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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   3738 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 20, 2023

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I know we've discussed voting policies at length, but something I keep returning to mentally is how it ever became an acceptable norm to implement mass mail-in ballots. Republicans (especially Trumpy ones) go on and on about susceptibility to fraud, and I certainly think there's something there, but it's not even my real objection. Even if you implement a system that I think incontrovertibly filters out all examples of identity fraud in voting and manage to get a full 1:1 match between the name on the ballot and the voter, I will still think that mass mail-in voting is an inherently corrupt system. The secret ballot is of such importance that it is enshrined in multiple international law settings; not that long ago, without the current valence of mail-in voting, I think I could have gotten almost everyone to agree that removing the secret ballot in favor of "assisted" voting inherently increases opportunities for coercion and vote-buying. Once we include ballot-harvesting, where low-propensity voters are "assisted" by people from campaigns, this is unmistakably a serious weakness to the traditional concept of secret ballots, with ample opportunity for intimidation, coercion, vote-buying, or using the mentally incompetent.

What puzzles me isn't so much why my opponents have decided that having people go door-knocking to collect ballots is a very important civil right, but why I don't really see anyone from the broader right arguing against this as a form of corrupt machine politics. Instead, they harp on about fraud, which might be a real concern, but is hard to prove and can't be scaled up the same way as sending political operatives around to do now-legal corruption. Why is there no organized campaign on the right to restore the secret ballot?

I have posted about secrecy in voting here before, and I included a discussion of the historical reason for adopting the "Australian ballot". This iswas a hugely important issue for a very long time, not in the sense that it was an important and controversial issue. No, it was hugely important and not controversial, at least among generally free countries.

Unlike how organizations like the ACLU officially changed course and explicitly disclaimed their prior views on vaccine mandates, my sense is that most organizations still overtly claim to value secrecy. Just a casual web search provides things from IPU:

Acknowledging and endorsing the fundamental principles relating to periodic free and fair elections that have been recognized by States in universal and regional human rights instruments, including the right of everyone to take part in the government of his or her country directly or indirectly through freely chosen representatives, to vote in such elections by secret ballot, to have an equal opportunity to become a candidate for election, and to put forward his or her political views, individually or in association with others,

From the Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP), U.S. Department of State:

Free and fair elections require:

...

Secret ballots — voting by secret ballot ensures that an individual's choice of party or candidate cannot be used against him or her.

USAID helpfully cites the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 21.3:

The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures

and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Article 25:

Every citizen shall have the right and the opportunity, without any of the distinctions mentioned in article 231 and without unreasonable restrictions... To vote and to be elected at genuine periodic elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret ballot, guaranteeing the free expression of the will of the electors.

They call "secrecy of the ballot" a "core election-related international obligation" and define it in the annex as:

Secret ballot: Voters should be able to cast their ballot in secret without fear of intimidation. Ballots should not be able to be linked with individual voters.

If those organizations are a little too America-linked, here's OSCE, circa 2010:

Voting by secret ballot Voters should mark their ballots alone, in the privacy of a voting booth, and in such a way that the marked ballot cannot be seen before it is cast and cannot be later connected with a particular voter. Exceptions can be made only under specified conditions, such as at the request of voters who require assistance, e.g., disabled or illiterate voters. Any voting outside of a voting booth compromises the secrecy of the vote. The presence of more than one person in a voting booth should not be permitted, as it compromises the secrecy of the vote. Open voting or unlawful voting by proxies are violations of the secrecy principle. Arrangements for voting by members of the military and by prisoners should ensure their votes are secret and not subject to coercion.

Reading their COVID-era publication sheds some light on the difficulty:

The right to cast vote by secret ballot is another cornerstone of a democratic electoral process, enshrined in:

 1990 OSCE Copenhagen Document, paragraphs 5.1 and 7.4;

 1948 UDHR, Article 21;

 1966 ICCPR, Article 25;

 1996 UN HRC General Comment No. 25, paragraph 20;

 1953 ECHR, Additional Protocol, Article 3; and

 2002 VC Code of Good Practice, sections I.3.2 and I.4.

Effective protection of secrecy of the vote is one of the key challenges posed by some alternative voting methods, particularly when voting takes place outside the controlled environment of polling stations, such as postal or Internet voting, or when voters' choices are revealed to their appointed representatives, as in the case of proxy voting. Secrecy should therefore be at the forefront of decision-making when introducing or expanding the use of alternative voting methods. It requires safeguards in law and regulations, as well as due care and proactive steps by polling staff to protect it and to prevent any breaches. The importance of the secrecy of the vote, as well as measures taken to protect it should be addressed in civic and voter education programmes, as well as through prompt investigation by law enforcement bodies of its potential violation.

Secrecy considerations are also central in the context of polling station layout and set-up, equipment used, as well as in voter processing and flow management. They need to remain as one of the priorities when considering adjustments to polling station arrangements, including any special measures to mitigate public health risks

They continue in detail:

The secrecy of the vote may also be challenged by remote voting systems like postal voting, as it takes place without the presence of election officials or observers. Postal voting also provides for less oversight of certain behaviours, like influencing the vote of others and family voting. States, nevertheless, have an obligation to take measures to ensure that the principle of secrecy is maintained.

Ballot delivery, marking, and counting systems used in postal voting present considerable and unique challenges to the integrity of elections. There are several commonly used procedural safeguards for voting by mail, such as ballot secrecy envelopes, witness requirements and signature verification. However, these technical solutions may not be enough to instill confidence in postal voting if there is diminished public trust in electoral processes and administration.

You can just tell that they know that this is a problem. They know that their 2010 position was widely considered to be the correct position for good reasons. They even point out some of those good reasons. But what can be done about it? "Eh." Probably nothing. Why yes, everyone must obviously agree with the position that ensuring strict voter secrecy is, in principle, an obligation of States holding free and fair elections, but it just doesn't seem like we can figure out any specific advice to make it actually work, since it's, like, not 2010 anymore. So, well, if we can't come up with any good ideas to actually implement the principle in the face of the concrete thing that we want to do right now, the "principle" will just be attested to verbally, as a signalling mechanism, while we proceed in just trodding all over it.

It's absolutely maddening from a historical and theoretical perspective. What's worse is that it threatens to be yet another issue where we had broad consensus across essentially the entire free world, but now could end up being another issue associated with "loony Trumpists", making it ripe for the chopping block. The impact may not be felt today, or even in the next decade... but I cannot imagine what the long-term consequences could be of simply jettisoning this principle for the rest of time.

  1. The line between "acceptable" political campaigning and "unacceptable" ballot harvesting is hard to define.
  2. People will argue that systems which are already in place are enough to make coercion and vote-buying sufficiently difficult to pull off that there is not a need to restrict voting to secret ballots. The proper response is to argue that no, those systems are insufficient, but we will make up for the lost easiness of mail-in voting by something like establishing voting holidays.
  3. If the right argues that it is unfair for Democrats to go knocking on low-propensity voters' doors to try to get them to vote, the left will argue that it is unfair for Republicans to spread ideas like Qanon that are not believed in by the vast majority of Republicans who actually make policy but that can also be persuasive to low-propensity voters.

  1. It's easy for me. Have people vote in person, then we don't have to worry about this at all. Ballot harvesting is just a way for political machines to cheat.

  2. Agree, I'm in favor of these sorts of actual compromises.

  3. I don't know of anyone that argues that door-to-door campaigning is an illegitimate tactic. If you can get the idiots from your side, whether they're welfare slugs or Qanon to show up to the polls, more power to you.

What puzzles me isn't so much why my opponents have decided that having people go door-knocking to collect ballots is a very important civil right

My impression is that it comes down to a freedom of speech thing - it's not so much that there is a specific civil right to collect ballots as that a law preventing people from talking to their neighbors about certain subjects would be legally problematic.

That said I suspect "push for a law limiting the number of mail-in ballots a single person can mail in on behalf of others" might be a popular policy for the right to push. We don’t want to stop mobility-impaired granny from having her granson take her ballot to the post office. We want to stop an organized group from going door to door throughout a neighborhood, asking people how they plan to vote and then offering to collect ballots only from those who give the desired answer, and collecting hundreds or thousands of ballots that way.

That said I suspect "push for a law limiting the number of mail-in ballots a single person can mail in on behalf of others" might be a popular policy for the right to push.

It's already in place in a number of states, it's just a matter of the will to enforce it. The footage from 2000 mules was from states that banned third party ballot collection, but there was no will to admit that there was a problem.

Yeah, the whole "this would not be a problem if we actually enforced the laws that are already on the books" thing strikes again.

Though those cases do tend to suggest a course of action that is more along the lines of "apply political pressure towards enforcing existing laws" will be more effective than one that looks like "create yet more laws that will not be enforced".

And "existing laws are not enforced, and they should be" is, IMO, one of the strongest right-wing talking points.

Why is there no organized campaign on the right to restore the secret ballot?

You hear it a lot as a Motte among intellectual conservatives, but it gets wildly drowned out by the Bailey of whackadoodles screeching about voting machines that changed votes* from Hackers in Venezuela or something like that.

I've spoken locally to my Republican party committee and elected reps that their election advocacy should focus more on "2020 was a weird time, it lead to a weird election, let's get back to normal..." than "2020 was actively illegally stolen." There was no appetite for it. It's hard to read whether they are all true believers (I doubt this) or if they worry that signaling less than true belief will lead the base to eat them alive. But the result is the same: the GOP is too focused on allegations of "Actual" election fraud to worry about the procedural stuff.

*I want to be clear here: I interact with people on a daily basis who told me throughout 2021 that Trump was still the president, that he had secretly written a memo that passed all presidential powers to the Military (it is not clear what is meant by this? The JCS? The DoD? Some individual general?) and so it never was given to Biden, and that any day now (in July/August/September/etc) the dominos were going to fall. When I refer to the voter fraud bailey, I mean those people, who are vastly more numerous than motte users generally. If you don't believe insane things like that, but do believe in some degree of voter fraud, quite simply I am not referring to you when I use the term whackadoodles.

My big thing with voting machines is why the hell is their firmware/software NOT open source? That shit is what fuels the conspiracy theorist in my head. At this point, I want to be dying peoples thumbs blue or whatever the fuck they do in Africa, because there are just too many inconsistencies for me to be comfortable.

I've been wondering lately to what extent the whackadoodle ideas are being deliberately seeded as a tool to discredit more cogent complaints.

I realize that this sounds fairly whackadoo itself, but there seems to be a bit of a pattern with recent government actions that might reasonably be criticized:

  1. Mandatory vaccination as an infringement on civil liberties --> "Bill Gates/5g/microchips"

  2. Unauthorized Chinese spy-balloon overflights --> "I'm not saying it's aliens..."

  3. Inadequate/bungled wildfire response + possible manual arson by crazy people --> "Jewish Space Lasers!"

  4. Unprecedented and technically illegal changes to election procedures --> "Dominion/Italian satellites/German servers changing vote tallies"

and so on...

I just now notice that most of these involve space vehicles of some sort -- is it a tell, or am I whackadoodling?

I think it’s an attention getting strategy along the lines of some of the crazier PETA stuff. If you’re not getting attention, nothing else matters. And like it or not, crazy gets attention. If people weren’t talking about 5G nanotubes or whatever, the question of mandatory vaccination would have been a minor issue.

Yes but no IMO.

I think they are seeded, but not as a tool to discredit cons. They are probably seeded by people with a financial interest in creating a media sphere distinct from reality; so people get locked into the conspiratorial universe where Hilary Clinton isn't a made-man venal corporatist stooge but a literal satanic pedophile blood drinker.

The same exists on the left; from tankies and such who aren't content with the boring Marxist critique of capital and has to make the further leap that rich people and the US personally crush third worlders in wine presses for entertainment.

It's the same everywhere and forever 99% of the time 100% of the time: there is no grand conspiracy or narrative; there are individual actors reacting to market forces attempting to maximize profit and therefore coordinating with no coordinator.

I think that is why a lot of these dudes that I am familiar with on the left conspiratorial media sphere spend no time at all attacking Trump/Desantis/the Reps; and all of their time and energy attacking AOC/ "Elites"/ the Dems: because they aren't primarily trying to steer politics. They are trying to lock their audience in by providing a unique product; so their main competition isn't the right, it's the left.

I knew people who were repeating 5g nanotechnology bill gates sterilization vaccines back when the public’s view of antivaxxers was still hippies with scented candles and children with misspelled names. There might have been some amplifying of narratives going on, but I highly doubt that particular constellation of ideas came from the government.

It seems very possible. Though the fertile soil for growing your own Dale-Gribbles is pre-existing, I've noticed a strong personality type among the conspiracy theorists in my life. There's a natural tendency in any extremist community to play "more extreme" as a trump card, so it wouldn't be hard to play into this tendency by offering ever more extreme stories.

I've spoken locally to my Republican party committee and elected reps that their election advocacy should focus more on "2020 was a weird time, it lead to a weird election, let's get back to normal..."

This is likewise what I've tried to encourage in people around me. I frankly think 2020 was a complete mess, but also think that it would be best to let bygones be bygones and give my opponents an easy intellectual out that doesn't rely on them needing to admit to any sort of malfeasance. They may not want to reform elections to improve security (although some might), but the above framing is much, much harder to push back vigorously against than the whackadoodle stuff.

On the whackadoodle note, the guy that really summed it up for me the most was a helpful guy at my gun club. Nice guy, good dude, set aside some time to help me figure out what the hell was wrong with the sighting on my rifle (turns out the scope rings were genuinely awful, needed to be lapped). This was back in mid-November of 2020, and we naturally got to talking about the election, and he was absolutely convinced that not only did Trump legitimately win, but that he was definitely going to figure out a way to prove that he'd been cheated and would remain in office. When I asked how he figured that was going to work out, his eyes narrowed, he got a very knowing look, and simply replied, "He hasn't been wrong about anything yet". I'm basically on this guy's side, but I really have no idea how to reply to that. Trump? The guy that we've all been watching? That guy hasn't been wrong about anything? Well, fuck me, I guess we're about to be in for a wild ride was my thought pattern, and you know what? I haven't been wrong yet.

I frankly think 2020 was a complete mess, but also think that it would be best to let bygones be bygones and give my opponents an easy intellectual out that doesn't rely on them needing to admit to any sort of malfeasance.

My West-Wing type fantasy scenario would be the GOP leadership of 2020, including Trump and Mitch McConnell, getting up and doing a collective press conference where they said something like what an NBA team says after a playoff series where their best player tore his ACL. "Hey, we lost under the rules, but those rules were weird, the whole thing was weird. Maybe some portion of our base refused to leave the house? We'll accept the result, but we will win it next time when the rules/situation aren't weird."

I forgot to note in my first comment, the local GOP is also very heavily trying to get people to vote by mail. So part of the reason they aren't turning against Mail-Ins is because doing so causes their own people to refuse to vote by mail, which loses you some votes relative to the Democrats who encourage Mail-Ins. Even people who really do plan to vote in person forget, or get there and the line is too long, or get sick, or whatever. Where that same person might have remembered to vote by mail. So unless you can change the rules with your current elected officials, opposing mail in voting will cost you votes on election day right now.

I really have no idea how to reply to that. Trump? The guy that we've all been watching? That guy hasn't been wrong about anything? Well, fuck me, I guess we're about to be in for a wild ride was my thought pattern, and you know what? I haven't been wrong yet.

I couldn't have phrased that any better.

Huh. That is a good question.

My best guess is a side effect from Trump boosting specific claims. If the court cases and Raffensbergers had found fraud, his gamble would have paid off. Since they didn’t, it became an attack surface. Now complaining about the election is coded as defending Trump’s claims, specifically.

It’s a shame, because I’d like to see emphasis on the secret ballot. I’d vote for that platform like I’d vote for FPTP reform.

I would too, actually; if polling places where selected at random then pared down by population density and there were mandatory voting holidays.

The voting place where I was got fucking annihilated by population density on the weekend and I'm not even in the city, it was actually faster to drive out into the country then drive back than to wait in line in the 'burbs.

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