Tiber727
5d ago
This response reads like a congressional hearing where the person being grilled is asked a very straightforward question, and the person responds in a way crafted to be technically true but is obviously trying to avoid the thing they don't want to admit.
Trump's specific interpersonal style is called being unprofessional, the very thing you are calling out others for being.
The easy answer is that other people don't see Trump's plans or deals as positively as you do. Trump's particular way of negotiating is usually to frame it that you need something he has, and he will try to extract as much from you as possible in the process.
So now Trump is trying to sell something most people don't want - a war with unrealistic objectives - after pissing them off. He's not in a position to play his usual games so now he needs to be the one to learn a new trick.
The U.S. is influential, but their boss he is not.
Tiber727
5d ago
You are ignoring Hawaii with a 115 vote difference in 1960.
I'm not ignoring it, I'm treating it as a freak occurrence. It's the closest state in the closest election in the last 80 years. That's the platonic ideal of cherry picking. I copied the chart into Excel and took the average, and the average is 56,514 (median is 28,713) of a data set already filtering for the closest elections.
I notice that you neglect responding to the part where the fraudsters don't have to cast only 115 votes. They have no idea at the time they're doing it how many they need.
Note that you are ignoring senatorial and local elections
I focused on the Presidential election because:
A) it's where we have the most data
B) it's what most of the people talk about, like Trump is still out here claiming he won in 2020.
C) It makes the topic even more unwieldy to discuss.
In polling, 25% of some broad groups approve of using violence for political ends:
I've seen that poll before and I think the question is shit. I would say yes to "political violence can sometimes be justified?" because I'd consider a hypothetical random civilian who tried to assassinate literal, actual Hitler a hero. The question didn't ask what my limit would be.
your entire premise is flawed anyway. To get people to commit fraud, you would logically convince them that their fraud is justified, or not even fraud.
Two problems with this. First of all, doping is a crime you perform in private. Pretending to be someone else you do in public.
Second of all, the limiting factor of conspiracy is not finding like-minded individuals. It's finding like-minded individuals without failing to recruit someone and that someone tipping off authorities.
According to your link, the software is (also) used to identify people "who were eligible to cast ballots but were not registered to vote." But this is publicly available information and registering presumably doesn't require an ID check either in any states without Voter ID. So all it takes to create a list of exploitable people is to get a list of residents of a state (easy to get from data brokers) and then check whether they are registered.
Who is our modal fraudster anyway? To figure out who is eligible to vote you need their name and some other detail, usually birthday or partial SSN. You're talking about getting data from data brokers, but they're using it to just wander around a city casting votes in person? It's like assembling Ocean's Eleven to rob a liquor store. If you are smart enough to try to farm citizens to impersonate, I'd think you'd be smart enough to come up with a better plan than this. I think every person we have prosecuted for voter fraud at the polls was just trying to impersonate a single relative.
Except that there is an obvious purpose, to increase trust in the system.
The lack of trust in the system is not the problem of the system. It's a problem of people distrusting the system. To put it bluntly, to the Democratic party places a very low importance on this benefit, and doubts they can earn it even by following instructions. Georgia was a big part of Trump's 2020 claims of election fraud, and Georgia already requires photo ID.
If anything, it increases distrust in the system because it just opens the doors to further claims of fraud seeming plausible. Trump has just tried to restrict mail-in voting, which I predicted Republicans would do.
So why is the question not whether voters all get the needed information to make sure that they can get an ID in any (valid) circumstance?
I wouldn't be opposed to voters being given more info, but it doesn't remove my complaint that voter ID is a waste of time. But not all states use ERIC, and Republicans are the ones who seem to want to leave the program.
Presumably this was a study that looked at the effect directly after implementing such a law?
Yes, this was a government analysis done in 2014 covering the change in turnout in states before and after voter ID. It's mentioned right in that general section.
Did Democratic canvassers include information about IDs in their canvassing efforts?
From the page right after it, it was too soon to examine the effects. But I still object to putting everything on canvassers to fix the problem. Part of voter ID isn't just "whether voters need to provide some proof vs none at all." It's that Republicans change the laws to arbitrarily reject perfectly valid ways to identify people.
Tiber727
6d ago
I don't think that's an issue related to quality of arguments so much as what happens in forums that are heavily slanted but don't actively ban heretics.
For instance, I came from /r/moderatepolitics . It has a similar nature to The Motte, but with a different moderation style. You can argue almost anything if you do it in a very specific way, but the mods are both hypersensitive to and arbitrarily define what is and isn't a personal attack. It leads to things like not being able to accuse someone of being disingenuous even when they do things like repeatedly attribute a belief to you that you've explained is wrong. Even though the sub was created for debate it still ends up with a consensus belief - IMO anti-Trump, somewhat left-leaning but right-leaning on guns and immigration.
That said, in my experience the people in the minority who stayed weren't necessarily better debaters, they were just people who were completely undeterred by downvotes and often just repeated the same argument and ignored reasons why their argument was bad.
Of course I'm sure The Motte would say that about the left-leaning people here. Like I remember in the not too-distant past where magicalkittycat was farming downvotes arguing something, and had to respond to an accusation of ignoring someone with "You know I get 20 responses to every comment right?"
As far as the heretic goes, the experience is "Why are you booing me? I'm right!" Your good arguments will just go ignored and be buried. The difference between a friendly forum and a hostile forum is you can say the same thing but in the latter it feels like you are talking to a wall.
The 'Watergate' conspirators had no trouble finding people who were willing to go much further than this.
Watergate involved about 15 people according to a quick wiki check?
At minimum you need one, depending on how close the election is, in a state.
Here are the narrowest statewide Presidential victories in the last ~approx 80 years. In the vast majority of them it was still tens of thousands of votes. The closest 2024 victory in a state that does not already require photo ID is either New Hampshire (which requires photo ID but student ID is allowed) by 22,965 or Nevada by 46,008 votes. Imagine how many people and hours it would take to fraudulently cast 46,000 votes in person.
And again, very importantly, the would-be fraudster(s) do not have precognition and does not know how many votes he needs to cast or where in our massive country he needs to cast them! Even professional pollsters are often wrong.
Let's imagine that it takes you 15 minutes to vote and drive to another polling station. In 12 hours you could cast 48 votes. Early voting varies wildly, but let's take a rough average of states and say you can vote in person 8 hours a day M-F 2 weeks early. That puts you at about 370 fraudulent votes, with a wildly optimistic 15 minutes per vote and taking 2 weeks off your job to run around casting fraudulent votes.
So to flip the 2024 popular vote in Nevada, the closest state that does not require voter ID, you'd need at least 125 people in your conspiracy. That's 125 people running around for 2 full weeks each pretending to be 370 different people.
Being (self-)selected for being a partisan in one direction, seems like it would make someone very unlikely to seek fame from the opposite political party.
We're talking about getting 125+ people into a conspiracy without one of them thinking cheating is morally wrong, or wanting to be famous for any reason. Or some third party seeing the 125 people talking and getting suspicious.
But if this is never seriously investigated, then we can only say that this is the minimum amount. Also, we could see a big upsurge in attempts.
30 states use ERIC which both helps identify eligible voters who have not registered and identify people who have moved or died. Though there are allegations this system has false positives.
They don't regularly check, but they sometimes do. Here's a check of 5 states where after investigating, there were no more than 200 suspected cases per state. Bush had the DOJ investigate, and they turned up with a handful of felons who claim they thought they could vote. Kris Kobach ran on alleging 100 known cases of fraud, and by the end of it scored 4 convictions of people voting in 2 districts.
This kind of stuff is also on par with people forgetting how to register for voting, not knowing how, etc; which is one of the reasons why canvassing happens anyway. So if Democrats are worried about black people being more disenfranchised, they have every opportunity to combat this by asking whether people have an ID during canvassing and helping them get one if they do not. If the Democrats are right about their allegations, then this would make a big difference, so they would do it. If they don't, this suggests rather strongly that their rhetoric is false and just intended as a marketing exercise.
It suggests nothing rather strongly, as "Why are you making me fill out this form? It's a waste of time!" is a perfectly coherent and rational response to someone trying to make you fill out an extra form that provides no useful purpose. The way I see it, removing the need extra pointless busywork is better than trying to find a way to get the pointless busywork done. At best you've explained that they could do something else, but no reason why they should feel they should do so when they feel their current method works just fine. The Democratic position is that not being able to vote because you forgot to register is bad, and that voting should be as easy as possible while still being secure (and that it is currently sufficiently secure). Your fix isn't a good fix, since people don't canvas everywhere, as you yourself acknowledge.
As far as my claim about closing DMVs was concerned, I admitted I hadn't looked into it enough and I wasn't claiming it as true. I was using it as an example of how one could do something that looks innocuous but intentionally create a catch-22.
I'm pretty sure that Republicans are much less prone to canvassing, and there are in fact quite a few poor white people living in Alabama, that presumably would also have a relatively large percentage of no-IDers and would live far from DMVs (especially since they tend to live rurally). But these people are consistently erased from the conversation. So on the one hand we have the speculative racism from one side, but we also have the definitive racism from the other side, which also taints all the evidence from that side, because they are not even looking at poor whites as a group, even though there are a lot of similarities with poor blacks. Hmmm.
What? That's a rather interesting attempt at a reverse UNO. First of all, according to a 2014 study voter ID reduced white turnout by 1.5% and blacks by 3.7% in some states (pages 52-54 of the report). Second of all, your argument makes no sense. Democrats are taking the side of the issue that benefits those 1.5% of whites in terms of easy voting. Democrats are neither preventing Republicans from canvassing nor are they trying to make canvassers solve the problem they created.
The problem with this analysis is the belief that nothing happened between 2014 and 2022. For pretty much the entirety of that time Ukraine was fighting with "separatists" armed with Russian weapons. Europe had arranged ceasefires, with Russia negotiating for terms which benefited the separatists, but those ceasefires were repeatedly broken (each side of course blames the other for violating it). Hell, in 2017 Putin announced that he was issuing passports for citizens in Eastern Ukraine.
Trump did send some weapons, but that's about the extent of it that I remember.
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