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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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The argument is that the actions Republicans take do not increase election integrity, and are instead aimed at adding hoops to jump through that may reduce voter turnout among groups that typically vote Democrat.

Those all sound like eminently reasonable election safeguards (possibly except for the in-county restriction, maybe because I live near the intersection of 4 counties; in-state should suffice), and would be easy to comply with for anyone of any race or background, and it seems racist to suggest otherwise. If some communities need to be better educated on election procedures, that does not seem like an insurmountable obstacle, and I'm sure there are organizations dedicated to voter awareness that would be happy to help them.

I don't agree with that.

Early voting would give more time to count votes, thus increasing election security.

Photo ID = either it's the person or it's not. There's no reason to be any more restrictive than is necessary to establish identity. Creating a fake ID to cast 1 extra vote out of 100 million would already be a large waste of time. Also, when I said they only disallowed SOME forms of ID, I mean only the forms of ID democrats would use, like student IDs.

Same day registration I don't see as a problem to verify.

Provisional voting I could see being used for fraud, but that also make it trivially easy to check provisional votes for double votes.

Pre-registration I see literally no way to use for fraud.

If anything, mail-in votes would be the most likely way to commit fraud, and they were untouched by North Carolina after they found whites used them.

I don't agree with that.

Is your agreement required for something to be reasonable?

Early voting would give more time to count votes, thus increasing election security.

This is incorrect, and the reasons why are precisely why international election standards focus on consolidating votes received early with strong chain-of-custody measures, but only opening and counting concurrent to election day.

Counting votes in advanced of election day provides increased opportunity and incentive to compromise election security by informing the people who could/would commit fraud that it is either unnecessary (in which case they don't expose themselves to risk), or likely to be needed (in which case they have more time and ability to prepare to act without being noticed, and scale their intervention more carefully). Without the foreknowledge, rigging becomes more prone to obvious abuse, as after-the-fact interventions after delayed revelation are easier to notice and expose due to increased scrutiny on election night and increased reliance on heavy-handed measures (such as freezing counts to insert more ballots before resuming, seizing the records of the talley counts and later releasing unverifiable numbers, and so on).

If you are a party that would conduct election fraud- a position that requires you to have both the interest and the ability to act on the interest with reason to believe you can pull it off (which generally requires already being established and domiannt)- early voting increases your interest (by letting you know you're at risk of losing your positional advantage if you don't cheat) and your ability (by letting you have more time to prepare / act without notice / scale your means of intervention) to cheat.

This is also the reason why long vote-counting periods are bad for election security. Instead of 'taking time to be careful,' it instead allows parties more time to intervene while dragging out public attention and creating more opportunities to act than a shorter time period would.

Photo ID = either it's the person or it's not. There's no reason to be any more restrictive than is necessary to establish identity.

This smuggles in the assumption that a photo ID is sufficient to establish a valid identity. This is incorrect.

A photo ID is simply a photo tied to a set of credentials, not a guarantee that the credentials are valid for all purposes. Particularly when photo IDs are issued across valid and invalid criteria without distinction- such as a driver's license that doesn't actually address citizenship or registration- various forms of ID, photo or otherwise, have no categorical compliance with voting criteria. If you can use a particular ID to vote, but don't need to be able to vote to get a particular ID, the ID itself has no validating function in whether you should be permitted to vote, even if it is actually you.

And this in turn doesn't approach database correlation. A form of ID may not be registered or applicable to a relevant authentication database in a way that provides appropriate tracking and authentication. For example, a driver's license number can only validate against a database of driver's license numbers. Unless that database is actively set up to also note which elections the person tied to the driver's license is actually enrolled in, it provides no indication that the person is a valid registered voter in the state, because all the database can provide is 'this is a driver's license.' Most voting systems are not setup to provide this, which is why ID is used to verify that someone is an individual, but then the individual is checked against a local roster rather than an ID database.

Creating a fake ID to cast 1 extra vote out of 100 million would already be a large waste of time.

This assumes the only reason to create a fake ID production or dissemination process is to cast 1 extra vote, or that 1 fake ID only enables 1 extra vote, or that a fake ID is required for a fraudulent vote, or that 1 extra vote is in a context of 100 million. This would be incorrect, on all ends.

To pick just one example- if you automatically enroll people with driver's licenses to vote, but also issue driver's licenses to non-eligible persons (as Oregon did), then a real ID of a real person would flag as a valid voter no matter how many fraudulent voter IDs were issued.

Also, when I said they only disallowed SOME forms of ID, I mean only the forms of ID democrats would use, like student IDs.

This is not an argument of disenfranchisement, this is an argument that non-standardized partisan-correlated voting IDs like student IDs should be used in the first place.

This is absolutely contestable.

Provisional voting I could see being used for fraud, but that also make it trivially easy to check provisional votes for double votes.

This is incorrect, as many systems do not have means or methods to actually check for double voting across jurisdictions, and this is separate from the desire to on the part of those who would need to.

If your voting station marks down that you voted via a tally mark on a piece of paper, it does nothing to check for double voting unless there's someone else, sometime later, who actually puts it into a system to check against other databases. And if that database does not touch the correct other database that could identify an issue, it still does nothing.

If anything, mail-in votes would be the most likely way to commit fraud, and they were untouched by North Carolina after they found whites used them.

I am always happy to find a new mind reader in the American populace, unless you happened to have some other evidence that the distinction was driven by racism rather than something else.

Like how South Carolina is a ballot harvesting state and thus has a different entrenched political interest setup than non-ballot harvesting states. Or that there might be different legal considerations involved in terms of surviving legal challenges. Or that South Carolina has a significant military recruitment demographic, and so there is a higher than normal socially-accepted basis for significant out-of-state voting.

Is your agreement required for something to be reasonable?

No? It was an introductory statement which I laid out my reasons for.

Counting votes in advanced of election day provides increased opportunity and incentive to compromise election security [...]

That all assumes that voter fraud is reasonably achievable and the only issue is needing more time to adequately prepare. That premise has yet to be established and even if it were, the reaction to that knowledge should be change the process such that they cannot achieve that regardless of having an extra few days.

This smuggles in the assumption that a photo ID is sufficient to establish a valid identity. [...]

This is a neat trick of dismissing an opposing argument while missing that it detracts from your own argument. Your argument is that you need to do 2 things in order to vote:

  1. Establish an identity

  2. Establish that the identity is able to vote

Your argument following that is that doing 1 does not do 2. Okay, but the fact that you still need to do 2 has nothing to do with whether or not you've done step 1. They already do check that your name and credentials is registered, so 2 is covered. And even if it weren't, changing which IDs can be used to establish 1 does not change how step 2 is performed according to you. If your argument is that step 2 is insecure, then if the N.C. legislature were truly trying to increase security and not disenfranchise voters it seems like they should have focused on that, no?

This assumes the only reason to create a fake ID production or dissemination process is to cast 1 extra vote [1], or that 1 fake ID only enables 1 extra vote [2], or that a fake ID is required for a fraudulent vote [3], or that 1 extra vote is in a context of 100 million [4]. This would be incorrect, on all ends.

To pick just one example- if you automatically enroll people with driver's licenses to vote, but also issue driver's licenses to non-eligible persons (as Oregon did), then a real ID of a real person would flag as a valid voter no matter how many fraudulent voter IDs were issued.

You do a bit of a gish-gallop here. I put numbers above to show the 4 arguments, but you only respond to 1.

  1. Doesn't sound like North Carolina is enrolling all drivers to vote, so probably not relevant. And even if it were, automatically registering people when they get a driver's license != registering everyone just because they got a license and not checking eligibility.

  2. Why would it not? And even if not, then the problem isn't with checking the ID.

  3. As with 2, if they aren't even using an ID, then messing with the requirements to use an ID won't fix this.

  4. I threw a semi-random number out there because most people talk about election fraud in the context of Presidential elections. While election fraud should still be caught, election fraud only really has consequences if it changes who/what wins, which it takes way, way more than a single vote to do. You have to commit it at scale for it to achieve anything at all.

This is not an argument of disenfranchisement, this is an argument that non-standardized partisan-correlated voting IDs like student IDs should be used in the first place.

What? If the reason it was disallowed was because it was most used by one party, then it absolutely was an attempt at disenfranchisement. That's tautological. Either you can vote or you cannot, and the ID proves your identity or it does not. If a form of ID previously was good enough to prove a person's identity, then I would say the onus is on the people removing it to argue that it's not secure.

If your voting station marks down that you voted via a tally mark on a piece of paper, it does nothing to check for double voting unless there's someone else, sometime later, who actually puts it into a system to check against other databases.

Then you'll be happy to know that they literally do go back and check. And they sometimes prosecute people for it if they believe it was intentional.

I am always happy to find a new mind reader in the American populace, unless you happened to have some other evidence that the distinction was driven by racism rather than something else.

It was North Carolina BTW. And what you sardonically refer to as mind-reading was the N.C. court of appeals looking at all the actions performed and all the actions NOT performed at the same time, and taking into consideration that the legislature had the data they could use to disenfranchise. They came to the conclusion that their actions lined up too strongly with what a biased actor would do to reasonably assume a coincidence.