January 17, 2019
We know that Republicans have trouble with arithmetic so I thought I would take a few minutes to help Mitch McConnell with some of the numbers in a column he wrote for The Washington Post complaining about a bill to protect voters’ rights and limit the influence of money in elections.
The column complains
“…the legislation dedicates hundreds of pages to federalizing the electoral process. It would make states mimic the practices that recently caused California to incorrectly register 23,000 ineligible voters.”
While 23,000 people would be a lot of people to have to a dinner party (or a Donald Trump inauguration), California has over 19 million registered voters. This means that the 23,000 ineligible voters who were wrongly registered constitute 0.12 percent of all registered voters.
The goal, of course, is to have as few improperly registered voters as possible, but also to have as many eligible voters registered as possible. California has more than 25 million eligible voters, which means that 24 percent of eligible voters are not registered. For some reason, Mitch McConnell is more concerned that 0.12 percent of registered voters were ineligible than almost one-quarter of eligible voters are not registered.
Then McConnell decides to strike out for the average taxpayer against the campaign finance legislation in the law.
“They’re also taking aim at your wallet. Pelosi and company are pitching new taxpayer subsidies, including a 600 percent government match for certain political donations and a new voucher program that would funnel even more public dollars to campaigns. Maybe that’s why every Democrat opposed our tax cuts for middle-class families and small businesses. They’d rather use your money to enrich campaign consultants.”
Roughly 30 million people contributed to political campaigns in 2016. Let’s say the average matchable contribution is $50. (Only contributions of less than $200 are eligible for the match.) This implies $1.5 billion in matchable contributions or a total tab of $9 billion.
Is this $9 billion a big deal? Well, it’s roughly 0.2 percent of the annual federal budget. It would be enough to give 100 million middle-class taxpayers $90 each or $45 annually since this is an every-other-year expenditure. It is equal to less than 3.0 percent of what the federal government gives each year to the pharmaceutical industry through patent monopolies and related protections. And it is less than 1.4 percent of the annual military budget.
I’m sure Senator McConnell appreciates my effort to clarify the points in his op-ed.
Correction:
As Curt Adams points out in his comment, the linked article in the McConnell column did not say that any ineligible voters were registered. It referred to errors in the registration process, such as wrong party identification or preferred language for ballots. McConnell seriously misrepresented this part of the story. Apparently, the Post’s fact checkers either didn’t look at the linked article or chose to ignore the misrepresentation.
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