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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?
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.
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.
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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