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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.

You forgot the bits about gerrymandering!

"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 :^)"

When did this happen? A casual google has failed me.

If I had been able to remember the specifics I'd have linked them, but (to my shame) I'm not a high enough level Motte-ian who curates a linkbank of every gotcha example of malfeasance I've ever seen (this sounds sarcastic, but it's not, I wish I had the diligence to do that).

The best I can tell you is that I vaguely remember second-hand discussion of the vote-by-mail rules getting relaxed in some purple state's senates at the last second and in questionably quorate circumstances, ostensibly due to Covid, read-between-the-lines-ibly because they knew mail voting helps Dems. For some this was seen as a smoking gun that Dems were planning massive mail fraud; I was of the more prosaic mind that they were trying to lower the effort bar so as to improve turnout rather than literally fake turnout. One is technically illegal cheating, the other is technically legal cheating, but in my mind it's the cheating makes it wrong, not which side of BureaucratSpeak Administrative State Law #16493B Subsection 17F you're on.

I appreciate your honesty about not having an example for Texas. I’m pretty sure the Northeast had some of the last minute changes, but can’t remember for sure.

Re: cheating, I don’t see how improving turnout can be considered cheating at all. In my mind the ideal election has 100% (real) turnout, and encouraging that is generally good. Allocating state resources holds some risk of impropriety, but just lowering the barrier to entry should be fine.

If that benefits one party...well, I’ll cite the Litany of Tarski.

I appreciate your honesty about not having an example for Texas. I’m pretty sure the Northeast had some of the last minute changes, but can’t remember for sure.

Harris county(the same one discussed here) did institute drive thru voting at close to the last minute in 2020 and may or may not have been totally within the confines of what state law allows to do so. They certainly wouldn't be to do so again. And the state did actually try to throw out a batch of Harris county ballots over the issue, which the county sued over, and won.