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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.

As someone who believes democratic elections are indeed fixed structurally, watching Republicans flail around trying to catch literal voter fraud is very frustrating. In the adjacent thread on the New Right the point was made that one has to put up with watching the Stupid Version of your ideology be the one that actually gets to see the light of day, and I certainly get that sense here.

Elections in Texas are rigged because:

  • The blue tribe has been importing a new electorate hand over fist for decades

  • The media memeplex blares out left-propaganda 24/7 in an effort to manufacture consent

  • Lawmakers just change the rules whenever they feel their hegemony slipping (e.g. Covid mail voting), "We had a vote to rewrite the ballot rules at 3 in the morning the day before the election with no public consultation, that means it's legit :^)"

  • It doesn't matter whether the Reps or Dems win anyway because the politicians of both parties come from the same class stratum and are pursuing UniParty agreed goals anyway

  • And even if they weren't, the example of Trump proves that even if an outsider were to win, they'd just get stymied by the Deep State

  • It's all fake and gay kayfabe, stop buying into the horse and pony show

...but they are probably NOT rigged due to ballot stuffing. I feel like a guy who muttered in frustration "Will no-one rid me of this turbulent priest?" and then I have to watch Reginald FitzUrse literally kill Thomas á Beckett. It was FIGURATIVE you guys.

I agree with this, and to amplify it: I think Republicans would have done better to write off the Covid elections as "weird" than as "fake." The equivalent of a team losing a game when half their starters are injured, you don't argue that the other team didn't win, but should it really count as a sign of the quality of the two teams?

A united front of Republicans arguing that the combination of the weirdness of the election and the narrowness of the Dem majority meant that it was inappropriate for Democrats to attempt major legislative actions or fundamentally change the country would have been highly appealing. It would have given a hook to a lot of people who desperately don't want Democrat policies in place, but do want the country to actually operate and run fundamentally well. It would have put Democrats in the position of obstructionists trying to keep the government from running properly.

Instead we get periodic infighting between the Election Truthers and the Responsible Adult caucus. We're losing lots of good veteran pols from statehouses to the Senate because they don't want to be pressured to be part of the R clownshow.

I agree with this, and to amplify it: I think Republicans would have done better to write off the Covid elections as "weird" than as "fake." The equivalent of a team losing a game when half their starters are injured, you don't argue that the other team didn't win, but should it really count as a sign of the quality of the two teams?

Meanwhile, I thought a good faith, conciliatory effort from Democrats would potentially look something like saying, "well, that was certainly a weird election, we did what we could to keep it safe even when it required some last-minute changes, but we promise to return to normal next time". Instead, I see histrionics about voter suppression any time someone wants to take us back to the dark days of 2016 when we didn't have ballot drop boxes in public parks and an insistence that 2020 was the "most secure election ever".

Sadly, there doesn't seem to be any Responsible Adult caucus for this one that wants to admit that it was actually weird that a quarter million people in Wisconsin decided they were "indefinitely confined". I really, sincerely don't think there was any mass fraud, just a general freakout over Covid, but I don't get why it's impossible for people to just admit that this was pretty weird and probably a bad idea to reify.

Meanwhile, I thought a good faith, conciliatory effort from Democrats would

You are running off of mistake theory.

Not really though, I'm just hypothesis checking. If the last minute Covid changes in elections had been good faith, I would have expected to see something like I described above. I didn't think the Covid changes were good faith, but if they were, I would have expected a different post-election tone than what we got.