Students who participated in sexual abstinence programs were just as likely to have sex a few years later as those who did not, according to a long-awaited study mandated by Congress.

Remember all the nonsense about voter fraud in Milwaukee? From the New York Times:

Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.

Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year.

Most of those charged have been Democrats, voting records show. Many of those charged by the Justice Department appear to have mistakenly filled out registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules, a review of court records and interviews with prosecutors and defense lawyers show.

122,293,332 people voted in the 2004 election. 86 convictions (0.00007%), after a major, White House-directed effort to “crack down” on voter fraud, is an astonishingly small number. Alleged fraud in Milwaukee has been at the heart of the issue, but:

The Wisconsin prosecutors lost every case on double voting. Cynthia C. Alicea, 25, was accused of multiple voting in 2004 because officials found two registration cards in her name. She and others were acquitted after explaining that they had filed a second card and voted just once after a clerk said they had filled out the first card incorrectly.

The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has professed its “bafflement” at the “mysterious” decisions to prosecute these cases. In addition to the double-voting cases, Biskupic has also brought to court and lost cases involving felons who didn’t realize they were ineligible to vote (*). Of the fourteen cases he prosecuted, Biskupic won five of them.

Since the average conviction rate for felony prosecutions is close to 85%, the fact that a partisan GOP prosecutor, after hand-picking the most credible fraud cases to prosecute, managed to obtain a conviction rate of 36%, is striking. Add to that the fact that all of the convictions involved cases where the crime was inadvertant (one man presented a prison-issued ID card at the voting booth), and one wonders why people thought there was a problem at all.

And then there’s this:

The Justice Department stand is backed by Republican Party and White House officials, including Karl Rove, the president’s chief political adviser. The White House has acknowledged that he relayed Republican complaints to President Bush and the Justice Department that some prosecutors were not attacking voter fraud vigorously. In speeches, Mr. Rove often mentions fraud accusations and warns of tainted elections.

Is Karl Rove really portraying himself as a virtuous defender of electoral integrity? Or is he trying to gain a political advantage by increasing the amount of distrust and polarization in the country?

Of course, election fraud is a bigger problem than voter fraud, which is only a subset of the larger issue. There are far easier ways to tamper with an election than by voter fraud, which requires lots of participants and is easy to uncover, especially if done conspiratorily to a degree that can affect an election.

How much easier to simply miscount the ballots, or to lose ballot boxes from precincts in which your opponent is strong, or to discover ballot boxes with lots of votes in your favor? Or you could get your friends on the Supreme Court to demand that ballots favoring your opponent not be counted?

How much easier to discourage people from voting with arduous registration procedures? Or by limiting the number of voting machines and polling places, so that people are forced to wait upwards of 10 hours in order to vote?

We need cleaner elections, but the administration, by the politicization of the Justice Department, and its disregard for empiricism, is making it difficult to evaluate the various problems with our electoral system on their merits.

Is voter fraud a problem? If so, what steps do we need to take to correct it, keeping in mind that more stringent identification requirements will also have the (desired, from the GOP point of view) side effect of preventing eligible voters from voting.

If voter fraud is insignificant compared to other methods of fraud, or compared to the number of people who are illegimately prevented from voting by anti-fraud measures, we would be better off with prosecutors that investigated the things that are actually corrupting our elections. Hi, Karl.

(*) Presumably because the continued prohibition on voting after one’s time has been served, is out of step with common notions of fairness and decency.

Google Earth, in cooperation with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum now presents details of the growing disaster in Darfur. They give a virtual tour of the area, with details of events in many villages in the words of local residents.

The prosecution was a boon to Mr. Doyle’s opponent. Republicans ran a barrage of attack ads that purported to tie Ms. Thompson’s “corruption” to Mr. Doyle. Ms. Thompson was sentenced shortly before the election, which Governor Doyle won.

The Chicago-based United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit seemed shocked by the injustice of her conviction. It took the extraordinary step of releasing Ms. Thompson from prison immediately after hearing arguments, without waiting to issue a ruling. One of the judges hinted that Ms. Thompson may have been railroaded. “It strikes me that your evidence is beyond thin,” Judge Diane Wood told the lawyer from Mr. Biskupic’s office.