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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?
Republicans don't really care about election security, so the idea of spending piles of money to improve election security is unappealing to them.
and...
Democrats dont really care about poor people, so the idea of trading minor barriers to voting to improve the lives of poor people is unappealing to them.
If the parties were honest about what they cared about, it would be obvious to trade voter-ID for a program that provided grants and assistance to people for getting IDs. But they're not honest.
South Carolina offered free rides to voters to get their IDs, all of 22 people took advantage: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/nikki-haley-s-south-carolina-to-give-rides-to-22-voters-to-get-photo-ids
North Carolina's current iteration of Voter ID includes providing IDs to voters for free.
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When you make a sweeping claim that someone is lying, you should at least do a little work to back it up. Throwing similar shade at the other guys doesn’t make that any better.
I think as far as elections go it’s fair to say both parties just want to win and they requires getting that 2% of the population marginal vote.
I don’t think either party has any strong belief about Democracy being the true “good” versus their ideology, own power, own profits being the “good”.
As far as this post goes I think GOP has taken steps to make ID’s free and more available because I think they rightfully belief getting people to show up on Election Day strongly favors them. And that left rightfully believes that even if we had a secure way to get you ID for free at 7-eleven in 5 minutes they would on net lose votes on Election Day.
And it has a lot to do with the barbell strategy for the Dems now of winning the college vote and winning the bottom 20%. They think they dominate the demographic that can’t hold a 9-5 job which in tight elections do change elections.
The thing about Democracy is you never like everyone in your coalition. But you can’t win without them.
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If either Democrats or Republicans really cared about the poor and electoral security respectively, they would call the other on their reapective claims. This equilibrium only holds if they both don't value what they claim to value.
What does “calling each other on it” look like? Sponsoring bills, even if they won’t go anywhere? Making it the flagship of the latest spending bill? Whatever this shit was?
You don’t have to believe politicians hold ending poverty or getting everyone to vote as a terminal value. But they clearly are willing to expend time, effort, and money on the subjects. Dismissing that as “not caring” is sophistry.
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