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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.
Two arguments for no illegal fraud:
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.
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?
I'll bite this bullet and agree, but we shouldn't be giving extra votes to fraudsters.
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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.
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X. Both sides spend lots of time fighting against things which don't happen.
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