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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35167 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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So, granted the liberal/left leaning narrative that the recent wave of election integrity laws is true(which I have my doubts about), should we expect to see republicans outperform their polls in states with those laws but not necessarily states absent them?

Or to put it another way, if the real purpose of election integrity is to benefit republicans, then we should expect a pattern of polling errors benefitting republicans in states where voter ID laws already exist, particularly the recent stricter wave. And that furthermore those polling errors should be larger than the ones in place in states lacking the recent wave of election integrity laws. So it follows that if, as in the last election, we see polls as broadly accurate in the sun belt and biased in favor of democrats in the frost belt, that would constitute evidence against election integrity laws tilting the playing field, would it not?

I think the reality is wildly disappointing to both sides of the argument - there just that much actual fraud, nor is there actually a large, measurable suppression effect of requiring voter IDs. I strongly side with the pro-ID side because I think the appearance of free and fair elections is incredibly important and the number of legitimate voters without IDs is a rounding error, but I don't actually think there are many people running vote scams either.

That said, I could be wrong, and agree that your suggestion is a good way of testing whether these interventions matter. One problem is that the delta wouldn't actually tell us whether large amounts of fraud had been stopped or whether there was mass suppression of legitimate votes.

I tend to agree with you, but while my libertarian tendencies point toward "You shouldn't need the mark of the beast to function in society"; I tend to go a step further: there are no legitimate voters that don't have IDs. If you don't have an ID at this point, you probably aren't functioning on a level where I care if you vote or not.

A far more interesting question is what kinds of IDs can be used.

If you don't have an ID at this point, you probably aren't functioning on a level where I care if you vote or not.

Yeah, my framing there was really just being careful enough to use "almost". I actually agree that it's pretty much a tautology that lacking identification in 2022 means that you're not a legitimate voter. I flatly don't believe the sob stories about how requiring identification will disenfranchise X number of totally innocent people that are completely legitimate citizens.

I believe that there is probably a very small number of senior citizens who lost their drivers license after letting it lapse and live on some kind of autopilot. That being said, previous voter ID laws didn’t suppress turnout, and there’s no actual evidence that these election laws will either.

A lot of Voter ID laws have some kind of exemption system that handles the "I just totally let my driver's license lapse" people.

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