The Daily Beast has crunched some interesting data sets — convictions of elected officials, racketering & extortion, forgery & counterfeiting, fraud and embezzlement — to rank the 50 states and District of Columbia by corruption.
Virginia ranks No. 2 on the list.
That’s either very, very good or very, very bad. The Daily Beast is not clear. (Here’s the story.) When a state is rated No. 2 on a list entitled “The Most Corrupt States,” the implication is that it is the second most corrupt. But the number of convictions seems pretty low compared to most other states, including such notorious places as New Jersey, New York, Louisiana and Chicago, so I’m assuming that Virginia is actually the second least corrupt state in the union.
If so, that’s pretty good news. By the lamentably lax standards of the day, the commonwealth is, relatively speaking, pretty clean.
