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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28333 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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Naive policy engineering again, American electoral reform edition:

Team Red claims to want "reinforced" elections, where the risk of people casting a vote who shouldn't be able to is minimized or eliminated. A common proposed mechanism is to use state IDs to validate that the holder has the right to vote in that state or federal election, and (I imagine) to enforce one-vote-per-person. They prefer the decision to be biased in favor of minimizing false positives at the cost of increased false negatives and possibly true positives.

Team Blue opposes this with rhetoric about wanting to maximize access to the electoral systems at all levels. They prefer to maximize true positives and minimize false negatives at the cost of false positives, the symmetric opposite of Red, as in all things.

Left unstated is the assumption, seemingly held in common by both Red and Blue, that people who have a hard time obtaining state IDs are likely to vote Blue.

A compromise solution seems to exist, and I don't understand why it's not being pursued: increase funding for voting accessibility programs, in exchange for tighter requirements for voting authorization. Have, literally, a list of people who were born in state, can't be accounted for as having left the state, and authorize a spend of $10k or whatever to find them and Get Them Registered No Matter The Cost.

One thought: spending on this is a continuous value, whereas a policy state IDs as a bearer authentication token are boolean. Fine, hold state IDs out as a carrot, and offer improvements in, I don't know, signature matching in mail-in ballots.

In summary, two symmetrical problems exist, there exist opportunities to progress towards solving both of them, no serious efforts are being taken. Why? Per the meme, are they just stupid?

Team Red wants fewer people to vote. Team Blue wants more people to vote.

A compromise solution that targets the nominal justification for their policy while preserving the balance of the thing they care about (that's why its a compromise) is uninteresting, so no serious efforts are being taken. It would be difficult to spin it as a bipartisan feel-good agreement, because both sides will have their share of internal critics complaining the other side got too much.

In my opinion, the Blue take is more honest in that the advertised benefits of their policy better represents the actual effects of their policy. They say they want more legally enfranchised people to vote, and this is basically what would happen in their preferred world. The Reds, on the other hand, are basically lying, because voter fraud is pretty much a non-issue. Voter fraud is trivial now and will continue to be trivial under their preferred policy; its the legally enfranchised people that matter. This doesn't make the Blues any less shrewd than the Reds, they just have the luxury of relative honesty in this matter due to the circumstances. But if you asked them about the proposed compromise, they would say you're wasting resources by defending against voting fraud that doesn't exist and then implementing social programs to repair the disenfranchisement that didn't need to happen, and they would be pretty much right.

I agree that the left has a more simplistic and perhaps even more coherent argument.

Children in public schooling are brought up with the idea that everyone should be able to vote easily. We're hammered with the sins of the past where ballot access was conditional at best and often outright discriminatory.

As I've gotten older, I continually wish that the bar was raised for voting. If you can't muster up $12 and a ride to the DMV in 4 years, you shouldn't be able to vote.

Likewise with illegal immigrants. I wouldn't call a bloc of 25 million potential voters "trivial". This isn't legal in every jurisdiction or context, but getting around it (especially without ID and even with ID) is trivial. I'd still consider that voter fraud lite.

"Every mentally competent adult citizen is entitled to vote" is a Schelling point because basically every proposal to "raise the bar" winds up being a veneer over "people I disagree with shouldn't vote" or "people I like should have privileged status".

Sure, and this may be biased of me, but I don't think people incapable of making it to a DMV are responsible enough to manage their own lives, much less a fraction of anyone else's.

The problem with the left's narrative is that it makes clear the inverse correlation between what almost anyone (in a vacuum) would consider positive traits in a voter and who they want to get to the ballot box. Extremely low bars are unacceptable, like:

  • Speaking English
  • Understanding civics
  • Understanding math
  • Transporting yourself to a voting location
  • Budgeting time to vote early if you can't get vacation on the last day

At the end of the day, though, I recognize that what would start as reasonable tests to exclude the irresponsible and stupid would gradually ratchet up. It's the same concept with gun control - I don't trust anyone to pass "reasonable" laws on that front, so I understand the reluctance to cede ground to even basic shit like ID.

The latter two are much more difficult for poor people than for most people here.

I understand that, and maintain that if you can't make it to a booth to cast a ballot sometime in 3 weeks you're not responsible enough to vote.

Not true. In India, like the majority of the world, you need to show some kind of ID to vote, and things work just fine. This is a uniquely American (pointless) quibble.

The difference is, in the US, for a long time, you didn't need your ID in most places, and calls for ID's only came when a certain group of people began voting in far higher numbers.

Now, personally, I'd be fine w/ voter ID, as long as it was a national ID, given out for free, sent out as an update to your SS card.

Calls for voter ID’s came about in Obama’s first term, long after African American voter participation had become commonplace.

Yes, that is why it's a uniquely American quibble: having a national ID at all is extremely normal elsewhere.

We have the REAL ID Act, federal standards for a state ID card as a proxy for a national ID. But I assume you mean free in cost and provided to citizens by default instead of forcing them to apply for one in addition to freedom to obtain?

Most countries force you to obtain a national ID and charge you for this service. What's more, they fine you if you don't obtain it on time.

State-level IDs being considered good enough opens up issues once the people of Kentucky decide that clearly the Oregon state apparatus is handing them out to the wrong sorts (those who vote democrat, of course). Contrast and compare the whole birth certificate comedy with Obama, where people kept insisting it must've been a fake long after that nonsense should have died down.

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Alright: Discarding basic verification like signature matching was a mistake and should be reversed.

I mean maybe this was true prior to the Covid times but it is a much easier sell now.

Is their any good evidence that taking election security measures which are standard in developed democracies actually results in fewer people voting? AFAIK it’s a progressive fever dream getting repeated as fact.

Is it standard, though? I've never presented any ID to court in any Canadian or UK election—and I have voted in many. I understand that the UK will now be requiring ID in future elections, but this is a novel development that the current government seems to have cribbed (like many of their more dubious electoral engineering projects) from the US Republicans.

It seems hard to prove this, because large swathes of American voters cast effectively useless votes. People in upstate NY or central valley CA aren't going to see their votes matter much no matter how secure elections get.

You seem to be forgetting that president, senator, and (maybe) governor aren't the only officials people vote for.

The more hoops you make people jump through, the more advance thinking and organisation that is required to vote (i.e. to get a photo ID months prior to the election), the fewer people will clear those hoops and actually vote. That's hardly a stretch.

Mandatory ID would solve this problem handily and is common in other developed countries but that would of course be a non-starter in America.

It kinda follows from "people who aren't legally allowed to vote voting" doesn't it?

Both ends of the argument are arguing that more people are voting, just one arguing that they aught not to.

Research is inconclusive, but it doesn't really matter because conservatives equally believe this "fever-dream".

Whether a state adopts strict voter ID laws correlates to number of Republican legislators, but this correlation is much-stronger in competitive states.

MIT Election Labs has some good analysis on various election topics, including voter identification. Both liberals and conservatives largely support voter ID laws in theory.

From their analysis, most states that actually adopt strict voter ID laws share the following:

  1. A Republican takeover of the state government after years of Democratic control,
  2. Being a “battleground state” (i.e., a state hotly contested by the political parties), and
  3. Being racially heterogeneous.

I think it’s a big assumption that voter fraud is trivial now.

The Democrat strategy if you think none of it is fraud does rely heavily on basically no information voters. People getting the votes “harvested” or get the message republicans are white supremacists but only put the effort to check a box on a mail-in ballot.

We didn’t even do signature matches to any great extent on mail-in votes so the idea there is no fraud would seem to be false.

Two arguments for no illegal fraud:

  1. The cost-benefit is hilariously bad for the individual. It's a serious crime, you're leaving a paper trail, you basically achieve nothing on the margin. Why would you do it?
  2. There is great benefit for the Republicans for finding this sort of fraud if it exists. Voting is a joint Blue-Red operation. Why don't they do signature matches? I do not think it's because there is a Blue conspiracy to suppress closer inspection (correct me if I'm wrong). It's that the Reds know they won't find what they are looking for, so it would be counterproductive to do so.

If there was fraud, I think it would need to be perpetrated by a institution, and again, since the Reds would benefit hugely by being able to point at any single significant thing, I think that absence of evidence is evidence of absence here.

As for ballot harvesting and no/low information voters, I rate this as the Blues doing what they are advertising. They want to enfranchise more people and presumably the ways they are doing it are not technically illegal or else they would get in trouble. So the bottom line is that you don't want these legally enfranchised people voting when they otherwise would not under a different policy decision. Well, yeah, its understandable why one might think so, but it's a difficult argument to sell! Massive voter fraud is an easier one. And if "voter fraud" is to be construed as code for Blue institutional shenanigans, then Voter ID requirements is fighting systemic bias with systemic bias. Which is what it is, but you can't say it out loud. The optical advantage is in the hands of those who advocate for more voting, so the Reds are forced to be more dishonest about it.

Why don't they do signature matches?

Because the courts don't let them.

Signature rate matches on mail-in voting disappeared in 2020 as mail-in voting surged. Some of that is likely fraud. Like a granddaughter helping her nursing home grandmother vote and leaning heavily on the scales. Or a wife voting her husband. Personally, I had my ex-gf ballot and easily could have just filled it out and it would have counted.

I would call all those fraud. Violation of the concept of secret ballot. And I bet they happened widely in 2020. And wouldn’t show up on any fraud investigation that was done.

Funny thing is in my opinion if a bag of fake votes were found nothing anywhere would have changed. Courts still wouldn’t want to interfere in an election. Reddit would still be reddit and deny the bag of fake votes found.

@yofuckreddit up there notes that he believes someone who can't get a driver's license probably doesn't deserve to vote. Fair enough. I'll echo the same perspective here: if you got defrauded by your granddaughter, wife, or ex-boyfriend, you deserve to lose that vote too. Consider those the wages of not treating the one vote you get more carefully, I suppose.

And re: 'I bet they happened widely in 2020'

Well, I bet they didn't. Now what?

if you got defrauded by your granddaughter, wife, or ex-boyfriend, you deserve to lose that vote too

I'll bite this bullet and agree, but we shouldn't be giving extra votes to fraudsters.

To the first point I don’t know if you don’t deserve to get a vote if you can’t get an ID. On one hand it’s probably not good for a highly functioning society to pick there leaders based on the beliefs of low functioning people. But I do think poor people deserve a choice in their society.

Your second thing “if you got defrauded by” - well we are a Democracy so no one gets two votes and the people being defrauded is the rest of society not the individual.

Ballot harvesting does happen. Or the left wouldn’t fight against it. Whether it flipped an election I don’t know. But it violates a lot of core Democracy values.

As hydroacetylene below notes, the phrase tilting at windmills is an old one. We might as well grant that the right is full of fascists; after all, the left fights against those all the time, too.

Ballot harvesting does happen. Or the left wouldn’t fight against it.

X. Both sides spend lots of time fighting against things which don't happen.

Ideologically motivated decentralized gangs are notoriously difficult to crack, and ballot harvesting can be done with minimal risk to the harvester -- particularly if he has the implicit cooperation of the people counting the votes.

presumably the ways they are doing it are not technically illegal or else they would get in trouble.

The letter of anti-ballot-harvesting law was broken in many states in 2020, and nobody got in any trouble.

Why don't they do signature matches?

This one always strikes me as a silly question. In theory it sounds like a tolerable system in the same way that paper cheques or signatures on credit card receipts do. But there is a reason we don't tend to use those anymore: as best as I can tell forging a signature to at least pass within a large dataset isn't hard -- we aren't going to deploy credentialed handwriting experts for every ballot -- and many, if not most, of your obvious signature mismatches are probably going to come from medical issues like dominant hands in casts or motor control issues in older people.

I suppose it might catch a whole building or block of voters all signing with an X, but I'd be curious to see someone argue the cost-benefit of checking is worthwhile.

Cryptographic signatures is a whole different can of worms.

Each time someone has insisted that there is massive voter fraud, sued, kicked off an investigation…it’s come up more or less clean. Is that not evidence against fraud?

It isn't every time, though it is rare. For example, a judge tossed the results of the '97 Miami mayoral election due to voter fraud.

While Suarez was not personally implicated, the prosecuting circuit court judge cited the district as ''the center of a massive, well-conceived and well-orchestrated absentee ballot voter fraud scheme.'' People working for Suarez's campaign were found forging voter signatures, including at least one of a dead citizen.

If the most salient example is 26 years old, but the more recent investigations have come back negative, I think it’s still evidence that “voter fraud is trivial now.”

Not perfect evidence, of course. We didn’t “signature match” every vote. We just spent thousands of man-hours hunting anything that looked vaguely like it could be abused. Plus the sitting POTUS turning it into a household debate.

By design, there is limited evidence that is retained after the fact, which makes after-the-fact proof unusually difficult. As such, I am less persuaded by no-finding results than I would be in many other investigations.

Well there was the 2018 U.S. House election in North Carolina that was voided because of illegal ballot harvesting. By Republicans... So these things do happen.

Team Red wants fewer people to vote. Team Blue wants more people to vote.

This seems true with respect to strategy, but I haven't seen any compelling data that these strategies actually improve their electoral outcomes: I don't see any hugely-compelling trends in, say, presidential election voter turnout and which party tends to win. I think there's a fairly minor bias toward Republicans in low-participation midterm elections, but I'm less convinced that this carries all the way to marginal voters in terms of whether or not they hold valid voter IDs.

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