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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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Number one doesn't work anymore (at least in Pennsylvania) since maintaining voter rolls isn't the responsibility of the parties. In PA when someone dies the department of vital records notifies the county election board within 60 days so they can be removed from the rolls. Obviously people who recently died or died out of state can still slip through, but we aren't talking huge numbers of people. As for the fraudulent absentee registrations, I think that widespread mail-in voting actually makes it less likely for this kind of fraud to happen. Absentee balloting used to be rare enough that unscrupulous people could take advantage of the lack of familiarity with the system. If someone from your own party came to your door and told you about an easier way to vote that you weren't familiar with, it might seem okay that, yeah, just give the ballot to him, he'll mark all the Democrats for me. In the run up to the 2020 election there was a media blitz about how to properly fill out mail ballots. There were news stories on regularly, and I got tons of emails from both the party and the election commission with instructions on how to request and fill mine out, just in case I decided to vote by mail.

Much of the opportunity for fraud is now outsourced to GOTV organizations tied to both the local and national parties. They conduct the registration drives, canvassing, and harvesting with a degree of separation from the party proper so that when an employee is caught being "inadequately supervised" it doesn't implicate the party.

Registration fraud I'm not worried about because registration forms require enough verifiable information that it would be impossible to register enough fake applicants at scale to make it worthwhile. At the very least, you need to be able to match a name with a state ID# or Social and the kind of person willing to give that information to a stranger apropo of nothing probably isn't the kind of person you can rely on to provide accurate information.