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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   29944 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 1, 2024

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Bruh, this idiotic “so I guess (a bunch of crazy shit I don’t believe)” is tiresome.

Yes I believe in the secret ballot. I do not believe that the option to do mail in seriously erodes that.

Less antagonism. You've been warned about this repeatedly. Next time is going to catch you a ban.

I've asked at least 5 times in this thread for folks not to reply to a post saying X with "oh so you believe Y and Z and beat your wife". That seems like the minimal amount of non-antagonism required as well.

And if we defund the police. Crime won’t skyrocket. If we get rid of the SEC - no one will insider trade. If the MLB isn’t enforcing bans on steroids then even those who don’t want to do steroids will (like Barry Bonds a later user) because the players getting ahead are cheating. Maybe I just know more people who are willing to cheat that if you remove the enforcement preventing cheating that people will cheat.

If you remove the enforcement even if society is 99.5% trustworthy those who abuse the commons are going to rise in power.

I do not believe that the option to do mail in seriously erodes that.

I’m going to jump in to ask, why?

I agree that VBM by itself doesn’t really enable classic vote-buying: if someone offers you money to vote a certain way, sure the buyer can verify your ballot before it goes in the envelope prior to handing over the “wages”, but you can easily get another ballot (unbeknownst to the vote-buyer), vote however you want, and invalidate the previous ballot.

But the examples given above (spouse pressuring spouse, filling out ballots for non compos mentis elderly relatives) seem to be much easier to pull off when mass VBM is the norm. To belabor the point re: the spouse example, if you live with someone, you presumably have access to their mail and can see whether they have received another VBM ballot with which to try and evade your spousal pressure to vote a certain way.

Not to mention, “ballot harvesting” seems vulnerable to unscrupulous harvesters steaming open the envelopes, changing the ballots that don’t vote for the right candidate (e.g. by filling in all the bubbles, so the ballot gets rejected) and then re-sealing the envelope.

Those are all valid points!

I agree that there is the possibility of fraud in VBM, but the original bombastic claim was that VBM is itself intrinsically fraudulent:

mass-mail in voting is considered fraud by historical Democratic principals [sic]

There is a huge difference your nuanced points and this blanket statement.

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