This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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?
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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."
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
At least some of them had it in writing:
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link