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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31238 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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I'm assuming the discussion over red state efforts to crack down on voter fraud are sufficiently far downthread to justify another top level comment:

https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/2022/10/19/435531/texas-agencies-plan-to-monitor-harris-county-elections-raises-concerns-among-observers/

TLDR is that Texas government agencies are sending their own teams of pollwatchers, inspectors, and legal advisors to Harris county(Houston metro area) to monitor the conduct of the election. This is only the latest round in an ongoing saga of escalating tensions between the Harris county and state governments, the previous episode of which- a controversy over property taxes and policing- is fascinating in its own right.

The Texas Secretary of State's Office, in a letter submitted days before the start of early voting for the 2022 midterm election, has informed Harris County it will send a team of inspectors and election security trainers to observe and help administer the Nov. 8 election in the state's largest metropolitan area.

Representatives from the office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is on the ballot and seeking reelection, also will be present in Harris County to "immediately respond to any legal issues" raised by the inspectors, poll watchers and others, according to the Tuesday evening letter sent to Harris County Elections Administrator Clifford Tatum and obtained by Houston Public Media.

The letter cites preliminary findings of the secretary of state's ongoing audit of the 2020 election in Harris County, claiming there are unexplained irregularities in vote tabulation and chain-of-custody procedures, as the basis for the state's involvement in this year's election.

My priors, like with other red state election security measures, is that it will spend some amount of money to accomplish precisely nothing, but it will give Beto O'Rourke and Rochelle Garza ammunition to claim voter suppression/vote rigging if they underperform in Harris county(which is likely; Harris county is probably the lightest shade of blue of Texas's blue counties and also has an unpopular dem county judge running for reelection). It should go without saying that the commission being sent to oversee things is... not exactly non-partisan, the line between the Texas GOP and Texas governor being much thinner in the case of the secretary of state(a political appointment in a one party state) and Ken Paxton's office, but the Texas government has historically not taken large risks they weren't 100% sure they could get away with and even if Abbott and Paxton were able to flip votes, they almost certainly wouldn't be able to do so without it being widely known, and in any case they both have a single digit chance of losing which gives them almost no upside to pulling stunts like that.

It should go without saying that the commission being sent to oversee things is... not exactly non-partisan

It's wrong to expect them to be. Elections are naturally adversarial. All the major candidates should be able to send observers for key moments.

Actually one of the big problems with the American election system is that counties are allowed to manage their own elections, but they have a strong incentive to stuff the ballot boxes. When dealing with elections where the total votes in the state are what matter, the political power of the county is directly proportional to the number of votes cast.

If county overwhelmingly supports one candidate then they have exactly zero incentive to stop ballot box stuffing.

Observers from outside the county who support the other candidate are the only solution.

This is the exact opposite case, though. Harris county has been narrow-margin blue, but only for the last couple elections. It’s probably one of the better candidates for self-policing under that theory. If Harris is at risk, it’s not because they overwhelmingly support one candidate.

You will also notice that Abbott and Paxton have little interest in hovering over small counties which “overwhelmingly support one candidate.” The Democrats aren’t complaining of ballot stuffing, either, even for 90% red counties in the panhandle.

hovering over small counties which “overwhelmingly support one candidate.”

Cheating in a solidly Red/Blue county makes foul play more obvious. In a purple one, ballot-stuffing side winning can be more easily explained away and is thus less likely to be investigated.

And yet so many people insisted the opposite in 2020. Must be nice having such a flexible set of "facts."

The idea cheating doesn't happen in solid Red/Blue areas is hilarious -- have people never once heard of Chicago?

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