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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.
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.
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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