In my piece a few months ago about the Republican push for voter ID laws (“The Dog That Voted”), I hung my narrative largely around Thor Hearne, the little-known Republican lawyer who founded the American Center for Voting Rights in 2005 and spent the next two years barnstorming the country with grim tales of voter fraud and stolen elections. Then, having tilled the field, he disappeared, leaving others to finish up the task of passing voter ID laws all over the country.

But if Hearne was the policy entrepreneur who got it all started, Hans von Spakovsky is the ubiquitous snake oil salesman who’s become the most persistent foot soldier in the voter fraud wars. In the New Yorker this week, Jane Mayer profiles the man who has become the most famous and brazen purveyor of voter fraud whoppers in the country. Here she is on the issue of people casting ballots under a false name:

Von Spakovsky offered me the names of two experts who, he said, would confirm that voter-impersonation fraud posed a significant peril: Robert Pastor, the director of the Center for Democracy and Election Management, at American University, and Larry Sabato, a political-science professor at the University of Virginia. Pastor, von Spakovsky noted, had spoken to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights about being a victim of election fraud: voting in Georgia, he discovered that someone else had already voted under his name.

When I reached Pastor, he clarified what had happened to him. “I think they just mistakenly checked my name when my son voted—it was just a mistake.” He added, “I don’t think that voter-impersonation fraud is a serious problem.” Pastor believes that, compared with other democracies, America is “somewhere near the bottom in election administration,” and thinks that voter I.D.s make sense—but only if they are free and easily available to all, which, he points out, is not what Republican legislatures have proposed. Sabato, who supports the use of voter I.D.s under the same basic conditions, says of the voter-impersonation question, “One fraudulent vote is one too many, but my sense is that it’s relatively rare today.”

This is typical von Spakovsky. He routinely throws out incendiary charges, apparently hoping that either no one will check up on them or that no one will care once they eventually hear the real story. Rick Hasen wrote about his encounters with von Spakovsky in some detail in The Voting Wars, and he talked to Mayer for her piece:

Hasen, who calls von Spakovsky a leading member of “the Fraudulent Fraud Squad,” told me that he respects many other conservative advocates in his area of expertise, but dismisses scholars who allege widespread voter-impersonation fraud. “I see them as foot soldiers in the Republican army,” he says. “It’s just a way to excite the base. They are hucksters. They’re providing fake scholarly support. They’re not playing fairly with the facts. And I think they know it.”

To repeat a point I’ve made before: there’s only one kind of fraud that voter ID laws can stop: impersonation fraud, where someone tries to vote under a false name. Even in theory, ID laws can’t stop ballot box stuffing or registration fraud or machine tampering or any other kind of vote fraud. They can only stop impersonation fraud.

And impersonation fraud just doesn’t exist. No politician would be insane enough to try it on a broad enough scale to throw an election, and virtually no individuals are insane enough to risk a felony just for the sake of casting a single vote:

Hasen says that, while researching “The Voting Wars,” he “tried to find a single case” since 1980 when “an election outcome could plausibly have turned on voter-impersonation fraud.” He couldn’t find one. News21, an investigative-journalism group, has reported that voter impersonation at the polls is a “virtually non-existent” problem. After conducting an exhaustive analysis of election-crime prosecutions since 2000, it identified only seven convictions for impersonation fraud. None of those cases involved conspiracy.

Photo ID laws are a scam. Republicans loudly deny that their real purpose is to suppress the vote among blacks, students, and the poor — all of whom have lower than average rates of possessing photo ID — but what other motivation is left? They have no impact on voter fraud and everyone knows it.

From Jennifer Rubin, in a column insisting that Barack Obama has too apologized for America:

Liberals don’t even see that Obama’s excoriating his predecessor is apologizing for this nation, but of course it is. George W. Bush wasn’t acting as a private citizen, and whatever he actions he took were done in the name of the United States.

This pretty much mocks itself, doesn’t it? In any case, Jimmy Carter will certainly be glad to hear that conservatives plan to stop criticizing all the actions he took in the name of the United States. Better late than never, I guess.

Just a quick update. The press mostly seems to be stuck in its post-first-debate groove of insisting that Mitt Romney has all the momentum and is closing fast on President Obama. And maybe so. But that’s not what our best forecasters think. Models from both Sam Wang and Nate Silver show the same thing: Romney surged after the first debate, but by October 12 that started to turn around. Since then, the momentum has mostly been Obama’s. Just sayin’.

Speaking of the hack gap, can I take a little victory lap on this? Think about what we saw last night: Mitt Romney dispassionately marched through the entire oeuvre of conservative obsessions on foreign policy and rejected virtually every single one of them. He’s getting out of Afghanistan with no conditions; he’s happy we helped get rid of Hosni Mubarak; he’ll take no serious action against Syria; he wants to indict Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the World Court; he didn’t even mention Benghazi; and he refused to say straight-up that he’d support Israel if they bombed Iran. It’s the kind of performance that should have had a guy like Charles Krauthammer tearing his hair out, but instead we got this:

I think it’s unequivocal: Romney won. And he didn’t just win tactically, but strategically.

Was there any rending of garments anywhere else? Not for a second. Conservatives just reveled in the fact that Romney apparently made himself acceptable to undecided voters. Yuval Levin: “Romney clearly achieved his aim.” Ramesh Ponnuru: “Advantage Romney.” Rich Lowry: “Romney executed what must have been his strategy nearly flawlessly.” Bill Kristol: “Tonight, Romney seems as fully capable as—probably more capable than—Barack Obama of being the next president.” Stanley Kurtz: “Romney has now decisively established himself as a credible alternative to Obama.” Erick Erickson: “Mitt Romney won this debate.”

On a substantive level, Romney’s performance from a conservative point of view was worse than Obama’s in the first debate. It was pure rope-a-dope, with Romney abandoning virtually every foreign policy position the right holds dear while utterly refusing to attack President Obama as the weak-kneed appeaser they believe him to be. And yet….no one seemed to mind. As far as the right is concerned, two weeks before an election is no time to get too worried over principle.

I’m just curious. Has this passage from the debate last night gotten any attention in conservative circles? It’s Mitt Romney explaining what he’d do to Iran aside from tightening sanctions further:

Secondly, I’d take on diplomatic isolation efforts. I’d make sure that Ahmadinejad is indicted under the Genocide Convention. His words amount to genocide incitation. I would indict him for it. I would also make sure that their diplomats are treated like the pariahs they are around the world. The same way we treated the apartheid diplomats of South Africa.

Can you imagine the howls from the Drudge/Rush/Fox axis if Obama — or any other Democrat — had said that? Their contempt for legal proceedings at The Hague is pretty well known, and the idea that a president of the United States would make such impotent action a centerpiece of his Iran strategy would elicit withering scorn. National Review would splash it on its cover, the Weekly Standard would write a hysterical editorial, Drudge would bring out his siren, and Rush would spend hours harping on it. “The Hague” would become yet another in a long line of conservative pet rocks, to go along with Fast & Furious and Obama’s removal of the Churchill bust from the White House.

And yet, I didn’t notice any conservatives taking issue with this last night. Am I wrong about that? Or is the hack gap every bit as big as I think it is?

Watching Sean Hannity on Fox, I’m sure not feeling much excitement about Romney’s performance. He spent five minutes talking to Sarah Palin, and they spent most of the time expressing disappointment about what Romney didn’t say. “He just didn’t have time to make all the points he needed to,” Palin sighed. In the end, they used nearly the entire segment imagining the attacks Romney should have made, rather than defending what he did say. I’m not surprised, since Romney went out of his way to be as un-Foxlike as possible on the warmongering front.

I’m not sure if this will be the line of the night, but Obama was obviously prepared for Romney to repeat his tired talking point that “our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917.” I guess Romney just couldn’t resist. But Obama zinged back immediately:

Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. And so the question is not a game of Battleship, where we’re counting ships. It’s what are our capabilities.

Not only is this a good line, but it made Romney look naive and childish, dishing out puerile talking points without really understanding what they mean.

The CBS snap poll of uncommitted voters gave the debate to Obama, 53%-23%. CNN’s poll of all debate viewers (which tilts Republican) showed Obama winning 48%-40%. PPP’s poll of swing state voters had Obama winning 53%-42%.

For my money, Obama’s best moment came after Romney hauled out his “apology tour” trope. The transcript doesn’t do it justice. On paper it sounds good, but his delivery made it great. He sounded just a smidge outraged by the whole thing, which was exactly the right tone.

On MSNBC, Steve Schmidt says he thinks Romney passed the “commander-in-chief test.” I’m not so sure about that. I don’t think this debate hurt him badly, but I sure don’t think he looked especially ready to take over America’s foreign policy.

Mark Kleiman: “Obama landed some heavy blows, while Romney maundered; in a sane world, Obama would count as the clear winner. In the actual world, more or less a draw. Romney’s capacity not to notice when he’s had a hole blown in him is astounding.” I suspect that’s a little too pessimistic. I think most viewers probably noticed Romney’s inability to articulate any real policy differences with Obama.

Chuck Todd: Republicans “aren’t claiming victory, just saying he passed a bar.” That sounds about right. Also, “Foreign policy heavyweights were disappointed, didn’t feel like he articulated anything.”

Andrew Sprung: “As I expected, Romney brought Moderate Mitt to this debate. Practically the first word out of his mouth was “peace” — and throughout, he stressed that he wanted to foster peace….Now, Mitt is the one pushing economic aid in the Muslim world, using sweet persuasion to defuse extremism, fostering a new ally in Syria, rebuilding a relationship with Pakistan. He even had the chutzpah to suggest that he was the one more likely to bring about a Israeli-Palestinian settlement. He portrayed China as a potential partner, implying they’d just brush off being labeled a currency manipulator.”

Andrew Sullivan thinks Romney did better than I did: “For Romney, he made no massive mistakes. No Gerald Ford moments. And since the momentum of this race is now his, if now faltering a little, a defeat on points on foreign policy will be an acceptable result. But this was Obama’s debate; and he reminded me again of how extraordinarily lucky this country has been to have had him at the helm in this new millennium.”

Hilarious line of the night comes from Sean Hannity: “Marines still use bayonets, so maybe somebody should educate the president about how the military works.” Seriously? Apparently so. Later on Hannity was crowing about the Marines using horses in Afghanistan too. This just reeks of desperation.

Republicans are spinning hard to make this sound like an Obama debacle, but if you read between the lines, conservative reaction to the debate hasn’t been very positive. Romney decided — probably with good reason — that he needed to be extremely restrained tonight, and this meant that he barely mentioned any of the Republican pet rocks that keep the base so riled up. No Churchill bust. No failure to meet with Netanyahu. No attacks over Benghazi. Only a bare mention of the Muslim Brotherhood taking power in Egypt. This has left conservatives mostly mooning about what Romney should have said and relitigating Benghazi all over again. They think Obama has proven himself the weakest world leader since Neville Chamberlain, and they just don’t understand why Romney didn’t mop up the floor with him.

The conventional wisdom, such as it is, is that Romney took this tack because he needs to build support among women, and bellicosity doesn’t play well with that demographic. Maybe so. We’ll see if that works out for him. But it sure has left a long trail of despondent conservatives behind him.

WRAP-UP: It felt to me like Mitt Romney struggled a lot tonight. His problem was simple: he wanted to draw a clear distinction with Obama on foreign policy, but he just couldn’t because he didn’t want to seem overly bellicose. As a result, he opened up very few serious, substantive areas of disagreement. This reached almost laughable proportions when Bob Schieffer asked him what he’d do if 2014 rolled around and Afghan troops weren’t ready to take over their own security:

Well, we’re going to be finished by 2014, and when I’m president, we’ll make sure we bring our troops out by the end of 2014. The commanders and the generals there are on track to do so. We’ve seen progress over the past several years. The surge has been successful and the training program is proceeding apace. There are now a large number of Afghan Security Forces, 350,000 that are ready to step in to provide security, and we’re going to be able to make that transition by the end of 2014.

Transcript here. Romney sounded like a cheerleader for the White House in this exchange. He didn’t even hint that Obama had mismanaged anything or done anything wrong. This is especially noteworthy since, in fact, it’s vanishingly unlikely that Afghan troops will be ready to take over in 2014.

Likewise, Romney didn’t open up any real daylight on Israel. Partly this was because Obama was so pro-Israel that he didn’t leave Romney much room on the right. But it was also partly because Romney didn’t try. Twice he mentioned that a “nuclear capable” Iran was unacceptable, but that’s a term of art that’s meaningless to most people unless it’s explained. However, Romney was content to leave it out there as a dog whistle, and neither Obama nor Schieffer followed up on it. Later, when Schieffer threw Romney a softball question about supporting Benjamin Netanyahu if he launched an attack on Iran, he punted: “Let’s not go into hypotheticals of that nature,” he said. Weak! But obviously Romney wanted to distance himself as much as possible from charges of being just another neocon warmonger.

And that wasn’t all. On Syria, Romney basically approved of Obama’s policies. On Libya, ditto, and he didn’t even try to do any political point scoring over Benghazi. (Either Candy Crowley scared him off or else he reads this blog.) He didn’t really have a different policy to offer on Egypt. Or Pakistan. Or drones. Or even Iran, though he tried. And when he got a little closer to home and tried to haul out a normally reliable Republican warhorse — Democrats are weakening our military! — Obama jumped all over it. “You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets.” That was a pretty withering reply.

Overall, Obama did a very nice job of defending his foreign policy, sounding well briefed, confident, and commanding. About ten minutes in, he rattled off a five-point plan for dealing with the Middle East, and although I wasn’t especially impressed with this, I’ll bet a lot of viewers liked it — just the way they liked Romney’s crisp five-point economic plan in the first debate. Tonally, Obama did a very good job of sounding just tough enough while also emphasizing soft power capabilities, and doing it in a way that sounded credible. He even managed at times to make Romney sound almost naive about the realities of foreign policy. And when Romney accused him yet again of taking an “apology tour,” Obama had one of his best moments of the night:

If we’re going to talk about trips that we’ve taken — when I was a candidate for office, the first trip I took was to visit our troops. And when I went to Israel as a candidate, I didn’t take donors. I didn’t attend fundraisers. I went to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum there, to remind myself of the nature of evil and why our bond with Israel will be unbreakable.

And then I went down to the border town of Sderot, which had experienced missiles raining down from Hamas. And I saw families there who showed me there where missiles had come down near their children’s bedrooms. And I was reminded of what that would mean if those were my kids. Which is why as president, we funded an Iron Dome program to stop those missiles.

So that’s how I’ve used my travels, when I travel to Israel and when I travel to the region. And the central question at this point is going to be: Who is going to be credible to all parties involved? And they can look at my track record, whether it’s Iran sanctions, whether it’s dealing with counterterrorism, whether it’s supporting democracy, whether it’s supporting women’s rights, whether it’s supporting religious minorities.

Romney looked almost pained while Obama was saying this, like a kid caught telling a whopper and getting dressed down in front of the whole class.

Romney’s main goal tonight was pretty transparent: not to sound like a warmonger. He probably succeeded in that, but at the price of turning every attack into mush and validating nearly everything Obama said. It just didn’t seem like a good night for him. I’d give him a C+ and Obama an A-.

---

Tonight’s debate liveblogging is brought to you by an Android tablet. Barely. The Mother Jones back end really, really doesn’t want me to do this. But let’s try it for a while just for fun. Let the games begin….

7:34 – And that’s it.

7:33 – Romney’s closing statement is basically a marketing brochure for Moderate Mitt.

7:31 – Romney wants peace. Really. Then he’s back to domestic economic policy. He gave foreign policy even less of a nod than Obama did.

7:30 – Closing statements! Romney wants to take us back to a foreign policy that’s “wrong and reckless.” And that’s a wrap on foreign policy. Now we’re back to domestic economic policy. Good foreceful wrap-up.

7:29 – Romney loves teachers again. And yet again. Schieffer: “I think we all love teachers.”

7:27 – Romney, as usual, is good when he criticizes Obama’s economic performance over past four years. Sounds a little tired, though.

7:25 – Obama: “You keep on trying to airbrush history.” Good line, but I’m still not sure that arguing about Detroit is worthwhile. I guess it’s all about Ohio.

7:24 – Yes, let’s have another argument about the Detroit bankruptcy. Please.

7:22 – Obama makes point that Chinese currency has strengthened lately. True. Not sure anyone will really understand the point, though. Would have worked better if Obama had explained a bit more and taken credit for it.

7:21 – Obama: “Well, Governor Romney’s right, you are familiar with jobs being shipped overseas.” Ouch.

7:19 – Romney blathering on about China being a currency manipulator. See Krugman on this. Romney is convinced that nothing he does will invite any retaliation. Uh huh.

7:18 – Romney just gratuitously announces that the world’s greatest threat is a nuclear Iran. Where did that come from?

7:17 – Romney probably right on the merits of the tire tariffs. But probably wrong on the politics.

7:16 – Obama talking about tough he’s been on China. Finally, a chance for Romney to be even tougher. Will he take it?

7:14 – Schieffer is certainly keeping to his schedule. No missing pods for him.

7:11 – Ah, a question about drones. Romney’s answer is unsurprising: he’s all in favor of using them. Zero daylight between him and Obama. Somewhere Glenn Greenwald is tearing his hair out.

7:10 – Romney: “I don’t blame the administration for the fact that the relationship with Pakistan is strained.” Again, Romney sounds like he’s in the spin room defending Obama.

7:04 – WTF? Romney on Afghanistan sounds like he’s Obama’s Secretary of Defense. Everything is working great, our boys will be home by 2014. Wow.

7:01 – Obama hitting Romney hard tonight. Generally, though, both candidates are less aggressive toward each other than in second debate.

9:59 – Would you support Israel if they bombed Iran? Romney won’t answer a hypothetical. This is Moderate² Mitt. What will Bill Kristol think?

9:57 – Obama hitting it out of the park responding to Romney’s apology tour nonsense.

9:54 – Romney trying to sound tougher than Obama while offering nothing that Obama hasn’t done. One exception (maybe) is that he wouldn’t allow Iran to achieve “nuclear capability.” Will Schieffer follow up?

9:53 – Apology tour! Take a drink!

9:53 – Romney: ” I think [Iran] looked at that and saw weakness.” This is really tired stuff.

9:52 – Obama making point that sanctions only work if everyone agrees to them. This is an important thing to get across. Voters need to understand just how successful and persistent he’s been on Iran.

9:51 – Overall, we’re mostly seeing Moderate Mitt tonight. He sure sounds like he basically supports everything Obama has done on Iran.

9:50 – Did Romney just say he’d indict Ahmadinejad at the Hague?

9:48 – Romney won’t allow a “nuclear capable” Iran. Will Schieffer follow up to make clear what this means?

9:47 – Obama is claiming that the foreign policy differences between him and Romney are pretty small. That’s true, actually.

9:45 – Should we say that an attack on Israel is an attack on the United States? Obama: “I will stand with Israel if they are attacked.” Not formally an answer, but close enough.

9:44 – Obama: “We also have fewer horses and bayonets.” Pretty good line. Not sure this exchange can have a winner, though.

9:43 – Romney finally willing to talk about military, but hauls out nonsense about our Navy being smaller than anytime in the past century. Sheesh.

9:42 – Not yet. Romney back on balancing the budget.

9:41 – Finally back on the military budget. Will Romney now be willing to actually talk about the military?

9:40 – Now Obama is attacking Romney’s tax plan.

9:39 – Bob Schieffer completely unable to get Romney back onto foreign policy.

9:34 – Romney surely wins an award for inserting teachers union bashing in a foreign policy debate.

9:33 – Oh for God’s sake. Can we please stop talking about our domestic economic plans on the pretext that this is really a foreign policy issue?

9:27 – Romney just attacked “sequestration” without explaining what it is. That’s how you lose your audience.

9:22 – Romney has a whole lot of goals for Syria but precisely no plans for achieving them.

9:19 – Romney wants to form a “council” in Syria? He’s otherwise being very non-belligerent on Syria.

9:17 – So far, Obama pandering to Israel more than Romney.

9:11 – Obama really going after Romney’s inconsistencies. Not sure he really made the point convincingly.

9:10 – Romney has now mentioned Mali twice. Is this the latest Republican thing?

9:08 – Romney: “My strategy is pretty straightforward, which is to go after the bad guys.” Okey dokey.

9:05 – Kinda looks like Moderate Mitt so far. But the night is young.

9:00 – So which Mitt will we get tonight? “Red line” Mitt or Moderate Mitt? Or something in between?

The infamous L’Aquila earthquake trial is over, and it turns out that in Italy you can be convicted of manslaughter for not predicting an earthquake:

Six Italian scientists and an ex-government official have been sentenced to six years in prison over the 2009 deadly earthquake in L’Aquila. A regional court found them guilty of multiple manslaughter.

Prosecutors said the defendants gave a falsely reassuring statement before the quake, while the defence maintained there was no way to predict major quakes. It took Judge Marco Billi slightly more than four hours to reach the verdict in the trial, which had begun in September 2011.

As bad as this sounds, it’s actually even worse. Prior to the L’Aquila quake, there had been a series of small tremors, prompting a local lab technician to issue several incorrect predictions of a large earthquake on Italian television. Residents were nervous, so a committee of seismologists was convened to assess the risk of a bigger quake. Here’s what they concluded:

The minutes of the 31 March meeting [] reveal that at no point did any of the scientists say that there was “no danger” of a big quake. “A major earthquake in the area is unlikely but cannot be ruled out,” Boschi said. Selvaggi is quoted as saying that “in recent times some recent earthquakes have been preceded by minor shocks days or weeks beforehand, but on the other hand many seismic swarms did not result in a major event”. Eva added that “because L’Aquila is in a high-risk zone it is impossible to say with certainty that there will be no large earthquake”. Summing up the meeting, Barberi said, “there is no reason to believe that a swarm of minor events is a sure predictor of a major shock”. All the participants agreed that buildings in the area should be monitored urgently, to assess their capacity to sustain a major shock.

So what’s the conviction based on? This:

The prosecution has focused on a statement made at the press conference by accused committee member Bernardo De Bernardinis, who was then deputy technical head of Italy’s Civil Protection Agency. “The scientific community tells me there is no danger,” he said at the time, “because there is an ongoing discharge of energy. The situation looks favourable.”

Many seismologists — including one of the accused, Enzo Boschi, president of the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology in Rome — have since criticized the statement as scientifically unfounded. The statement does not appear in the minutes of the committee meeting itself, and the accused seismologists say they cannot be blamed for it. De Bernardinis’s advocate insists that his client merely summarized what the scientists had told him. The prosecutor claims that because none of the other committee members immediately corrected De Bernardinis, they are all equally culpable.

Even if you think De Bernardinis was culpable in some way, it’s beyond belief that six scientists were convicted merely for not immediately disagreeing with him. This is a sad day in Italian justice, and it’s going to be a long time before any qualified scientist is willing to say anything ever again about earthquake safety.

Here’s a headline from Sarah Kliff in the Washington Post today:

Sorry, nerds: Popular kids earn more in the long run

This is a description of a study that followed high school seniors from the class of 1957 and, among other things, looked at whether popularity correlated with later success in life. And it did. Students were all asked to name their three best friends, and those who were named most often ended up earning more as adults. This isn’t surprising. But it’s worth noting that smart kids didn’t actually do poorly. Here’s what the study says:

We ?nd a tendency for high-IQ students to nominate more friends and to be popular in turn, suggesting that high ability students might be more attractive as peers and better understand the opportunities arising from social interactions.

Social scientists have known for a long time that the usual stereotype of smart kids as socially maladjusted outcasts is wrong. Some of them are, but then again, so are some average kids. Popularity is independent of smarts, and on average, it turns out that smart kids are actually a little more sociable than the mean. This new study confirms that.

Mitt Romney, displaying the political courage we’ve come to expect from him, has declined to take a public stand on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. So does that mean we’re doomed to simply guess what he thinks? Steve Benen says no: “There’s ample evidence that the Romney campaign and its surrogates strongly oppose the pay-equity bill.”

Steve runs down the recent evidence, but can I just add the obvious? We actually held a vote on this bill in 2009. A grand total of eight Republicans out of 219 voted in favor. Romney may not feel like admitting it during an election in which he needs women to vote for him, but Steve is right: I think we have a pretty good idea of exactly what he and his fellow Republicans think about this.