The Right Stuff: Harvard admissions and the SAT

It is fascinating to read about the brouhaha over Harvard admissions and the SAT and see no mention of Catholic applicants.   Many years ago elite schools like Harvard and Yale selected most of their students from the ranks of exclusive preparatory schools that catered to affluent Protestants.  In the 1930s, Harvard's president James Conant thought it would be a good idea to recruit talent from outside those ranks.   He may have looked around and decided there should be some neighborhood kids at Harvard,  as in, if you people cook for us,  your children should be able to go to school with us.   And so it came to pass that my uncle, Robert Regan, the son of a trolley car conductor and a native-Gaeilge speaking washer woman, "passed" Conant's SAT test and won a scholarship to Harvard.  Uncle Rob joined Navy ROTC at Harvard and became a naval aviator who fought in the ferocious air battles of WW2 from the South Pacific to the Sea of Japan, winning the Navy Cross and many other medals.   Later he joined the ranks of Navy test pilots, chronicled in Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff.  It is ironic today that the SAT test,  which was intended to diversify our elite schools,  may now become a means for making them overly exclusive again.   I think it is a good thing for elite schools to make sure they have room for the "neighborhood" kids, the children of the people who cook their meals, cut their lawns and wash their clothes.   If the SAT no longer serves that purpose, then the elite schools should find other ways to determine who has The Right Stuff.

Election Hypocrisy and Hysteria then and now

As Republicans and their media friends go crazy over 2018 ballot counting in Florida and Arizona, it would do well to recall the 2012 election and how Democrats and their media friends reacted.

In 2012, no one bothered to compare Arizona to the neighboring states that also had a vote-by-mail and provisional ballot "mess,"   notably California with a million or more provisional ballots,  which they still may not have finished counting.   When the dust settled,   Arizona won the 2012 West Coast balloting counting championship with California finishing last, although folks in the State of Washington still complain that they are the perennial losers... how do you live in Washington State where all the smart people are and not be able to count your ballots faster than Arizona.

Counting delays in 2012 and 2018 mostly reflect dealing with vote-by-mail verification issues ... at least in the desert and the nearby coast.   I have no opinion one way or the other on Florida.  Vote-by-mailing has made voting much easier, but counting's harder.

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By Laurie Roberts, The Arizona Republic – 11/14/12

Suddenly, we’re the Florida of elections which is never a good thing when it comes to tallying votes.

No hanging chads here but a fair number of hanging questions as the counting continues -- eight days after the election -- and suspicion swirls in some corners that certain Arizonans were deprived of their vote.

As of Tuesday evening, an astonishing 324,000 votes still had not been tallied, well over half of them provisional ballots that must be verified before they count.

MSNBC called it Arizona’s “broken-on-purpose election” – one that Rachel Maddow flatly charged is deliberately aimed at disenfrancising new Latino voters. The Santa Fe New Mexican called it “an election travesty next door.” Even U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid weighed in over the weekend, urging Arizona to count the votes “promptly, accurately and equally.”

In Arizona, Latino protesters stormed a county elections office last week and now are holding vigil in downtown Phoenix.

“There’s too many problems in this election,” Maria Uride told me, as she sat at the corner of Third Avenue and Jefferson on Tuesday morning. “I think maybe the people will say, ‘I don’t want to vote anymore. My vote is not respected.’ Once the people say that, it’s good for the other side.”
Actually, it’s bad for all sides when confidence in this fundamental right – your right to vote – is eroded.

Thus far, however, there is no hard evidence that Latino voters were disproportionately affected by problems at the polls last week. Then again, there are also no hard numbers for how many people actually voted which is not only troubling, it’s embarrassing. (Late Tuesday, Secretary of State spokesman Matt Roberts estimated we'll be just shy of 2.2 million votes cast.)

Maricopa County elections officials say it’s standard for the vote counting to take 10 days. They attribute this year’s 20 percent rise in provisional ballots – those that must be verified before they count – to people who received early ballots but showed up at the polls to vote.

Tammy Patrick, federal compliance officer with the county’s Elections Office, says provisional ballots were distributed across the county, not just to Latino voters. Of the 121,000 provisional ballots cast in Maricopa County, 60,000 were given to people who came to the polls despite being on the permanent early voting list. The second largest group of provisional ballots went to people who had moved but didn’t update their voter registration.

Thus far, Patrick says 42,000 of those 121,000 provisional ballots have been processed, with 81 percent verified and counted.
Meanwhile, the number of outstanding conditional provisional ballots – the ones that require voters to return to election HQ with proper identification – is actually down from 2008, Patrick says.

In Maricopa County, 1,011 voters must return by 5 p.m. today with proper identification if they want their ballots counted. That is down from 1,811 that were tossed out in 2008.

Suspicions remain, however, that Latinos were hit hardest with provisional ballots.

“My gut tells me that it disproportionately impacted first-time voters of which many or probably the majority are Latino voters,” said Sam Wercinski, executive director of the Arizona Advocacy Network.

Wercinski says he spent hours at a poll near ASU and witnessed a stream of students turned away because they couldn’t produce utility bills or other identification with their address that would satisfy Arizona law.

Neither Wercinski nor several Democrats I talked to are buying this idea that there was some nefarious plot to suppress Latino votes. They do, however, question how many of those votes were lost to bad information, early ballots that never arrived and other electoral snafus.

“I don’t think any person was sitting in a dark room trying to figure out how to disenfranchise voters,” Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Phoenix, said. “But I think the result of incompetence has created that situation.”

Whatever the reason, it’s clear that the long running spectacle that is Election Night 2012 bears a closer look.

On Friday, House Majority Leader Chad Campbell, D-Phoenix, sent letters to Gov. Jan Brewer, Secretary of State Ken Bennett and other legislative leaders, calling for a non-partisan investigation into how the votes were tallied this year.

“I’ve heard countless stories … of very odd experiences,” Campbell told me. “There are some irregularities that concern me. My bottom line: if the system is actually working the way it’s supposed to, if there’s nothing that went wrong, then we probably need to look at redesigning the system.”

I imagine Ron Barber and Martha McSally, still waiting to find out who’s headed to Congress, would agree.

Republic Doubles Down on Fake Election News

"Why up to 270,000 voters had trouble exercising their fundamental, constitutional right to cast a ballot in one of Arizona’s hottest primary elections in decades."  

-- Laurie Roberts, AZ Republic, citing AZ Republic'a flubbed election flub analysis

Bill Goodykoontz,  Media Maven [Arizona Republic]:

Today (11/3/18) your fine newspaper again featured the fake 270,000 voters affected number in an advertisement for its upcoming election coverage.   Sensational circulation generating claims trump integrity.

Much as I'm a fan of schadenfreude and karma,  your fine newspaper wasn't fair to Adrian Fontes ... and you have yet to confess and ask forgiveness.  Help me understand how this one got past the editors and recycled by Laurie Roberts, who's supposed to be an election maven.   Since it's hard to imagine that the paper is going after Fontes for partisan reasons,  it may just boil down to sensational claims sell newspapers.  

Gilligan

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From: Slante9 J <slante9@msn.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2018 1:05 PM
To: Ruelas, Richard
Subject: Thanks for asking...

In the precincts affected by the outage

11420 ballots were cast on election day

65693 ballots were cast prior to election day by mail or in person 

We know ahead of time that only about 30% of the registered voters in Maricopa county will vote in a primary.

We know ahead of time that most voters will vote before election day.   In the recent election, the number for the affected precincts 85% of the total vote.

Using the election day turnout rate for the unaffected precincts,  we get a proforma election day vote for the affected precincts of 12140.

The hard ceiling for the number possibly affected by the outage is 13,000.   But we know 11,420 were able to vote and that the affected precincts were closed for only part of the morning.

Using an estimated hourly arrival/voting rate at the affected precincts and the timeline recently provided by the Recorder,  the number of voters affected works out to about 2,500 with the number that might have been entirely deterred at about 600-700,  using the difference between the proforma vote and the actual vote.

Sure it's an educated guess ... an educated guess informed by 50 years of experience -- from here to Aramco and Vietnam -- and four college degrees including econometrics and mathematical economics.

You don't need a degree in econometrics to figure this out, though, but it does help to have a Falcon Northwest heavy duty workstation that loads a big spreadsheet really fast -- the [entire] publicly available precinct detail.   

Thanks again.   This was fun

Gilligan

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From: Ruelas, Richard <richard.ruelas@arizonarepublic.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2018 12:06 PM
To: Slante9 J
Subject: RE: How can we trust fact checking when ...

Thanks for taking the time to write [Mr. Ruelas].

My job was to simply fact check the governor’s debate.

The things you mention are out of my wheelhouse.

Still…

Your clean energy comments are interesting. But they don’t negate Abe’s opinion, which is his job to express.

I am not aware of the Clean Energy folks saying the initiative would stop global warming. If that does become part of the argument, your information could come in handy.

I’ll pass it along to our actual Fact Check team that looks at claims and ads.

As to the 270,000 number, it appears that number was calculated by counting all registered voters in the precinct.

You are correct that those who had already decided not to vote on that day would not have been affected.

I don’t know of a way of knowing that the figure is.

We also don’t know how many people attempted to vote, were met with delays and decided not to cast a ballot.

To me, reporting the overall potential number of voters affected is a valid number.

I don’t know what your calculations are, but given the unknown quantity of voters who might have voted but not for the problems, that would be an educated estimate. Agreed?

Thanks for reading.

Please continue to keep us on our toes.

Richard Ruelas

Arizona Republic

From: Slante9 J <Slante9@msn.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2018 10:55 AM
To: Ruelas, Richard <richard.ruelas@arizonarepublic.com>

Subject: How can we trust fact checking when ...

Mr. Ruelas:

How can we trust the Republic's fact checking when you refuse to correct your own mistakes.

The Republic claimed 270,000 voters were affected by Recorder Fontes's election day problems.   Preposterous.   Only 101,000 people voted on election day and even then most of these don't live in the precincts affected by the outages that lasted only a few hours.

My analysis of the problem indicates that only about 2,500 voters would have been affected and that probably only about 600 people might have been deterred from voting at all by the outages.

Gilligan