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Notes -
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?
Because ‘voting accessibility programs’ are just funding for democrat political machines, and tighter requirements for voter authorization are totally off the table for democrats.
I mean. Yes? That's the point, to give both sides part of what they want. Democrats want funding for democrat political machines.
This I'm more ignorant on. There really aren't any minority sub-parties that don't care about the topic that can't be peeled off?
I mean the counterpoint is ‘why should we have to fund partisan democrats and only partisan democrats in their political operations in order to have the same election security measures as every other developed democracy on earth’.
Because horse-trading is necessary to achieve anything in politics no matter how strongly you feel that your political opponents should just give you what you want with no concessions on your end?
Horse trading implies you get something of equivalent value for the horse. In this metaphor, the charge is that the person you trade horses with is a horse-thief, and that their horse-trade is that you hire more of their possible horse-thieven associates to guard future horses in exchange for a current horse.
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