This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Pennsylvania's Commonwealth court just ruled that ballots that are in Allegheny or Philadelphia must be counted, even if they are undated or misdated. This only applies to ballots submitted on time, purportedly. The takes that I've generally seen online are that this is evidence that they have plans for fraud. The court argued this, though, on the grounds that dates are unnecessary, as the counties have other means of telling when votes were submitted (I think they scan a barcode when received). But what's certainly a problem is that this decision was written to apply only to Allegheny (where Pittsburgh is) and Philadelphia counties, the two counties that contribute the largest margin to the democrats. Given that they estimate that around 75% of mail-in ballots are for democrats in Pennsylvania, the most mail-in ballots are from suburban and urban voters, and that around 10000 ballots were not counted for that in 2022, this could have the effect of aiding the democrats by 5000 votes or so. Thankfully, this is only 0.07% of the vote, so not all that likely to be decisive.
The other interesting feature of this case is that the court ignored non-severability provisions, which said that if any provision of the act, or its application to any person or circumstance, was held invalid, the whole act is void. They did so merely by arguing for a presumption of severability in Pennsylvania laws, despite the explicit language to the contrary in this case. Voiding the act would have thrown out the entire mail-ballot system. Them striking down part of it, but not the whole thing, against the explicit text, seems the most sophistic part of the whole thing, to me.
This can still be appealed to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. It's blue, though, so I'm not expecting changes. Thankfully, it doesn't seem like, barring fraud, the effect will be too large.
Edit: Make sure you read the comments of @Rov_Scam, where he argues that I'm not representing this accurately or completely—I don't want to be misleading.
I find most relevant the announcement from Pennsylvania's Department of State:
What an odd thing to say. So hire more workers, run campaigns, do everything necessary to ensure you have the results. If significantly poorer, significantly less bureaucratically competent and on-the-whole significantly less organized and civilized countries can manage elections in single days, the continuing tolerance of statements like this -- statements that are expressly narrative primers for fraud -- in the Union is so goddamn insulting. They have the ability, we know this objectively from other countries, and we know from this statement they could but decline to do so. This is ostensible incompetence at counting ballots covering for a highly competent fraud machine.
The general upside is they'll lose the national regardless of fraud in Pennsylvania. The dream upside is they lose the state while posting so many precincts with actual and effectual >100% turnout even the laziest audit torches them.
I'm going to be very blunt - they are lying. Everyone knows this is a lie. While changes to results aren't dispositive with regard to rigging, they absolutely constitute evidence of rigging. All else equal, it is much better that results be immediately obvious and transparent to all. Preemptively lying in this fashion is additional evidence of rigging.
More options
Context Copy link
The way the systems are designed really affects how they are counted. I know Arizona allows for day-of dropping off of mail ballots and requires signature verification, which slows things down, and so it can take a few days to be entirely finished. But Florida's way faster.
More options
Context Copy link
One of the things I find most irritating about gish gallop election fraud claims is the way they breathlessley move between theories that assume the theft of the 2020 election was something that Democrats had been planning for months and that it was something that was done at the last minute after they realized Trump was going to win. Somehow, your post seems to capture both of these sentiments simultaneously — the PA Department of State is planning on rigging the election, but it's apparently impossible for them to do so without a couple extra days on the back end. How this is supposed to work is beyond me.
What has to be understood about this discussion is the American left is better if they commit electoral fraud. It means they believe what they say, that they really do view their opposition as so grave a threat -- to whatever they hold sacred -- they are willing to take extreme measures to protect themselves. That left, who speaks and acts with capricious concern for constitution and law, have spent most of the last decade giving every indication they would steal an election if necessary, and you are calling them a unique kind of liar. You treat them with a cynicism even the most lefty-hating righty commentators don't hold. You won't find MacIntyre musing on the left not believing in what they march for; 0HP might observe on the meta their level of investment in a given position but he wouldn't categorically reduce the movement to having no conviction in what they say they believe. Hyde's most famous lines all implicitly consider their being genuine believers and Carlson knows them as zealots and speaks of them as such.
"They don't need to" begs the question in assuming they haven't. They needed to for most of the 20th century, we know they had fraud machines dominating major cities during that time, through JFK. What, they just stopped? As the economy exploded and the US reached ever greater hegemony, the corrupt interests packed up? Of course not, the system put selective pressure to produce the sorts of bureaucrats and politicians who don't get caught, and who exert control within their hierarchies such that the system further protects their ways of corruption. Pivotally on the election, which when we look at your field of arguments they fall apart one by one until you're left with "Well despite all that, they didn't." A process that produces a quantity result that cannot be audited is necessarily unfalsifiable. In literally any other circumstance an unfalsifiable number would be presumed false. Why not elections? Why not the thing that decides who has power?
"It hasn't been a problem until now," yes, and until the last 10 years the American government hasn't been in a dead sprint toward anarcho-tyranny. We haven't had such material reason to believe they would defraud a nation until now, and raising the novelty of our concern is not an argument.
"Gish gallop" is also not an argument, nor is your false dichotomy. Even you, which I say apropos your ideological inclination, must understand in the pure hypothetical, fraudulent actors would face extreme risk if they went all-in on flooding the machine with fraudulent ballots before the results are known. If they undershoot they lose, if they overshoot they hazard blowing past the polling margins while producing rows of precincts with ≥100% actual or effectual turnout and thus reveal themselves. It's no stretch to understand this as a priming of the narrative, something that requires no knowledge on the part of the individuals in the PA DOS responsible for actually making that statement, as the fraudulent actors anticipate as, like 2020, they will need some number of fraudulent ballots delivered after midnight November 6th, which is when they will have the totals so they will know the approximate number to inject to stay within the polling margin.
As for arguments from complexity, I wrote on this about a month ago. American history has immediate examples of conspiracies involving very large numbers of actors who never came forward. With "democracy and the future of the country" at stake, the ideological component of conspiring for the greater good is more than fulfilled. But this is just a reiteration of the above, that the only argument is "They wouldn't." They would, and their failure and now continued refusal to build a system that proves they don't is the only evidence anyone needs on the matter.
If I had to guess about you, and of course I am probably wrong, but I know this is the case for my brother and a couple of my dearest friends and so I know for many others -- I know they think my view, this view of the world is very bleak. They don't want to live in a world where the American left needs to cheat to win. There's a frightening finality to it, an upheaval of fundamental beliefs about the way of things. I definitely understand if nothing else the discomfort they have at the Trump Right being the good guys, which they feel is the necessary consequent to admitting a stolen election, but it isn't. Everybody can be and often are wrong about many things, like viewing me as a pessimist. I know I'm more optimistic than anyone I know, I don't think anyone on this site is as optimistic as I am about the future, and my optimism does include anticipation of a very dark period, but I see us getting past the issues of today, without war or calamity, I see us reaching the singularity and becoming post-scarcity and settling the stars. The shadows in the hearts of men don't discourage me, they embolden me, I know we'll make it through, but I know we'll make it through by understanding the world as it truly is. The world is what it is, reality is, all unaffected by our perceptions and by what we want to be true rather than what is true. The things we know in this life that are worth loving and worth working for all still exist, and we love them as they truly are even if we're not quite right about what they truly are. They exist in a world that does have shadows, they exist in great spite of those shadows. We just can't ignore the shadows. Know them, name them, chase them. Win.
Really? I've been among mainstream lefties my entire life and I've never once heard anyone say that elections should be stolen if necessary, whether from personal acquaintances or any mainstream media or political figures. Of course, you never claimed that they said as much, only that they gave indications that they believe it, which is whatever you subjectively interpret that to mean. Anyway the sum total of your case is as follows: 1. Leftists gave "indications" that they were willing to steal an election. 2. Democratic politicians had fraud machines in major cities 60+ years ago. 3. They couldn't overshoot their fraud or they'd get caught, 4. Big coordinated secret campaigns have happened before.
What you haven't presented is any real allegation, let alone real evidence. Give me a name or names and describe something specific that they did and how it affected the vote totals. Then provide some kind of evidence, whether documentary or testimonial. If Trump were to have won the 2020 election I'm sure I could have come up with just as many broad, vague, unprovable allegations as to why the Republicans rigged the election, were I so inclined. Give me something like "The Bubb County Judge of Elections commandeered 1500 mail-in ballots that the postal service returned to his office as undeliverable and marked them for Biden. As evidence of this we have copies of the ballots themselves, which all have signatures which an expert concludes are from the same pen, and email from the judge to his secretary telling her to hold onto any returned ballots, the testimony of the secretary stating that the judge instructed her to put the ballots into the office safe, and testimony from the assistant judge saying that he wanted to consult with the county solicitor on the matter of what to do with the ballots but the judge told him not to worry about it. This would create a strong, though not dispositive, case of fraud.
One thing all those have in common is thousands upon thousands of pages of documentary evidence. There's no way you're running a complex fraud operation across five states involving hundreds of local boards of election and doing it all with in-person meetings that wouldn't arouse anyone's suspicion. What makes you think the people counting the ballots are all ideologically motivated to the point where they'd be willing to commit felonies? Seriously, if your employer asked you to commit a felony for ideological reasons and promised that you'd totally get away with it, would you do it? I know people who actually counted ballots in Allegheny County. They're county employees who don't make a lot of money. They also hate doing it and look for any excuse to do their regular jobs on election day (one supervisor described the tedium of testing thousands of voting machines as they moved them out of storage). Even if you assume they were all paid off, that amount pales in comparison with how much money they'd make if they were able to present a credible case of electoral fraud. It wouldn't even be that hard to prove either since you'd have to hold huge training sessions with handouts and Power Point slides. I know you're going to come back at me with some supposition on how they destroyed the evidence and how every employee in Allegheny County is a Democrat and whatever but unless you can actually prove any of this, I don't want to hear it. Just show some real evidence or quit making the allegation.
How do we have a discussion when you ignore the evidence staring you in the face? The evidence of fraud is the inability to audit results. If a corporation's books have unauditable numbers year after year, people will go to jail. Why is this not the standard for American elections? You repeatedly present the tautological "They wouldn't cheat; they aren't criminals." You don't get to claim this, one you could know every single elections department worker and poll worker and poll volunteer in Alleghany County and it still wouldn't be an argument, and two, it is insultingly untrue to present the institutional American left as having a moral compulsion against breaking the law, most definitely including "felonies." (Also, Pennsylvania was won in 2020 by Philadelphia, no matter how great your familiarity with the mechanics of Pittsburgh politics, it says nothing about the notoriously corrupt Illadelph.)
Maybe 100 years ago a guy could make it through court by taking the stand and saying "I'm just not the type of guy to have done this." Today, that guy would go to prison. I see the retort, "If there's no evidence" -- there may be no murder weapon, but there's means, motive, and opportunity. Circumstantial evidence yes, people do to go prison over circumstantial evidence, but I only make this comparison for the lack of investigation when any one of these meets criteria. A system closed to audit is means; the transferal of executive power is motive; a dominant ideology among poll workers is opportunity. There should be investigations in every state at a minimum every 4 years. I'd support it in my blood red state, as would almost if not universally the voters in this country who could characterize themselves as if nothing else "not left." Yes, when Trump wins in November, voice your doubts, clamor for investigation, I agree. We should audit every election, in every state. Prove it, everywhere, every time. Behind you 100%.
As for paper trails, we still don't know the depths of MKUltra because Helms had so many records destroyed. We know very little about the CIA's drug smuggling because they learned to keep looser books. They don't need records, they would need conversations, those surely happened, but if nobody's recording, nobody goes to jail. Also keep in mind MKUltra included mid-20th century-cultured-American university personnel giving highly psychoactive substances to individuals who did not consent. Stopping the next Hitler from getting to power? C'mon man. It's also feasible for disparate and especially mostly unwitting actors to converge on one goal. Atlanta is individually corrupt, Detroit is individually corrupt, Philadelphia is individually corrupt. Not hard to see their local corruption being incidentally congruous with a separate national objective. But to be clear, I do take somewhat more to the former, I would argue for some level of national conspiracy, insofar as on election night in 2020, the knowledge Trump was to win was received by a central source and propagated to those separate necessary parties who oversaw the injection of fraudulent ballots. There are also assumptions of numbers, we don't know the process, it is closed to audit, we have no idea if, were we able to examine the system, we would find a glaring "at this step it'd be trivial for a handful of actors to introduce significant numbers of fake votes."
And here we return to the inability of audit as proof of fraud. If an electoral system cannot prove itself to be free of fraudulent activity, like the mass injection of fraudulent ballots, that is itself an act of fraud. I describe a criminal act when saying of the system "It can't be audited," that is itself a crime. Though, even without this, you remain wholly mistaken on where the burden of proof lies, and on this I put most vital emphasis: I owe you nothing, the people owe you nothing, because myself and more than a hundred million of my fellow Americans are under no obligation to prove ourselves when we fear the government as having become criminal. The government however is obligated not only by the intrinsic bindings of our nation, but by the very essence of the social contract to prove, whenever demanded, that they aren't criminal. If they can't, they are.
Before when go any further, what do you mean by "inability to audit"? The last I checked all but 6 states had audit provisions. If you want to make that argument, fine, but you have to apply it to all states equally, so unless you can tell me what it is in particular about Texas's audit procedures that make it better than Pennsylvania, I'll have to assume that Trump only won Texas due to fraud, no? I'd like to respond to your other points as well but I need this cleared up first.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Respectfully, I think you're conflating two entirely separate mechanisms here. Actions taken at the state level do not require coordination at the local level, even if the actions taken at the state level can enable actions taken at the local level.
We know that Pennsylvania, and in particular Philadelphia, is unusually corrupt. So corrupt, in fact, that a former congressman was recently convicted on election fraud charges.
It is entirely possible that the department of state is not rigging the election. It's also entirely possible that the department of state is pointedly not taking steps to assure that other parties do not engage in illegal activities.
At the local level, we already know that actors have wildly rigged elections in multiple Pennsylvania precincts already. Are we supposed to ignore that evidence and not factor it into our priors? Given that the constant media drumbeat of "Trump as Existential Threat" has been banging for close to a decade now, are we supposed to believe that nobody might bend the rules (again, still)? Especially when it's for the Greater Good? Especially when we know that the supposed watchers are looking the other way?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If people are engaging in fraud what makes us think that they will be willing to steal an election but balk at back dating their fraudulent ballots?
I think we shouldn't be relying on the date the voter puts on their ballot at all. In Bayesian terms, it's not very good evidence one way or the other.
But the law apparently required the State to give it credence. Which is silly.
More options
Context Copy link
Excellent point, you're right, I shouldn't have mentioned it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This seems like a pretty good scenario to go back to the basics: ballots should be counted if the relevant authority can be assured they arrived on time should not be counted otherwise. The remaining effort is on how to ascertain that for a given set of facts.
If an early MIB arrived on October 15th and the relevant authority has strong assurance of that (it went into a chain-of-custody and blah blah blah) then not counting it because it was dated wrong seems unjustified. Other fact matters might lead to different conclusions.
The obvious answer would be to knock it off with the gigantic piles of no-reason absentee ballots and just hold a normal election.
There are real concerns with absentee ballots, the inability to date them is hardly the most salient.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This seems reasonable.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I addressed the mirage of this decision only applying to Allegheny and Philadelphia counties below. As to the severability question, any severability or non-severability clause in a statute is going to be ignored by courts. This has been true for a long time, in every jurisdiction. Courts in Pennsylvania and elsewhere have all but completely invalidated these clauses. If this seems sophistic to you, there are legitimate public policy reasons for the courts' stance. Consider the following: Congress passes a law with several provisions that are clearly, unequivocally, unconstitutional. The law also includes a provision saying that if any part of the law is ruled unconstitutional than every law passed by congress since 1890 is unconstitutional as well; the ultimate non-severability provision. I don't think we disagree that it would be ridiculous for a court to uphold such a provision. Now lets consider a less dramatic and perhaps more on-point example. Suppose the PA election law that was at issue here was part of a comprehensive electoral reform bill that completely replaced all prior election law, which was repealed in a separate bill. The new law includes a non-severability provision. Should any successful challenge result in the complete scrapping of an entire state's election laws? If there are clearly unconstitutional provisions in that law, should the courts be forced to either let them stand or concede total electoral chaos? There's obviously a line here somewhere, and the courts have repeatedly ruled that the only way to determine where it is is on a case-by-case basis. They strike down entire laws only when it's clear that the problematic provisions are essential to the law itself. They aren't going to let legislatures poison pill their way into keeping unconstitutional laws on their books.
The entire state’s elections wouldn’t vanish overnight because the non-severability provision would also apply to the part of the comprehensive election reform law that repealed the prior election law.
The statement that courts ignore severability is also absolutely wild, considering severability questions have been a major part of many Supreme Court cases (which is relevant, considering your example related to Congress). I’m not going to go trawling for more, but off the top of my head, this was the case for the NFIB case upholding Obamacare and the Reno case that effectively created the modern Internet by invalidating almost all of the Communications Decency Act.
I’d also agree with @anti_dan that it is reprehensible behavior even if it were true, so it shouldn’t matter if it is truly some norm amongst judges, as you claim.
I specifically said that they repealed it in a separate bill.
I'm not going to regurgitate it here, but Stilip v. Commonwealth (905 A.2d 918, 970) goes into an extensive analysis of why courts aren't required to strictly interpret clauses relating to severability. It basically boils down to a separation of powers issue: The legislature can't dictate to courts how they will analyze a case. They can provide such statements to demonstrate intent, but that's as far as it goes. The US Supreme Court ruled similarly, IIRC, in a case where the statute said that the court would use strict scrutiny as the standard of review, and the court basically said that you can't legislate the standard of review. The cases you reference are just examples where the court applied severability provisions. There's no conclusive ruling stating that courts are strictly bound by that language when deciding severability questions.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
While your interpretation is what the courts actually do in practice, I find it fairly reprehensible. The court doesn't know that the severability clause (terminating all American law prior to 1890) isn't what the legislators actually wanted in the beginning. They are engaged in mind reading by not sticking to pure textual readings and saying "this is what the legislators told us they wanted".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Applying vote counting rules only to specific counties has shades of Bush v Gore and equal protection. Not that that case was supposed to set precedent. 🙄
Could this one go all the way to SCOTUS? Even if Pennsylvania's court doesn't change anything, they could.
Well, at least it set President (ba dum tss)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
On what grounds did the court decide that this ruling only applies to those two counties?
Short answer: They didn't. The declaratory judgment invalidating the strict dating provisions as unconstitutional applies to all 67 counties.
Long answer: The plaintiffs only sued Allegheny and Philadelphia Counties. Since those counties declined to defend the suit, the Republicans (the RNC and the PA equivalent) intervened as defendants. They then filed a motion to dismiss on the basis that the plaintiffs failed to join all necessary parties. Civil procedure requires that certain "indispensable" parties be joined in a lawsuit. Typically this is for stuff like contracts involving multiple parties or property with multiple owners, where the court needs to sort out what everyone's rights and obligations are. The defendant intervenors argues that since any declaratory relief would apply to all 67 counties, the plaintiffs should have joined the other 65. The court didn't buy this argument; the plaintiffs said that the reason they only sued 2 counties is because those were the only counties where they had knowledge that voters were being harmed by the dating provisions. If the court had dismissed the suit on the grounds that the plaintiffs hadn't joined all necessary parties, the plaintiffs would have refiled the next day naming all 67 counties as defendants. At that point, the 65 counties who weren't sued the first time would have moved to dismiss for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted, and the court would have been forced to grant those motions. The court didn't say this in so many words, but suffice it to say that if a court knows that an action against a party won't survive a motion to dismiss, they're loathe to find that party "indispensable" to the proceeding, especially if there are 65 such parties. The court can't issue injunctions against non-parties, so injunctive relief was only granted against Philadelphia and Allegheny counties by virtue of them being the only named defendants. The technical distinction is that they've been specifically ordered to stop something they were already doing. We officially don't know if the other counties were doing anything offensive to the state constitution or not, but the declaratory judgment clearly delineates what they aren't allowed to do in the future. Pinging @urquan since his comment touches on these issues.
Please use more paragraphs, they make text much easier to read.
More options
Context Copy link
Makes sense, thanks for the clarification.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think just that only those two parties were part of the suit.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think this election will provide evidence for or against the 2020 election fraud narratives.
How? Because some states, but not others, are now taking action to prevent election fraud. And if Republicans outperform expectations in those states it would indicate that Democrats were benefiting from fraud. It's a natural experiment.
Virginia seems to be ground zero here. The Republican governor, Youngkin, has directed that the voter rolls be purged of people who are dead, non-citizens, or have moved out of state. Tens of thousands have been purged. To further prevent fraud, they will only allow paper ballots, and the machines that count the ballots will be tested and not connected to the internet. People will need to request an absentee ballot instead of mass mailing of ballots. And all dropboxes will be monitored 24/7.
All of this stuff is basic common sense and should be standard practice.
The fact that many states don't take these basic actions is sort of a wink-wink-nudge-nudge, "there's no fraud, but also we're going to make it incredibly easy to do fraud". There's a good chance that this election will come down to how much cheating happens in corrupt cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee.
So I wouldn't be surprised if Trump outperforms polls in Virginia. I also won't be surprised if he doesn't. Whatever happens, it will be a good opportunity for me to update my priors.
One of the things I find most irritating about these "Voter integrity" narratives is that they operate on the assumption that states have crappy systems while the people making the arguments have no idea what the systems actually are. I can't speak for what Virginia's laws were like before Youngkin, but the fact that only "tens of thousands" of voter's were purged after his directive suggests that things were actually running like they were supposed to. I live in Pennsylvania, a state that's often accused of shenanigans and was in fact so accused earlier in this very thread, and they purged nearly 300,000 voters from the rolls in 2020. There was nothing unusual about this because they "purge" a similar number every year because that's how many people die or move away every year. While I wouldn't expect some rando on the internet to know that, I would expect a gubernatorial candidate to know that before he says the state of the PA voter rolls is so messed up we need to do a total purge and require everyone to re-register. OF course, it's easy to keep track of people who move out of state if you're part of a multi-state system that keeps track of these things. Youngkin, however, decided to remove Virginia from the ERIC system, following the lead of other Republican-led states who were convinced by conspiracy theories about it being some evil Democrat vote rigging scheme. How these states plan on eliminating those who move elsewhere from the voter roles is currently anyone's guess, but election deniers would prefer to ignore that.
Again, Pennsylvania was doing this before 2020. Voting machines were never connected to the internet. I'm unaware of any jurisdiction that hasn't tested voting machines before an election, at least in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
I highly doubt this is the case. The most obvious concern about dropboxes is that someone could break into them and destroy the votes. This is not something I've heard the election deniers express any concern over. Instead, they express vague fears that the dropboxes will enable ballot harvesting that is somehow a vector for MASSIVE FRAUD. They might have an argument if the only place to cast these ballots were the dropboxes, but these are mail ballots. Every mailbox in the state is a potential ballot dropbox. If someone is going to ballot harvest they can just put them in a mailbox on the street, or mail them from their house for that matter. I doubt Youngkin is posting monitors at all public mailboxes, let alone monitoring households and businesses.
This sounds like an argument for increasing security around mail-in voting in addition to monitoring dropboxes more closely, not an argument that the dropboxes don't matter?
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, if states are doing this, then great! But let's be honest. Not all of them are. There are constant exposes about dead people on voter rolls.
Here's an article in which BBC "debunks" claims about dead people voting, then acknowledges that dead people did indeed receive ballots and maybe even vote, even if the maximalist fraud claims were untrue: https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54874120
Given everything we know about state and local governments it's very unlikely that they do a good job maintaining clean voter rolls. Presumably the 80,000 people removed by Youngkin was opposed to the counterfactual of a Democratic governor. That's like 1% of the population of the state. It's big. But I'll admit that reporting on these issues is very low quality.
Personally, I think it's important to get this right, and to not dismiss concerns that people are voting illegally. You want people to buy into the system? Don't make them feel cheated. We need to have clean voter rolls. And we need to be able to easily prove that they are clean. To my knowledge, no states are doing that. The example of Michigan's effort to be transparent (in the linked BBC article) shows how badly managed these systems can be.
Caesar's wife must be beyond reproach.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
won't this just be proof that Republican efforts are effective voter suppression which is what Democrats claim they are
Yes, suppressing the rights of the dead, the out of state, the non citizen and the ballot harvesters. How much did these factors matter? We’ll see.
To be maximally charitable, the requirement to request an absentee ballot does make voting harder, and thus constitutes suppression of legitimate (i.e., 18+, living, compos mentis, state-resident, US citizen, voting-once-per-election) voters—at least according to some people’s definition of “suppression”
Going further down this line of reasoning, anything less than electoral officials bringing a mobile voting booth and ballot box to your front porch would be "supression". At some point voters should make the smallest of efforts to enable themselves to vote for the sake of practicability and in support of election security.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I found this incredibly frustrating in all the discussions on the topic. I get "look, we can't overturn the elections on the basis of your sayso", but the lack of acknowledgement of the sad state of American election integrity was driving me bonkers.
I think the flip-side is, the lack of acknowledge of the frictions of voting are also frustrating.
Both are valid, IMHO. We have a system that manages to be both awful at integrity and awfully painful to use.
Can you elaborate on what friction there is to voting where you are? I am in Texas and I find it ridiculously easy and painless to vote here.
Well, these days I live in a deep blue state that's completely eliminated friction at the enormous cost of serious doubts about the integrity of the election. But before, I'd say the largest friction points were:
You can 100% pre-fill choices on your own time and use the sheet in the voting booth in Texas(supposedly strictest voting laws in the nation), don’t know about other states. You just can’t use your phone(it must be physical paper) and need to research the races ahead of time.
Ideally I would want to get a machine readable version so voting in person was as smooth as possible.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
VA is a bad test case to use, because it's got a giant tumorlike amalgram of the worst kinds of Never Trump Republicans around defense installations near DC.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link