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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?
What compromise could the right offer the left that they would want? And what compromise could the left offer the right that they'd be willing to give up? The right would probably want stricter voter harvesting laws and some kind of approval system for vote-by-mail, and better oversight for vote counting in exchange for what checking IDs at the voting site? Most reasonable right-aligned people I've seen do not believe that voter fraud in that sense of someone voting twice or without the legal right to vote voting is rampant or affecting the election count to a changeable degree. The left has all the power, is already in the lead for the most part, and gets a political issue that at worst makes them seem naive in that they're defending the poor and downtrodden.
Also, even discussing the compromise will shift the debate landscape and it will suddenly not be about what the unreasonable people are saying. It's easier to come at this saying, well if the problem is just people who shouldn't be voting having a higher barrier of entry to committing voter fraud then why couldn't they come to some compromise? Because the people that seriously want to do something about this topic have serious changes in mind and most of them have nothing to do with how their opponents characterize their position. So, the people that think thousands of people illegally voted to a degree to change the outcome of an election are not going to want this because they're likely unreasonable because they are the caricature their opponent uses as an example of the other side and the people who would make the compromise probably wouldn't see the value in compromising toward something that amounts to giving themselves a worse position because making it easier for people to vote doesn't work in their favor: most people are left, why would they compromise to get more people IDs to vote when they're likely to not vote for their side by two metrics because they're more likely to be left-leaning in general and also specifically more likely to be left-leaning because of the situation they're in. It makes no sense to give your opponent a win like that to get some law about people checking state-IDs which probably from the evidence, I suspect, would not change anything, and even if it would it wouldn't be enforced anyway.
And that state census solution of finding people for 10k and forcing them to register sounds like it would be insanely disapproved by both sides as being authoritarian government overreach that would likely never be fully finished. It sounds like a make-work investigatory bureau would be created for the purpose and they'd likely antagonize many people, accomplish very little, and end up being used for things entirely unrelated to its stated purpose because its purpose would be impossible to accomplish anyway.
I don't know what the solution is but from my perspective it seems like mostly people entrenched in this aren't looking for solutions because the issue is more valuable existing than a resolution of the issue because most people don't care. I'm against voter fraud (so is most everyone), I want to help the poor (so does most everyone). It's probably a political issue of magnitude precisely because it's really hard to politically step in it because the issue is so seemingly contained to itself. Other soundbyte positions like being "for jobs" (but what about free trade?) or wanting to lower taxes (but how will you pay for anything?) require much more complex solutions. The issues without compromise are the easiest to represent yourself with the more compromise that leaks into whatever the issue is then the harder it would be to take a stance or even talk about at all. I think politically wedge issues are too easy to give up because most of them have two positions with no real nuance that you can talk about while appealing to your base, if they start talking about compromise then they're talking to people who won't vote for them so what's the advantage in an election? And what's the advantage of making the compromise when it comes to governing for that matter?
I mean, surely from the left's point of view the compromise of 'we'll make it easy to vote if you agree to ID checks' is a massive win? Soft voter suppression is a real issue wheras election security is a nothing-burger. "we'll solve this issue that loses you blues a fuckton of votes if we can also solve this issue that loses us reds basically no votes"? Ka-ching!
Of course, the left could always argue that even free and easy-to-get ID is still suppression as it might be too high of a hurdle for some of their voters (and they'd probably be right) but I don't see why they'd be opposed to the deal in principle.
Question is why don’t the democrats make that offer explicit? Perhaps one of your premises are wrong.
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