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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 here, but the 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?
My point 4 is that a prosecutor's job isn't just to point to some circumstantial evidence of why a suspect might have done it, they need to be able to describe a reasonable chain of events of how the suspect did it. I'm asking you, how does our hypothetical fraudster perform the fraud? Does he go in as himself and vote as himself, then come in later posing as someone else and vote again? Might someone recognize him? Sure, in any individual case the odds might be low, but if the scale of fraud is large a 1% chance each time is likely to happen.
I'd add "requires being able to make fake forms of ID in many states."
The "But once it's actually done" part is assuming the conclusion, in a "but how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?" kind of way. [Many states have rules about signing an affidavit], and they can compare signatures after the fact. And you keep not addressing the part where there aren't any complaints about people being told they've already voted. Sure, you can make a safe bet about who is likely to vote and who isn't, but safe bets still sometimes lose. Consider how dumb Americans can be, and consider that criminals are usually dumber. People manage to find a way to fuck up. And Republicans want to shine a spotlight on voter fraud so they'd tell everyone if they found it.
A hurdle doesn't have to be insurmountable to be a hurdle. Why do you think gyms do things like letting you sign up easily but have to jump through hoops to cancel? Why do you think companies do mail-in rebates instead of sales? Because that extra hassle sometimes works.
I don't study the governments of other countries, but from what I've heard they have different laws on how people get IDs. But I do study pay attention to American politics, and I have seen American Republicans repeatedly target things like early voting which is primarily used by Democrats. I'm not accusing them of this in a vacuum.
It depends, someone here linked one time to a story about wide-scale fraud done by a political machine it Chicago that went on for years, and only came out because someone got cut out of a deal, and snitched. What's more, on questions where one side is strongly politically invested in a particular answer, I don't think you can assume the normal truth-seeking process will work as usual. I've seen this in the transgender issue, where the pro-trans side was knowingly and deliberately hiding studies that showed the evidence for gender affirming care is poor. Normally this would be a scandal, but there's been no professional consequences as far as I can tell. The voter-ID question seems to draw the same kind of zeal, so I'd fully expect people in a position to say something to look the other way, because doing otherwise would be inconvenient for the narrative of their tribe.
What you're saying might work in states where institutions are politically mixed, and the sides keep each other in check, though.
Are there not states that don't require any ID? The Google summarizer thing seems to be under the impression that there are quite a few.
Yes, and there's nothing wrong with that in this case. If you want to tell me "there's in no evidence for X", "what kind of evidence would you see, assuming X happened" is a perfectly valid question to ask,
It looks like you forgot to include a link. How many states, and how often are these signatures compared? How reliable is the signature comparison method to begin with?
What do I have to address here? This seems to show that unless someone loses the bet, you will not be able to show there was fraud after the fact, just like I suspected. Further, if you're particularly good at making these bets, losing a few won't even matter, because a part of your argument is "the amount of fraud is miniscule, so there's no reason to enhance integrity".
A hurdle that you only have to overcome once, is not much of a hurdle. You can even sweeten the deal. We had people people here recount the absurdity of the American approach to ID, just include in the law that whatever ID document you're proposing shall be valid in all American institutions, public and private alike, and you will have actually reduced the total amount of hurdles people have to overcome.
Well, I'd like to hear some details on what you think is so different, because I've often heard American progressives just outright lie about the state of laws in other countries (for example there were similar arguments about abortion laws, where conservatives pointed out late term abortion is illegal in Europe, and progressives tried claiming the law is dead letter, which is complete nonsense). Also, if there is some version of ID-law that Democrats would support, it's rather suspicious that they never argue try offering a counter-proposal, and instead just go on and on about how voter ID is unnecessary, racist, voter suppression.
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