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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6347 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026

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Trump appears to be embracing his role as the late Republic's Gracchus.

I missed this announcement the first time around buried as it was under all the talk about Iran but it looks like the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act may be moving to a vote and Trump has "tweeted" that he will refuse to sign other bills until it pases. The SAVE act is a measure that would require individuals to furnish proof of citizen when registering to vote, and significantly curtail the circumstances under which absentee and mail-in voting are allowed. Strictly speaking these rules would only be binding for federal elections but as the majority of precincts bundle their, federal, state, and municipal ballots together for cost reasons it's going to effect all elections except those in states that spend the extra time and resources to run federal and local in parallel rather than together. Naturally the GOP has framed this in terms of election integrity, while the Democrats frame it as an attempt to disenfranchise the under privileged, and (a bit ironically) usurp state authority.

This is happening in context of a recent FBI report suggesting that Fulton County Georgia had tabulated approximately 20,000 more absentee votes than they had recorded sending out. This is the same Fulton County that was the subject of a "conspiracy theory" alleging that after a broken water main had supposedly forced counting to be suspended for the night only for the poll workers to resume counting after the candidates' representatives had left. It's probably just a coincidence but it feels noteworthy that Biden won the State of Georgia by a little under 12k, IE just over half the number of allegedly dubious ballots.

For those who didn't recognize the historical allusion in the opening line, in latter part of the second century BCE the Roman republic was wracked with civil and economic unrest prompted in part by the importation of cheap foreign (slave) labor undercutting local wages and the ability of smaller family-owned farms to compete with large commercially owned estates. Tiberius Gracchus was a scion of wealth and privilege, the grandson of Scipio Africanus, he ran for the position of Tribune of the Plebes on a platform of Land Reform. The Senate used every procedural trick in the book the could to thwart him only for Gracchus to retaliate by famously(infamously?) using his veto powers to gridlock the senate until they acquiesced.

"Having to show ID/proof of citizenship to vote" is one of those things that even when I was quite left-wing I didn't think was at all unreasonable.

I know, I know, my German statism is showing, but what ever was the counterargument in the first place?

Here there are campaigns to let resident foreigners vote, but even then they need to provide documentation.

The steelman, I guess, is that American elections are sufficiently Molochian that if the possibility (that you can stop someone from voting for your enemy party by making them fail an ID requirement) is put out there, someone will find a way to exploit it against people who constitutionally should be allowed to vote. The toolkit exists: you can charge money for valid forms of ID, or require a postal address, or make the process involve forms that are beyond the ability of the illiterate and low-executive-function to fill in and submit. If America wants to limit the franchise to those with $100 to spare, fixed housing, the literate and organised, then perhaps it may do so, but this seems like a change that should be performed explicitly through a constitutional amendment, rather than through the backdoor by people who will rub their hands and do the this-isn't-happening-and-it's-good-that-it-is denial dance.

You can moreover argue that even if we weigh disenfranchised Americans against wrongly enfranchised non-Americans who slip in under an ID-less voting procedure, the former should individually be given far greater weight as wrongs to avoid, by reasoning somewhat mirroring the "better n guilty men to go free than 1 innocent man to be punished" precept: one inappropriately counted vote only wrongs Americans by 1/(10s of millions) of an election outcome, but one American denied the franchise is one American wronged greatly by being excluded from the great civic ritual that tells them they are an equal member of their country (+1/(10s of millions) of an election outcome damage to everyone). This is a big deal under the Omelas-style non-additive ethics many subscribe to.

I also was under the impression (and very much [citation needed]) that historically, Anglo opposition to mandatory ID actually had a nontrivial undercurrent of Christian "this pattern-matches to the Mark of the Beast" thinking.

I yeschad to your first paragraph, but with regard to the last point - that may be a current among weird Kansas evangelicals, but the typical Anglo-civil-libertarian opposition to mandatory ID is more along the lines of "it's not a question of what the government pinky promises to do with it now, but what it can do with it in the future - plus, we can expect it to end up disenfranchising innocent people in a much worse way than something like slapping voter ID onto the existing system." This is very much a live political issue in the UK, where several governments have tried to introduce national ID and failed (voting in the UK also requires a government-issued photo ID, or a certificate from your local voting authority including a photo and the UK-equivalent of an SSN).

At least the version I heard in school:

In the American past, there was a group of people (Freed descendants of African slaves) who had a legal right to vote but the people running the voting booths did not want them voting. They created lots of ways to prevent this group of people from voting:

  • Some created tests with a mix of hard and easy questions, and required someone had to answer five random questions correctly. Naturally the people running the voting booth would make sure the easy questions were given to people they liked, and the hard questions to people they didn't like.

  • Others skipped the test and made a "Poll tax" which was set in a way that most African Americans could not pay.

This was frowned upon by the rest of America and some severe and broad laws were passed to make it impossible to require someone to pay money or to take a test in order to vote.

Democrats complain that most Government Forms of ID require paying a small amount of money to discourage people from losing theirs and to help offset the costs of printing the card and maintaining the ID system. Voter ID is then associated with a Poll Tax, which we all learned in school is Racist and Bad.

We should bring back the poll tax. Those are some of the oldest genealogical records of my family. It's also downright republican.

Of course, it must be noted that black voter turnout has not declined after voter ID requirements became stricter.

Black people do in fact usually have IDs. The people most likely to be loose in the world without one are professional white women who think their phone is a scifi universal gadget.

The people most likely to be loose in the world without one are professional white women who think their phone is a scifi universal gadget.

They would have IDs, even if they don’t always carry them. I would think the only people who really don’t have a government ID today are going to be dysfunctional hobos/junkies, and extremely “off the grid” types. But yeah, the idea that there’s this massive number of black people (even more so, black people who vote) who don’t have IDs is a nonsensical caricature. Something something DR3.

As an aside, I made friends with a few international students in college. When I voted in an election they asked what it was like, and were somewhere between shocked and baffled when I said that you basically just walk in and say your name (and registered address) to a volunteer clerk. “You really don’t show them… anything??” We really are deeply out of step with the rest of the democratic world on this one.

I would prefer, idealistically, that if we require an ID to vote we should also make getting it free, but one way or another it’s long past time for us to do so. The alarm bells of voter confidence in elections being a live issue have been blaring since at least 2000 and it’s only getting worse.

They would have IDs, even if they don’t always carry them. I would think the only people who really don’t have a government ID today are going to be dysfunctional hobos/junkies, and extremely “off the grid” types

One of my more favorite stories from being a new lawyer is how many female states attorneys (who always start in misdemeanors and traffic) admitted they had expired DLs or out of state DLs (despite living in and working in the state, which is against the law). Its like, your job is to prosecute yourself. Get with it!

professional white women who think their phone is a scifi universal gadget

Electronic licenses are getting more common! My state DMV was supposed to offer them last summer but it's been crickets since.

most Government Forms of ID require paying a small amount of money to discourage people from losing theirs and to help offset the costs of printing the card and maintaining the ID system

IIRC states with existing voter ID requirements have been required to provide no-cost IDs. Those free IDs may say "not valid except for elections", though.

To steelman, there's genuine problems with paperwork and compliance overhead, especially in more marginal cases. The United States doesn't really keep centralized databases for a surprising amount of important details. If you need a replacement birth certificate, for example, at best you have to dial into your birth state (and more often birth county's) offices. In rare cases, they just don't have it; either it wasn't filed correctly, or was filed and lost. It's usually not absolutely insurmountable - though it might escalate to a point where you have to get an administrative or court finding that you were born - but it can range from obnoxious to expensive. That's doubly true for people already on the margins: if you're couch-surfing it's a lot easier to lose an envelope of vital records, and a lot harder to give a mailing address for a certified form that can take a month to get there.

Ostensibly, you need these records to do a lot of other stuff: most employers have to get a photo ID and social security card, which generally rounds to the same set of problems. If you're outside of the normal business world, though, there's a lot of people that don't.

The primary argument by opponents to such a policy is that everyone who has the legal right to vote ought to have the option to have their vote counted, and this policy would place a burden on those who have the right but lack a government-issued ID for whatever reason. There are many other arguments surrounding this, but this is the core point that all their arguments come down to.

Yes, but if you can't prove you have the right to vote, then there's no reason to believe you have that right, and therefore there is no burden, since someone who is ineligible to vote is not being burdened in any way.

And if you can't prove that you have the right to vote, why should anyone believe you?

This is just weak apologia for lax voting, which favors the party importing millions of foreigners and putting them on welfare while signing them up to vote automatically when they give out IDs and driver's licenses.

the steelman would be something along the lines of "they CAN prove it (because they are a natural born citizen) but not necessarily within the required timeframe due to scheduling issues or other paperwork hangups"

I think the adoption rate of real ID is a decent stand in for approximating how many people have their birth certificate, original SSN card, and a tax return available at the ready.

And if you can't prove that you have the right to vote, why should anyone believe you?

when only 20% of the population in some states meets the bar for the new voting regulations, i think the onus falls back on the side that wants to disenfranchise over half of the census answering people.

I think the adoption rate of real ID is a decent stand in for approximating how many people have their birth certificate, original SSN card, and a tax return available at the ready.

Nah. Its people who have those things + 5 hours to waste at the DMV.

As of last week, New Jersey had the lowest compliance rate in the nation — just 17% of its state-issued IDs are Real IDs.

I assure you that Newark Airport is neither empty, devoid of New Jersey residents, nor full of people paying the TSA no-real-ID fee. This is just because New Jersey's process for getting a Real ID sucks so much and New Jersey residents who travel by air likely have a Federal Real ID (a passport, a Global Entry card or a passport card works).

i think the onus falls back on the side that wants to disenfranchise over half of the census answering people.

You're deliberately conflating "census answering people" with "eligible voters" or even "citizens" when you're on the side that fought and won to keep that question off the last census.

What percentage of census answering people deserve to be disenfranchised? It's sure more than zero.

The big obstacle with Real ID is getting an appointment in the first place. Every time I hear about it, the waitlist is months long.

My state offers walk-ins, did it first thing at opening a few months ago. Was waiting for six hours.

Wow, that’s… insane. I thought my red state ran the DMV poorly but here you can walk in to an office and get a temporary ID document same-day, and a card in the mail within a month. You might have to wait an hour for everything, but you’ll get it done. Appointments for the DMV aren’t even a concept, lol.

And the only difference between a standard state ID and a real ID is you need ONE MORE piece of mail sent to your address. When I realized that was the difference I laughed at how much of a political fight it was for and against it.

If that’s the reality for a lot of the country, then no wonder voter id is controversial. Y’all need to fix the DMV before anyone talks about voter ID.

Y’all need to fix the DMV before anyone talks about voter ID.

I believe this is known as the Moldbug Speedrun.

Blue state blues. On the plus side, I've been renewing my old-style license online and having it mailed to me since the Obama administration.

Wait till you see North Carolina, where you can't even get on a wait-list or an appointment to begin with in most areas. It's been like this since at least late 2024/early 2025, I had to check the site early morning every day just to get an appointment four months out in an awful early morning time slot.

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