ymeskhout
1yr ago
I don't know if I worded it in the best way. I'm not saying that pure heroin is necessarily "safer", but rather that the dangers are at least less unpredictable to the stepped on stuff. When people do drugs that are stigmatized, they tend to hide or go places where they're less likely to attract attention, especially from law enforcement. I can buy alcohol at the store or go to a bar if I wanted a drink, I wouldn't have any avenues similarly sanctified if I wanted heroin. So it was not totally precise for me to say "the stigma itself" makes it more dangerous, because it's more of a parallel track than a linear causation.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
I think everyone would agree that "sentence" would include time spent behind bars. If you were to widen the scope of the definition, the concept you'd encounter next would be probation, where you're still under supervision even though you no longer in a prison. If you were to widen the scope even more, you could reach the concept of fines if the definition is expansive enough. But generally the progression here logically goes from most central to the concept, down to most collateral.
So when the amendment says "all terms of a sentence, including parole or probation" it's there to disavow any potential confusion of the scope anyone might have vis-a-vis "prison" and "parole or probation". The fact that they specify parole or probation further anchors the demarcation line. To argue that fines are implicitly included in this expansion, you'd have to establish that fines are logically just as central to the concept of a sentence as parole/probation are within the context of a criminal prosecution. A common analysis technique in statutory interpretation used by courts is where the trailing examples are used as guiding illustrations to set the scope. For example if I ran a restaurant and had a generic contract with a supplier for "dairy, like milk and cheese" and they deliver tubs of whey protein powder, a judge is very likely to rule that violated the contract, even if it was technically correct.
The amendment text could have said "all terms of a sentence, including parole, probation, or fines" in which case there would not have been any ambiguity. It didn't, and the best most charitable interpretation its omission can sustain is that reasonable minds can disagree. But if this was really an edge case of interpretation, it doesn't explain the insistence to choose an implementation everyone knew was going to come with severe practical problems, which is why they're relevant.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
Given that he's formed a branch of the State Law Enforcement specifically to investigate election crimes, I'd guess the odds of such an investigation both taking place and finding evidence if fraud did occur is substantially higher than it was before.
I mean, the motivation behind forming this agency was as a response to completely delusional claims of voter fraud that are unfortunately held by a significant portion of the electorate. I get that DeSantis is a politician that has to cater to the people who vote for him (no matter how crazy they are), so I can't fault him too much on this point. However, it does undercut the notion that this necessarily means it's an earnest and non-crazy investigative endeavor. It's possible that it was just put in place for the sake of appeasing the louder loons. Of course this doesn't mean that the agency is incapable of doing honest police work, but it definitely doesn't augur well that they chose — as their opening salvo — to go after random nobodies who are guilty of being misled by their government.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
I agree with this. I linked to when I last wrote about this issue:
After failing to uncover evidence of what has been alleged as the greatest electoral fraud in the history of the world, the back-up plan for some in that camp is to display a "tough on election fraud" approach. But in effect, it looks like they're taking out their frustrations on random nobodies. One of those guys was Hervis Rogers, who went viral during the 2020 election for waiting in line at a polling place for six hours and being the last person to vote. He eagerly spoke to and gave his name to a TV news crew that was on site, presumably proud to showcase to the public how committed he was to voting. But, it turns out, Rogers was a convicted felon.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
I agree, and would never claim otherwise. It might still be a useful sample if compared against that specific state's average. But besides that my main point is that we don't know much on this topic, and finding out more information is very hard.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
I'm so confused as to how voter id would help. This was not a scenario of mistaken identity here but rather the government choosing to implement a system everyone knew was going to be a record-keeping mess.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
You keep dodging the question. People are going to jail because they believed bogus information given to them by the government. Do you or do you not support those prosecutions? If you do, can you explain exactly how prosecuting people for believing the government advances any causes?
he's committing voting fraud
I don't want to gloss over the distinction here. What Hervis Rogers did was cast a vote when he was not legally allowed to, even though his registration went through without issue. Calling this a case of "voter fraud" does not make sense to me, because fraud implies deception. It's perfectly possible that Rogers somehow purposefully hoodwinked the local election board to accept his voter registration despite knowing he was still not eligible, but what's more likely is that Texas does not have a good system in place to accurately keep track of people's convictions across the 472 district court jurisdictions in the state. This on its own is not surprising, because judicial record systems are a hot mess.
I think it's reasonable to use Rogers' specific case to draw attention to the government's record-keeping practices and to what extent their systems jeopardize election integrity (if you believe felons voting two months before their 14 year probation term ends is a problem). It's also reasonable to opine and investigate to what extent poor record-keeping can facilitate fraud. But neither is the same as claiming fraud actually happened.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
you have failed to uphold in this very day's update regarding Desantis's domestic political context, in which multiple contemporary contexts of conspiracy to commit voter fraud, potential evidence of fraudulant voting, and systemic weakness for fraud have been noted without sufficient rebuttal
But I did, in the same post above you're replying to. If DeSantis was serious about actual voter fraud, I don't have an explanation for why he'd choose to make a public spectacle of people who were misled by his administration and dragging them to jail.
Given your past ruts on this topic with similar tendencies of not acknowledging contrary evidence...
We've been over this so so many times by now, and this exchange from May 2021 remains the most illustrative. I ask questions and your response is along the lines that it's not your job to educate me. Ok, fine, I accept that it's not your job, but I have no idea what exactly you expect of me. I have no idea how I'd even try to parody your position if I wanted, because you repeatedly refuse to state what it is besides a generalized complaint! If I said "Trump's election fraud allegations were true, or at least were made in good faith" you'd accuse me of strawmanning or whatever and then darkly hint that I am somehow missing the point or that I am intentionally ignoring the real and totally valid election fraud theories that apparently exist somewhere out there.
I get that you don't like it when I talk about the 2020 election fraud theories, you've made that abundantly clear! What I don't get is why you keep wasting time on this beat. You either have specific arguments to make or you don't. If you don't have any, or you just refuse to make them out of principle, vaguely complaining is not going to accomplish anything. I'm not a mind reader, and you can't expect me to respond to arguments you choose to keep cloistered in your head.
given your frequent shills for your private substack and the financial interests in catering to your desired target audience I would submit you are not impartial
Well, you caught me. The dozens of subscribers paying $0 a month pose a grave liability to my impartiality. I hope my reputation can someday recover.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
How exactly is this a voter id issue? There was no confusion about whether the voters in questions were who they said they were.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
I don't really understand your point. I've said many many times that voter fraud exists, and anyone who claims it doesn't exist is lying. I've also never claimed that the people who get caught for voter fraud constitute the entire universe of voter fraud. It's damn-near certain that plenty of people have engaged in voter fraud and gotten away with it, but how many exactly? Because there's a slight gap between a claim like A) "19 foreign nationals were caught illegally voting in North Carolina" and something like B) "vans are pulling up to polling places delivering suitcases full of tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots". You can't just point to A, add an unspecified "uncaught fraud" variable, and claim to have proven B. I can't just accept B as a leap of faith, and it's reasonable to discount B if the evidence presented in its support is consistently shoddy.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
I'm trying to identify where we disagree. Yes, there's intersection between property crimes and violent crimes and illegal drugs. Yes, property crimes are not conducive to a functional society. Yes, an efficient fencing market will encourage more property crime. I don't deny that carceral incapacitation can prevent crime, I'm just skeptical about the relative elasticity so to speak. I used car prowling as an example to showcase the wide gap between the supply and demand. Most people know not to leave anything valuable in their car, but enough people forget to make it worthwhile for junkies. And that's true even with the horribly inefficient methods junkies rely on to convert stolen property to cash. You can sentence thousands of drug addicts to decades in prison, but all you need to end up with dozens of car windows smashed up is just one junkie experiencing opioid withdrawal desperate enough to do whatever to scrounge up $10 for a pop. A car prowling rampage plus the hours of work it takes to convert the loot (my clients definitely are not lazy when it comes to scoring drugs) does not make sense in a world where clean heroin is handed out for free.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
This feels like shadow boxing because I'm not opposed to investigating claims of fraud. If I had any pushback it would be not wanting to see resources wasted chasing after patently delusional claims (e.g. Italian satellites) but hey, it's not really my money anyways, and the report could make for some entertaining reading.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
You could have secure elections where none of these people would be able to vote at all unless it was explicitly signed off by an authority that they had cleared their felony restriction... instead you're taking them at their word, now its just down to whether there are consequences when you prove their word is wrong.
Somehow you missed the part where the government told these people they could vote, and you somehow also missed how Florida intentionally decided to implement restoration requirements everyone knew was going to be a mess. It might be useful for you to at least skim through the litigation that explained the problems. Here's an excerpt from pg 53:
The case of one named plaintiff, Clifford Tyson, is illustrative. An extraordinarily competent and diligent financial manager in the office of the Hillsborough County Clerk of Court, with the assistance of several long-serving assistants, bulldogged Mr. Tyson’s case for perhaps 12 to 15 hours. The group had combined experience of over 100 years. They came up with what they believed to be the amount owed. But even with all that work, they were unable to explain discrepancies in the records.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
How the hell does a government bureaucracy run on not just the spoken word of a bureaucrat, but a convicted felons spoken memory of the spoken word of a bureaucrat?
You are making things up. Nothing about this case relied on the honor system. These people registered, local elected officials asked the state government to verify they were eligible, the state said they were, and the local officials granted the registration.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
You appear to be acting on the assumption that "you can't prove X" and "X didn't happen" are equivalent statements and the point that I am trying to make is that they are not.
I have no clue how you arrived at this interpretation, and if you can point to what I said that made you think this that would be helpful. No, I do not believe those statements are equivalent. I also don't believe "you can't prove X didn't happen" and "X did happen" are equivalent statements either.
People should absolutely be punished for trusting bogus information because that's how you nip that shit in the bud. If you want people to trust government officials your first, last, and only priority should be ensuring that government officials are trustworthy.
Uh, what? Nip what in the bud? How does prosecuting the people who believed the government help encourage the government to be more trustworthy? Shouldn't you direct your efforts towards...the government?
ymeskhout
1yr ago
Ok, which part of that do you think I disagree with? What position of mine do you take issue with?
ymeskhout
1yr ago
Or you know, law enforcement. I'm guessing the counter-argument is that the consent decree that the RNC voluntarily agreed to had such a profound chilling effect that it spooked the RNC and their allies from even raising the issue, even after the decree expired in 2018.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
If as soon as they presented their ids to vote, the computer would be able to tell whether they were ineligible or not, this wouldn't happen.
I keep repeating this point, but the problems with the current system is something that the Florida legislature intentionally accepted. I'm going to link the court's opinion again because it provides a very thorough breakdown:
The case of one named plaintiff, Clifford Tyson, is illustrative. An extraordinarily competent and diligent financial manager in the office of the Hillsborough County Clerk of Court, with the assistance of several long-serving assistants, bulldogged Mr. Tyson’s case for perhaps 12 to 15 hours. The group had combined experience of over 100 years. They came up with what they believed to be the amount owed. But even with all that work, they were unable to explain discrepancies in the records.
Voter ID does not fix any of the implementation problems. What you're essentially arguing for in your second sentence is that the record problem wouldn't exist if we had a system that didn't have the record problem.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
Seems pretty disingenuous to call it “voluntary” when the nigh-certain alternative was an even worse court-imposed judgment.
Why do you think the prospect of a worse court-imposed judgment was nigh-certain? Do you believe it's disingenuous to label voluntary any lawsuit settlement? I'm assuming the RNC is not a mom & pop business whose legs start shaking at the sight of a legal document. They had the resources to litigate the allegations and chose not to, I'm assuming because the chances they had a meritorious defense was dim.
Yeah, surely the prior three decades of forced atrophy had no effect on their ability to effectively discover and root out such things. Two years should be more than enough to get them up to speed! Not to mention that they obviously extensively raised the issue in 2020, their next earliest opportunity, much to your oft-voiced chagrin.
Right, we're back in familiar unfalsifiable country. If the RNC lose on an issue it's not because it wasn't meritorious but rather because the RNC is perpetually helpless and unable to defend its interests against an onslaught of relentless attacks. These types of excuses can be self-soothing as a coping mechanism, but they're not very persuasive to other people.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
It's your position that Rogers, having already spent almost a decade in prison and almost two decades on probation, was willing to chance yet another felony conviction at the age of 60 years old just to vote? Not only that, but his knowledge of his voting eligibility was somehow more accurate than the election authority that granted his registration? And he was so confident enough that he'd get away with it that he was willing to speak to a television crew about it?
I suppose that's all possible, but I don't know why you find that explanation more plausible than "court records are a mess and the election authority that granted his registration fucked up"
Your responses, more so than anyone else's in this community, continues to be the greatest source of inscrutability for me. Besides the vague and generalized discontent, I continue to have no idea what you're talking about, and I don't understand if this is just a language issue or an indication of a less obvious chasm or something else entirely.
If anyone besides Dean is capable of summarizing to me the specific concerns he holds, that would be really helpful.
Edit: I've been trying to organize a Bailey episode about the 2020 election with Shakesneer for a few months now. If you think a real-time discussion would be helpful and want to team up with him, let me know!
ymeskhout
1yr ago
It's apparently ok to file charges against people who are likely innocent because then they might sue the people who are actually responsible for this situation and then maybe those settlements will encourage better behavior from the government...you do see how convoluted that is, right?
The guy DeSantis picked to run Office of Election Crimes and Security explicitly told local election officials this wasn't their fault. It's the state government that is in charge of parsing through all the relevant records and giving a final answer to local officials. If this is an issue worth putting people in jail over why isn't DeSantis prosecuting his own administration officials? There's an obvious conflict of interest here, which I would think would severely undercut the idea that DeSantis' was acting in good faith when he chose to make a spectacle of these random people's arrests. I've explained what I believe DeSantis is doing — he's prosecuting these people to scare the hell out of any felon from even thinking about getting their voting rights reinstated, to appease his supporters who still believe in delusional election fraud theories, and also to distract from the problems his own government has in implementing Amendment 4 — and you haven't disavowed me of those beliefs. What do you think I'm missing?
[I'll just repost a comment I wrote on this]
There have been multiple studies, but it's difficult to get a clear picture because every state is different and there are a host of confounding variables.
It's relatively straightforward to get a good perspective from Vermont and Maine, because those are the only states that allow people currently incarcerated to vote from prison. The Marshall Project surveyed that population and did not find that they leaned heavily Democratic.
Elsewhere however, a common problem is that it is very difficult for felons to know exactly their right to vote is restored, so many of them don't bother trying even if they are legally allowed to. If you asked me right now to answer without looking up whether felons can vote in my state, I literally have no idea whether they regain their right upon release or after a judge restores it, and I'm a public defender who has processed hundreds of guilty pleas! All I know is that felony convictions take away your right to vote, and you get it back "someday".
Besides the lack of knowledge, felons face higher hardships (finding housing, finding employment, not committing more crimes, etc) than the general population, and their appetite for voting is a fairly low priority. You can see why something as heavily publicized as a referendum on a constitutional amendment for voting right restoration would draw a lot of attention and get people with convictions coming out of the woodwork to register. In a state that is as purple as Florida and with razor-sharp electoral margins, this is bound to be a catastrophic risk that just isn't worth it for the party that expects the short-end of the stick.
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