Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen

Posted on July 2, 2021 by Luke Ford

From the 2005 book by Henry Bial, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen:

* At 8:00 P.M. on the evening of Thursday, 14 May 1998, the Jewish Museum in New York City hosted a panel discussion entitled “Young Jewish Writers” featuring novelists Allegra Goodman (The Family Markowitz), Marcie Hershman (Tales of the Master Race), Thane Rosenbaum (The Golems of Gotham), and Aryeh Lev Stallman (The Illuminated Soul). The conversation, moderated by Ellen Pall (Among the Ginzburgs), focused in part on how the writers’ perceptions of their own Jewish identity did or did not affect their professional craft. As part of the museum’s inaugural “Live at the JM” series, the event was specifically intended to attract a younger, “hipper,” Jewish audience than the institution’s typical public programs. Although the discussion was lively, the hall was sparsely filled. Many spectators left early. The real interrogation of contemporary Jewish American identity was taking place elsewhere.

At 9:oo p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on that very same evening, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) broadcast the final episode of its top-rated comedy Seinfeld (1989-98). The self-billed “show about nothing” features comedian Jerry Seinfeld as a comedian named …Jerry Seinfeld. The character of Jerry is explicitly identified as Jewish in selected episodes, and this identification is reinforced through a variety of visual and linguistic performance codes: Jerry has dark hair, dark eyes, and a stereo typically Semitic profile. His accent (especially in the early episodes) betrays his real life upbringing in Queens and Long Island. He resides on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a largely Jewish neighborhood. His last name, Seinfeld, is unmistakably “different” from the Anglo-Saxon norm and is recognizable to a Jewish audience as German-Jewish in origin. Yet, while Jewish critics and viewers alike identify Jerry Seinfeld as unambiguously Jewish, his religious and ethnic background is essential to the narrative in only a handful of episodes scattered over the show’s nine-year run on NBC. The vast majority of episodes contain no explicit reference to Jews or Jewishness. The episodes that do acknowledge his Jewishness tend to downplay its importance. For example, in one episode Jerry suspects that his dentist has converted to Judaism so that he can tell Jewish jokes without being labeled a bigot. When a priest asks Jerry, “This offends you as a Jewish person?” he replies, “No it offends me as a comedian.”

* My argument is based on the concept of double coding, the specific means and mechanisms by which a performance can communicate one message to Jewish audiences while simultaneously communicating another, often contradictory message to gentile audiences. As the late performance theorist Dwight Conquergood explained, “Subordinate people do not have the privilege of explicitness, the luxury of transparency, the presumptive norm of clear and direct communication, free and open debate on a level playing field that the privileged classes take for granted.” Jewish American artists in theater, film, and television, while certainly enjoying access to the “means of production” at a level far from subordinate, nonetheless have tended to approach their creative work from just such an outsider’s point of view. Because of real or perceived anti-Semitism, Jewish characters and themes are frequently “reformed” for performance.

* Ethnic studies as it has developed in the United States owes its greatest debt to African American studies and Marxist epistemology. A byproduct of this genealogy is that ethnic studies, or in some departments cultural studies, tends to assume that there is an adversarial relationship between the ethnicity under consideration and the so-called dominant culture. In other words, to be a minority, whether ethnic, racial, or religious, is to be by definition marginalized, oppressed, victimized.

* Jews are anything but marginalized in American theater, film, and television. Indeed, the success of Jewish writers, actors, and directors (not to mention producers, agents, and network executives) is legion, to the point where “Jewish control” of America’s entertainment media has achieved almost mythic status among both Jews and antiSemites: a source of pride for the former, an instrument of demagoguery for the latter.

* Judaism is a particularly performative religion; that is, unlike most forms of Christianity, Judaism is more concerned with process than product, more concerned with actions than interior reiterations of faith.

* Theater historian Brooks McNamara suggests, on the other hand, that Jewish dominance of Broadway is largely a historical accident. Popular entertainment, he argues, has always been looked down on by so-called respectable people. In the nineteenth century, the Irish, the largest working-class ethnic group, dominated theater and vaudeville. With the vast immigration of eastern European Jews to the United States around the turn of the century, the Jews became the new underclass and moved into the performing arts largely because no other group was willing to humiliate itself. 16 But, as one of the many Jewish
stand-up comics of the 1950s might have put it, a funny thing happened on the way to the theater. As Jews experienced upward mobility throughout the twentieth century, they did not leave the performing arts behind; rather, theater and film also climbed the social ladder. This was partly due to the emergent technologies of radio, film, and television. Mass market entertainment turned the performing arts into a cash crop…

* While Jews account for less than 4 percent of the U.S. population, in the New York and Los Angeles metropolitan areas, the historical centers of theater, film, and television, Jews make up closer to 25 percent of the population.

* Whatever the cause of this “overrepresentation,” the binary, dominant versus oppressed paradigm of ethnic and cultural studies lacks a vocabulary that can address the phenomenon of a dominant minority. As a result, Jews as an ethnic group are frequently left out of the ethnic/ multicultural studies conversation. This is especially true in theater and performance studies. Contemporary performance theory holds that performance’s political potential lies largely in its power to disrupt the existing social order. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the minority performer (female, gay, ethnic, communist) to use performance to call attention to the inequities of late capitalism and/or present a rehearsal for social change. The former usually means a sort of Brechtian alienation or estrangement, which often finds its expression in performance art that explicitly critiques the so-called dominant or hegemonic culture.

* But the Jewish minority, which we might call a dominant minority, is not looking to overturn the entire applecart. Its political activism as played out in theater is limited largely to addressing issues of racial or ethnic discrimination. The Jews are decidedly not planning the revolution. In fact, as Neal Gabler points out, Jewish artists are largely responsible for-some critics would say complicit in-the promotion of the myth that America is a meritocracy. While there have been many self-identified leftists among Jewish theater, film, and television artists (e.g., Lillian Hellman, Zero Mostel, Tony Kushner), their political messages have always been wrapped in the audience-friendly trappings of well-constructed emotional drama. Is this protective coloration? Is this part of the secret plot to control America that is alleged by anti-Semitic hate groups? Or is it a genuine belief that the system works? After all, the so-called meritocracy in America has worked out better for Jews than for almost any other definable ethnic group over the last century.

* The familiar Hollywood narratives of rags to riches, taming the frontier, and suburban domestic bliss, argues Gabler, reflect not a self-satisfied gentile culture but the fantasies of Jewish artists seeking an escape from the literal and metaphorical ghettoes of early-twentieth-century urban Jewish communities.

* Many feminist scholars have productively challenged this notion by pointing out that the preponderance of media depictions of women’s bodies as spectacle has impeded rather than advanced the cause of women’s rights.

* the high concentration of Jews in the American television industry has led to Jews “policing each other’s visibility and, in some cases, striving for invisibility.”27 Hence, we have seen the entrance into popular usage of the phrase “closet Jews,” which stands as a more sympathetic and strategic reading of what others have called “self-hating Jews.”28 To put the matter in colloquial terms, it seems to be Jews, rather than an anti-Semitic culture industry, who are most concerned about performances that are “too Jewish.”

* In the early 1990s, the French writer Alain Finkielkraut proposed the term imaginary Jews to refer to those Jewish children of the post-Holocaust years who identify themselves as an oppressed people yet suffer no genuine oppression. He writes: “They are unwavering Jews, but armchair Jews, since, after the Catastrophe, Judaism cannot offer them any content but suffering, and they themselves do not suffer.”

* In communities with strong religious affiliations, writes [Haym] Soloveitchik, the yeshiva (Jewish religious school) became the focal point for imparting Jewish religion and culture to new generations. In less affiliated homes, popular drama has become increasingly more important as a source of information on how to act Jewish. Stephen Whitfield, for example, in In Search of American Jewish Culture, writes, “No epicenter of American Jewish culture exists …. But if there were such a locale, it would be Broadway.” Egon Mayer, expressing optimism about the future of American Jewry writes, “We see this longing for Jewishness reflected time and again in Jews who flock to Woody Allen movies.”42 Literary critic Arnold Band perhaps sums up the proposition best: “[O]nce we ask the basic question: What shapes the identity (in the sense of self-image) of a Jew in the post-Enlightenment period?, we are compelled to treat Exodus, Maryorie Morningstar, and Fiddler on the Roof-and dozens of other works of this genre-with the same scholarly respect as a truly epic work like Graetz’s History of the Jews…”

* Like the tortured spirit in S. Anksi’s classic Yiddish drama The Dybbuk (1914), the modern American Jew is trapped between two worlds: the “Old World” of our ancestors and the “New World” of America.

* I would also contend that the development of the American Method is inclusively Jewish to a degree unmatched by previous approaches to acting. First and foremost, Method acting from its inception has been a cultural process for which Jewish American artists can claim a birthright, much as African Americans claim jazz music. Its arrival and subsequent level of acceptance in the United States coincides with their own.

This is partly because so many members of the influential Group Theater (generally credited with the Method through their work in the 1930s) were Jewish. But what is often overlooked is that the Jewish members of the Group, even those who did not speak Yiddish themselves, grew up in homes where Yiddish theater was the primary source of dramatic entertainment. Harold Clurman, for example, writes that “from the age of six, when I had been taken to see Jacob Adler in Uriel Acosta at the Grand Street Theatre, I had a passionate inclination toward the theatre.”

As Nahma Sandrow notes, Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater was the fin de sicle art theater that “most directly influenced Yiddish theater, which was attuned to the intellectual life of its East European environment…. In interpreting modern realistic drama, Stanislavsky’s group evolved a vividly lifelike method of acting which was to have a widespread effect on modern Western theater, especially in America, where Yiddish immigrants helped to spread it.” Thus, while most European (and many American) theater historians attribute the Group’s psychologically based and emotionally driven manifestation of the Method to Americans’ desire for individual glory, it would be more accurate to say that the American Method differs from “pure Stanislavsky” because (at least in part) the “system” arrived in the United States filtered through the emotionally and politically charged
Yiddish theater.

Of course, the Jewish members of the Group were, in part, reacting against the contrived plotlines, star turns, and overly theatrical staginess of the Yiddish theater. Nonetheless, they found the deeply felt emotion and working-class consciousness of the Yiddish theater more appealing than either the bourgeois vapidity of the commercial stage or the aloof and self-consciously artistic style favored by the Theatre Guild and other art theaters.

So while it is fair to say that in the course of its translation from Russian to Yiddish to American the Method became less “authentically” Stanislavskian we should also note that it took on a decidedly political tone. Strasberg’s emphasis on the specificity of the actor’s emotions is based not on self-aggrandizement but on a liberal assumption of universal humanism. The Method actors believe that their own emotions can be appropriate to the character because people of all races, religions, and nations experience similar emotions in similar ways; otherwise they are limited to playing characters substantially like themselves. Indeed, it was the Group’s resistance to typecasting that initially distinguished its repertoire from those of its contemporaries…

But the fundamental premise on which the Group operated was that a talented actor could pass as anything, precisely because, at the level of deeply felt emotion, all human beings are essentially the same. Obviously, the Method actor must likewise believe that the audience shares this common humanity. This is why the actor’s interior evocation of emotion in performance can be “read” correctly with a minimum of theatrical mechanics. Yet cultural and psychological specificity is essential to the naturalistic mode of production that dominated the latter two-thirds of the twentieth century. Indeed, the Method virtually equates specificity with truth. Realism demands specificity because a real individual is never generic. Thus, a playwright may argue, as Miller does, that “Where the theme seems to require a Jew to act somehow in terms of his Jewishness, he does so. Where it seems to me irrelevant what the religious character or cultural background of a character may be, it is treated as such.” And yet the actor playing the role, in building his or her character, must reconsider the question of “religious
character or cultural background”-especially when the playwright consciously omits such information from the written text. As part of this reconsideration, the actor will scrutinize the information provided by the text, with an eye toward an overall “objective” or “motivation” that will shape the performance.

* Performance theorist Jos Esteban Munoz argues that “majoritarian” American performance is distinguished by a “national affect, a mode of being in the world primarily associated with white middle-class subjectivity, [which] reads most ethnic affect as inappropriate.” Overt displays of emotion or excitement are configured as incorrect or declasse. Munoz further suggests that “the affective performance of normative whiteness is minimalist to the point of emotional impoverishment.” In other words, to the degree that an audience perceives a character’s
behavior as emotionally excessive that character is seen as Other-different from the nonethnic norm.

* Like spic, anti-Jewish epithets such as kike, yid, and sheenie connoted a J ewishness that exceeded the bounds of white middle-class good taste. Consider Miss Wales in Gentleman’s Agreement, who seeks to distinguish “good Jews” like herself from “the kikey ones” who “ruin it for the rest of us.” The “other kind”-a phrase once common among acculturated American Jews-as Miss Wales explains, talk too loud, dress too outlandishly, wear too much makeup, and, worst of all, talk too much about being Jewish.

* This rhetoric of ethnicity as excess offers another way to think about the mechanism and function of double coding. Method acting (and, to a lesser degree, all forms of emotive performance) demands emotional affect that the actor provides in excess of the written play text. And to the degree that the actor’s emotion exceeds the written text, the performance challenges the emotionally impoverished “national affect” theorized by Munoz.

Posted in Jews | Comments Off on Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen

Saving Private Godward (7-1-21)

Posted on July 1, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 Saving Private Ryan, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saving_Private_Ryan
01:30 Justin Martyr’s Dialog with Trypho, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spv_T4QE9Ow
03:00 Justin the Martyr, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Martyr
05:00 Fruit of the Holy Spirit, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_Holy_Spirit
36:45 Justin Martyr by Andrew Hayes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scmdaGIteNo
1:07:00 Justin Martyr and the Jews, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1453625
1:14:00 The motivations of Leo Strauss, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140778
1:53:00 Germany’s neo-nazis and the Far Right, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/germanys-neo-nazis-the-far-right/
2:29:00 CNN: “Anti-Semitism Gaining Traction in the US”
2:37:00 Rabbi Stabbed Outside Shalom House Synagogue In Brighton
2:39:00 Stephen Kotkin: Taiwan, geopolitical tension and China’s inevitable rise in indices, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fFxhqT7d4Y
2:51:00 Goddess Dr. Jill Biden
3:04:00 Charles Murray Uncut, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8mWxWfblfw
4:03:00 Richard Spencer vs Judas Maccabeus debate Zionism on the Killstream, https://odysee.com/@theralphretort:1/richard-spencer-vs-judas-maccabeus-killstream:a

Posted in America, Christianity, Jews | Comments Off on Saving Private Godward (7-1-21)

‘Considering an Author’s Background in Relation to His Unstated Motivations’

Posted on July 1, 2021 by Luke Ford

Godward writes:

Yes, we should think about Melville & Heraclitus’s personal background if we really want to understand their thinking. Yet, for some reason, if we apply this same logic to someone like Leo Strauss, people get a lot more sensitive. Where was Strauss from? What major events in politics & war defined his early & middle life? How might his Jewishness, for example, shape his interpretation of Plato and of Thucydides — and how might his exile from his birthplace, and his being unable to find work in England because he was Jewish, have shaped his teaching when he finally found work in academia in America?

These seem like reasonable questions to me — but if we arrive at a hunch that his personal experience gave him cause to subvert or work to change certain definitions or even to deceive students for his own benefit, or for the benefit of other exiles, etc., well — that seems all the sudden more controversial.

There are many books and articles about Leo Strauss that examine these very questions. Did Godward look at them? Did he even look for them? If he did, he should state that. If he did not, he should state that. The honest man won’t proclaim we can’t talk about things that many scholars publicly discuss.

Leo Strauss was from Germany, he escaped the Nazis, and he wanted to create a world safe for Jews. Strauss praised religion but was an atheist and did not practice Judaism. He praised Zionism as he thought it was wonderful for Jews to pursue their ethnic interests, but he had no interest in living in Israel and he thought it would be awful if Europeans pursued their ethnic interests. Strauss thought that Jews being conscious of their race was wonderful but if Europeans were conscious of their race, that was terrible. Strauss thought that Christianity, in moderation and so long as it did not inconvenience Jews, was good. His thinking boiled down to — is it good for the Jews?

Stephen Turner notes: “One cannot really understand the Frankfurt School, or Leo Strauss, or Hans Kelsen, or Hans Morgenthau, without understanding what they both absorbed and rejected from [Carl] Schmitt.”

In his book Persecution and the Art of Writing, “Strauss sets forth the thesis that many philosophers, especially political philosophers, have reacted to the threat of persecution by disguising their most controversial and heterodox ideas.” That sounds like Godward.

Steve Sailer wrote in 2005:

…the importance of extra-rational charisma in the appeal of egomaniacal, messianic intellectuals like Marx and Freud to younger Jewish students. Over the last 150 years, secular Jewish intellectuals have repeatedly reproduced the traditional brilliant rabbi-student relationship in launching powerful cults. Among the more recent examples have been Ayn Rand (see Murray N. Rothbard’s hilarious 1972 article “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult“), Susan Sontag (see Terry Castle’s hilarious 2005 article “Desperately Seeking Susan“), and Leo Strauss (see the unintentionally hilarious 2003 article “What Leo Strauss Was Up To” by two true believers, William Kristol and Steven Lenzer).

From the book Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America by Paul Gottfried: “This book offers an original interpretation of the achievement of Leo Strauss, stressing how his ideas and followers reshaped the American conservative movement. According to this study, Strauss and his disciples came to influence the establishment Right almost by accident. The conservative movement that reached out to Strauss and his legacy was extremely fluid and lacked a self-confident leadership. Conservative activists and journalists felt a desperate need for academic acceptability, which they thought Strauss and his disciples would furnish. They also became deeply concerned with the problem of “value relativism,” which self-described conservatives thought Strauss had effectively addressed. But until recently, neither Strauss nor his disciples have considered themselves to be “conservatives.” Strauss’s followers continue to view themselves as stalwart Truman-Kennedy Democrats and liberal internationalists. Contrary to another misconception, Straussians have never wished to convert Americans to ancient political ideals and practices, except in a very selective rhetorical fashion. Strauss and his disciples have been avid champions of American modernity, and “timeless” values as interpreted by Strauss and his followers often look starkly contemporary.”

Posted in Leo Strauss | Comments Off on ‘Considering an Author’s Background in Relation to His Unstated Motivations’

New York’s Mayoral Race (6-30-21)

Posted on June 30, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 Election Experts & The New York Voting Fiasco, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140750
21:00 New York Times investigates Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riots, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/us/jan-6-capitol-attack-takeaways.html
25:00 The Politics Of The Word And The Politics Of The Eye, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140729
1:56:20 Tucker Carlson on New York mayoral election
2:08:00 Mark Levin Launches BRUTAL Attack On Tucker Carlson, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3KzPqLIT5U
2:17:00 Jason Kessler
2:20:00 Ramzpaul responds to Karlyn Borysenko on CRT

Posted in New York | Comments Off on New York’s Mayoral Race (6-30-21)

Election Experts & The New York Voting Fiasco

Posted on June 30, 2021 by Luke Ford

Something awful happens. Do you immediately jump to conspiracy thinking? Or do you first suspect incompetence? I first suspect incompetence (unless there’s strong evidence to the contrary, such as two planes crashing into the Twin Towers on 9-11).

I am not an expert on voter fraud but I do like the challenge of reading what the experts say, and then comparing their views with one another and with popular accounts.

I notice that many skeptics of the 2020 election results are seizing on New York City’s latest vote counting problems as evidence that the voter fraud experts quoted in the media are not up to snuff.

A friend says:

It’s pretty clear that the experts who claim there was no substantial result changing fraud in the 2020 presidential election fail from a failure of imagination. They are applying their standards of the past to things which may have been without precedent. The fact that 135,000 votes run as a test were maintained in the computerized total and would have remained undiscovered except that Adams started questioning them (and was roundly criticized for doing that) says it all. I am not saying that Trump won the election. All I am saying is that those who unqualifiedly say nothing happened are expressing opinions based on their own preconceptions and not necessarily fact based. That specific claims of fraud were debunked don’t seem to get anywhere near the issues that occurred in the NYC mayoral election.

You were appropriately skeptical of the Trump claims of fraud, but you have uncritically accepted the assertions of the election integrity’s defenders. Of course that is inconsistent with the attacks on the 2016 results in which Trump won and with the criticisms of computerized voting which Democratic senators raised a year before the 2020 election. The experts you relied on may be right on particular claims by those who challenge the results, but on the broader claim that the election in fact reflected the will of the voters, they might be wrong.

When I looked at the most prominent claims for massive voter fraud in the 2020 American elections, I found that all the claims fell apart upon examination. I don’t claim that voter fraud has not played a significant role in American elections, rather, I propose that all arguments that voter fraud has played a large role in recent American elections fall apart upon examination. I’m waiting to read a strong case for massive voter fraud in 2020.

“Voter fraud” means many things to many people. For example, “voter fraud” is often used to describe mistakes that are endemic to all large human enterprises. You show me any activity that is largely staffed by amateurs and involves counting millions of pieces of paper, and you will always find lots of mistakes. Mistakes in processing ballots are not voter fraud. Taking weeks to count votes is not evidence of voter fraud.

It seems to me that there is one definition of voter fraud that makes more sense than the others — that voter fraud is a crime. The recent mistake in the counting of the New York election is not, I believe, a crime. I am unaware of any evidence that the mistaken counting of 135,000 test votes would have remained undiscovered except that Eric Adams challenged the count.

Regarding this: “It’s pretty clear that the experts who claim there was no substantial result changing fraud in the 2020 presidential election fail from a failure of imagination.” All the expert analyses I have read were responses to allegations of voter fraud that did not add up. I’m not sure what role imagination should have in this type of analysis. If someone imagines ways that voter fraud might be massive, that could be the beginning of a useful investigation, but to say something important, one needs to uncover evidence supporting your imagination. Fantasies about voter fraud in and of themselves and without any supporting evidence have no importance and they need no analysis.

“They are applying their standards of the past to things which may have been without precedent.” No, they were examining claims of voter fraud in 2020 and finding that these claims fell apart upon examination.

Mail-in balloting is not without precedence in America. Five states do voting exclusively by mail and we don’t have evidence that these states have higher rates of voter fraud. There may be such evidence, but it has not been presented as yet.

“All I am saying is that those who unqualifiedly say nothing happened are expressing opinions based on their own preconceptions and not necessarily fact based.”

I am unaware of any voter fraud experts who say nothing happened. Instead, they say the allegations that voter fraud happened on a massive scale do not hold up to scrutiny. They say that the evidence does not indicate massive voter fraud.

It shouldn’t be hard to make a case for voter fraud in 2020. Simply point out counties and states where the voter returns were anomalous. I am unaware of such counties and states. In 2018 and 2020, there was a 2% swing against the Republicans in the suburbs. That little swing accounts for the election results in 2018 and 2020.

Regarding “on the broader claim that the election in fact reflected the will of the voters, they might be wrong”, I’d just like to see evidence for this claim. Everyone might be wrong on anything. We all have to make judgments based on imperfect information. I find it fun to try to make sense of imperfect information.

I agree with this analysis by Philip Bump of the Washington Post:

This is the first year New York City will use ranked-choice voting to pick its leaders. So far, it isn’t going great.

The Democratic primary election for mayor was held last week, on June 22, with initial results favoring Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams by a healthy margin. But ranked-choice voting means determining the winner of the primary will require several rounds of vote-counting. Each voter was able to pick up to five candidates who they hoped might win. If their preferred candidate is eliminated by being the lowest vote-getter in a round, the voter’s ballot shifts to their next preference down the list, until either the race is down to two candidates or until that voter’s ballot lists no more viable candidates.

For some inexplicable reason, the city’s Board of Elections (BOE) decided on Tuesday to run through how that ranked-choice system would work using the ballots it had received and counted. That tally showed Adams’s lead narrowing — and the second-place slot shifting from lawyer and activist Maya Wiley to former city sanitation director Kathryn Garcia. But while that trial run of ranked-choice voting did reveal generally how the eventual results might shift, it didn’t offer much insight into how that shift might occur, given that there are still more than 124,000 absentee ballots to count. That’s about 10 percent of all the votes cast — an obviously significant number.

Then things got worse. It turns out that the results the city released also included a number of dummy ballots, used to test the system — ballots that should not have been included in the initial count. The mistake was caught soon after the trial-run results were announced, so the Board of Elections ended up pulling its totals and announcing its mistake.

No observer of New York City politics was surprised to learn that the Board of Elections had messed things up. It’s common knowledge the board is at best inept, as a report from the city’s local paper documented in late October. The city’s politics broadly are byzantine and dishonest, often relying on a system of patronage that those in power — generally the system’s beneficiaries — are loath to challenge. It’s an embarrassing situation, but usually one that does its embarrassing thing out of the spotlight of national attention. A mayor’s race in the country’s most populous city, though, tends to draw a spotlight.

It will still be a few weeks before we know who won the primary, given those absentee ballots (which are likely to aid Garcia) need to be counted. But in the meantime, the snafu at the BOE has been seized upon by allies of former president Donald Trump as evidence that elections in Democratic areas are corrupt and dishonest, just as Trump has been claiming for months…

Look, it is obviously the case that there is no connection between reality and Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was stolen. For nearly eight months, he and his allies have been trying to claim rampant fraud occurred and they have the evidence to prove it, without actually providing credible evidence and without offering any reason to assume that the claims of rampant fraud are worth taking seriously.

But it is nonetheless worth explaining why this argument is no better.

There is an apt analogy between what happened in New York City on Tuesday and the 2020 election. That error was akin to the miscounted ballots in Michigan’s Antrim County, an error that election administrators quickly caught and corrected. In that case, a change to the ballot wasn’t accounted for properly, so vote tallies were shifted between candidates. It’s as though you announced the order of horses in a race and, at the last second, slotted a new horse in the middle, shifting all the numbers. Suddenly, all the existing bets get wonky — a correctable but embarrassing mistake.

According to the BOE — which, again, is a mess, so assume this might also change — the mistake on Tuesday was similarly technical. It was a thing that should not have happened, but did, and officials announced the mistake and are correcting it. It was not some effort to throw the election. Unlike in Antrim County, these weren’t even intended to be final results! If the idea was to somehow allocate a number of ballots to all the candidates and hope no one would notice, it seems weird to inject them in a preliminary trial run of the results.

Damon Linker writes:

With its massive screw-up in counting and reporting preliminary results in New York City’s Democratic primary for mayor, the city’s Board of Elections has managed to vindicate the self-serving and politically corrosive mendacity of Donald Trump.

No, reporting hugely inaccurate preliminary results in the Ranked Choice Voting primary held last week doesn’t demonstrate that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump — or that, as the former president continues to claim, voter fraud was rampant in the swing states that delivered the election to Democrat Joe Biden. But there was always a more sweeping and more dangerous claim underlying those baseless assertions — namely, that American elections in general are corrupt and unreliable, producing untrustworthy results. That’s what Trump alleged during the summer and fall of 2020, before any ballots has been cast or counted. And that’s what the shambolic Democratic primary in New York City has now vindicated.

The primary involved only Democrats. It pioneered the use of RCV in order (supposedly) to deliver fairer, more representative outcomes. The Board of Elections is overseen by bipartisan commissioners. For all of these reasons, last week’s vote should have served as a demonstration of what a clean and corruption-free election looks like. Instead, it’s shown that NYC’s BOE is too incompetent to be trusted with counting the votes. And the shadow of its bungling will haunt whatever results it announces going forward, opening the door to fully justified challenges to the outcome.

From Politico:

NEW YORK — For months, President Donald Trump has made baseless claims of voter fraud, insisted he would only lose an election that was “rigged” and said he is rushing a Supreme Court nominee ahead of a potential legal challenge to the results.

Democrats and published media reports have widely disputed his assertions and officials have promised a valid voting process, despite the unprecedented challenges brought by the pandemic.

Then along came the New York City Board of Elections.

The notoriously dysfunctional entity has given ammo to Trump’s charges by mailing some 100,000 ballots with erroneously marked return envelopes to voters in Brooklyn. The latest screw-up from the bipartisan board — whose members are appointed by local party leaders and approved by the City Council as one of the last vestiges of old-school machine politics — became an immediate talking point for Republicans….

Susan Lerner, of the good government group Common Cause New York, said the president is misrepresenting the issue at stake. Rather than providing an opportunity to cast extra votes for his opponent Joe Biden — as the president has claimed mail-in voting would do — the mix-up in Brooklyn would have the opposite effect by bringing vote totals down if it is not remedied.

“Not only is the info being used in a negative way, it is being misused,” she said. “The problem is not what the White House is making it out to be.”

The sanctity of mail-in ballots is not the only uncertainty facing New York City voters ahead of the momentous presidential election in November. The board hasn’t even instructed voters on how much postage to use for sending their ballots in, according to city and state officials. And last week, Ryan indicated a final count of all the votes may not come until well into December.

A friend says:

The failure of imagination is that as far as I know none of experts considered that test ballots, which may have been entered favoring a particular candidate, were not deleted but added to the legitimate votes. I had no idea that election boards ran test ballots, but experts on elections who claim to know every aspect of elections should have known about it. That’s what I mean by failure of imagination. The biggest experts on election law are Sabato and Hasen, I am unaware that either of these persons considered the possibility..

The issue is not the 2% swing of voters, but if there was such a swing at all. A relatively small number of ballots such as those in New York “mistakenly” left in the voting machines could account for the swing. Instead the experts rely on polling (which is notoriously inaccurate) to confirm the numbers which under their application of knowing how past election fraud works, they categorically denied. That is their preconceived notions, ignoring a possible wholly new method. Most lay persons, including those who follow elections, such as you, have no idea how such a thing can happen and can’t conceive of it, but the experts should. The difference between intelligence and wisdom is that the wise person can foresee consequences that the smart person cannot. The experts have proven themselves with their opinions to be smart, but not wise.

Anyone remotely acquainted with American mail-in ballots knows that voters are sent test ballots. Anyone with voting expertise would know the potential for test ballots to get counted as real ballots (as I understand it, the experts say there is no evidence that this has happened in significant numbers). What happened in New York was a test run of a system never used before. It did not purport to be a final count.

Larry Sabato and Richard Hasen would not rank in the top ten of voter fraud experts, but they do get interviewed a lot in the media, just as Carl Sagan was often interviewed about space, but he had no significance to the discipline of astronomy. Even Larry Sabato and Richard Hasen know about test ballots and they know that there are infinite number of mistakes that vote counters can make. There is no evidence that a “relatively small number of ballots such as those in New York “mistakenly” left in the voting machines account[ed] for the swing” to the Democrats in 2018 and 2020. Contrary to this assertion, “Instead the experts rely on polling (which is notoriously inaccurate) to confirm the numbers which under their application of knowing how past election fraud works, they categorically denied”, academic studies of claims of voter fraud that I have read do not mention polling.

In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it seems to me that a 2% swing in the suburbs against Republicans accounts for the 2018 and 2020 election results.

“That is their preconceived notions, ignoring a possible wholly new method.”

There is nothing new in sending Americans test ballots though there is something new in the number of mail-in ballots and test ballots mailed out in 2020. I am unaware of any evidence that either of these produced increased voter fraud in 2020.

A friend says:

I don’t think Trump won the election, but I do think it is possible he won. As you know a swing of under a total of a hundred thousand votes in certain states would have given Trump an electoral college victory. If in a relatively small election with a relatively small turnout in a community that watches its elections closely, you can “inadvertently” add in 135,000 votes, it certainly raises the possibility that the experts you relied on might be wrong… These experts claim to have some sort of superior knowledge about election procedures so that they can opine on whether the election is open to question. If they limited their conclusions by stating that there may be other means of committing fraud which may have occurred which we aren’t considering, that would be one thing. If they specifically said that although registrars testing the machines with test ballots there is no way that could end up skewing election results that would be something else. But if you are relying on them to conclusively state that there was no fraud, that seems to be a big stretch.

You can’t conclusively prove there is no voter fraud. You can conclusively prove that shoddy arguments for massive voter fraud are shoddy.

James Joyner writes:

The drive to make voting easier, which I support, has had the pernicious effect of making it less trustworthy.

Eric Adams seemingly won a plurality of the vote on Election Day. But, of course, Election Day no longer exists. Some people vote early. And a lot of people, effectively, vote late because they can send their absentee ballot in on the last day and we allot an inordinate amount of time for ballots to arrive.

We used to get election results almost immediately. It was rare that we went to bed on Election Day without knowing the outcome of the race. Now, we’re expected to wait days—in this case, an entire month!—for results. Yet, over the same evolution, we have become to getting our information instantaneously.

Even absent malfeasance such as the Republican Party leadership’s attempt to falsely claim the 2020 Presidential election was somehow stolen, partisans are not going to trust a system in which their guy seemingly has the lead and then watch it slowly disappear through a mysterious process in which new votes are found and old ones are thrown out because errors are discovered.

Incompetent administration—as seen here an in the most recent run of the Iowa Caucuses—certainly don’t help. It just feeds the conspiracy theorists.

And the addition of ranked choice voting to this particular contest—which, again, I support in theory—complicates matters further. While there’s no obvious reason why a computer program can’t eliminate the votes for the bottom candidate and reallocate second place votes and so on and so forth, this particular election board somehow didn’t get its act together ahead of time. And, again, it’s feeding the conspiracists.

Posted in New York, Voter Fraud | Comments Off on Election Experts & The New York Voting Fiasco