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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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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.