A draft of my contribution, entitled "Brown, Democracy, and Foot Voting," is now available on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Traditional assessments of Brown's relationship to democracy and popular control of government should be augmented by considering the ways it enhanced citizens' ability to "vote with their feet" as well as at the ballot box. Brown played a valuable role in reinforcing foot voting, and this has important implications for our understanding of the decision and its legacy.

Part I of the article summarizes the relationship between foot voting and ballot box voting, and how the former has important advantages over the latter as a mechanism of political choice. Relative to ballot box voting, foot voting offers individuals and families greater opportunities to make decisive, well-informed choices. It also has special advantages for minority groups, including Blacks.

Part II considers traditional attempts to reconcile Brown and democracy, through arguments that the decision was actually "representation-reinforcing." While each has its merits, they also have significant limitations. Among other flaws, they often do not apply well to the Brown case itself, which famously originated in a challenge to segregation in Topeka, Kansas, a state in which – unlike most of the South – Blacks had long had the right to vote.

Part III explains how expanding our understanding of Brown to include foot voting opportunities plugs the major holes in traditional efforts to reconcile the decision and democratic choice. Among other advantages, the foot-voting rationale for Brown applies regardless of whether racial minorities have voting rights, regardless of whether segregation laws are motivated by benign or malevolent motives, and regardless of whether the targeted ethnic or racial groups can form political coalitions with others, or not.

In Part IV, I discuss the implications of the foot-voting justification of Brown for judicial review of other policies that inhibit foot voting, particularly in cases where those policies have a history of illicit racial motivations. The most significant of these is exclusionary zoning.

As noted in the article, producing a thesis on Brown that is both new and useful is a tall order. Few if any other judicial decisions have been analyzed so much. But, as the saying goes, "fools rush in where the wise fear to tread." And so I accepted the journal's invitation.

I welcome comments, suggestions, and criticisms.

The post New Article on "Brown, Democracy, and Foot Voting" appeared first on Reason.com.

I wrote back in late February about how my congressional district was experiencing that most rare of events, an election without an incumbent.  Our congress critter of the last 30+ years finally decided to retire… though I will give them credit for doing so before they were too infirmed to do the job, like our late senator, who had no business running in her final election.

There are few more reliable jobs than that of an incumbent congressional representative in a safe seat.  In the time our departing congress critter was representing us I have had six jobs, been through seven mergers or acquisitions, and have been laid off three times.  Everybody hates congress but loves their own representative is the cliche.

Anyway, I put up some odds for the likelihood of success for the range of 11 candidates that were going into the March 5th primary, from which only two would emerge on the ballot in November.

And I could claim to be absolutely correct in my estimates… if I were to go full Gevlon… because the top two candidates in my ranking will, in fact, be on the November ballot, “The Big City Mayor” and “The Party Ladder Climber.”

However, to have correctly predicted the actual outcome would have been like somebody flipping a silver dollar in the air, asking you to call “heads or tails,” you calling “edge,” and the damn coin actually landing on its edge.  I certainly did not do that.

We will have a three way race in November because there was a straight up tie for second place.

The March 5th Primary Results

I have been watching this race every day since election night with an eye to doing a follow up post about how off I was… and the count went on for weeks.  I have screen shots from various election tracking sites showing Evan “The Party Ladder Climber” Low being as much as 200 votes down early on.  But as they went through and validated provisional ballots and hand verified the race got closer and closer.

The last couple of screen shots I have are from the morning of April 2nd, so the updated results from the previous day, which put Joe Simitian up by five votes.

The count in the morning

Then I checked back that evening and Evan Low was up by one vote.

Back in the evening

And then it settled down to the tie above, with both having a count of 30,249 votes.

I kept watching daily as the April 12th certification date closed in, but nothing changed.  Evan Low at one point declare a win… in that he had made it to the November ballot.  I suspect Joe Simitian did the same.  Local news coverage here in the valley is poor.  As is the case in so many places, a conglomerate bought out all the local newspapers, hollowed out the newsroom, and now mostly prints AP wire stories and whatever their minimum wage J-school grades can string together when they aren’t at their second job.

With a race so close, you might ask about a recount.  But there are no automatic recounts for primary elections, only for the final election in November.  Either of the second place candidates COULD request a recount… granted, in a primary, their campaign would have to pay for that recount… but neither has an incentive to do so.  They made the November ballot and the last week or so of updates made it clear that a recount wouldn’t necessarily favor one or the other.  So we get three names for my district for the final election.

[Addendum below: The Liccardo campaign has apparently asked for a recount, potentially to knock out one of their two potential November rivals.]

Interesting times.

But back to me.  How did I do on my estimation in the race?  Let’s match my guesses up to the results in descending order.

I put Sam Liccardo, the “Big City Mayor” on top largely because he raised the most campaign money and spent the most on advertising.  He also went in early on ads, so had visibility ahead of other candidates.  And guess what?  He got the most votes.  Money talks.  This was not a difficult guess.

Evan Low, “The Party Ladder Climber,” was second on my list and, hey presto, he made it to November.

Joe Simitian, on the other hand, was in my “Non-Starter” category because I hadn’t seen any campaign material from him when I wrote my original post and he is on the Santa Clara Board of Supervisors, a group of such low profile that I couldn’t tell you who else was on the board or if I voted for any of them.  County politics generally focuses on who is elected Sheriff.  He spent less than half of what Liccardo did on the election and made it past the first round.  He must have a constituency somewhere… though he was a CA state senator for two terms, so I may have underestimated his attachment to the Democratic machine here.

Peter Ohtaki was one of the two Republicans on the ballot and there are enough from that party in the valley that will vote strictly based on part affiliation that he came in fourth.  If he had been the only Repulican on the ballot he would have come in second because he probably would have gotten most of the votes that went to Karl “spent no money” Ryan, though Peter spent very little compared to other candidates for a fourth place finish.

Peter “The Marine” Dixon, who heavily played up his service in his ads and who spent nearly as much money as Liccardo proved that maybe it isn’t all about the cash, but how you spend it.  His campaign message seemed to be very “I support all the things!” without a lot of specifics and no track record to back any of it up.

Rishi Kumar, the “eternal challenger” used to make the November ballot against the old incumbent, only to get thrashed in the general election.  As I suspected, this time he couldn’t depend on any protest votes or to stand in for his Republican neighbors in his rich suburb.

Karl Ryan, the other Republic, got his name on the ballot and then spent zero reported dollars on the campaign, and still came in ahead of people who put in some effort.  Again, I think his votes were primarily due to party affiliation and lack of campaigning by the people who might have otherwise gotten those voters.

Everybody else.  The last four are Democrats who hadn’t bothered to campaign much or didn’t have the budget or who didn’t use their budget very well or simply didn’t have a constituency.  Joby B Bernstein, the 28 year old Stanford grad student with zero political experience came in last, blowing $146,660 of campaign money on 1,651 votes, meaning he spent about $90 per vote.  Not a good return on investment.

As for November… that is a more difficult call.  Sam Liccardo came out on top, but 46% of ballots cast were for somebody besides the top three, so one has to guess where those voters might fall… plus, it being a presidential election year, a lot more voters will show up in November in the district.

I think Liccardo still has the advantage.  I suspect, given he leans more center conservative than the other two, that he will pick up much of the Republican votes.  We’ll also have to see how the fundraising goes.

If the state Democratic party comes out for one of the candidates, that will tilt the balance as well, though the party has been reluctant to do that when two members of its own inner circle, Low and Simitian, are in the running.  So I suspect they will stay clear.

Meanwhile, I have kept reading the primary results out to my wife as her mail-in ballot is still sitting on the counter, uncast.  She could have changed the results of the election, and she would have likely voted for Evan Low.  Our daughter would be non-stop roasting my wife for this, but she too failed to vote in the March 5 election.  A lesson in how every vote can count.

Related:

• CA.gov – District 16 Election Results
• Ballotpedia – District 16 Primary Election Coverage
• Cal Matters – Two Candidates Ties

Addendum:

I wrote this earlier in the week and hadn’t seen any news, but apparently at the last minute a group connected to candidate Sam Liccardo requested a recount to be funded by a newly formed political action committee. (This did not show up on the state election result site that I had been watching.)  The county of Santa Clara has filed a federal complaint that saying that the Liccardo campaign is coordinating unlawfully with this PAC.

My wife saw this come up in the news feed for one of our local television channels and I was following it up this afternoon.  So there may not be a three way race in November and it may be that the Liccardo campaign worries about having to fend off and out spend two contenders.

Related:

• KTVU News – Federal complaint filed against San Jose Congress candidate Sam Liccardo
• NBC Bay Area – More questions surround recount for District 16 congressional race
• SJ Mercury News – More than 20 previously uncounted ballots discovered during Congressional District 16 recount
• ABC 7 News – Here’s how much a recount costs in tied District 16 congressional race and who requested it
• San Jose Spotlight – Silicon Valley Congressional District 16 re-examines uncounted ballots
• LA Times – Two congressional candidates tied. Now a recount is complicating the results even further
• KQED – Requests for Recount Could Upend Silicon Valley Race for Congress
• KQED – Silicon Valley Readies for Low-Simitian House Race Recount

So I will probably have another follow up post on this next weekend if the recount finishes up this week as expected, and there isn’t any sort of injunction against it based on the complaint that has been filed.

Iranians went to the polls on Friday—or didn't—for the first time since a women-led uprising against religious rule rocked the nation. Authorities reported a record-low turnout of 27 percent, even after they extended voting for an additional two hours, amidst widespread disillusionment and calls for an election boycott.

The country had suffered months of unrest following the death of Mahsa Amini, who was arrested for not complying with the country's mandatory hijab rule in September 2022. Although the streets have calmed down, it was the most significant challenge to the Islamic Republic yet.

The Iranian government was clearly hoping that the parliamentary elections would be an opportunity to show that Iranians had renewed their trust in the system. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei recently argued that voting was an act of resistance against the Islamic Republic's enemies. Banners in public places stated that "strong turnout = strong Iran."

Instead, the election became an opportunity for Iranians to show that they were still fed up with the system. Jailed women's rights activist Narges Mohammadi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, called on Iranians to avoid the "sham elections" in order to show the "illegitimacy of the Islamic Republic."

Even many figures from within the Iranian system declared their intent to boycott. A group of 300 political figures, including former members of parliament, signed a petition stating that they would not participate in an "engineered" vote.

The news site Khabaronline cited a poll in the run-up to the election projecting a 36 percent turnout. Authorities ordered the article deleted. The final turnout number turned out to be ten percent lower than the offending poll.

Since the 1979 revolution, Iran has had a mix of democratic and theocratic institutions. Election turnout has rarely fallen below 50 percent and has sometimes reached as high as 70 percent. Iranian "leaders crave constantly high turnout as evidence of the people's love of the revolution, but…loathe the results that high turnout always brings," in the words of political scientist Shervin Malekzadeh.

Over the past few years, the government has dropped the pretense of caring. During protests in November 2019, authorities launched a crackdown that killed hundreds of people, then banned thousands of candidates from the February 2020 parliamentary election. A record low 42 percent of voters turned out that year, a result that the Iranian government blamed on coronavirus and "negative propaganda."

Even Hassan Rouhani, who was President of Iran during the November 2019 crackdown, has been banned from running for office. He joins a long list of elected Iranian leaders who have outlived their usefulness to the system, including former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was in office during the 2009 protest wave and crackdown.

Ahmadinejad and Rouhani have both refashioned themselves as dissidents.

"Something should have been done to make these elections more competitive. Instead, they limited people's opportunity to participate," Rouhani said in an August 2023 interview. "Those who are in favor of minority rule over the majority should know that they are threatening the future of the system and the revolution. It's not so easy to call this system an Islamic republic anymore."

The post Record Low Turnout in Iran as Voters Lose Faith in Elections appeared first on Reason.com.