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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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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