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Daily Archives: October 27, 2021

Questioning Questions in the Law of Democracy: What the Debate over Voter ID Laws’ Effects Teaches about Asking the Right Questions

Zhang, Emily, Questioning Questions in the Law of Democracy: What the Debate over Voter ID Laws’ Effects Teaches about Asking the Right Questions (October 14, 2021). UCLA Law Review, 2022, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3942940 – “Voter identification laws, laws that require voters to present identification when voting (“voter ID laws”), first launched the modern Voting Wars. After the Supreme Court blessed Indiana’s voter ID law in Crawford v. Marion County, voter ID laws proliferated across the country. Their prevalence belie their notoriety. They remain one of the most hotly contested election laws and are often referred to as a voter suppression law, if not the modern voter suppression law. While these laws first served as a rallying cry for the election law/law of democracy community, they have become a sore spot—even a pain point—for what is historically a collaborative and close community of social scientists, lawyers, and legal scholars. Many social scientists have come to conclude that voter ID laws have had negligible effects, if any, on voter turnout. That conclusion may seem surprising—even difficult to believe—given how many eligible voters lack IDs. And that surprising conclusion has raised uncomfortable questions about whether the progressive legal alarm over voter ID laws—including litigation challenging those laws—was warranted. By harmonizing the causal social science literature and descriptive evidence unearthed in the course of litigation, this Article is the first to offer an account of why empiricists have consistently failed to detect a turnout effect from voter ID laws. Upon investigation, what is surprising is not that a turnout effect has not been detected, but why an effect should have been expected in the first place. Evidence from litigation suggests that more than 99% of registered voters who habitually vote may have the requisite ID for voting, even though large numbers of eligible (but not registered) citizens lack IDs. It is therefore unsurprising that the best causal studies suggest that voter ID laws decreased turnout (i.e. voting conditional on registration) by no more than 2%. Those studies should not have expected any other result: existing causal studies sought to detect an effect that descriptive evidence did not support. Thus, the discord in the literature results not from the sidelining of important causal findings, but rather from the lack of interaction between the causal academic literature and litigation-derived descriptive evidence….Questioning questions also helps clarify doctrine. I consider how courts hearing challenges to voter ID laws have applied—and mis-applied—turnout evidence in conducting the burden inquiry in the Anderson/Burdick standard governing federal constitutional protections for the right to vote. Anderson/Burdick standard balances the burdens imposed by the challenged law on the right to vote against the state’s justification for the law. Causal evidence of turnout effects is a clearly efficient—but also radically incomplete—measure of burdens on the right to vote. Conceptual clarity of both what turnout estimates measure and what doctrine asks ensures not only that all relevant evidence is presented and considered in voting-rights cases, but also that the social science literature is better positioned to produce doctrinally responsive research.”

Report – Some fast-food items contain plastics linked to serious health problems

Washington Post – “A new study out Tuesday reports that far too often, small amounts of industrial chemicals called phthalates (pronounced THA-lates), which are used to make plastics soft, have been found in samples of food from popular outlets including McDonald’s, Pizza Hut and Chipotle [Burger King, Domino’s, and Taco Bell]. George Washington University researcher… Continue Reading

Giant, free index to world’s research papers released online

Nature – Catalogue of billions of phrases from 107 million papers could ease computerized searching of the literature.  In a project that could unlock the world’s research papers for easier computerized analysis, an American technologist has released online a gigantic index of the words and short phrases contained in more than 100 million journal articles… Continue Reading

Indeed State of the Labor Market – Job Seeker Interest Shifting Toward Higher Wage Jobs

“Indeed’s new Relative Job Seeker Interest metric shows workers are drawn to jobs advertising higher wages and that offer more opportunity to work remotely. Key Points Job seekers are substantially less interested in lower-wage, in-person sectors like loading & stocking and personal care & home health than they were before the pandemic. Median advertised hourly… Continue Reading

The COVID Retirement Boom

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Miguel Faria e Castro, 2021-10-15 – “The labor force participation rateregistered its largest drop on record in 2020, falling from 63.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2019 to 60.8 percent in the second quarter of 2020. By the second quarter of 2021, the rate had recovered slightly, to 61.6… Continue Reading

The Library Technology Market’s Failure to Support Controlled Digital Lending

The Scholarly Kitchen – The Library Technology Market’s Failure to Support Controlled Digital Lending – This article is by Nathan Mealey, Michael Rodriguez, and Charlie Barlow. Nathan is Associate University Librarian for Discovery & Access at Wesleyan University. Michael is Collections Strategist at the University of Connecticut Library. Charlie is the Executive Director of the… Continue Reading

LA Library’s Glen Creason Retires

LAPL.org – Fare Thee Well, Glen Creason, Glen Creason, Librarian III, History & Genealogy Department, October 14, 2021: “…I’ve been here for 8 presidents, 5 Mayors, many numbers of Microsoft Windows, 3 Dodgers World Championships, 11 Laker crowns, flip-phones, and smartphones, subways, a spectacular Olympics, a book, and the birth of a wonderful daughter. There… Continue Reading

CDC – Immunocompromised may need a fourth Covid-19 shot

CNN – “People with certain health conditions that make them moderately or severely immunocompromised may get a fourth mRNA Covid-19 shot, according to updated guidelines from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC authorized a third dose for certain immunocompromised people 18 and older in August. It said a third dose, rather than… Continue Reading

Frances Haugen took thousands of Facebook documents: This is how she did it

Washington Post – “The company’s documents were available on its internal social network, which resembles the Facebook used by billions..Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen left her job at the company earlier this year with thousands of pages of documents referencing a litany of societal harms. Haugen didn’t have to rummage through filing cabinets or secretly make… Continue Reading