Proper Representation II

 When I was young "representation" wasn't an issue. Instead you had "mobility", the idea that immigrants climbed the ladder from poverty to middle class with some striking it rich.  Actually there were different ladders--Jews were noted boxers and basketball players before they became doctors and lawyers. Mobility was often about "firsts". We noted the "firsts"--the first Jewish SCOTUS justice, the first Polish cabinet secretary, even the first black cabinet secretary.

Emphasizing the firsts obscured our view of the many, or perhaps was just a way to avoid looking at the many.   But "firsts" are still important; they show what is possible, what isn't prohibited.  Similarly the extreme cases, like Muggsy Bogues, may be outliers but they too show what's possible.

Somehow this discussion ties into "intersectionality" to me.  But that's for another day.

What Is Proper Representation?

The conventional wisdom now seems to be that groups, whether ethnic, racial, gender, ideological, deserve to have representation in every walk of life that matches their presence in society.  

For example, I've noted articles on the dwindling presence of American blacks in major league baseball; the absence of blacks in management positions in the NFL, the lack of conservative professors in higher education, etc

My first reaction is to go slowly--the first consideration is whether there are legal barriers to such representation. Those I presume are almost always wrong. 

A second consideration is that under-representation of one group necessarily means over-representation of other group(s).  For example, the over-representation of Asian students in top educational institutions (i.e., Harvard, Thomas Jefferson High School) is the other side of the under-representation of other minorities. 

A third consideration is the under-representation  of a group in one area means the over-representation in other area(s).  For example, the over-representation of blacks in pro football and basketball seems to be the counterpart to their under-representation in pro baseball.

A fourth consideration is trajectory through history.  For example, blacks seem to have created and still dominate areas of music (about which I know nothing), like hip hop and rap.  Jews seem to be prominent in Hollywood and the entertainment industry.

A final consideration (some would put it first) is whether the differential representation indicates a barrier to advancement of some kind. One rule of advancement is usually--it depends on who you know--meaning the greater the representation the easier it is to advance.

Feds Exchanging Data

 Matt Yglesias had a tweet:

A weird fact about the US government is the Department of Education isn’t allowed to just access the IRS data to determine which of its borrowers are eligible for forgiveness and then do the forgiveness.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 26, 2022

He got a lot of replies, including one from me. I'll embed it when it pops up in my profile. 

 

The Strange Case of "Identity"

 Read, or skimmed, Julia Galef's book, The Scout Mindset.  I'd recommend it.  But what I want to write about is the mystery of "identity". The last part of the book covers how "motivated reasoning", or the "soldier" mindset as she calls it, is tied up with our sense of identity. Her repeated references to "identity" got me wondering when it became so important.

When I was young, I knew my identity was white, Scots-Irish/German, Protestant, farm boy from upstate New York. Child of John and Gertrude, sibling of Jean, with stories of ancestors immigrating to the US. But I don't recall feeling my identity was in question.  

Is it possible that these older sources of identity have faded away as society has changed and market capitalism has evolved so Americans and Brits worry more about identity and start to find it elsewhere?  Google Ngram viewer has been improved since I last used it; you can now search texts in languages other than American and British English.  When I used it to search for use of "identity", it started to be used much more around 1960. 

The pattern was similar for British English, but not for French, Spanish...

Organized Fraud in Unemployment Claims

Pro Publica reports on the existence of organized fraud rings which submitted false claims for unemployment benefits/pandemic aid in multiple states.                 (https://www.propublica.org/article/how-unemployment-insurance-fraud-exploded-during-the-pandemic)

It's part of the price we pay for our individualism, freedom, and privacy, I guess.

Election Reforms from the Past

 Thanks to someone (on the right but I forget the name) I looked up the Carter-Baker Federal election commission.

A blast from the past is this paragraph on the commission's homepage:

Full Report PDF (7.6MB) or Text Only
(Download will take approximately 20 minutes on a dial-up connection, 4 minutes on a cable or dsl connection, and under 30 seconds on a LAN.)

Apparently the report failed to attract support, perhaps for reasons indicated by the dissent.  Personally I like the idea of standard photo ID for voting, but that's my nerd/bureaucrat coming out.  I'd spend a few billion to get those IDs into the hands of everyone (including the majority of Native Americans (or possibly only Navaho members) who don't have individual mail service.)) and the very old, and then phase in use of the requirement.  I know liberals don't like this, and it's reasonable to say it's not cost-effective: the amount of electoral fraud due to identity fraud is small. 

 But, and it's a big but, many on the right don't trust the system. Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections, and that trend is likely to continue, meaning the distrust will only increase.  

So my grand bargain (which I've posted about before) is phase in photo-id of everyone, along with basic data (i.e., citizen/non citizen, age) to be used for election verification and for employment verification (E=Verify).  The right get assurance about election validity and strong immigration enforcement; the left gets voting eligibility for everyone in national elections.  I think it's a reasonable deal but I'm not optimistic.

More on Vaccinating

I posted yesterday about a chance un the 1960's to lay the basis for an efficient way to vaccinate the public.

Today a Post article reinforces that--a quote:

Israel’s vaccine success is made possible by its small size (slighter larger than New Jersey) and the efficiencies of its nationalized health system, in which all 9 million citizens hold identity cards and register their electronic medical files with one of the country’s four national health maintenance organizations (HMOs).

Israel also maintains a national vaccination registry, first designed for childhood vaccinations, that will be used in the coming weeks to monitor immediate and long-term progress of the coronavirus vaccine program.

I suspect one of the arguments in the 1960's against a national identity system was the specter of the Holocaust; people being numbered, tattooed, and subject to totalitarian rule, at the whim of the state. 

While I continue to believe that efficiency would have been, and would be, enhanced by a national identity system, I have to concede the disadvantages which are real.  One worth mentioning here: the greater security provided by our dispersion of data--the eggs in one basket proverb--especially in light of the election and the Southwinds hackl 

 

If Only Back in the 1960's

 There was an aborted effort to establish a national identifier in the 1960's, using the Social Security number. IIRC it was some nerds/bureaucrats suggesting it, but it was quickly killed amidst a concern over privacy, not to mention the sign of the beast. 

Over the decades the U.S. has come up with jury-rigged substitutes, Real ID being the latest. In the last century we had a process for passing information on men who were ordered to provide child support between states.  But we don't have the sort of process which bureaucrats would like.  If we did, it would alleviate problems on updating voter rolls and on tracking coronavirus vaccinations. 

We'll continue with our jury-rigging process for the foreseeable future.

The Declining Value of Signatures

Stories on the elections, particularly in Florida but also elsewhere, have touched on the issue of signatures, but without going into much detail.  I assume what happens is that the voting registrar has a voter's signature on file and is trying to match it to a signature on an absentee ballot or a mail ballot.

Thinking about my signature over the years causes me to believe that the process is of declining value:

• my signature has varied--usually I've signed "William D. Harshaw", but occasionally "William David..." I use "Bill..." for less official occasions.
• my bank may still have my 1968 signature on file, although perhaps it's been updated.  IIRC when I bought the house in 1976 I had to go to an officer of the bank to convince him I was me, because the difference in signatures over the 8 years was great enough to raise doubts.
• but that was back in the day when I made payments by check, signing 5 or more checks each month.  These days I likely write 5 or more checks in a year, so whenever I sign a check I'm really out of practice.  I'd predict that means my signature is more variable these days.
• I usually use a debt card instead of a credit card, but when I use the credit card I often have to sign using my finger on a tablet, not using a pen.  My tablet signal bears only a slight resemblance to my pen and ink signature.

So my bottom line is the bureaucracy should begin to steer away from signatures as a proof of identity.

[Updated: post on signatures.]

The Problems with E-Verify

Part of a compromise on immigration has always been E-Verify, the process of bouncing a new employee's data against database(s) to confirm she is legal to work (i.e., has a green card).  Conservatives push it, liberals tend not to be enthusiastic.  (That's sort of weird, because conservatives generally resist government ID programs as an invasion of individual rights and liberals generally believe in government programs--but that's the way the human consistency cookie crumbles.)

So it's interesting when Cato comes out with a piece on the problems the program has in those states which have made it mandatory.   Cato is libertarian enough that their results deserve a bit of salt, but the study shows relatively low compliance rates and a significant rate of false positives. 

My uninformed analysis would suggest that a mandatory program by the feds could be much more effective, but others might disagree.

Improper Payments and Election Fraud

GovExec has a piece on a proposed commission to look at steps to reduce improper payments.  It's good, but I'd like to make a connection to another issue: election fraud.

The piece includes this sentence: "The example he recommended is easing the current restriction in the Social Security Act that prevents the Treasury Department’s Fiscal Bureau from readily accessing the Death Master File for privacy reasons."  It goes on to note that IRS uses its databases to vet 87 percent of all federal payments.

A major problem in improper payments is knowing when your intended payee is dead. Perhaps the payment should go to the estate  (usual in the case of farm programs) or should not be paid at all.

A major problem in keeping voter eligibility files current is knowing when the previously registered voter has died.

By improving the IRS process by allowing access to the Death Master File (as opposed, IIRC, to using less accurate data from SSA) and using that process for both payments and voter eligibility we kill two birds with one stone.

Voter Fraud Commission

Trump's commission on voter fraud has requested data from all the states on voters names, addresses, ID's, registration, and voting records.  It's getting a lot of flak from the left and resistance from states both on the right (i.e. Mississippi) and left.

I'm a little conflicted on this, because I've a residual affection for the idea of a national identity, like Estonia, as an enabler for many good things.  I don't trust Mr. Kobach or Hans von Spakowsky.  In an ideal world there could be tradeoffs: do a national matching process to determine which voters are registered in more than one state and/or voted in more than one state while at the same time improving the national registry of firearms owners and those ineligible to own firearms.

That's a dream world though. As I posted recently, we have some security through chaos. Maybe one thing which could be done is to require states to do is bounce their voter registration lists against the SSA list of deceased voters (the same process as is done to avoid erroneous federal payments)>

Unique Identity: the American Solution

Some countries, like Estonia and Burkina Faso, try to assign a unique identifier to each citizen.

Others, like the U.S., don't.  Instead we have workarounds.  One of the latest which has comet to my attention is the Food and Nutrition Service's "Electronic Disqualified Recipient System (eDRS).  This seems to be a file of people who have been disqualified for food stamps (aka SNAP) because of fraud.  FNS is now notifying the public it will furnish the file to each of the states so they can verify SNAP recipients against the file.

One might consider this to be somewhat similar to the "do not fly" list, where civil liberties people protest the lack of procedures for challenging the contents.  But it seems likely from this bit in the MD manual that there is a process for determining fraud:

Fraud overpayments. Consider cases suspected of fraud to be client error overpayments until the court or an Administrative Disqualification Hearing (ADH) makes a determination of fraud. Consider an overpayment in any month in which a client files a false report timely and this results in an overpayment to be a client error overpayment. This applies even if there is an agency error in the same month, unless the agency caused the client's failure to report.

SSNs and VA

FCW describes a bill to force the VA to stop using SSN's.  On this weekend I want to pat myself on my back--the SCIMs data design was intended to allow FSA to stop using them, and that was 20 years ago.  I hasten to add that I've no information or confidence that all FSA systems no longer use SSN's, or even that SCIMS doesn't.  The force of inertia and the interweaving of dependencies hard to overcome.

Proof of Identity--All Things Change

Once upon a time, the signet ring and the seal, as in the Great Seal, were the proofs of identity, and were the means of authenticating a legal transaction.  Then, as literacy spread, the signature was added, eventually replacing seals and signets for all but the most official transactions.  (Go to have a document notarized and she has a seal and will emboss your document.)  But all is changing.  From a Timothy Lee Vox post, on how Europe does debit cards better than the US:

Unfortunately, signatures are practically worthless as a security measure. If you don't believe me, try scribbling randomly next time you're asked to sign a credit or debit card receipt. I've been doing this for years and I've never had a store clerk decline the transaction because my signature didn't look authentic.
The rest of the world is way ahead of us on this. Over the past decade, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia — just to name a few — have switched to PIN-based authentication, in which customers identify themselves with a four- or six-digit code.

The Growth of Trust: How We Sign

Once upon a time in a faraway land the process of authenticating a document was labor intensive.  Those who generated documents were few, and communication slow, so a document which arrived at your doorstep had to be examined with due suspicion:  was it signed in the proper format, was it sealed with a seal which bore the imprint of a signet ring, or for monarchs perhaps the great seal.  All of this reflected a prudent lack of trust; people were loosely connected and individual transactions were rare but very important so fraud was tempting.

Even 55 years ago, a rite of passage was determining what my legal signature would be: William David Harshaw, William D., W. D., W. David, or Bill.  And I took a little care in practicing the signature, before beginning to sign checks and college applications and such.  Early on I was proud of my signature and theoretically the bank could examine the signatures on my checks to determine whether or not they were forged.

But today you watch people at the checkout counter using a credit card in the card machine--they stick in the numbers or slide the card, then scribble a signature, very often in my observation just a squiggle which is almost a straight line.  Even when you go to the bank these days, signing some bank documents, you use the same technology.  From my limited experience it's impossible to use the technology to sign legibly.  I'm sure the variations in signatures from one time to the next are much greater than when signing with pen on paper, so the likelihood of an expert being able to authenticate such a signature is much lower than in the past.  But that's okay, because we do so many transactions which don't really matter much.  The effect on society is to make us less suspicious and more trusting.

Nevada and Voter ID

I don't have much problem with phasing in voter ID requirements, as long as it recognizes the problems of the elderly (and others).  I'm struck by this paragraph in a Politico story:

"One state, Nevada, is proposing a different kind of voter ID law — one that would cull photos from the DMV and state databases rather than making voters bring their IDs to the polls. If a voter doesn’t have a photo in the database, they would be photographed at the polling station.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/voter-id-battle-set-to-rage-again-86080.html#ixzz2Hmgw08u0

Makes sense to me.  If the bureaucracy already has a photo associated to a name, why not put the burden on the bureaucracy instead of the citizen.

Erroneous Payment Process and Eligibility

Here's a Federal Computer Weekly article on the administration's hopes and plans for VerifyPayment.gov, their portal to try to reduce erroneous payments and the more detailed Federal Times article.

It strikes me as a parallel to one of my better ideas, the FSA eligibility file.  As I've mentioned before, I visited ASCS county offices in the late 60's, spending enough time to observe the detailed work processes.  I remember being struck in one office by the clerk's (this was in the days before they were called "program assistants", much less "program technicians" as I believe today's nomenclature is) systematic process for issuing deficiency payments.  Essentially she had what Atul Gawande has written a book about: a checklist.

Move forward a number of years and we're trying to implement the payment process on the IBM System/36.  But there was a problem between assembling the necessary data to compute the payments and actually approving and printing the checks.  That's where the idea of the eligibility file/checklist came in: a place to record the various determinations which affected payment eligibility (i.e., controlled substance conviction, sod/swamp, etc.). And our Kansas City developers could create a common routine, so any FSA program area could inquire to see if the producer was eligible for that program.

As a digression, I've always regretted we didn't have the available people to build on the eligibility file to automate the source documents  It wouldn't have been that difficult and would have eliminated the gap between the county committee making a determination and getting it  recorded in the eligibility file.

Anyhow, back to the Verifypayment process--it seems to me the Feds could and should take the same approach: make a front-end process which tells the calling entity whether the subject is alive and eligible for the payment.  The website lists some of the major program areas they're focusing on, but the approach could be expanded so that state and local governments could access it, as well as OPM for deceased annuitants. 

Voter ID Again

I blogged earlier on a possible Voter ID compromise, providing a one-time grace period and issuing ID's at the polling place. Here's a post on the problems with voter ID.  I'm not convinced by the arguments and still think my compromise works. 

A Compromise on Voter ID

Seems to me there's a relatively easy compromise available for liberals and conservatives over Voter-ID, which the cons want and libs don't.  Phase in the damn thing (phasing tends to be my solution for many things).  The problem liberals have is that many people don't have photo ID's (like my mother-in-law). So update your voter registration database to show people who do have photo ID's and require them to present them when voting.  For those on the list who don't have ID's, give them one free vote, and offer photo-ID's at the voting station.  In other words, m-o-l shows up to vote, the list shows she doesn't have a photo-ID that's valid, so she can vote but she must get a photo-id before leaving (or at the DMV before the next election) to vote again.

Yes, this is a step towards identity cards for everyone, but I can live with that in exchange for the gains in effectiveness of programs.