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Notes -
Pennsylvania mail-in ballots with flawed dates on envelopes can be thrown out, court rules
This came up when the lower court issued their opinion a few weeks ago. I remember several commentators asking if the fact that it was only filed in two counties was going to have a material impact in the outcome. It looks like it did.
For those of you who leaned one way or the other, how does this impact your future predictions?
On a more specific note - @Rov_Scam, you had some fairly extensive commentary on this case that was interesting and insightful due to your profession. If you have time, would you mind chiming in with an update?
I'm a "Stop the Steal" agnostic. The 2020 election looked fishy, but most of the "proof" of election fraud has been merely suggestions with no follow-through. I'm not a Trump voter, but I have no faith in the integrity of his opponents -- especially if you take them at their word that he is an existential threat.
The Democrats do themselves no favors by trying to stop all of these election reform measures in swing states, like PA and GA. Their insistence that we should not clean the voter rolls, enforce ballot integrity or deadlines, or be able to produce records that verify vote counts or reconcile ballot and voter numbers is bewildering in the absence of fraud. Can anyone of the "Most Secure Election in History" persuasion steelman the argument against increasing election integrity? Isn't it in everyone's best interest to increase confidence in the electoral process, even if you think 2020 election deniers are kooks, as it will improve the legitimacy of whoever wins and diminish avenues of sympathy for the deniers?
The argument is that the actions Republicans take do not increase election integrity, and are instead aimed at adding hoops to jump through that may reduce voter turnout among groups that typically vote Democrat. For example, North Carolina in 2016 had a law overturned combating voter fraud. For important context, the legislature had requested an received demographic information about how voters vote, by race. That is, whether they use provisional voting, early voting, mail-in ballots, etc. The day after the Supreme Court rolled back provisions of the Voting Rights Act the legislature moved forward with a bill over "election security." Said law:
Reduced early voting.
Disallowed SOME but not all forms of alternate photo ID
Removed same-day registration
Removed provisional voting if a voter showed up at the wrong polling place within the same county
Removed pre-registration which allowed teenagers who were below voting age to register, provided they would be eligible to vote on election day
Did NOT require mail-in voters to show ID.
Based on the above bullet points, can you guess which forms of registering/voting were most used by blacks, and which were most used by whites? Hint - the ones which were used primarily by whites were untouched.
Democrats believe that Republican leaders are borrowing a similar playbook in Republican controlled areas, and that "election security" is simply plausible deniability. I agree with that, but I'd add that as a project manager, my philosophy is that a process should be only as complex and restrictive as it needs to be to perform its function, and no more. In other words, something like photo ID is a burden on the process of voting, and justifiable only if it stops a fraudulent vote. If it does not, then the time spent is a waste and should be cut with prejudice. Likewise, if a form of ID is enough to reasonably establish someone's identity, include it.
Democrats should get ahead of the game and propose their own voter integrity initiatives. It would be an easy slam dunk to say, "Republicanss don't make elections more secure, but Democrats do." Maybe this trickles out in press releases about unmasking Russian ad campaigns, but it never manifests in having the kind of election procedures that are universal in Europe and Asia.
The election security procedure that is universal in Europe and Asia but not the United States is public or semi-public hand counting of paper ballots. This would be prohibitively expensive in the US because of the large number of races in an American election - it is very unusual for a European election to include more than two or three races, whereas a typical US election includes dozens of state and local races as well as up to three (President, House, Senate) federal ones.
Countries which have complete, accurate and up-to-date lists of resident citizens (i.e. not the Anglosphere) have meaningful citizenship checks to register to vote, and generally require a national ID card (which proves citizenship as well as identity) to be shown when voting. Countries which don't do Papieren, Bitte culture generally have weak voter ID cards which could be defeated with a $10 fake ID if anyone actually wanted to commit retail in-person voter fraud, which empirically they don't. (Postal vote fraud is much easier.) Apart from a few red states in the US, no country without a citizen register requires proof of citizenship to register or vote. (In general, in countries without a citizen register, the only strong documentary proof of citizenship would be a passport)
My browser ate an effortpost on this point, but the fate of ERIC demonstrates that the MAGA activist base is not acting in good faith on election integrity issues, so there is no point in the Democrats trying to co-operate with them or appease them. The median voter (quite correctly) doesn't care enough about election integrity for it to be a winning issue for either side in the general - the noise about election integrity is there because it is a winning issue in Republican primaries full of Dale Gribble voters.
I'm embarrassed, since I claim to care about transparent election integrity but haven't heard of ERIC beyond this. Can you whip up a precis? I've only found https://www.npr.org/2023/10/20/1207142433 and https://www.npr.org/2023/06/04/1171159008 casually.
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