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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30108 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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I'm aware. I'm not being cynical or manipulative when I say that this is a very bad thing and is exactly why secret ballots are an important piece of social technology. Mail-in ballots enable coercion, manipulation, theft, and vote-buying. That this claim is controversial when it's mechanically obvious is a product of partisan propaganda.

This is a drum I've been banging for a while, but what struck me here was Marcotte walking right up the edge of it, even using the words "secret ballot", but not even mentioning the solution.

Sure, what I was pointing to was this being another case of evil white men that probably aren’t white in the real world.

I'm from Colorado, and I've had mail in voting for basically my entire adult life (the bill was passed in 2013), and I would be immensely disappointed if we ever got rid of it. For me, it is and was the status quo and I would not enjoy a change in the social contract because of some heady intellectual concerns.

I can understand some of the concerns people had in 2020, with sudden, massive changes to many states' voting systems, where there might not have been adequate provision in place to ensure that it wouldn't be a massive magnet for fraud and questionable tactics. However, I tend to think that in places where mail-in ballots are the norm, it's not so much of an issue. I fill out my ballot, drop it off in a box under 24 hour surveillance, then check online to see that it has been received. It's all a very straightforward process.

There are certainly good arguments in favor of the secret ballot, but America had public ballots up until the 1890's, and that in itself didn't cause any major issues for the country for most that period. Mail in ballots are more private than voting was in this period, but less private than walking alone into a voting booth, and I don't actually think there's a compelling reason to prefer one to the other. If gathering ballots is such a big concern, pass some laws regarding that, but leave mail in voting alone unless it becomes obvious that it is an issue in practice in a given state.

America had public ballots up until the 1890's

I've told the story of the "Australian ballot" here before:

When Australia was colonized by the Brits, they used it as a penal colony. Of course, they didn't go full Lord of the Flies with the convicts, but sent good, upstanding Brits to run the place and maintain good order. After serving out their sentences, many convicts did have the option of returning to Britain, but lots of them chose to stay. They were free citizens, but obviously, their jibs were cut a bit differently than the better class of good, upstanding Brits who were sent to run the place. The convicts were even free to run for elected office, and some even did. Yet somehow, confusingly, even as time went on and there were many more freed convicts than there were good, upstanding Brits, none of these convicts ever won any elections. Maybe everyone just realized that it was better if good, upstanding Brits continued running the place.

Other folks disagreed, and they managed to implement the 'Australian ballot', where each individual's vote would be totally, completely secret. Suddenly, magically, freed convicts began winning elections and were able to curtail some of the harshest abuses curious practices of the good, upstanding Brits.

The Australian Ballot was first introduced in Victoria and South Australia in 1856. Being adopted literally halfway across the world only forty years later is a testament to how compelling the idea is to solving genuine concerns.

I understand that you've had mail in voting for a decade and that you personally have not encountered any issues with it. But basically right before you got mail in voting, international pro-democracy organizations had all agreed that in-person secret voting was basically the only way to do it. If you expand your scope beyond an extremely-restricted, probably high-trust (and high-other-things) setting, there are plenty of reasons to significantly favor an actually secret ballot.

However, I tend to think that in places where mail-in ballots are the norm, it's not so much of an issue.

On what basis? Vote buying is a common practice and coercion is common all around the world. On the contrary, I think the only thing that has prevented this from turning into a much more obvious mess in the United States is that it hasn't been the norm and the machinery wasn't fully in place to take advantage of such a vulnerable system.

...but America had public ballots up until the 1890's, and that in itself didn't cause any major issues for the country for most that period.

Yeah, and vote buying was famously common! Notably, the husband-wife dynamics discussed in Marcotte's article weren't a problem yet anyway. I don't like Amanda Marcotte, but I think it's pretty obvious that she has a point about spousal coercion.

I think the reason vote buying isn't the norm is that it's basically illegal and more importantly, the amount it'd take to get any high number of American's to 'sell' their votes is pretty high. Yes, you can could get a promise from a bunch of people to sell their for vote for $100, but actually getting proof and such before sending payment would be a much more complicated scenario, when it'd be actually much cheaper and efficient to get more people to support you to turn out.

Whatever you'd spend on the former, is far better spent on just getting low propensity people within your own coalition to drop off their ballot in the dropbox or mail.

Yes, if you're a poor country and selling your vote can pay your rent for a month, that's one thing. America is too rich for that.

Are you familiar with walking around money? People don't actually need to be paid very much to do things. There isn't actually much of an attachment to political positions for most people.

Sure, getting people out to vote by paying them is one thing - but verifying they're actually voting the way you want is a whole other thing. Obviously, if you do that in a D+80 area, the few Republican votes you'd end up is worth it, but we're talking about payment for legitimately changing their vote.

The sorts of people who would vote for money aren't the sort that would vote republican, except in deep deep rural areas.

Why not? By hypothesis, the targets of such a scheme would have to be pretty apolitical, or at least not fanatically partisan. What would make them any harder for one party to buy off than the other?

Because such people would be the dregs of society, and the dregs of society don’t like republicans very much. Inasmuch as democrats can get more of the underclass to vote, they benefit.

That's the whole thing with mailin ballots + harvesting though -- if you weren't going to vote anyways, and some nice person shows up at your door to 'encourage' you to fill out your ballot, it's not too hard to imagine this leading to a conversation in which said person 'helps' you choose the right options. Which could plausibly lead to cash changing hands if this person is, say, co-ethnic and establishes some kind of trust relationship.

There are a lot of people willing to do weird illegal things for trivial amounts. Pill mills were paying their patsies like $100/mo.

and that in itself didn't cause any major issues for the country for most that period - though I understand the concerns that eventually led to the adoption of secret ballots in most of the country.

If one reasons that since it took so long for the secret ballot to invented, it is thus not that of an important part of democracy, same could be said of women voting. That was enacted even later, so it is even less crucial.

I agree that women voting is not an essential part of democracy, though I support women's suffrage.

I'm partial to the empirical arguments from Garrett Jones' "10% Less Democracy", which argues that if you look at indexes of democracy and compare them to a variety of measures of well-being, it is not the case that the most democratic countries have the best outcomes. There's some floor of democratic-ness above which outcomes tend to rise, and some ceiling above which outcomes become bad again.

I think fiddling with secret ballots probably isn't worth it, as long as you're empirically above the floor of democratic-ness with all of the other policies you adopt.

Also, machine politics was the norm for most of that era in any city big enough to be worth looting. The secret ballot helped make maintaining the machine more difficult.

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