Friday the 13th Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, February 13, 2026
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19 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Until some real penalties are levied on officials in charge (like Kristi Noem), then there will just be a shrug of the shoulders and an attitude that says: Sucks to be you.
A federal tool to check voter citizenship keeps making mistakes. It led to confusion in Texas.
@Scott:
The errors are not a bug, they are a feature. More uncertainty for the PTB to manipulate, more fear to help increase polarization. Fascism thrives on polarization.
ChatGPT has biases:
“WaPo Gift“
Interesting little article from Defense One.
Men lie, strategies lie—numbers don’t. The word counts of the new National Defense Strategy.
Some insights.
There’s more. But I think you get the point.
@Scott: @charontwo: It was news that the Feds demanded Minnesota’s voter lists in exchange for pulling ICE. TACO has pulled ICE, but they’re still demanding voter lists from states. In some cases state law prohibits sharing detail info like drivers license and SS numbers but the feds are demanding it. Red states are, of course, graciously cooperating.
The feds presumably intend to run it all through the error prone software Scott notes or perhaps some bigger, badder Palantir software integrated with other data including the face ID stuff ICE seems to be collecting on protesters. They may send long list of names to the states demanding they be removed from the rolls, and probably late so voters will have less chance to challenge removal.
@gVOR10:
My guess is the software has algorithms that target characteristics thought to be likely Democratic voters.
Per the WSJ, Corey Lewandowsky fired a Coast Guard pilot because Kristi Noem left her blankie on the plane
@Scott:
@charontwo:
It’s very likely the GQP will lose the House and Senate in the midterms. Instead of adjusting or eliminating their unpopular policies, or at least throwing a bone to the middle class, they’re doubling down on wealth transfers to the rich. So their only choice left is to steal the midterm elections.
Democrats should do everything in their power to stop them. Unfortunately, I don’t know what that is.
@Kathy: I suspect that only well informed voters even know the GOPs are shifting wealth upward. They do, however, know prices aren’t going down. ICE is a good target, but they’ll try to avoid visible atrocities until November. Trump’s state of mind may be a good target. Hard for him to hide.
@Kathy:
It’s helpful to listen to people on the frontlines of the legal battles, most notably Marc Elias.
@gVOR10:
Which is itself a sign of the level of economic illiteracy in the public. Prices going down would be a bad sign for the economy. The real problem is that wages aren’t keeping up with inflation, making the rising prices hurt the consumer more.
Of course, politically speaking for Republicans, it’s the chickens coming home to roost. They’re the ones who pushed the message that the Dems were at fault for the high prices and that Repubs would solve that problem, which put them in an impossible position once they entered office–and that would be the case even if the tariffs had never happened. Trump just didn’t think he needed to worry about it, because he thought he could just bullshit his way out of the problem like he’s done for everything else, failing to realize that calling something fake news has its limits when it comes to something as straightforward as a grocery bill.
According to The New Republic, Trump is receiving another meaningless award, that of “The Undisputed Champion of Coal,” by the Washington Coal Club.
@charontwo: @Kathy: if you look at @Scott’s article, you will see
0.01% flagged. 99.99% of people registered to vote are not flagged. This is not a voter suppression tool, unless it is the most ineffective voter suppression tool known to mankind.
The false positive rate is high, and we don’t know the false negative rate (how many of the 99.99% are non-citizens), so it may not be a very good tool, but roughly no elections are decided by 0.01%.
Ok, I can think of 3: 2000 Florida Presidential, 2004 Washington Governor, and 2008 Minnesota Senate — but these are insane outliers, despite the regularity they occurred with, and the errors in counting may well be greater than the difference in voters, with the Florida vote counting being the most aggressively fucked with.
So, even if this was a voter suppression tactic, the most they could hope for is flipping one race somewhere.
And this 0.01% flagged by this tool does not mean those people actually voted — it’s probably not a representative sample of registered voters.
It’s far more likely that this is just a tool, designed to actually try to identify non-citizens on voter roles, working with data that either has it’s own error rate or out of date (a n-week lag from certain sources). If I wanted to just make shit up, I would assume that someone high up at DHS is very upset that it’s not flagging more people because they think 30% of voters are illegal.
The false positive rate is high, but it could reasonably be used for a first pass, assuming the false negative rate is low. (Of course, if the actual population of registered voters was 30% non-citizen, the false negative rate would be massive and the tool would be useless)
If you had an easy test for cancer or pulmonary embolisms or something that ruled it out in 99.99% of cases, that would be amazing, even if all you could say about the other 0.01% is “more testing required.”
@Gustopher: Also, our right wing doesn’t work at subtlety of 0.01%.
I would think that the general rhetoric from the administration would rule this out, but there’s also the Epstein files where we see people emailing each other things that are basically “hey, it was good raping children with you last Thursday, we should do it again, but let’s not invite Elon, that guy is annoying.”
(I do find the emails of Elon begging to be invited to the child raping parties very funny — as funny as anything related to raping children could be. Even child rapers don’t like Elon.)
@Gustopher: It’s kayfabe. Whether they know it’s BS or don’t, they know they can’t back break kayfabe. How many investigations and commissions have they done? They’re not looking for an answer, they’re looking to keep the question open.
@Gustopher:
Because it’s almost objectively hilarious. It plays into the comic tragedy of losers like Trump, Musk, Zuck, etc: all the billions in the world can’t make an unlikeable loser not be a unlikeable loser.
It comforts us poors to know wealth and power can’t turn a insecure, needy, off-putting grasper into a happy cool kid, because comfort in one’s own skin is an essential element of coolness. The cool weirdos and cool nerds DGAF about being cool, and that’s just not Musk and his fanboys.
That the most powerful or the wealthiest (inflated, on ledgers) men in the worid can also be so desperate, grasping, and uncomfortable is slapstick.
@DK:
I heard a psychiatrist say once he preferred to treat patients who are well off economically, because he claimed “the rich know more money won’t solve their problems.”
He may have been right about more money not solving psychological problems*, but he was wrong to think the rich know it.
*Then again, someone suffering from stress because they need to work two or more jobs to make ends meet, on top of taking care of home and children, would find more money very helpful.
@Gustopher:
Many recent news reports say there’s only a tiny, tiny, very tiny percentage of non-citizens who register to vote, and fewer who actually cast or attempt to cast a ballot.
This brings up a thought. “Non-citizens” includes undocumented immigrants, to be sure, but also legal permanent residents, people under TPS and DACA rules, I assume H-1B visa holders and the holders of other visas that allow a lengthy legal stay (like student visas), and even tourists and others who are not undocumented but can’t stay in the country for long.
I’m willing to bet some of the above might think they are entitled to vote. Most of them, after all, pay taxes.
@Gustopher:
As you know, Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire and co-founder of Palantir the big data firm, is out there these days lecturing about the Antichrist. Couldn’t a case be made that Elon Musk …? Some people are saying. Just saying …