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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31292 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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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.

I'd propose that Walker is "Making His Record" for a dispute about voter-id that will happen sometime in the next year or two.

The basic anti-voter-id argument starts with two claims:

  1. There's no proof that anyone votes illegally

  2. Requiring ID will stop some eligible voters from voting; perhaps the number is small but every vote is sacred.

If Walker does nothing, his opponents can run with those two claims and he has to make some abstract argument about how secure elections are essential to get the losing side to accept their loss as legitimate. And that argument is going to suck for him.

If I were in Walker's position (and allowed to influence prosecutions) I'd tell the prosecutors to quietly offer some amazingly generous plea-deals. Let the felons go in front of a judge, admit that they voted illegally and pay token fine. Then the prosecutor can give a press conference where she blames election officials for giving her a hard-to-win case via their bad information.

Once that happens, Walker can claim that he uncovered and prosecuted dozens of cases of election fraud and that this proves the need for more robust and rapidly-updated systems for verifying voters. Now, his opponent's argument morphs to:

  1. Dozens isn't very many people; there's no proof that illegal votes shifted an election and anyway half of the people accused of voting illegally plead down to some other offense.

  2. Requiring ID will stop some eligible voters from voting; perhaps the number is small but every vote is sacred.

The political advantage is that position #1 ("We don't care very much about tens of votes" / "This only matters if if shifts an election") now exists in tension with position #2 ("Every vote matters").

...Walker?

Let the felons go in front of a judge, admit that they voted illegally

It might be helpful to learn about why the voter restoration system in Florida is a mess right now, because it's nonsensical to claim voter ID is somehow a solution. Here's the 125-page court opinion that details the problems on Pg 53:

The case of one named plaintiff, Clifford Tyson, is illustrative. An extraordinarily competent and diligent financial manager in the office of the Hillsborough County Clerk of Court, with the assistance of several long-serving assistants, bulldogged Mr. Tyson’s case for perhaps 12 to 15 hours. The group had combined experience of over 100 years. They came up with what they believed to be the amount owed. But even with all that work, they were unable to explain discrepancies in the records.

And see page 65 about the workload the state estimated for itself:

Even without screening for unpaid LFOs, all the Divison’s caseworkers combined can process an average of just 57 registrations per day. The LFO work, standing alone, is likely to take at least as long as—probably much longer than—the review for murder and sexual offenses and for custody or supervision status. Even at 57 registrations per day, screening the 85,000 pending registrations will take 1,491 days. At 261 workdays per year, this is a little over 5 years and 8 months. The projected completion date, even if the Division starts turning out work today, and even if screening for LFOs doesn’t take longer than screening for murders, sexual offenses, custody, and supervision, is early in 2026. With a flood of additional registrations expected in this presidential election year, the anticipated completion date might well be pushed into the 2030s.

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