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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31253 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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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.

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."

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:

An example is a flat $225 assessment in every felony case, $200 of which is used to fund the clerk’s office and $25 of which is remitted to the Florida Department of Revenue for deposit in the state’s general revenue fund. Another example is a flat $3 assessment in every case that is remitted to the Department of Revenue for further distribution in specified percentages for, among other things, a domestic-violence program and a law-enforcement training fund.

And here's one guy's efforts to pay all his fines:

Mr. Wrench was convicted of felonies under two case numbers on December 15, 2008. The State introduced copies of the judgments, but it is unclear whether the copies are complete. The criminal judgments, or at least the portion in the record, do not show any financial obligations. But on February 2, 2009, a civil judgment was entered under the first case number for $1,874 in “financial obligations”—no further description was provided—that, according to the civil judgment, had been ordered as part of the sentence. Similarly, on March 15, 2011, more than two years later, a civil judgment was entered under the second case number for $601 in unspecified “financial obligations” that, again according to the civil judgment, had been ordered as part of the sentence. It is unclear what amount, if any, the State asserts Mr. Wrench must pay on these convictions to be eligible to vote.

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.

It would not help this problem but voters often move just on a pathos of "oh yeah we should clean things up."

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