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Notes -
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.
The resistance to Voter ID on the left is one of the best, maybe the best, example of how signaling became weaponized and how to build a Motte-And-Bailey into the very DNA of a party / movement.
No reasonable person (sorry mods, but let me finish) could really have a strong stance against valid and secure forms of identification as a requirement for voting. Maybe there's some sort of argument along the lines of "secure IDs are too expensive and too difficult to get for people who, while citizens and non-felons, don't have their shit together." But it's a stretch.
Instead, the left does nice little sleight of hand card trick. It's not about the object of voter ID, it's about the real goal of those pesky rightists; disenfranchising qualified voters. This is why references to poll taxes and other Jim Crow era voting shenanigans are ubiquitous in the discourse. It's a way to hijack the object of discussion itself and redirect it into "THE RACISMS" pile.
A fun thing to do - something I've been doing more of of late - is to find your local leftist cat lady (who you've befriended, right?) and pretend to be retarded. Bring up the issue the way a retard would - "Hey, so what's like the deal with voter ids and whatever? I was just hearing about that on reddit." The immediate response is some version of "THE RACISMS" because that neurological pathway has been so well developed - anything to do with identification / documentation (oh, that's a fun word, isn't it) / registration is all "THE RACISMS" (unless we're talking about gun ownership).
To extract myself from any "boo outgroup" reporting, I'll finish by saying that this is a universal comms strategy used by all sorts of organizations, not just the political. People aren't good at holding multiple things in our heads at once and certainly not if there is complexity to them. We respond better to clean and clear associations. This is the whole psychology behind literal slogans. McDonald's' "I'm loving it" is literally the equivalent of zapping "MCDONALDS GOOD - ME LIKE MCDONALDS" to your brain. Politicians know that emotionally resonant issues are the power issues, so they want to re-route even minor ones to them whenever possible.
But the cost, aside from the real cost downstream (voting fraud), is that political communications are some of the most low signal, high noise forms of discourse. Sorting happens mostly at the tribal level (which is a close to Gospel as we have here on The Motte), and any sort of second and third order effect of a specific policy is never, ever really given consideration (again, with the exception of us internet mole people).
Sure there is. If you want to make a process more burdensome, then there should be a benefit to outweigh the burden. The proclaimed benefit is reducing fraud. If in reality it does not reduce fraud - because the amount of fraud committed that it could stop is effectively zero - then it's just a burden. If it stops 1 fraudulent vote and 10 citizens, it's still pointless. The right pivots the conversation that the burden is very tiny and easy to circumvent, but it doesn't change that their preferred policy didn't actually do anything.
Would you buy and carry around with you a tiger repelling charm, even if said charm did repel tigers?
It's "not about the object of voter ID" because the object of voter ID is stopping something from happening that isn't happening. If you kept trying to further criminalize cannibalism I'd look at you like you were stupid or playing some game with me.
You're doing that thing where you take a reasonable argument but try to discredit it by making it about the emotional salience of the word racism. Yes, disenfranchising qualified voters is bad and I'm tired of pretending it's not. It's even bad if we ignored any discussion of race.
"The real goal" is a perfectly valid talking point when dealing with someone who categorically does things different from what they say they will. In 2013, a day after provisions of the Voting Rights Act got gutted by the Supreme Court, Republicans got to work making an election security law. Note that when making this law, they had already completed a survey of how people register and vote, broken down by race. They changed:
ID requirements - they already required some forms of ID, but accepted even expired photo IDs. They restricted the kind of IDs that would work, but kept some alternate IDs that whites use. Because apparently the vote fraudsters could also somehow get a hold of a bunch of expired IDs?
Same day registration - Notably not photo ID, which is the part always focused on. Sounds more like a way to stop people voting than increasing security. "The district court found that legislators similarly requested data as to the racial makeup of same-day registrants."
Out of precinct voting - Notably not photo ID, and not discussed. "Legislators additionally requested a racial breakdown of provisional voting, including out-of-precinct voting." If you vote provisionally, they check whether you've already voted before counting it.
Preregistration permitted 16- and 17-year-olds, when obtaining driver’s licenses or attending mandatory high school registration drives, to identify themselves and indicate their intent to vote. - You guessed it, done without ever suggesting we needed to do this. What does this have to do with security?
Reduction in early voting - also not photo ID, and also known that it was used primarily by black people.
Mail-in voting - This is commonly cited as a weak point in election security. But white people use this more than black people, so this wasn't touched at all!
Just such a strange response. I make an admittedly slightly uncharitable "boo outgroup" argument that literally gets a nasty gram comment from the mods (appropriate, however).
And then you swoop in and become a living breathing caricature of my outgroup.
I don't really know what to do here except sincerely thank you for your contribution.
Perhaps recalibrate what counts as a caricature?
Your post above was not actually arguing any point. It was just saying "Why would anyone oppose common sense
gun controlvoter ID?" And follow a similar tactic where one simply sidesteps any discussion about the fact that mass shooters are incredibly rare to begin with and a smaller mag size doesn't really stop them by making the conversation about the supposed unreasonableness of opposing it. The correct response to this tactic is to ask, "You tell me - why then are you so insistent on this if it doesn't actually do anything?"I don't actually care about 'THE RACISMS" except for the fact that if black people reliably voted Republican then the GOP would be all over expanding the vote.
You play this game of "Dems only oppose it because it's a tribal signifier." I'm saying that yes, "disenfranchising qualified voters" fucking is the real goal of those pesky rightists. And we know this because we've literally seen them do it, in ways that cannot be written off as election security, in recent memory.
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