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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?
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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.
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