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I want to talk about how we talk about elections and what’s acceptable for whom to say. Over the weekend, when I was discussing Trump and the reaction to him from the broadly construed left, I told someone that I just genuinely don’t understand the perspective that he’s a “threat to democracy”. Since my interlocutor is on the same page as me with regard to January 6, they didn’t go down that easy and well-trod road, but instead brought up something from before the 2016 election that really rubbed them the wrong way, that they thought from an otherwise neutral perspective was unacceptable behavior, and that’s the way Trump speaks about his acceptance of electoral results. We have a shared recollection of him saying that he would only accept the results if they were fair, but now that I’m sitting down, I want to make sure I know exactly he said:
I don’t think this is a cherrypicked example either, instead being a clear articulation of a position that I think Trump has consistently espoused with regard to both the 2016 and 2020 elections, that he will only accept the results of the election if he thinks they were legitimately free and fair (which may well require his victory for him to agree things were on the up and up). The person I was discussing this with thinks this is a terrible way to speak about elections because of the damage caused to trust in institutions by having your highest political officers saying that they really don’t know whether it’s a fair election or not.
I have previously articulated at some length why I think the 2020 election was an absolute mess and why I think the de facto elimination of secret ballots calls all American elections into question. Nonetheless, I have to admit that having a Presidential candidate express the same sentiment is destabilizing. The question I bump into is whether it’s incumbent on the speaker to be the one trying to stabilize things if they truly believe that the election is going to have highly questionable results. As a general matter, I think it would be best for candidates to not deliberately increase the level of uncertainty about a result; if you basically agreed to the rules and security procedures and thought they were fine, you should assure the public that their votes will determine who wins and you’ll win or lose on the merits. But what if you don’t think the election is even close to fair? What should you say? Let’s try a few examples to think about:
As I describe in the link above, the 2020 election was a mess, with large numbers of ballots cast illegally and laws changed at the last minute. If I were running and believed that, what should I say about it? I don't actually know if it materially impacted the results, but I would be pretty pissed off if my opponents pulled these kinds of stunts in my election.
If I were running in an Illinois state-wide election in 1982 and there turned out to be over 100,000 fraudulent votes just in Chicago, do I still have to just play along with the crooked machine?
Should all Russians agree that Putin was fairly elected this Spring? While his margin might be implausible, he probably is popular, so why stir up pointless turbulence?
Paul Kagame is making Rwanda great again and won 99% of the vote in 2017. His opponent offered him the high praise of saying, “but so far in this election no one in our party has been killed or imprisoned or harassed and that means at least some progress” which was presumably both stabilizing and good for his personal health. Can’t beat that!
Aside from the specific considerations, where at some point an election moves from sincere disagreement about the quality to obviously crooked, there seems to me to be a game theoretical problem with unqualified agreement that there are no concerns about the election. If I repeatedly state that the election is free and fair, am I not limiting my ability to challenge the results if it turns out I was wrong and it’s crooked? Is the game theoretically optimal choice not saying that you’ll see how it goes and assess accordingly? Setting aside problems with Trump’s honesty and bombast, I have trouble with the idea that one should offer such a concession to an opponent that they don’t think is actually a good-faith actor.
But really, I do get the point. Most American politicians don’t talk about issues with the electoral process, favoring stability over personal gain, with the added element of it being likely that they’ll be punished electorally if they attempt to defect from that equilibrium. How should politicians talk about their confidence in elections that haven’t happened yet?
It is fascinating that not more is done to fix an issue that undermines the confidence in the system.
Republicans should push hard for making IDs a free government service. Giving ID cards to people wouldn't be that expensive, and it would be hard for democrats to oppose a program that would help homeless people get a bank account and integrate into society. Not requiring voter ID is rather unique to the US and a hard position to defend when IDs are required for almost everything else in society.
As for stability having a more unified voting system that makes it harder to cheat would increase stability. Having a percentage of the population believe Bush/Trump/Biden stole the election is a destabalizing force.
Every voter ID law / bill I'm familiar with over the last ten years has included subsidies for acquiring an ID. Republicans already do it.
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This has bugged me too, to the point of asking in the past why Blue and Red teams didn't coordinate to both get what they want: money and a makework program for Blue, better voter ID for Red, more faith in voting infrastructure for both the Uniparty and the plebs.
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I think you're missing the point: voter ID laws are largely a class/regional issue.
I live in a rural/red area, the idea of a functional adult who lacks a driver's license is beyond my comprehension. The people who don't have IDs, I mostly don't care to have them vote. They're either so poor or so stupid or so drunk that I have a very low opinion of the value of their vote, I'm only in favor of their having the right to vote on a marginal principled stand. At core, Republicans have no interest in spending money to get these people to vote. The goal is to make sure they can't vote because they really shouldn't vote.
In urban areas, it is theoretically possible for someone to function without any identification at all. I still think it would tend towards lower classes and less functional people, but it could be a middle class person.
I sympathize with this view, and with voter ID laws in general. Although I've never shown an ID, I've voted at the same precinct my entire life, and the people running it are my little league coach and my best friend from fourth grade's mom. It's redundant.
That said, I did comment to my father when casting his votes in the DIS proxy fight ongoing this week, that despite the money at stake, despite the fact that both sides have taken out full page ads in national newspapers and cold called us multiple times and sent letters and packets of information to both of us, there was very little effort to make sure we were who we said we were. I logged into Fidelity with the normal password, and voted the shares, and then switched accounts and did it again. Done. No separate ID or 2fa or other effort to verify. Interesting.
As someone who grew up middle-class in an exurban area my thoughts were the same as yours... until PA announced it had provisionally implemented Voter ID and suddenly my grandmother was effectively disenfranchised. She hadn't driven in years and let her license expire. She could get a state ID, but that required a birth certificate, and she didn't have that. Getting a copy from Vital Records isn't difficult, but since she didn't have a driver's license we had to go to one of the "other" forms of ID, and then present the newly-acquired birth certificate to the DL center with an entirely different group of required documents that some people might not have (e.g. you need a Social Security card, and if you lost yours then you have to go to SSA to get a replacement which is a whole other process). So yeah, I can understand why this could be disenfranchising for elderly people who don't drive and don't work. There may not be many people like this in rural areas, but go to some neighborhoods in Pittsburgh where the average age is deceased and there are a ton of them who use the bus to get around since it's free if you're over 65. These people aren't at the fringes of society, they're just pensioners who live on Social Security and aren't going to maintain a license to drive a car they don't have and who have no reason to get a photo ID.
The big reason I think voter ID failed nationally was that its proponents made it sound like people without IDs were bums who, as you suggest, are a vanishingly small part of the population and who probably have no interest in voting anyway. If instead they had acknowledged the problem and worked towards rectifying it and maybe kicking in some money for outreach efforts or modernization of the ID system then they may have been more successful. But they instead stuck to the argument that we didn't need to worry about these people. For their part, the left didn't do a good job of defining who these people were in a way that would be understandable to Republicans — the more moderate ones just said such people existed in urban areas and left it at that while the more dedicated proggies trotted out their tried and true sob stories about a homeless woman of color with a glass eye and a wooden leg who was forced to make a living collecting cans behind Wal-Mart, which did little to disabuse conservatives of their preconceptions. But that doesn't mean that the Democrats didn't have a point.
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Off topic, but how are you leaning on the DIS fight? Do you think Trian would be an improvement? Is Blackwell Capital even a contender?
A lot of people see it as a fight against woke Disney, or unaffordable Disneyland, or whatever their current complaint is, but I don't think that's a priority for anyone in the fight.
I have to be honest: I nearly always vote against management in proxy fights. Management nearly always wins, but I don't want them to win too easily.
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While I am in 100% agreement with you, I do acknowledge that this is a source of genuine disagreement with my more left-leaning interlocutors. Setting aside cynics that want marginally attached vagrants to vote because of which way marginally attached vagrants tend to lean, there are plenty of people that just really believe that it's important that everyone not only have the ability to vote, but that it be very easy and that everyone should be encouraged to vote. I sincerely have trouble understanding this perspective. I get why people would regard some version of universal suffrage as important both pragmatically and morally, but I simply cannot relate to the idea that it's important to get the drunken lunatic from the park down to the polls.
One argument would be something like: "Even though it may be the case that the heroine addicted degenerate will only vote to make the government give out free heroine, that person is still a human being with rights and it's their right for their interests (as they see them) to be represented in government. The fact that they are crippled by their addiction does not change that."
And I have a value disagreement with the people like that: No, having one's interests represented in government is not a human right.
And, if it were a human right, it would follow that we urgently need some Congresscritters pumping up astrology, others fighting to recriminalize adultery, others defunding traditional medicine and subsidizing homeopathy and acupuncture, and still others demanding free alcohol for all teenagers. People's interests (as they see them) are very diverse.
It should be a citizen right (with some citizenship being a human right, of course).
Restricting the franchise is a slippery slope. You start with heroin addicts. You move through other drugs. Then why should alcoholics vote? People with mental illnesses? How about people in unemployment programs, if they can't manage their lives well, why should we trust them to manage the country? And are students studying on the goverment's dime really that different? While we are at it, should we not classify an IQ below 90 as a mental illness for the purpose of having fewer dumb people vote?
The result would not be something we would call democracy, and would depend on which party is in power and can disenfranchise the voters of the other more effectively.
One adult citizen, one vote is a very defensible Schelling point. Yes, this means that less intelligent people will have more influence which will likely result in worse policy decisions, but that is a price worth paying to prevent an oligarchic system which would spawn otherwise.
(I am aware that felons are routinely disenfranchised, and don't particularly like it, but at least there is some due process involved.)
Personally, I am not interested in barring drunkards or junkies from voting. Ditto for the mentally ill and unemployed. Lord knows I have my vices and deficiencies.
But if you're too drunk, strung out, depressed, or otherwise incapable of getting an ID - or moving your body to a polling station, or requesting a mail-in ballot by normal means - then I see no reason why anybody should be giving you an 'assist' or pretend that that your vote is of any value beyond a stocking stuffer for an R/D candidate. You aren't being restricted from the franchise, you're just too lazy or unintetested to partake in it.
It's a low bar, and it doesnt perfectly solve the problem of 'people voting wrong' (whatever one thinks that is), but simply showing up out of your own volition is enough for me. If you truly feel you have a stake in the system, then these are trivial hurdles to clear. But if you're just waiting around for a canvasser to help you fill out a ballot and take it to a drop box because you couldn't get your crap together in a 4-year period, I can only be suspicious of anybody trying to ply your vote.
Every election year we're inundated with narratives about how it's so hard to vote in the US, and I just don't ever see it. And I hate how the 'low voter engagement' phenomenon was interpreted as a clarion call to herd cattle into voting booths - as opposed to an indictment of our two leading parties and their general governance. I bristle even more when somebody suggests legally-required voting.
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I don't think it's entirely possible to disentangle cynical vs principled stands on this, in that the way a person votes is likely to be viewed as strong evidence of their intelligence in diametrically opposed ways. A Democrat increases their estimation of the intelligence of anyone that votes Democrat, while a Republican reduces it. I see similar dynamics with vaccine debates: when the correlation between various indications of intelligence (education, income, professional responsibility) and vaccination status are pointed out, antivaxxers instantly deny their uselessness: the vaccinated are definitely stupid to get vaccinations so any metrics that indicate their intelligence are flawed.
Oh sure, that's true as well. I don't think it's strictly required though. I am well aware that white Democrats are smarter than white Republicans, on average. While I might in some sense prefer that they didn't vote, I don't actually have a principled position against my local university's lefties voting. I disagree with them on many things, I even think they're obviously wrong on many things, but I will grant that they are reasonable adults that have different opinions from me. Drunken lunatics in the park, not so much. I could not possibly care less what their opinions are on zoning laws and I can't imagine why anyone would offer any honest disagreement with that position.
I mean the obvious principle, and the one that I generally adhere to, is who gets to decide what constitutes being a drunken lunatic in the park and therefore liable to disenfranchisement? There's obviously some level of procedural disenfranchisement at which people whose opinion we do care about would be disenfranchised, indeed there's a level of procedural disenfranchisement at which I myself would probably get disenfranchised! And for fear of that outcome I prefer to remain at universal franchise.
But that's in a vacuum, then the question becomes how much do you value that principle against other principles like accurate vote counting? Weighing that balance is the debate.
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Is that true? Sure you don’t need to drive in certain core urban areas. But you still need ID for a million things (only slight exaggeration).
I knew people who went about their lives not having ID’s in my time among the underclass.
Many of them had at one point had ID’s(generally a drivers license), but hadn’t had one in 10+ years. Most commonly this was because of refusing to pay a fine for a minor traffic offense preventing renewal or getting it suspended for reason of DUI and then not bothering to renew. They had bank accounts from back when, but mostly lived their lives in cash. They cashed their paychecks at dedicated check-cashing places, paid rent in flophouses(or put it in their girlfriend’s name and reimbursed her), and bought beer by looking over forty, either in the cashier’s imagination or in real life.
Obviously it shouldn’t surprise us that this is technically possible; there’s an entire social stratum of people who do this- illegal immigrants.
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So at this point we start to get into what constitutes voter id vs what you can use for Id other places. Student IDs or other less formal Id cards will get you through lots of stuff, and most people don't open that many bank accounts or whatever. We're still almost certainly talking about poverty, marginal or unemployed people.
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Because the two parties have diametrically opposed reasons for lack of confidence in the system. In general, Republicans are worried about vote fraud, want to make it harder to vote, and prefer state controlled elections. In general, Democrats are worried about voter disenfranchisement, want to make it easier to vote and want more Federal standards and oversight.
That would defeat the cynical purpose of voter ID laws and be deeply unpalatable to much of their base. Universal Federal ID proposals are DOA on the Right.
The proposals consistently poll very well across both parties and independents. They don't get stopped because rightists oppose them. Most Americans really don't see what's so hard about giving everyone an ID and tell them to bring it to the polls. It's only in recent years that Democratic activists have convinced so many people that it's actually very important that people be able to vote from home without identification.
This is the sticking point. Republican political leaders have not been particularly enthusiastic about the universal ID part of voter ID laws. Only about half of states with photo ID laws provide free IDs, and the ones that do often make you jump through hoops to get it (e.g. Texas).
The simplest thing to do would be to have a Federal voter database and an associated ID, but that seems to be considered generally unattractive.
A lot of things poll very well across both parties and independents until you start talking specifics.
YesChad.jpg
But, ya know, for an entirely different reason. Nothing to do with voting. Identity theft is awful. I absolutely want anyone who is trying to acquire an ID that is in any way related to any component of my personal information to have to jump through hoops to do so. I know full well that this means that I also have to jump through some hoops at times. E.g., when I moved states right after school, but didn't rent with a traditional lease or utilities that were in my name, I had to figure out how to jump through the right hoops to get appropriate documents. For most people, this is a big headache at most once or twice in their life, but it is an eminently solvable headache. For identity theft mills, this is a cost that scales poorly and significantly hinders their ability to wreck massive headaches for large swathes of people.
I would also note that when I had the aforementioned headache, the easiest document for me to acquire that would then help me unlock many other documents was voter registration. The baseline level of hoops that we require of people for voting is wayyyy easier than literally any other thing. I could see someone thinking that we should just bump up the registration to being a full "voting-only ID", still with an obscenely low level of hoops to jump through. I don't think that's particularly unreasonable, but then we really just get down to haggling about price. What specific hoops would you allow for obtaining a "voting-only ID"? If you let there be even one hoop, someone out there will have a story about how, in their highly-specific situation, this one hoop is actually an annoying headache for them. We will never have anything other than tradeoffs, nothing other than both Type I and Type II errors, and nearly everyone is allergic to actually using numbers to analyze these tradeoffs.
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Republicans have gotten voter ID In basically every state they control. Dems being conspiracy nuts about voter suppression means it’s probably not coming to blue states any time soon, but republicans have mostly won on the issue.
Not while an election-swinging share of states don't have it.
You could say they've won to the extent they realistically can, but that's different.
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Nuts is one explanation. The other is more nefarious.
Please elaborate on your alternatives rather than hinting at them.
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Note that there are substantial loopholes to voter ID policies in even states where Republicans ostensibly "won" and those loopholes were expanded to the size of highway tunnels in 2020. I'm a broken record, but again, Wisconsin added half a million absentee voters that claimed to be "indefinitely confined" and therefore did not need to provide identification. I have heard defenses of why that was necessary with Coronavirus "rampaging" through the population, but I have not heard anyone explain how this doesn't basically just cancel the ID laws for an intents and purposes.
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How is that winning the issue? If blue and some swing states are able to exploit a lack of ID to cheat elections and remain perpetually blue, then they can win all the elections via fraud. And all the republicans can do is prevent fraud in already-red states so they don't also flip to blue.
On issues related to local governance, each State being able to do whatever it wants is a victory. But on federal issues, especially elections, that's not good enough.
Any Federal voter ID law actually able to make it through Congress is likely to also impose restrictions on election administration that red states don't want. Avoiding Federal standards for voter qualification and election administration gives more leeway to put their thumb on the scale.
This is a victory conditional on the belief that Republicans are more prone to putting their thumb on the scale than Democrats, rather than the other way around.
That is, if we have any two parties, A and B, and A is more prone to putting their thumb on the scale, then more leeway towards voting regulations is a victory for A, and less leeway is a victory for B.
It seems nontrivial to simply assume that the Republicans are party A, especially given their recent demands for more transparency and stricter adherence to election rules.
The counterpoint is that laws on the books will always be enforced in such a manner as to restrict red states and allow blue states to do whatever they want.
I don't see why that would always be true. I would expect red-leaning judges to be biased towards the red states, while blue-leaning judges would be biased towards the blue states.
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How elections are run is a local issue in the USA, though.
The Voting Rights Act puts all sorts of restrictions on how elections are run.
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I'm not super familiar with the specific laws, but I'm pretty sure there's some sort of oversight. That is, if the Nevada State legislature suddenly coordinates and decide that all of them are permanently elected, only they are allowed to vote so they always win elections and can pick whoever they want to send to the senate/house/president, the federal government would object. I'm fairly certain they can't just overthrow their own Democracy. The Supreme Court would overrule them somehow, even if they had to stretch the text of some law or constitutional clause to make it happen.
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I like the no ID, I think we should have fewer things requiring a "papers please" approach. The fact that domestic air travel is restricted by REAL ID or a passport is not a good thing, what are all the scanners for then? At my polling stations you need to register with your name and address, preferably ahead of time, so you can be on the voting rolls when the old ladies look you up in their binders and you can be in and out quickly. This works well and we don't have any voting fraud here.
That said. I don't think it is actually that big a deal to require ID, the government can already track anyone any time (but I at least like the illusion I'm not in England or China), and I wouldn't actually be upset about it. Just a bit of a libertarian view on it.
How do you know you don't have any voting fraud?
We have a robust system and when some fool tries they get caught and punished and their fraudulent ballot is not counted.
The paper ballots that are marked by the voter and not a machine. Prior to an election, the state tests the memory devices that are programmed to read ballots to ensure the machines used to count ballots — known as tabulators — produce the same results as a hand-count of test ballots. Clerks repeat those tests on local machines. Tabulators are not connected to the internet.
Local nonpartisan clerks then report each person’s voting history in the days following each election through the state’s central voter registration system. This allows state election officials to verify that the total number of ballots cast and voters match. It also lets election overseers check that voters did not cast multiple ballots either by voting by absentee ballot and again in-person, or at multiple polling locations.
The only cases of alleged voter fraud charged by the attorney general’s office after the 2020 election were against two University students. One case is still pending against a woman who allegedly voted twice. Two felony charges against another woman were dismissed in November 2021 after she completed 200 hours of community service and wrote an apology letter to a voter she falsely submitted an absentee ballot for, according to DH, a spokeswoman for the Office of the Attorney General.
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Yeah, voter ID is a ridiculously low bar that the GOP should be able to hammer home, but the fact that they cant speaks volumes to their weakness/idiocy.
I'm in the UK at the moment, and there are posters everywhere reminding people to bring their photo ID to vote. India manages to give free, mandatory voter IDs to its population. For literally the rest of the planet, voter ID is a uncontroversial requirement. The fact that Democrats push against it so heavily when there are many more apparently lucrative applications to spend political capital on has turned me into a bit of a conspiracy nut about voting integrity.
Nobody even thinks of it as voter ID. It's just some ID (passport, drivers license, dedicated ID card etc) that you use in any situation where your identity must be verified.
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The electoral reality in the US is that many states have a history of very overtly disenfranchising certain kinds of voter. This colors basically everything about electoral reform in the US.
Anyone who deeply cares about mandatory voter ID and is really worried about vote fraud is already a die-hard conservative.
Other nations have far more recent and far worse histories of this sorts of behavior, and yet manage to pass reform just fine.
The blunt truth is voter ID laws in this day and age are going to disenfranchise almost exclusively elderly rural people who managed to get along without an ID their entire life. The hypothetical poor urban dweller that blue tribers wave around is virtually guaranteed to be on some sort of public assistance which requires ID to collect. Or is not actually eligible to vote, possibly to their surprise but not to the ballot harvesters who knock on their doors.
I live in a very blue city, and my very blue friends are expressing increasing frustration and skepticism with our local elections, because there are absolutely shennanigans going on, to the point that one went on an hour long rant about ballot harvesting the homeless community she works with, because many of the homeless are being paid for their ballots and its causing overdoses. No, i have no personal evidence for this claim, and yes its illegal as fuck, but i have no reason to doubt my friend and it jives with the genral politics of the city. Voter ID truly has become a universal issue, which is why i have nothing but contempt for GOP failures to do something about it.
Can you give examples?
You'll forgive me if I don't take this seriously - "shenanigans are happening, I just know it" is not credible. Not only is this sort of belief more often an expression of fatuous cynicism than actual knowledge, it's also just a frequent loser's cope. "Those establishment politicians with their organizations and social networks and actual funding are doing something shifty, I'm certain of it." (To be fair, they often are, but it's far more likely to be in the category of ethically dubious transactional politics with interests groups than buying ballots from bums).
How do you know this? Your skepticism about election fraud being without proof seems to rest on your intuition here.
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. If your theory predicts a phenomenon and the phenomenon is not observed, that strongly suggests the theory is wrong. In this case, there's a lot of incentive for election security enthusiasts to find voter fraud and they've made considerable effort to do so. The fact that have failed to do strongly suggests their theory doesn't hold water*. In this case, concealing the shenanigans requires counting on the discretion of numerous homeless drug addicts.
By contrast, there are tons and tons of instances of politicians being caught in awkward financial arrangements or grifting off their supporters. In many cases they don't have to bother hiding them because it isn't even illegal.
What are you talking about? The provenance of mail-in-ballots is basically unverifiable, and chain of custody was long-since destroyed, in some cases while ballots were being counted. You cannot prove a negative, and the unverfiability of election results is what has been concluded by everyone who has actually studied the problem.
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This is mind-boggling to me. How do those people live? They live in a rural area but don't have a driver's license- do they ride horses to get around? Or just live with a family member who drives them everywhere? Or is it such a closed community that they know everyone so they're able to buy a car and drive it without ever getting a license?
I think this is a small number of mostly very old- like makes congress look young- people who don’t maintain picture ID because they lost their driver’s license from age related legal blindness or something and didn’t bother to keep track of it. I suspect they’re all living in nursing homes or with family.
Most people who can’t come up with a picture ID on reasonable notice are dysfunctional underclass types who just drive illegally and do everything in cash.
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