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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30111 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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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.

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