Dave Gilson

Senior Editor

San Francisco native, word wrangler, data cruncher, chart drawer, pun maker. Recent areas of interest: campaign finance, income inequality, prison riots.

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Dave Gilson has worked at Mother Jones since 2003. Previously, he worked for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and the Northern California bureau of the New York Times.

The House That Ate the Hamptons

—By Dave Gilson

| Mon Jul. 9, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

Ira Rennert's Fair Field Wikimedia Commons

This weekend, Mitt Romney made a very profitable swing through the Hamptons. On the agenda: A trio of fundraisers, including a $50,000-a-head party at David Koch's $18 million estate and a shindig at financier Ronald Perelman's 57-acre estate, home to "the most outstanding private conifer collection in the United States." But those spreads have nothing on billionaire Ira Rennert's estate in Sagaponack (which, sadly for Romney, did not host a fundraiser).

Thought to be America's largest inhabited residence, Fair Field cost $100 million to build and is worth at least $200 million. The 110,000-square-foot complex has 29 bedrooms, 39 bathrooms, three pools, two libraries, a bowling alley, a playground, a full theater, its own power plant, and a garage for 100 cars. The main building is 66,000 square feet, 28 times bigger than the average new house. It's the third-largest private home in America. (No. 1 is the 174,000- square-foot Biltmore Estate.) The mansion even inspired a novel, The House That Ate the Hamptons. Kurt Vonnegut called it "the greatest book ever written." In a rare public appearance, Rennert described his mega-mansion as "old age and loneliness insurance."

A local architect who approved the project praised its "restrained classic design." Or, as one local put it to MoJo's Josh Harkinson, "It's a fucking monster!" Fair Field is now at the heart of a new controversy between Rennert and his slightly less affluent neighbors, who have accused him of "practicing class warfare" with his noisy private helicopters. Seriously. Check it out.

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UFO Sightings Are More Common Than Voter Fraud

The GOP says election fraud is rampant. A close look at the numbers shows there's no evidence of that.

—By Hamed Aleaziz, Dave Gilson, and Jaeah Lee

| July/August 2012 Issue

Block The Vote

Since 2001, nearly 1,000 bills that would tighten voting laws have been introduced in 46 states.

24 voting restrictions have passed in 17 states since 2011. This fall, new laws could affect more than 5 million voters in states representing 179 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.

In the past two years, 5 battleground states (Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) have tightened their voting laws.

As of April, 74 restrictive voting laws were on the table in 24 states.

Sources: Brennan Center for Justice, NAACP

Card-carrying Americans Only

Since 2011, 34 states have introduced laws requiring voters to show photo ID, and 9 states have passed photo ID laws, affecting 3.8 million voters.

2.2 million registered voters did not vote in 2008 because they didn't have proper ID.

*Does not include laws awaiting DOJ clearance, blocked by courts, or not in effect until after 2012. Source: National Conference of State Legislatures

Last year, 12 states introduced laws requiring birth certificates or other proof of citizenship to vote; 3 passed.

Only 48 percent of women have a birth certificate with their current legal name on it.

Texas' new ID law permits voters to use concealed-handgun licenses as proof of identity, but not state university IDs.

Sources: Brennan Center for Justice; Gabriel R. Sanchez, Stephen A. Nuño, and Matt A. Barreto

Discouraging New Voters

80 percent of the 75 million eligible voters who did not take part in the 2008 election were not registered to vote.

In 2008, more than 1/3 of voters cast ballots before Election Day. In 2011, 5 states passed bills to restrict early voting.

States with Election Day registration have 7 to 12 percent greater turnout than states without. Last year, 5 states introduced bills that eliminate Election Day registration.

12 percent of minority voters report registering through voter drives, twice the rate of white voters. In 2011, Florida and Texas passed laws making registration drives much harder to organize.

Florida state Sen. Mike Bennett, a supporter of the tougher voter registration law, said, "I don't have a problem making it harder. I want people in Florida to want to vote as bad as that person in Africa who walks 200 miles across the desert. This should not be easy."

Source: Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project

Locking Out Ex-cons

4 million Americans who have completed prison sentences are ineligible to vote. 38 percent of disenfranchised voters are African American.

13 percent of African American men cannot vote due to criminal records, a rate 7 times the national average.

The United States and Belgium are the only democracies that disenfranchise citizens for lengthy or indefinite periods after completing prison sentences.

To regain their voting rights, released felons in Iowa must provide the address of the judge who convicted them and a credit report showing they have paid off their court costs. "They make the process just about impossible," said a 40-year old ex-con who'd stolen a soda machine as a teen.

In Search Of Stolen Votes

While defending its precedent-setting photo ID law before the Supreme Court, Indiana was unable to cite a single instance of voter impersonation in its entire history.

A 2005 report by the American Center for Voting Rights claimed there were more than 100 cases of voter fraud involving 300,000 votes in 2004. A review of the charges turned up only 185 votes that were even potentially fraudulent.

In support of a voter ID law, Kansas Secretary of State (and the legal brains behind a slew of anti-immigration laws) Kris Kobach cited 221 incidents of voter fraud in the state between 1997 and 2010. Yet those cases produced just 7 convictions—none related to impersonating other voters.

Last December, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus declared that Wisconsin is "absolutely riddled with voter fraud." In fact, the state's voter fraud rate in 2004 was 0.0002 percent—just 7 votes.

In 2008, John McCain said fraudulent registrations collected by ACORN were "one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy." The Congressional Research Service found no proof that anyone improperly registered by ACORN tried to vote.

Federal convictions for election fraud, 2002-05

Voting while ineligible: 18
Voting multiple times: 5
Registration fraud: 3

unidentified lying objects

Between 2000 and 2010, there were:

649 million votes cast in general elections

47,000 UFO sightings

441 Americans killed by lightning

13 credible cases of in-person voter impersonation

Special hat tip to craigconnects.org

Additional sources:

A 2005 report by the American Center for Voting Rights…: The Myth of Voter Fraud by Lorraine C. Minnite
13 credible cases…: Justin Levitt, Loyola Law School

An Interactive Map of the Dark-Money Universe

Click your way through the final frontier of unlimited political money.

—By Dave Gilson, Gavin Aronsen, Tasneem Raja, Ben Breedlove, and EJ Fox

| Wed Jun. 27, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

[Read the full article]

Charts: The Supreme Court's Rightward Shift

Before the Obamacare decision, the Roberts court was on its way to becoming the most conservative in decades. (It still is.)

—By Dave Gilson

| Tue Jun. 26, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

Update, 6/29/12: Yesterday, the Supreme Court upheld the bulk of Obamacare in an unexpected 5-4 decision, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing the majority opinion. That doesn't change the court's overall ideological direction; as explained here, the Roberts court does not rule conservatively all the time. And see below for updated broccoli-related data.

If the Supreme Court strikes down all or part of the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, it will undoubtedly cement the Roberts court's reputation as the most conservative in years. That's not an entirely a matter of opinion. Thanks to an amazing trove of data collected by law professors Andrew Martin and Kevin Quinn and the Supreme Court Database, the court's rightward trajectory can be confirmed.

By several measures, the court headed by Chief Justice John Roberts is the most conservative since the early 1970s, when Richard Nixon named Warren Burger to replace the famously liberal Earl Warren. Not only is its most conservative member (Clarence Thomas) nearly as conservative as the Burger court's most conservative member (future Chief Justice William Rehnquist), its most liberal member (Ruth Bader Ginsburg) is considerably less liberal than previous justices on the left side of the spectrum.

Looking at individual members of the Roberts court also shows a rightward shift in its ranks. Between 2005 and 2010, most of its five conservative-leaning members became more so. Additionally, liberal Justices John Paul Stevens and David Souter were replaced by Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, who may turn out to be less liberal than their predecessors.

[Read the full article]

What a Seat in Congress Costs, By the Hour

Just how much campaign cash do lawmakers have to bring in on a typical day? We did the math.

—By Dave Gilson

| Fri Jun. 15, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

Members of Congress gripe about how much time they spend asking for money. But just how much dough do they have to come up with while they're not doing their day jobs? We did the math: Assuming they spent 40 hours a week focusing on finding funds, House members must raise, on average, $367 an hour; senators must come up with $819 an hour. Some of the most costly (and cheapest) seats on the Hill, by the hour: