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Back in August 20 people were arrested in Florida as part of a sting operation on "voter fraud" heavily publicized by Gov. DeSantis. Each person had a felony conviction and voted, but I wrote about how each person was specifically told by election authorities that they were legally able to vote. The confusion stems from how felony voter right restoration was implemented in Florida, where the state insisted that everyone had to pay all outstanding fines while at the same time admitting it had no way of keeping track of all these fines.
A small update since then is that bodyworn video footage of the arrests has been released. The language in an arrest warrant issued by a court usually says something along the lines of "To every peace officer of blah blah, you are commanded to..." which means the decision to arrest is not discretionary. I've watched thousands of arrest videos by now and while the modal arrest is far less eventful that what the typical viral incident would have you believe, it's still an event that is inherently antagonistic. After all, the cop is placing handcuffs on you and taking you to jail, with serious retribution if you impede the process in any way.
I have never seen cops anywhere near as apologetic about an arrest as in the videos just released from Florida. They caught these people unaware outside of their homes, and as they explain the arrest warrant they pepper every sentence with "sir" and "m'am". When they explain that they're about to be handcuffed, they use "unfortunately" as a prefix. Thanks to qualified immunity along with the general deference courts give law enforcement, each cop would have had the legal authority to leg sweep each person and slam them to the ground if they displayed anything that could remotely be construed as resistance. Instead they take the time to calmly explain the process, including when they would likely be released, in a bid to secure as much of their cooperation as possible through what is understandably a distressing event for any person to go through. They're treated with astounding compassion. The people arrested start talking (of course they do), with one explaining how he was told he could legally vote, and the cop responds with "there's your defense". I've never seen a cop highlight legal defenses to the person they just arrested.
DeSantis is a Yale/Harvard educated former federal prosecutor. I would assume based on his background that he's not an idiot, and that he knows how criminal prosecutions work. If I keep my cynic hat on, DeSantis chose to make a big show of these arrests entirely as a means to appease the portion of the electorate that still believes the 2020 election was stolen and remains angry no one has gotten punished. But even so, what exactly was the follow-up supposed to be? Whatever charges one would levy against these people would require that you prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they knew they weren't allowed to vote but voted anyway, and how would any prosecutor counter the fact that election authorities approved their registration? What this does also just brings more attention to the confusing labyrinthian mess around court fines the state of Florida intentionally created as a hurdle for felons pursuing voter right restoration.
If the cops conducting the arrest are expressing this much skepticism about the charges, you can surmise how a random jury pool would react. These charges were patently frivolous from the very start but setting that aside they don't even make sense from the political grandstanding perspective. Bewildering.
Think on the meta level just a bit. As in, not about whether these twenty people themselves were or were not intentionally trying to commit a crime, and catching them is proof of anything.
From a pure signalling standpoint, if you want to prevent people from knowingly casting illegal votes and demonstrate that you are capable of enforcing this rule (i.e. detecting illegal votes), then yes, you have to arrest people who do cast illegal votes, even if they possess a defense for the action.
Especially since "I was told it was legal to cast my vote" is such an easy defense to invoke and hard to disprove otherwise. You show that you will STILL investigate such situations and try to verify the defense as valid.
Do you think that this action will, on the margins, increase or decrease the chances of someone attempting actual voter fraud in the 2022 elections in Florida?
Or would the effect be entirely minimal and worth disregarding?
Imagine if a democrat arrested 20 republicans for possessing an illegal firearm because they misunderstood an ATF statute and the ATF webpage said that particular modification / accessory was legal. And when Rs got mad about it, a democrat said "think on the meta level - from a pure signaling standpoint - if we want to prevent people from knowingly committing gun crimes, we have to arrest people who commit gun crimes, even if they possess a defense.".
This argument doesn't make sense, at all. If voter fraud is a real and massive issue, surely they can find at least 4 people who really did it and arrest them? Er, except it does actually happen, and people are convicted for it! wikipedia shows many convictions. So ... how does this make any sense?
This argument makes complete sense to me. Otherwise, you get exactly the implication that people will start intentionally violating gun laws because they know that "I thought it was allowed" is a valid legal defense.
there is a difference between committing a crime and not knowing it was allowed, and doing something that atf.gov / the judge said was allowed and then getting arrested
more broadly, arresting people who did the above is not a useful way of enforcing against voter fraud / gun whatever
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That doesn't sound like an insane tactic. Making things uncomfortable for gun owners who have accidentally committed a small offense still makes things uncomfortable for gun owners. How does it not make sense?
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My dude.
That sort of thing happens ALL THE TIME.
https://armedamericannews.org/fbi-atf-arrest-of-florida-man-for-unregistered-short-barreled-rifle-showcases-absurdity-of-nfa/
https://www.lakeexpo.com/news/politics/atf-sting-at-lake-of-the-ozarks-gun-shop-was-entrapment-family-member-says-video/article_3174504c-430f-11ec-9ba1-e36d03894a2f.html
https://www.firearmsnews.com/editorial/atf-brace-amnesty-unworkable-entrapment/465077
https://archive.jsonline.com/watchdog/watchdogreports/botched-atf-sting-in-milwaukee-ensnares-braindamaged-man-pk9d6or-201794871.html/
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/12/allegations-against-the-atf-using-the-mentally-disabled-as-pawns/282226/
If you agree that guns are bad then this is exactly what you would do to discourage gun ownership.
Its EXACTLY how the Drug War has been prosecuted for like fifty fucking years.
But there's significant disagreement on the general point of guns and drugs being bad/whether they should be legal.
I think there's broad agreement that voter fraud is bad, just disagreement on how common and impactful it is.
So you can absolutely think that the ATF is doing something 'rational' AND doing something morally abhorrent because the law in question shouldn't exist, AND think that Desantis is doing something 'rational' and morally grey or even acceptable because the laws in question should exist.
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My rules > your rules, fairly > your rules, unfairly.
"People can be jailed when the ATF makes it hard to follow gun laws, but they get away scott free when they violate hard to follow voting laws" is "your rules, unfairly".
I guess if you see everyone in two clearly defined camps.
I just see one gang going around town inflicting violence against randos, and then a second gang is showing up, saying "it is bad that the first gang is inflicting violence against randos," and then inflicting violence against some randos themselves while saying stories about how this is all part of some grand plan to reduce total violence in the world.
Or they just like inflicting violence. It is fun, after all.
If you observe a neighborhood where a gang has started muscling in from elsewhere, are you surprised if the youths of the neighborhood form their own gang in response? If it was just "violence is fun", why didn't they have a gang already? Why are they only "showing up" now?
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Yes, and this is how the ATF has done business for fifty years at least. "But don't you hate it when we do this to you?" isn't a strong argument. The right knows they're on the chopping block for stuff that was legal six seconds ago, or will be again shortly when their opponents do it. This is how the rule of law is slowly degraded until it holds no force but force itself.
No laws count other than the "will of the people"? Ok, people on the right have will also. "Your guns won't help you, you need to control the government to crush your opponents"? Ok, the people on the right have votes too. In the same way that the law does not exist to protect the victims of crime, but the perpetrators, the Constitution does not exist to protect the majority from the minority. If the left imagines they can govern by force and without the consent of the opposition, why should the right not adopt a similar stance? If you excuse the bad actions of one side, you lose moral authority to criticize the other.
Right, and if you have 350 democratic congresspeople in your basement, "If the left imagines they can govern by force and without the consent of the opposition, why should the right not adopt a similar stance" might mean something.
But this is a question of 'was it cool or not for desantis to charge a few people with meaningless crimes', that isn't 'crushing' the left or 'governing by force', it's just a random minor issue. Same for the gun thing, a few people go to prison for dumb reasons, people can't own cool guns, that sucks, but doesn't really have any long-term impact. The right isn't "on the chopping block", legally, if a few gun owners go to prison sometimes - i mean, is the left "on the chopping block" because people go to prison for weed and LSD sometimes? It sucks, but it's quite minor, hardly a pogrom or a work camp.
So what's the complaint? Just more bodies ground down under the wheels of society.
Is this anything more than an abstracted "Mommy he hit me back!!"?
I'm sure it sucks for these men and their families that they're getting railroaded for political purposes. It also sucks that they were tricked into committing technical crimes by people purporting to support their civil rights. They don't deserve either. Not the Dems who set them up as stooges and martyrs, and not the Reps who are going to take the bait.
Is there any reason DeSantis should not play hardball? Are his opponents going to stop doing the same thing? It's ok to shoot unarmed female election protesters on one side of the aisle, but not arrest people on a technicality for voting wrong? Let's all punch "nazis", but not enforce tendentious voting laws? The right still remembers Vicky Weaver, so "but how would you feel if the ATF snagged you on a technicality" is a bit real. They'd feel like the federal government is on a pogrom against them already, and the only thing standing between them and potentially getting murdered in their own home by federal agencies is the coin-flip chance they can get their guy into office who will redirect law enforcement against the opposition for four years. Which, ironically, is probably exactly what these poor schmucks were thinking when they voted.
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You don't even need to misunderstand the ATF: they're sometimes quite clear, like the since-rescinded 2004 letter in which they ruled that a "a 14 inch long shoestring with a loop at each end" was, by itself, a machine gun. In 2007 they were gracious enough to rule that the shoestring in isolation is not a machine gun, only when combined with a semiautomatic rifle.
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Er, this is actually the level of incompetent hostility that right-wingers already expect from the ATF, and the response from the Democrats is less "this is good on a meta level" and more "this is good because fuck your ilk".
Responding to this and all the other comments - yes, it's dumb when the ATF does stuff like this, they internally and externally justify it on procedural / justice grounds in addition to people on twitter saying 'assault rifles banned good maga mass school shooter incel republican bad', and it's dumb when desantis does it too, that is the argument
If it's stupid, but it works, is it stupid?
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Speaking purely from the political grandstanding perspective, it mostly makes DeSantis look silly and buffoonish: at the margin, it lost him votes, possibly even in future Republican primaries. You can talk about hypothetical second-order effects on marginal illegal voters all you want, but the public doesn't care, and it'll be hard to convince anyone that this escapade was DeSantis courageously trying to institute good policy despite any negative effects it might have on his grander political ambitions.
Find me a single likely voter who was actually swayed from voting for Desantis due to this action, I'll give you the point. Honest.
I doubt Desantis needs many extra votes given how he's got approximately zero chance of losing his re-election bid this year, though.
But if OTHER races end up being close, and he can dissuade fraudulent votes from being cast, well that is a serious benefit to people besides him.
HENCE: The Meta level analysis.
Desantis seems to actually care not just about looking good and winning his own elections, he seems to care about establishing systems which will, over a longer term, support his allies and thus increase the chances his goals will be achieved in the future.
Looking buffoonish for a month is a fine trade if you can bump your party's electoral chances by a few percentage points in the next election and every election to come.
If I can find a single felon who was considering casting a fraudulent vote who is now dissuaded, it would be strong evidence that the tactic worked.
There are two implicit assumptions buried in your analysis, though:
Voter fraud disproportionately favors DeSantis's opponents, and
The fraud is of such a scope to have an effect on an election
To the first point, there's no real evidence that this would be the case. I looked at cases of what I call "casual voter fraud" from the 2020 election in Pennsylvania. By Casual Voter Fraud I mean things like ineligible voting, impersonation at the polls, and mail-in or absentee ballot fraud; in other words, the kind of voter fraud a normal person could attempt without much difficulty. There are other cases of voter fraud, but these all either involved insiders or were part of large schemes that involved a certain amount of organization. Out of five total cases four involved registered Republicans and one didn't specify the party affiliation of the defendant. Given the small sample size, I'm going to conclude that there's no conclusive evidence that deterring voter fraud would help DeSantis's party in any way.
To the second point, again, I point to the small sample size, and to the fact that the incidents in question were distributed throughout the state. If they were concentrated in one area then it's conceivable that five votes could impact some local election, but that simply wasn't the case. More importantly, though, it speaks volumes that DeSantis is making this point by arresting people whom he knows are unlikely to be convicted. If he wants to send a message about voter fraud, then why not have a mass arrest of people who actually committed voter fraud? I understand that maybe it's a difficult thing to catch, but Pennsylvania managed to catch five people in a single election without really trying (there was no statewide crackdown and the only case that got even got significant news coverage was one that Fetterman memed about). Florida is larger than Pennsylvania and if you go back to the start of the Statute of Limitations it shouldn't be too hard to come up with 20 cases of real voter fraud if you were to actually try.
So Desantis wins an extremely close election and other races came down to a bare handful of votes, including one that an opponent won.
Any and all irregular activity in that year's election came out of two counties, both of which are extremely populous and both of which are controlled by his political opponents.
THEN an audit of one such county finds massive problems that could have been exploited for fraudulent purposes.
What, exactly, is the conclusion he should draw from this?
Nikki Fried (D) won by 6000 votes in 2018. 8 million were cast. As noted above.
Many local races were probably even closer than that.
At what point does it become concerning enough that a single corrupt election official might be able to tip races their preferred direction? At what point are you allowed to say "I don't know the exact risk that voter fraud occurs, but I do think that the outcome of fraud can be massive enough to take it seriously."
I just want to know the thresholds YOU think should apply.
I mean, one possible answer is that if they identified persons who they suspect committed voter fraud en masse, they've got them under surveillance, and if they attempt voter fraud again in 2022, they will gather evidence, identify all parties involved, then roll the whole thing up at once.
This tactic is used commonly against other sorts of organized crime, so I find it plausible.
My official prediction is that such mass arrests won't occur due to actual voter fraud in 2022, so this would in fact surprise me if true, but it's an easy way to explain the evidence we have.
Yeah, twenty people in total. Guy's not loading up train cars with his political enemies or anything.
Indeed, I suspect you'd be making even MORE of a fuss if he had arrested public officials who were suspected of voter fraud activities because THAT action, rounding up and arresting officials from the opposing party, looks particularly despotic. It is even just possible that he had grounds to go after, e.g. Palm Beach or Broward County's election supervisors for something like that, but opted to let them resign instead
So in my view, he's actually chosen the nicest way possible to send the message, without kicking in doors or interfering with his political opponent's rights, that the state is ready, willing, and able to detect and prosecute voter fraud.
In the early days of the War on Drugs, most police departments just arrested low-level dealers on the theory that that would be enough to curb the flow. Even the DEA, a group that now almost exclusively focus on the highest of the high-level drug dealers, spent most of the 1970s busting hippies for small amounts of weed. What you're doing here is pointing to things like corrupt election officials and other high-level forms of fraud and suggesting that a show of force against people whom you yourself agree aren't really guilty will somehow act as a deterrent.
I think deterrence works.
The degree to which it works can vary. But on the margins, enforcing laws harshly will incentivize people to obey those laws (or move their disobedience underground, i.e. with guns and drugs).
One of the several reasons we see rampant shoplifting in San Francisco is because they stopped enforcing shoplifting laws.
I don't want these twenty guys to end up in jail.
I'm simply OBSERVING that making a public show of arresting the guys is likely to have a deterrent effect. I think the goal is NOT to punish these guys, who likely had no real impact on any electoral outcome. I think the goal is to deter fraud in the next election.
If you have a better idea on how to dissuade potential fraud in an upcoming election, please proffer it.
This is an extremely low-cost way to possibly prevent the issue.
I think that this makes the action much easier to understand, so HOPEFULLY people can stop claiming to be 'bewildered' why Desantis does this.
Deterrence of what? If the problem in San Francisco wasn't shoplifting but truck hijacking, do you think cracking down on shoplifting by busting a few people who weren't shoplifting but didn't have proper receipts would have any effect on truck hijacking?
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You need multiple people. To stuff a ballot box in a precinct, you would need at least an accomplice stuffing the books, which are explicitly in the control of another person.
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That's not really what this is directed at, though. This is people voting in spite of not actually being allowed to. Felons, indigents, flavors of immigrants. Most of those categories seem likely to favor Democrats. It makes me think of the 2008 Minnesota Senate race, which ended up being decided by 225 votes. It was later determined that something like 1000 felons illegally voted in overwhelmingly Democrat counties. That result sent Al Franken to Washington, and gave Obama the 60th vote for the ACA.
Indigents? Is that a typo? Indigents obviously are allowed to vote.
Looking it up, I actually misunderstood the meaning of the word. I had the impression there was a strong subtext of homelessness + mobility, and thus would include people who were not in the municipality/county/state in which they were actually registered to vote.
do you mean 'transient'?
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Next time, include a source for the claim? I dug it up -
I read the wikipedia article, an incredibly boring use of 5 minutes of time (and reading the sources was worse...), and it ends with
"On March 31, the court issued an order to count at most 400 rejected absentee ballots and denied any other relief.[88][89] On April 7, the court scrutinized those ballots and determined that 351 had been legally cast. Those votes were counted, with 111 going to Coleman, 198 to Franken, and 42 to others, giving Franken a final margin of 312 votes.[90]"
You seem to refer to "In July 2010, Minnesota Majority, a conservative watchdog group, conducted a study in which it flagged 2,803 voters in the Senate race for examination, including 1,359 it suspected to be ineligible convicted felons in the largely Democratic Minneapolis-St. Paul area.[110][111] Subsequent investigations of Minnesota Majority's claims by election officials found that many of its allegations were incorrect. Some of the cases that were submitted involved mistaking a legal voter for a felon with the same name, others involved felons who had had their voting rights reinstated after serving their sentences, and others were felons who illegally registered to vote but did not vote in 2008 election.[112][113][114] Ramsey County officials narrowed their investigation to 180 cases, while Hennepin County examined 216 cases.[115]"
From the first source (fox news):
Added up, that's 342, which is slightly higher than 312. (although even if we believe that, if even 5% of the felons voted R, 342*.9 < 312). (although you could just as well argue plenty of the nonconclusive matches were 'real' too, whatever)
The star tribune confirms the 312 number, 'Ever since Franken won by a mere 312 votes', and
Unless most of those were confirmed, that still puts us under 312.
And (from kare11):
Those who are being charged with two felonies are felons who registered at the polling place on election day and voted, leaving no time for a cross-check with lists of convicts still on probation "We're going to continue to investigate 180 other complaints but we're not talking about a huge number of actual cases. And of that 30 about half of them were registration only, they didn't actually vote."
If we assume that cuts half of the 180 + 216, that puts us well under 312.
On the other hand, of course, dropping an investigation may be because it's impossible to prove, not because it didn't happen.
But
So - at a guess, these particular voters didn't tip it, but ... who knows.
However - these are right-wing claims. Did some R voters vote illegitimately, tipping the election rightwards? Idk, but from the wikipedia article, there were a number of recounts where both sides challenged vote counts, absentee ballot validity, et cetera - and in each of those, franken ended up with more extra votes than his opponent.
Obviously, both sides are very willing to play hard in the legal system, fighting tooth and nail, and care about the 'facts' only tangentially', and, more visibly so in more local races, sometimes commit outright fraud.
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That doesn't change the point at all - if that happens at all (and it does), then arrest people who are knowingly breaking the law, instead of people who were told they could vote!
Do you at least see the issue that arises when you arrest people who have cast illegal votes AFTER the elections in question have already been called?
Why you'd really, really prefer to have these votes not cast in the first place?
And how, in your mind, should one go about preventing potential fraudulent voters from casting votes?
What might, lets say, deter them from doing so?
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Why? I was always told that ignorance of the law is not an excuse, and there isn't even evidence he was told he can vote.
Right, exactly. "I called the IRS and they told me to do this" does not get you out of being penalized for violating tax law, for example.
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First, "ignorance of the law is no excuse" is a reference to what the law requires. OP is talking about prosecutorial discretion.
Second, the law requires that the defendant act willfully and "[a]s a general matter, when used in the criminal context, a 'willful' act is one undertaken with a 'bad purpose.' In other words, in order to establish a 'willful' violation of a statute, 'the Government must prove that the defendant acted with knowledge that his conduct was unlawful.'" Bryan v. United States, 524 US 184, 191-192 (1998). It says "as a general matter," so perhaps the voting law is an exception.
And, of course, advice of counsel is a defense to some crimes, which is another example of an exception to the ignorance of the law rule.
Edit. Btw the law applies only to those who vote knowing they are not qualified
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Depends on the wording of the law. From what @ymeshkout was saying above I surmise that this law specifies that it's only "fraud" if you know you're not eligible and vote anyway.
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Right, and scaring the shit out of anyone with a felony record about even thinking about voting (even if they are legally allowed to) is likely to have a beneficial effect for the Republican party's election chances. Do you disagree?
I would broaden it to "scare the shit out of anyone who was thinking of trying to fraudulently influence the election" at all.
This is a flex which shows "we can detect illegal votes and we WILL investigate illegal votes. Risk it at your peril."
My prediction is that there will be little fraud in the 2022 Florida elections. I DONT know how much occurred in prior elections. But there won't be much this time.
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?
I think that these guys should not be sent to jail.
I think if they can demonstrate that they were told that they were legally permitted to vote, and voted while under this belief, they should have their cases dropped.
Further, I think they should each sue the state of Florida for the hassle this imposed and other damages based on the theory of Malicious Prosecution.
I'd guess somewhere on the range of $10k to $25k would be appropriate damages.
So assuming all twenty were to sue, and all twenty were to win, and all twenty were to receive $25k, then the state of Florida should pay out that $500,000 to them immediately.
Or, in other terms pay out .002% of Florida's budget surplus
And that seems quite a worthwhile expenditure to avoid any major electoral fiascos in 2022.
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?
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If only there was a voter role system that was actually kept up to date, such that these cases would be resolved weeks in advance, and any questionable points dealt with before the election... some kind of registry to vote, such as parties and most nations have...
But one party systematically refuses to allow either voter ID laws, or any securing of the voter registry... leaving effectively an honor system for voting in America. Well if you're going to leave it unsecure enough we're trusting felons' word as to whether or not they're entitled to vote, then there has to be consequences for being wrong.
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.
.
I worked elections in Canada in another life... there was no way for anything like the regular "Mistakes" that happen in the American system because of all the ID and paperwork you are required to show and clerks required to document.
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:
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This wasn't an issue of ID, and these people were registered. That's why we have advocates saying things like:
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As a Republican, I agree that keeping criminals out of elections will disproportionately help my side.
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Does it make DeSantis look silly and buffoonish to his supporters, his detractors, the likely voters among them, the unlikely voters among them, the swing vote? Remember, every audience is seeing their own movie. It literally does not matter at all if a million people think this makes DeSantis look bad if they're not gonna vote for him anyway -- and it'd be worth earning all of their disapproval just to make 15,000 people on his side more likely to.. well, support him.
"But he might have alienated more independents than he did excite members of the base", you could argue. And maybe! The political calculations are certainly complex.. in theory.
In practice, though, I think everyone's collectively agreed that exciting the base beats infuriating the enemy, and these complex calculations aren't actually being worked out.
Agreed that base excitement outweighs infuriating the enemy and also that it trumps winning over hypothetical swing voters. And I also agree that all these factors are pretty amorphous and not easily measurable, or measurable at all.
It's all a matter of opportunity cost: was this the most effective use of DeSantis' time, effort, and attention in terms of getting earned media, particularly among conservative media outlets? Given foreknowledge of how it would play out, would he have made the same choices? If it was and he would have, I guess it was reasonable, but even that speaks to his skills as a politician.
It is really hard for someone to look at their outgroup do something controversial and say "oh yes, that was a good idea he just did."
(I do not trust the ingroup much on this, either.)
Like all politicians, DeSantis does lots of things, some of them work and some of them do not.
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Election security is very important. But if people ask if they can vote and get told they can vote, arresting them seems to not help much. This is not getting us Voter ID. It just looks like the bureaucracy telling people one day they are doing things okay and the next "lol get fukt."
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?
Merely speaking a lie should be insufficient to cast an illegal ballot like its insufficient in every single other advanced country. Canada, the UK, France, you have to show ID and prove with physical documents your eligibility to vote. Address changed? Show the paperwork. Citizenship status changed? Show the paperwork. Name Changed? Show the paperwork.
Only in America is the fate of the nation riding on the honor system. And only in America would it be considered a scandal that you'd hold someone accountable for being demonstrably wrong in such a system.
"But he claims some rando he can't remember told him he could do it" We should totally remove the very last post facto enforcement mechanism we have that even pretends this is secure, because now that we've narrowed it down to just personal honor we find we're uncomfortable punishing people for being wrong on matters of honor.
I mean, I already said I wanted Voter ID.
So. Yeah.
If someone has their address change and they file the change-of-address form and they get mailed a new voter registration card at their new address, the bureaucracy better not come back after they vote and say "oh wait we double-checked our records and the form showed up 3 days late we never should have sent you that now we fuck you in the ass."
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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.
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At least some of them had it in writing:
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Maybe he's hoping that people will look at this and go 'boy wouldn't it be great if instead of this banana republic bullshit where you can get arrested for doing what a government official told you to do we had a system in place that determines all this shit before the election and sends me something I can use to say "yes this is me and yes I can vote" like we do with plane tickets and driving and buying cough medicine?'
Yeah I agree, that would've been great! You do realize that the text of Amendment 4 simply said "This amendment would restore voting rights automatically upon completion of all terms of a sentence, including parole or probation", right? It was the Republican legislature that worked very hard to enshrine into law that "all terms of a sentence" actually also includes any potentially unpaid fines. They did this despite (or more accurately and less charitably because) everyone involved was loudly raising the alarm that there was no viable system in place for the state to keep track of unpaid fines.
Here's just one excerpt of the mess from the lawsuit that followed:
And here's one guy's efforts to pay all his fines:
None of this had to be this way. Voting restoration that only needed to look at when a prison or probation sentence ended would've been infinitely easier to implement that the system Florida chose instead, where the existence of an unnoticed $3 unpaid fine in some court clerk's drawer decides whether someone's vote is legal or a felony offense.
Yeah sorry I was typical minding, what I'm saying is that maybe the plan is to make it all seem crazy convoluted and impossible to follow so people throw up their hands and say 'just give us voting id already' in exasperation. I get the impression the republicans see voter id as the way to convince their base they've solved election fraud.
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.
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How would voter ID help? Couldn't there be a case where someone has a voter ID but their vote was still cast illegally because of <insert reason>? If government erroneously lets people vote verbally (like in real life), wouldn't they also erroneously let people vote with an ID?
The only possible reason I can think of is with voter ID, if a voter could prove they had the ID. Would a voter really be able to prove they had an ID? Why can't voters (in real life) prove they were told they could vote?
Voter ID to me, solves the problem of voters deceiving government. This case is about government deceiving voters.
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I guess I would have assumed that "all terms of a sentence" is implicitly inclusive of unpaid fines from that sentence. I'm not clear why fines would be excluded from either textualist or spirit of the law readings. I appreciate the practical problems that you're covering, and that certainly speaks poorly of the process, but it would seem quite weird to me if "all terms of the sentence" actually meant "the terms of incarceration, but not fines and fees".
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.
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How powerful is the "voting rights" faction?
I mean, did you hear about his kerfuffle with Disney and the Reedy Creek Improvement District?
Desantis directly challenged one of the single most powerful private entities in his state, which is also one of the biggest corporations on the planet.
I dunno if the "voting rights" faction warrants any particular caution in light of this.
If he gets taken down, it'll probably not be due to these twenty arrests. Probably.
Given that the Reedy Creek matter isn't over yet I'm not sure that's an example you want to be giving. I'd be willing to bet a decent sum that come next July, it's still in existence.
And do you think that other corporations in the state are more or less likely to take open positions disfavoring legislation passed by the state government during that time?
Again, Meta level. Disney spoke out against the "Don't Say Gay" (sic) bill at the behest of lefty/democrat activists. Then Desantis took the fight to them. Disney has since shut the fuck up about said bill.
Showing that you're willing to fight the biggest guy in the prison yard is a good way to keep other, smaller guys from messing with you going forward.
You think that in a liberal society it's the proper role of government to threaten legal consequences for exercise of free speech rights?
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The answer isn't obvious. These actions will absolutely discourage anyone with a felony conviction from trying to vote, even if they are legally permitted to, because who wants to risk getting arrested years down the line over something as individually trivial as voting? Felony disenfranchisement currently affects almost a million people in Florida, almost 10% of the adult population, so it's bound to have a significant effect.
In contrast, actual voting fraud is extremely rare. Just for perspective, 19 foreign nationals were charged for illegally voting in North Carolina in 2020. To me, it's not obvious how many of those foreign nationals were acting with malicious intent, or whether they made an honest mistake. Jeopardizing one's immigration status to cast one vote seems like an idiotic gamble. Beyond that, the scenarios where voter fraud is clearly motivated by malicious intent are too sporadic to get a comprehensive accounting for. I'm aware of very few cases, like for example this Nevada man who used his dead wife's ballot to cast a vote.
I suppose you can defend the heavy-handedness if your overriding priority is primarily to tamp down on the handful of actual voter fraud that takes place. But if so, I would like to at least see an earnest attempt to address the collateral damage. Is dissuading a handful of bad actors worth putting some innocent people in jail? Worth dissuading large swathes of the population from legally voting? If so, say so.
I don't recall if you and I have already had this conversation but I feel like this reply is illustrative of one of the wider gaps in inferential distance between the "red" and "blue-tribe"
There's a brand of argument that goes; thus far no one has been able to formally establish in a court of law that sufficient fraud to actually swing an election has occurred, therefore concerns about election fraud are completely unfounded and motivated solely by politics. However, if you stop to think about it the conclusion does not actually follow from the premise. As you yourself should well know given your background, only 19 instances of prosecution/conviction is not the same thing as there being only 19 instances of a crime. Similarly just because no one can prove X beyond a reasonable doubt doesn't mean that X didn't actually happen.
There was a post a few months back (before the transition) where Sam Harris was alleged to have "said the quiet part out loud" that tangentially points the same underlying issue. In short, there seems to be this attitude amongst a lot of blue-tribers and especially amongst those that fancy themselves "intellectuals" that they shouldn't have to justify themselves to plebes. But what is the point of having a democracy if not to justify the government to the plebes? The word democracy literally means "rule by the demos" IE the rank-and-file, or what some here might derisively refer to as "the normies". This distinction is one of the fundamental points of schism between classical liberals and the trad-right. Are hierarchies imposed or are they organic? If one takes the organic view, the onus is never on the on the loser to prove fraud. The onus is on the winner to prove they won fair and square, because "winning fair and square" is what confers legitimacy and demonstrates the Mandate of Heaven.
"there is no evidence that black people commit crimes more often than white people"
"there is no evidence that jews control the media"
"there is no evidence sex ed teachers are grooming children"
"there is no evidence democrats hacked voting machines to swing the election with 5M votes"
1 is plainly false, and justified by a ton of hedges and lies. 2 is ... eh, jews are profoundly overrepresented in the media, but going from there to 'control' or claiming jewishness is causal isn't proven at all. 3 is mostly true, sex ed teachers really aren't grooming anyone, but it's a cover for 'lgbt be bad' - which is arguable - and its own claim. and 4 is entirely true - that just didn't happen!
Just because 'the no evidence game' is played doesn't mean it isn't true sometimes.
his point is the evidence for anything more than that is entirely lacking.
and my point is that in an adversarial environment (which elections tend to be) the absence of evidence can not be assumed to be evidence of absence.
"There is no evidence for x" does not prove the absence of x unless one is under the impression that "you can't prove x" and "x didn't happen" are equivalent statements.
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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.
I recognize that, and that is what I'm talking about when I talk about "inferential distance"
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.
A bit down thread you ask whether people should be punished for believing bogus information provided by government officials and for my part the answer is an unequivocated "yes". 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.
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.
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?
Explain to me then how you made the jump from absence of evidence to evidence of absence.
A big chunk of this argument has always been about the book-keeping. Things like requiring ID to vote, having documented chains of custody for ballot boxes, third party observers in the counting rooms, etc... are put in place specifically to keep people honest and act as evidence against fraud. Elections are by nature adversarial, and as such the absence of such evidence can be interpreted circumstantial evidence in itself.
For a less emotionally fraught example, imagine a dealers' service agreement that explicitly excludes the car's transmission from the warranty. What would your immediate suspicion be? I can tell you what mine would be.
In an ideal world, maybe. But in the real world asking a government agency to oversee itself is almost always a losing proposition.
Sure, I'd be suspicious of the transmission. What part of the voting system is this supposed to map to your analogy?
This is bewildering. You haven't explained how prosecuting normal people for believing the government advances any interest. What problem does this solve? What behavior is this supposed to encourage?
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He is saying almost the exact opposite of assuming that "you can't prove X" and "X didn't happen" are equivalent statements.
Yet his arguments seem to rely on them being equivalent, so which is it?
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Even granting your basic premise, how does your proposed remedy accomplish this? I mean... the suggestion is literally to punish more or less random third parties, who didn't do anything wrong other than believe bad information they were given. If anyone should be punished here surely it's the people who actually dispensed the misinformation. I fail to see how your proposed remedy does anything to disincentivize the behaviour it's supposedly aimed at, because it isn't even aimed at the right people. What I do see very clearly is that it's patently unjust, for the same reason. I mean... people shouldn't be punished for stuff other people did. It doesn't get more basic than that.
You're not punishing "random third parties" or "someone for something someone else did" though. You're punishing people for voting illegally. The question is whether "but some dude told me I could" ought to be considered an affirmative defense for casting an illegal ballot.
It should be ~impossible to vote illegally by mistake. It's stupid to try to fix broken procedures which allow 'illegal voting' by just punishing citizens really hard if they make a mistake.
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Surely it makes a difference that "some dude" is a person in an official position whose job is, at least in part, to dispense accurate information about this. If anyone did anything wrong here it's them.
I guess the disagreement is largely about what kind of mens rea requirement should hold here. I don't see why voting illegally should be a strict liability thing like you apparently do, especially if the underlying goal is to prevent *intentional *voter fraud (though such votes should not be counted, if there's a way to enforce that without de-anonymizing them). Doing it with conscious intent, sure.
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Can you please connect the dots from “punishing people for trusting bogus information” to “ensuring government officials are trustworthy”? If the officials were misleading people, then they are the ones who should be punished, not the victim.
Imagine a police officer who writes tickets for speed limit violations but claims that the person caught speeding is signing a ‘warning form’ or something. The person then doesn’t show up in court, as they had no reason to believe that they needed to, and is later thrown in jail. The fix for that situation is not to tell people they shouldn’t trust cops, just like the fix in FL isn’t to tell people that they can’t trust county clerks.
At the most basic level this thread is about whether "a government official told me I could do X" ought to be considered an affirmative defense for illegally doing X. @ymeskhout appears to be taking the position that, yes it should, but to me this position seems untenable. To flip your scenario on it's head, If a cop pulls me over driving without a no license or insurance on a car with expired tags and I tell them that the lady at the DMV told that I didn't need any of that stuff, would you expect the cop to just say "my mistake" and let me go on my way? I wouldn't. Fact is that regardless of whatever some unnamed official at the DMV might have said, the cop has his own instructions.
There's a line of thinking here (Scott's posts on In Defense of Fauci and Bounded Distrust being central examples) that seems to go; the public trust is a public good ergo there is a moral obligation to trust public officials regardless of the truth value of their statements.
While this makes a certain amount of inductive sense if one takes the view that hierarchies as imposed, and that public officials are on the balance impartial. In practice it creates an environment that erodes trust because what real incentive does some unnamed official have to ensure that they get things right?
This discussion has been particularly frustrating because it seems that people are just assuming facts about a system they're not familiar with. This is not a case of a felon caught voting claiming someone "told" them they could vote. The problems with Florida's voting restoration system have been well known for a really long time. It would be helpful if you were at least somewhat familiar with the system, and you can learn a lot by just skimming this court opinion. Here's the 125-page court opinion that details the problems on Pg 53:
And see page 65 about the workload the state estimated for itself:
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Your error is italicized. The claim is not that B is proven, the claim is that B is alleged, and that A provides enough evidence that measures should be taken to investigate or attempt to prevent cases up to and including B.
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.
It's not just "investigating claims of fraud" post facto. It's also about increased security measures that provide one or both benefits: deterring fraud from happening in the first place, and/or generating more evidence such that future investigations may be more successful. The secret ballot has a great many reasons to exist as good policy, but as a starting point, it makes fraud investigations difficult.
Without more security measures, too many fraud investigations will end with "we did not find enough evidence to prove fraud." This leads immediately to the metaphorical response, "did you turn on the lights when you were looking?" I can generate a "no fraud detected" response by sitting on my ass and doing nothing. I can only be confident in the results of fraud investigations if the answer to "if there was fraud, would we have detected it?" is sufficiently high-probability.
Ok, which part of that do you think I disagree with? What position of mine do you take issue with?
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What sort of proof would you suggest? You're asking the winner of every election -- regardless of party -- to prove that voter fraud didn't happen. So, for example, what should Donald Trump have had to do after the 2016 election to justify taking power?
We could have a voting system where voting fraud is hard to commit and those who are caught trying face significant punishment. In this system, for example, if we find that 99% of people in several nursing homes voted even though dementia rates in these nursing homes should have made such high voting rates impossible, the FBI and elite media consider figuring out who committed this voting fraud to be a top priority.
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That's one of those hard questions of politics because in any adversarial scenario involving millions of people there will always be assholes. That said, the absolute last thing you want to do if you want to project an air of legitimacy is attack any one who questions your legitimacy as a conspiracy theorist/existential threat to democracy. The louder you insist that there's nothing to see behind the curtain the more convinced people will be that you're hiding something.
The 2000 presidential election went to the Supreme court. Maybe 2016 and 2020 should have to.
It's not just a matter of 'there will be assholes'. It's that motivated reasoning is extremely common - if you're mad you lost and work backward from the conclusion that you must have been cheated, nothing the winner can do will convince you. Even if you're well aware you lost fair and square this principle incentivizes you to act as if you believe you were cheated. It's essentially a heckler's veto for election results and seems unusable in practice.
I don't see how this is a remedy. The 2000 presidential election didn't go to the supreme court. A specific issue in Florida's election administration went to the supreme Court, and it did pretty much the opposite of convince people that the election outcome was proper. Fairly or not, the view of most Democrats was that Bush won because conservative justices put their thumb on the scale.
Then there's the question of what are we bringing before the court in 2016 and 2020? None of the serious accusations against Trump in 2016 really had any bearing on the legitimacy of the election from a process standpoint, and the 2020 voter fraud allegations are so broad and nebulous that there isn't really a thing you can bring up (you could pick through the various court cases brought by Trump to try and find something, but they're basically all laughable).
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Actual voting fraud convictions are extremely rare. Actual voting fraud is unknown as the Republican party was unable to perform any investigation into it for 30+ years.
The consent decree you reference hardly prevented investigation of voter fraud. As described in the 2009 decision modifying the decree, said that the RNC agreed (a consent decree is exactly what the name implies):
(a) comply with all applicable state and federal laws protecting the rights of duly qualified citizens to vote for the candidate(s) of their choice;
(b) in the event that [it] produce[s] or place[s] any signs which are part of ballot security activities, cause said signs to disclose that they are authorized or sponsored by the [RNC];
(c) refrain from giving any directions to or permitting their agents or employees to remove or deface any lawfully printed and placed campaign materials or signs;
(d) refrain from giving any directions to or permitting their employees to campaign within restricted polling areas or to interrogate prospective voters as to their qualifications to vote prior to their entry to a polling place;
(e) refrain from undertaking any ballot security activities in polling places or election districts where the racial or ethnic composition of such districts is a factor in the decision to conduct, or the actual conduct of, such activities there and where a purpose or significant effect of such activities is to deter qualified voters from voting; and the conduct of such activities disproportionately in or directed toward such districts that have a substantial proportion of racial or ethnic [minority] populations shall be considered relevant evidence of such a factor and purpose;
(f) refrain from attiring or equipping agents, employees or other persons or permitting their agents or employees to be attired or equipped in a manner which creates the appearance that the individuals are performing official or governmental functions, including, but not limited to, refraining from wearing public or private law enforcement or security guard uniforms, using armbands, or carrying or displaying guns or badges except as required by law or regulation, in connection with any ballot security activities; and
(g) refrain from having private personnel deputized as law enforcement personnel in connection with ballot security activities
That's it.
btw I think it's funny people downvoted a factually true comment that took some effort to dig up, and didn't even bother refuting it
Sadly, that is par for the course.
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What does this even mean? Are you assuming that voter fraud is only/primarily committed by Democrats? Because why would it be the Republican party's responsibility? And why/how were they "unable" to investigate the issue? What was law enforcement doing this whole time?
I believe that he’s referring to this. Per the article: “After more than three decades, Republicans are free of a federal court consent decree that sharply limited the Republican National Committee’s ability to challenge voters’ qualifications and target the kind of fraud President Donald Trump has alleged affected the 2016 presidential race.”
Presumably, republican organizations that aren't the "RNC" would be able to do that? And there are a ton of those.
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.
The RNC of 30 years prior, you mean? And aren’t consent decrees settlements to lawsuits? Seems pretty disingenuous to call it “voluntary” when the nigh-certain alternative was an even worse court-imposed judgment.
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.
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As much as I am annoyed by the Democrats saying "there is no almost no fraud in the places it is easiest to look and someone would have to have shit for brains to try to commit fraud", it is the same annoyance when Republicans forget their own commissions set up to exactly find fraud and then do not find any.
It is like there is no room for nuance at all and it is all signalling.
The investigation in Wisconsin didn't turn up definitive individual examples of fraud, but it turned up a lot of sketchy evasion of normal laws with hundreds of thousands of people avoiding normal voter ID procedures in 2020. If you're ever bored, I recommend a full read through of the report. The lack of security measures makes it difficult to trace individually fraudulent actions, but the overall impression one gets is not that this is a particularly secure process.
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The problem is that just because an event is rare, it can still be high-impact when it does occur.
I tend to hate that the Blue Tribe talking point states that "WIDESPREAD" voter fraud is a myth.
Because it doesn't have to be 'widespread' to have a significant effect on outcomes. Even accounting for how ambiguous that term is. If 50,000 fraudulent votes are cast in one precinct, that might not count since it wasn't taking place elsewhere?
And the rarity of it occurring in the past is not sufficient evidence that it won't be widespread in the future, if conditions change.
Of course, the Dems spent years alleging Russian 'interference' with the 2016 election despite no direct evidence, so I also don't think they've demonstrated good faith on the issue anyway.
Surely "widespread" here means "significant"
Of course there is evidence of Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election.
How many votes were flipped, added, or otherwise how was the actual outcome impacted by Russian interference?
No clue. Perhaps not at all, though of course some states were so close that even a small change might have been significant. But I did say only that there is evidence of attempts to influence the election. That seems pretty clear.
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Interference versus influence.
Whats the difference?
I don't understand your question.
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I am not aware of anyone pointing out 50 fraudulent votes within a single district, let alone 50,000. If something like 50,000 in a single district was something that had actually been shown to have happened, that argument would be a lot more relevant. Particularly if those 50,000 fraudulent votes came from individual people who should not have been allowed to vote individually deciding to vote.
Basically my issue with this is the type of fraudulent vote they're going after here isn't the type of fraud that I would expect to swing elections.
Agreed.
Honestly I feel like all the talk of fraud is a distraction from things that are legal but have significant effects on voter turnout (e.g. polling place locations, canvassing, changing laws around mail-in ballots, etc).
To expand this point, a great number of things were done along these lines in 2020 that were not legal, and yet were not fraud either, e.g. officials changing rules regarding mail-in ballots without the legal authority to do so.
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Cool, but I am not sure why this was a response to me.
Because you stated that Republican Commissions to find fraud tend not to find fraud.
Which is not really proof that we shouldn't place measures against fraud in place, or that Republicans are wrong to worry about it, even if they are obnoxious in their arguments.
The guy I responded to said that Republicans were "unable to perform any investigation into it for 30+ years."
There are absolutely investigations into fraud. Your very sentence implies their existence!
I do NOT think that, as many Democrats say, that "looking for fraud and not finding any means we can stop looking."
But I also do NOT think that "if we look for fraud and and do not find enough to flip an election, that means we were just not permitted to investigate hard enough."
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Perhaps we can gain some insight into Desantis' mindset by looking at the 2018 election:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Florida_elections
Desantis won by the veritable skin of his teeth by 33,000 votes out of 8 million cast.
Rick Scott won his Senate race by about 10k votes.
Nikki Fried, the ONLY Democrat to win an executive office, won by 6,000 votes.
These are outcomes that could be swung, potentially, by one county in the state being manipulated or screwing up a count.
And guess what happened in Broward County in 2018?
https://archive.ph/Qc9Tt
And the money quote:
Oh, and lets not forget that Rick Scott very directly claimed the election was being stolen. He and Stacey Abrams were two years ahead of Trump on applying this tactic.
Broward singlehandedly delayed the final outcome of multiple races and from the look of things had gaping holes in their system that COULD have been exploited. Oh, and it's heavily and reliably a blue county.
Actually, Palm Beach County also delayed it. Also another heavily blue area.
One of Desantis' first actions upon taking office was removing and replacing the Broward and Palm Beach County Election supervisors.
And, 'strangely,' Broward and Palm Beach County had no discrepancies or delays in the 2020 election. Further, Florida went more heavily Republican than usual, including more towards Trump than expected.
Broward County has almost 2 milllion citizens, this is not a small podunk area that we're talking about. Palm Beach has 1.5 million.
And while Desantis is going to walk to an easy victory this time, I can't imagine he wants to allow ANY room for doubt in the sanctity of the election should any races come down to the wire.
So in light of all this, perhaps it makes sense why Desantis might conclude that arresting 20 people is worth it for the possible upside of dissuading electoral shenanigans throughout the state?
I dunno. I think he cares very little that those twenty guys got misled, but cares a lot about ensuring he doesn't have to worry as much about catching electoral fraud after the fact.
So this action is a cheap way to possibly pre-emptively solve an issue that could arise.
Going along on the premise that because voter fraud has not been detected in the past and therefore is not likely to occur in the future seems like an unwise tactic in an environment as adversarial as this one.
It's not like there's not ample historical precedent of organized efforts to fraudulently influence election outcomes. Oh, also recent precedent.
Just because it's 'rare' doesn't mean, when it happens, it won't have significant impact.
Can't imagine why you'd want to chance it in a state where races can be extremely close.
I haven't denied that election fraud by either side sometimes occurs in local elections, I don't think ymes has either. But - how on earth does arresting people who were told by the govt that they could vote help, at all, with that?
Also, the motte is "sometimes politicians tamper with the ballots, bribe election staff, etc". The bailey is "lots of illegal voters are tipping elections". You provided evidence that the former might've happened - desantis's actions only affect the latter.
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It's probably also worth mentioning the 1997 Miami mayoral election, which was found by a judge to be fraudulent enough to throw out the election results. From that article:
I don't have particular evidence that serious fraud has happened in the last decade, but the idea that American elections have always been sacrosanct and nobody could ever question their validity is IMO laughable.
This is the part that really gets me.
No, the United States is not a Banana Republic where incumbents routinely win with 105% of the vote.
No, most elections in Florida are not ultimately decided by 'the margin of fraud.'
But it is not a deniable fact that some elections in the U.S. HAVE been decided by fraud. Florida has had its share of pain in this regard.
So what possible justification is there for ignoring the risk that a fraudulent election could pop up in a key race and throw it all into doubt?
Disagree with the methods used, fine. But deny the underlying problem? Silly.
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I don't disagree that this is the motivation behind the current system. Black voters are much more likely to be disenfranchised because of a felony record, and that demographic heavily votes Democrat. It's true that in total, there are way more white voters who lose their right to vote, but the voting pattern of the ex-con in general is not as lopsided as it is for the black demographic. So there's good reason to suspect that allowing felons to vote would benefit democrats, even slightly, but as you note there were enough close-call elections for that to be a real risk for republicans. Therefore, it made sense for the Republican legislature to do as much as it did to kneecap the implementation of the 2018 felony voting restoration amendment. Given the demographics, it was better for the republican party to keep as many felons disenfranchised as possible than to take a gamble with election results.
As for the rest of your post, I struggle to understand how it's relevant. You post about some election precincts in Florida having problems around keeping track of ballots. Assuming these were legitimate issues, I don't see how you solve that problem by targeting individual voters who are mislead by election officials. If I understand your argument correctly, you believe that prosecuting individual felons who were mislead by the government will have a collateral dissuasion effect on other (potentially higher-up) voter fraud that could happen, right? If so that seems to me to be needlessly attenuated. Why wouldn't these investigations just focus directly on the election officials responsible instead? What kind of messaging is sent by the government taking random nobodies to jail because they were dumb enough to believe something the government told them? I don't get it.
What makes you think they won't, or haven't?
Perhaps they've identified possible suspects but lack sufficient evidence for prosecution?
The Electoral Crimes Unit has only existed for LESS THAN A YEAR. This is the first election they'll be able to investigate directly while it happens.
How about this, if they DO make broad arrests of various public officials based on voter fraud allegations in 2022, would you then agree that this process was justified?
I am actually predicting the opposite, I expect very little fraud to occur in 2022.
But if it does, doesn't this, by your own standards stated herein, show that Desantis was doing the right thing?
Because the problems with how voting restoration works are not going to go away, as they're baked into the system the Republican legislature intentionally chose to implement. The problems that exist with tabulating the records are also not the result of any malicious behavior. The 20 people who were arrested were given faulty information by local election officials. All those local officials did was rely on faulty information that the state gave them. And as far as I can tell, the people working for the state appear to be doing the best they can in tabulating this information. For an ex-felon to get erroneously registered to vote, no one involved in the chain needs to have acted maliciously. Again, the record-keeping problems are inherent with the system DeSantis and the Florida GOP wanted to see implemented, so there's absolutely no surprise that mistakes were made, this was precisely the issue that was litigated! Again, here's the 125-page court opinion that details the problems on Pg 53:
And see page 65 about the workload the state estimated for itself:
So this is a system that can eat up dozens of hours from experienced staff for a single registration and still give the wrong information. There's no connection to actual voter fraud here either, because so much resources are incinerated towards a doomed mission of trying to make sense of a mess that was entirely man-made. There's no reason for me to expect criminal conduct from officials to be at play here, so there's no reason for me to expect any officials to be arrested.
The only honest response from DeSantis here should've been to admit the problem. Any of the system's supporters should be willing to defend it on its merits, and explain why the headache is worthwhile and what important interests are advanced. Instead they're taking out their frustrations on random nobodies and putting them in jail.
So if we see arrests of actual public officials, with actual evidence that said public officials were involved in voter fraud schemes, would that be something you would support?
Would that justify Desantis' actions thus far?
Just saying. This is the first year the Election Crimes Unit will be active during an election.
If they're decent at their jobs, and some amount of fraud occurs, one would expect them to catch it.
Do you think they're going to keep on arresting only Felons who got misled about their voting status?
What is your prediction, here?
Sure, but I don't see any reason to believe anyone related to the felony voting restoration process acted with criminal intent. So I don't see why this should be the focus of a law enforcement agencies. Arresting random nobodies does not advance the goal of addressing voter fraud. DeSantis is using the spectre of voter fraud as a pretext to scare a portion of the electorate he does not like away from voting.
I predict that the voter restoration process for felons will not get appreciably easier. I predict the backlog for processing felony registration will continue to pile up. I predict that out of the million or so felons who are potentially eligible to have their voting rights restored, very few will even bother to apply, and even fewer will get approved. I predict that even the ones that do get approved to vote, even fewer will bother voting because they'll have the threat of prosecution dangling over their head. I believe all these effects are intentional.
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I'd be curious to know how other aspects of the felon demographic intersect with its racial makeup. Although they are disproportionately black, it's also disproportionately male and not college-educated. I suspect it'd still solidly favor Democrats, but less lopsidedly than someone might imagine.
[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.
Vermont and Maine are ~95% white. Their state prison populations are overwhelmingly white. It's not reasonable to infer that the same political preferences follow for the nationwide prison population.
If you read the article, the prison population was 'roughly half' nonwhite. It also claims the POCs were "20 percent identifying as black, 14 percent as Latino, 17 percent as Native American and 19 percent as Asian or other races" (which adds up to 70%?), and that they polled at
20% trump / 30% novote / 50% dem, while whites40% trump / 25% novote / 35% dem.More options
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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.
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I stopped reading here because I had to look this up.
This is not "there are 4000 voters in this county, but 4100 ballots were cast."
This is "212 people were logged as submitting a vote at this voting center, but 213 ballots were in the machines."
So someone goofed up, or someone stuffed a ballot. This is distributed across 293 precincts, with a total of 885 extra ballots.
It sounds like Florida fixed the problems. Which is what is supposed to happen when an auditor shows problems! That is not "strange" at all!
The systems to keep the books aligned have gotten much better. The election I observed in Florida (very boring!) had numbers on each ballot so if one just "showed up" it would be recognized. Was it someone playing games or was it normal human error? Good question. The new system stops both accidentals and purposeful unaccounted ballots, so either way I am happy it is in place.
This is important to remember.
Uh, specifically Desantis fixed the problems. He probably would have done more investigation into what actually happened but he didn't take office until months after the fact.
Which is why the current measures shouldn't be surprising in the least. Because if an election does get compromised sufficiently, it is extremely hard to fix things after the fact.
Which Florida knows full well from the 2000 election.
Desantis has taken a series of seemingly low-cost steps to prevent some potentially VERY high cost issues from arising.
...and that is precisely why I suspect the word has gone out on whatever the current iteration of Journo-list is that DeSantis must be undermined at every opportunity. He is the potential nightmare scenario what many were warning about back in 2017, a "Trump" without Trump's baggage.
Its weird because while the Dems seem to correctly identify that Desantis is their single largest threat in 2024, they also seem to focus on his popularity and Trump-like qualities as the biggest danger.
They seem HORRIBLE at actually modelling him as a threat. Because if they could, they'd realize that what makes him really dangerous to them is the fact that he doesn't just do things for their object-level effects. He wants to win on the meta level, and isn't just focused on pumping his personal image or winning the next election. He is explicitly NOT Trump-like in this specific way, which is to say he won't make the same mistakes as Trump.
The lack of apparent baggage, of course, means their normal tactics are likely to fail, too. Ironically, their biggest hope is that a Desantis- Trump battle fractures the GOP and prevents either from getting the nom.
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My impression is that Desantis first needed to be undermined because he bucked the narrative on Covid policy. No mask mandates, no vax mandates, he didn't close schools and businesses. Maybe it's just b/c I'm in public health, but I first remember hearing about Desantis when the consensus was that Florida MUST be cooking the books on their Covid numbers because his reckless leadership was obviously killing Grandma. And if the data disagree, the data must be lies..
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surely desantis is being 'undermined' because democrats dislike republicans, as usual, similar to how republicans 'undermine' biden, not specifically because of voter fraud?
Any evidence here? Did the past journo-list leaks have any instances of "this guy is cracking down on voter fraud! better get him, we depend on illegal voters!" or even something vaguely similar to that?
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Those are, of course, organized efforts. Individual acts of fraudulent voting don't seem to be a major vector for attacks on election integrity; although they certainly happen, it's always marginal and doesn't have a huge partisan slant. The actual vector, both historically and in the present day, is actions by election officials and professionals.
Imagine a world where instead of this fiasco, DeSantis investigated Palm Beach County officials and came up with a ream of evidence that they manipulated the election. Would that have been more significant than this showboating, both in terms of ensuring election integrity and in terms of securing his political future?
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.
Likewise, this would imply that any officials who might have been considering it are much less likely to try it.
It'd be a bit hard for him to order an investigation into such a problem if it occurred in 2018 seeing as he didn't take office until months after the election.
Firing the Palm Beach County Election Supervisor was a measure he took to reduce the risk of it happening. So was the formation of the election crimes unit. So was the announcement of these arrests.
Not sure why this is hard to grok.
Maybe it works maybe it doesn't, but I don't find the motive behind it 'bewildering' at all.
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.
The Election Crimes Unit has been in existence for LESS THAN A YEAR.
If they're going to take down Public Officials, (which, being honest, I do not predict will happen!) it behooves them to build a very strong case, which means gathering evidence, which takes time. And of course this election would be their first chance to catch it in action.
So taking an easy early 'win' in hopes of deterring other actors makes sense as an opening salvo in this context.
I responded to this here.
I don't see the win here (aside from improving DeSantis' electoral chances), because the problem with faulty record-keeping was the main argument against how Florida decided to implement Amendment 4. None of the issues are predicated on criminal behavior by the officials. The fact that the system made mistakes about voter registration was exactly what was predicted, and it's rich for the government to take out its frustrations on the victims of this system.
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Objection! Low effort consensus building which you have not only failed to demonstrate, but 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. That you, and even a significant portion of the American electorate, insist that claims of voter fraud are completely delusional and dismiss other people's reasons and perspectives does not, in fact, make those other people unreasonable or completely delusional.
Given your past ruts on this topic with similar tendencies of not acknowledging contrary evidence, I would submit you are not objective on this topic, 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, and given some of your past clunkers on understanding other people's viewpoints even when described to you, I would submit you lack the credibility to be a trustworthy evaluator of the motivations of your outgroup, especially on topics in which you have both past bad history and current financial incentives to defend dumping on your outgroup.
Most of the american electorate on both sides wouldn't know a motte from a pot, so that's a weird objection. Most voters vote for a combination of 'my friends/family vote this way' and really strange idiosyncratic reasons, and their positions on any specific issue are much worse. I don't see what that has to do with ymeskhout's precise and very long arguments
Wouldn't he just not post on what a journo could call a "alt-right dogwhistle reactionary forum" in that case?
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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.
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.
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.
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