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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31282 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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There are two implicit assumptions buried in your analysis, though:

  1. Voter fraud disproportionately favors DeSantis's opponents, and

  2. 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.

Voter fraud disproportionately favors DeSantis's opponents

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?

The fraud is of such a scope to have an effect on an election

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.

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 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.

it speaks volumes that DeSantis is making this point by arresting people whom he knows are unlikely to be convicted.

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?

Yes, in the following scenario: there have been no prosecutions of either shoplifting or truck hijacking for a while. The prosecution of several cases of shoplifting regardless of the merits of the individual shoplifting cases may have a deterrent effect on truck hijacking, because it signals that prosecutions of truck hijackings may follow.

How big a deterrent effect? Very uncertain; deterrent effects are hard to measure in any case. But the deterrence mechanism is present, and operates on the margins in any case.

The prosecution of several cases of shoplifting regardless of the merits of the individual shoplifting cases may have a deterrent effect on truck hijacking, because it signals that prosecutions of truck hijackings may follow.

Or it signals that prosecutors are too lazy to pursue truck hijackings, so they're going after shopliftings just to make it look like they're trying. If your goal is deterring truck hijackings, you could just prosecute truck hijackings instead of pursuing something orthogonal in the hopes that maybe it sends a signal to all the truck hijackers out there.

There are many possible readings of the hypothetical, which probably all occur across the population in question, in varying proportions. Deterrence signaling is inherently lossy; it works at the margins. If 5% of the target audience believes the framing I suggested, then deterrence theorists say, "Yay, we got 5% that we wouldn't have had otherwise" not "Damn, we didn't get 100%." Critiquing a deterrence strategy by saying it didn't send a signal to "all" the truck hijackers is an attack that doesn't land--that's not how deterrence ever works.

In this case, I think your reading is less likely to be apt, because the observed prosecutor behavior is in the wrong direction--the status quo was zero prosecutions of either shoplifting or truck hijacking. If you're going to support a "prosecutors are lazy" rationale, you need to fill in what's motivating any new prosecutions at all. If they weren't doing anything in the first place, who is providing the incentive to "make it look like they're trying"? Laziness by itself explains the status quo, but predicts that it will continue.

If they weren't doing anything in the first place, who is providing the incentive to "make it look like they're trying"? Laziness by itself explains the status quo, but predicts that it will continue.

"Hey these complaints are not going away soon and we have an election for a new DA coming up, can you just make it look like we solved the problem? Thx"

Either way, I don't really see the utility of meticulously detailing this hypothetical. The obvious question of "why not prosecute truck hijackings?" remains, and dodging the question with "well maybe prosecuting shopliftings might end up deterring truck hijackings" is not convincing.

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