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PaperclipPerfector  25d ago (text post)   29199 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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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.

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.

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.

And all dropboxes will be monitored 24/7.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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"

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:

  • Narrow timing of in-person voting, sometimes just a single day that I couldn't make work
  • Long lines on occasion, or at least uncertainty about wait times
  • An inability to pre-fill choices on my own time and then go in person to quickly transfer them to an official ballot

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.

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.

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