By Dan Carpenter
TheStatehouseFile.com

Whom should we allow to vote, and for what?

Dan Carpenter is a columnist for TheStatehouseFile.com and the author of “Indiana Out Loud.”

Not just anybody and not anything sacred, depending on which side of the left-right divide you occupy.

As restrictions on ballot access continue to proliferate in Republican-dominated states, we seem to be hearkening back to the days when democracy was a daddy affair, kept in the gentle hands of the guys who knew best. Preach all they want about voting fraud and poll security, the propertied white males behind various hurdles to franchise exercise must have noticed that they hurt the ones who love the other party.

Oh, and those “activist judges” whom the conservatives so love to decry? Even though evidence of actual fraud is negligible, the courts have been OK with picture IDs, demands for citizenship papers and other ploys to impede and intimidate marginalized voters. So they get a pass.

With the basket thus shrunken at the enemy’s offensive end of the court, conservatives wax populist on issues that liberals would rather see closed to the game of electoral politics, most notably abortion and marriage equality.

While the Indiana General Assembly overall seems to be losing its taste for a referendum battle over same-sex unions, Gov. Mike Pence and his fellow “defenders of traditional marriage” insist that the average Hoosier has a right to weigh in on his neighbor’s personal life and public protections.

That, say the defenders of the American tradition of change, amounts to the tyranny of the majority, against which the Constitution and courts were erected. African-Americans and women did not gain the ballot via referendum. Gay couples might win one – everyone sees that tide turning, even in Indiana – but the message sent by a free-for-all would violate the principle that rights are not granted; they pre-exist. It would leave a nuclear winter regardless of who prevailed.

On a more – uh – pedestrian note, the legislature did grudgingly approve a referendum by Central Indiana residents on how to tax themselves for mass transit. The reluctance that delayed this breakthrough for several sessions was cast by the leadership as fiscal concern; yet the fiscal risk was and remains with the locals. Urban and suburban, government and business and labor and clergy, support is strong. Pence and Co. felt and still feel some fatherly need to protect these grownups from themselves.

Two issues, two proposed referenda, two sides. Each is asking why the other sought one and fought one. Each has claimed the high ground. Each knows that the real difference came down to who was likely to vote and to benefit. Small-town Indiana and conservative Christians in general would not do to mass transit what they’d do to the cause of gay rights.

At the same time, it would be well for the old guard to be careful what it wishes for – and against. Indianapolis is the perennial bete noire of a rustic-oriented Statehouse, and mass transit would benefit the big bad city’s working poor, the voters Democrats cherish. But enhanced regional mobility also figures to boost the economy – and state tax revenues – on the macro scale. And as for a marriage referendum, it’s clear that many Republicans fear it not only as a signal of backwardness to the business world but also as a potential wakeup call to young and liberal – i.e., Democratic – voters.

Principle and politics. Just as an activist judge is one who rules against us, a qualified voter is one of ours.

Dan Carpenter is a freelance writer, a contributor to Indianapolis Business Journal and the author of “Indiana Out Loud.”

By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS – In a few days, the National Rifle Association will come to Indiana for its big annual meeting.

John Krull, publisher, TheStatehouseFile.com

Gov. Mike Pence and the state’s lawmakers decided to mark the occasion by giving the gun lobby a gift – a new state law that allows gun owners to bring their weapons to school.

(If this annual meeting is successful and the gun lobby decides to come back to Indiana, presumably the governor and state legislators will move to the next item on the NRA wish list – a state law requiring Hoosier pre-schoolers to pack heat when they toddle off to daycare.)

A lot of people and groups opposed the whole “bring your guns to school” idea. The Indiana State Teachers Association, the Indiana Association of School Principals, Indiana Association of Public School Superintendents, Indiana School Boards Association, Indiana Urban School Association, and the Children’s Coalition of Indiana didn’t like it.

Initially, I agreed with the folks who didn’t like the new law.

But then I realized that, if allowing NRA members to bring their guns to school was the only way to get them to continue their educations, it was a small price to pay.

They could start by taking a refresher course in math. They seem to struggle with simple things like counting and comparing numbers.

The author of the “bring your guns to school” bill, Rep. Jim Lucas, R-Seymour, likes to point out that guns are not nearly the danger that automobiles are. Lucas proclaims himself a proud NRA life member and supporter. He says, correctly, that more than 32,000 Americans died in automobile-related incidents in 2011 – a number so significant and so threatening to public safety that, among other things, it justifies limiting drivers’ First Amendment rights to text while they’re behind the wheel.

Guns, Lucas says, accounted for “only” 8,583 deaths in that year, so we Americans really don’t have an issue when it comes to guns.

The problem with Lucas’s reckoning is that those 8,583 deaths were only a sliver of the number of gun-related deaths in the United States in 2011.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, nearly 32,000 Americans died in gun-related incidents in 2011 – basically the same “huge” number as were killed by automobiles that year.

To keep his gun number low, Lucas opted to ignore the number of gun-related suicides and accidental deaths. To make it a fair comparison, Lucas should have included all the gun-related deaths – or limited his cars-to-guns comparison to people who were killed by others.

What Lucas did wasn’t a case of comparing apples to oranges. It was a case of comparing apples to door knobs.

At a conference committee meeting on the “bring guns to school” law, Lucas repeatedly said that people opposing the measure had manipulated data to support their arguments. Critics charged that he was bullying those offering testimony he didn’t like.

Maybe Lucas’s motives were misinterpreted. Given his own determined and selective numerical cherry-picking, it’s possible that Lucas intended his statements about witnesses’ data manipulation as a compliment from one practitioner of the art to another.

Once Lucas and his fellow NRA members have finished with basic counting, perhaps they could move on to story problems.

For example, they could try to answer this one: The United States leads the developed world in the number of gun-related deaths by a wide margin. In fact, America records 20 times – that’s 2000 percent – the number of gun-related deaths per 100,000 people than the average of the world’s other developed countries.

If America’s NRA-crafted policies of free and unfettered gun flow – bring your guns to school – isn’t part of the problem, then what is?

Is it that Americans are 2000 percent more evil than the rest of the developed world?

Or are we 2000 percent more careless than people in other developed nations?

Or is that, in giving a special interest group like the NRA such a disproportionate voice in our laws and public policies, we Americans are 2000 percent more gullible than citizens of other developed countries?

John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism, host of “No Limits” WFYI 90.1 Indianapolis and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.