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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).
Wait wait wait.
How is this “sleight of hand”? It’s the crux of the argument. Opponents really believe that the laws will hurt many more qualified voters than fraudulent ones. If true, maybe the stated object isn’t the “real” object.
I don’t personally think Trump is doing this out of racism. I think he’d gloat about disenfranchising people of any race or creed if they criticized him. But I can see why someone who already thought he was racist would conclude it was the real object.
This is exactly how the signature Jim Crow policies worked. Setting voting requirements that were easier for your guys and harder for their guys. People are citing THE RACISMS because THE RACISMS are kind of the most obvious comparison.
They should be able to make the argument about the object of voter ID, then, without having to question the motives of it's proponents.
This is also how literally the entire rest of the world works: if it's too hard for you to get an ID, maybe voting just isn't for you. Acting like race enters into the equation at all is basically agreeing that the racists are right.
As an aside, I'd note that to some people on the forum, the motive is a perfectly reasonable reason to dismiss. See "arguments as soldiers" and "atheist quotes the bible to Christian" discussions.
But I don't think that's the central point anyway. We do regularly argue the object of voter ID.
We do in fact look for voter fraud and that's how we've find out that a small number of people have tried to commit it and gotten caught.
The amount we've found is so infinitesimal that the upside to implementing voter ID is nil, not even counting whether voter ID would have changed anything. Even if "the real number may be higher," the reason people don't care is that unless you had post-hoc knowledge of swing districts, the real number would have to be tens or hundreds of thousands of times higher than estimated (and towards the same candidate) to actually change the outcome of any major election.
That implementing it to make people "feel" that the election is more secure is pointless, because the real root is usually sour grapes that their candidate didn't win. They'll just move the goalposts to claiming mail-in ballot fraud or such. Security theater is stupid.
That voter fraud is already a low salience crime, because there's no personal benefit and you'd have to do it at a massive scale to accomplish anything. Even if you think "no one checks," don't you think that if you try to cast 100+ fake votes that the odds of getting caught would go way up just because someone recognizes you or for some other trivial reason?
That the motive of its proponents does matter at an object level if they say they are going to do A and turn around and do B. Which I argue they have done and will likely do again.
Mechanically, how would you even know that, if you don't bother verifying thr voter's identity?
Why does literally every other country do it, then?
Politics is notorious for being motivated by collective belonging. Limiting the analysis to direct personal benefit seems like intentionally blinding yourself.
A combination of factors:
In order to impersonate someone else, you'd need a bit of their information (which you could get, but would take time and this is a low salience crime). You'd need to spend time picking out people who don't vote and you can impersonate.
Most states do check for some proof of who you are. The real trick the Republicans pull is suggesting that the fraudsters are also out here printing fake student IDs or something, so we can't have that. Gee, I wonder who someone who uses a student ID to vote might vote for. Or that the fraudster might get a hold of someone's expired photo ID.
That Republicans have been beating this drum for decades now, and can't even come out with verifiable stories of people showing up to vote and being told they already voted.
Mechanically, how do these fraudsters operate? Do they vote, go to their car and pick up a hat and fake student ID, and go right back in? Wouldn't you think if this were happening at scale a pollster would notice seeing the same guy but with a different hat? Or do they drive around to different polling sites?
I once did some napkin math and suggested that on election day, if you were to use different polling stations to hide your crime, you could probably cast maybe 40 votes on election day. When most elections are decided by thousands of votes, you accomplished jack shit. Whoop-de-do. If there's only one or two people per election willing to even attempt this, it is literally better to let them get away with it and not turn away the greater number of people who might be turned away by Republican attempts to limit voting.
My strongest argument here is number 2. This fight is really over being able to decide which forms of ID are acceptable to vote rather than some ID vs no ID.
Lots of other first world countries limit free speech or gun ownership too. I always get a chuckle about selective calls to copy other countries.
You're overstating a nugget of truth. I didn't say there was 0 reason. There's just a tiny reason, a risk of jail, a low positive impact of a single vote, and a lot of time needed to pull it off.
No, the question was "Mechanically, how would you even know that, if you don't bother verifying the voter's identity?" You even quoted it!
From what you said it looks like you're assuming there's little fraud because it requires some prep, brings little individual gains, and carries some risk of punishment, but once it's actually done I see nothing about how you would prove it happened after the fact.
The problem with portraying this as an evil Republican plot to exclude students from voting, is that students can just go an get the type of ID that enables them to vote. You know, just like they do in every other country.
Same, I find it very humorous that American progressive portray Europe as some far-left utopia that every right-thinking person should emulate, that they routinely claim Democrats would be see as right-of-center there, but they moment you bring up basic election integrity they spontaneously erupt into a cascade of fireworks, hamburgers, and bald eagles.
Anyway, you have again not answered my question. Does this mean you think that the same European governments who are routinely repressing right-wing speech, are somehow requiring voter-ID in order to repress left-wing student voters?
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