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I think that a lot of people are under the impression that "wait until everything goes back to normal" is a viable strategy for dealing with whatever their pet problem happens to be.
I think the fundamental problem with that is confusing the symptom for the cause. It's certainly possible that Trump is uniquely causal of this voter ID thing. But I wouldn't bet on it going away after he dies. And I think the basic skepticism of election integrity (on the right, but also on the left from time to time) predates his POTUS run.
I don't think things are going "back to normal," if there ever was such a thing.
@Shrike
@TequilaMockingbird
You both cite Voter ID, along with many other commenters in this thread.
Voter ID has been a fight in American politics since I can remember, and I'm sure it was around before that. Georgia passed Voter ID in 2005. Did Trump accept the result of the election in Georgia?
Arizona has had voter ID from 2019. Did Trump accept the result in Arizona?
Wisconsin's Voter ID law took effect in 2011 (aside: I love the website name Wiscontext). Did Trump accept the result in Wisconsin?
Michigan requires photo ID. Did Trump accept the results in Michigan?
It's pretty obvious that "pass a voter ID law" isn't going to fix things. And we can play various forms of "true voter ID has never been tried" with things like National ID cards showing citizenship or an American version of the Hukou system to register where everyone lives, but there's no actual push to implement that, and those kinds of government registries that allow for more direct Federal control over people's lives have been considered a Bad Thing by Republicans at all levels for generations. Given the repeated failures to implement RealID, we're probably not going to see a successful implementation of National ID any time soon.
Voter ID : Election Integrity as Police Body Cams : Black Lives Matter. It's a reasonable sounding procedural change that will ultimately change nothing.
But even if we agree on Voter ID, normally the conversation moves on to mail in ballots. The venerable @Rov_Scam has done the Yeoman's work and extensively outlined how mail-in ballot changes were passed, in many cases by Republicans to benefit Republican constituencies like the rural elderly and the self-employed. The only state to implement mail-in balloting by executive action in 2020 to go for Biden was New Hampshire. Which...actually I don't know of any Trump efforts to overturn the result in New Hampshire. If it happened I don't think it got a lot of press? I'll note that personally, I do not vote by mail, and I dislike vote by mail systems in general, because I don't trust myself to successfully fill out paperwork and my handwriting is atrocious, it is worth taking a few hours off during the day to make sure my ballot is counted. I'm also pretty sure that the most powerful constituency in American politics is Nursing Home Aides, who even leaving aside actually filling out ballots for their charges, can simply decide to "lose" the mail in ballots for residents whose politics they know to be antithetical to their own. I'm surprised neither side has promised massive pay increases for them yet.
Then the argument shifts to more subtle/secret Democrat manipulation schemes, but as we saw above there's not much pattern to R control of state government or D control of state government in terms of accusations of voter fraud.
But to return to our list of states above, let's zoom in on two: Georgia and Arizona both had R Governors and R State Houses. There was, obviously, an R in the White House for four years before the election. Both states had voter ID laws implemented before the election. Both states went for Biden, and despite extensive efforts neither state's results were ultimately overturned. Given that outcome, why should we expect implementing Voter ID laws nationally to lead to Trump and friends accepting another election loss, should it occur?
This is a very poor choice of example given the widely reported issues in Maricopa county and the obvious conflict of interest invovled in the person in nominal charge of the count also being a candidate.
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I really don't think there was anything in my post that suggests that adopting voter ID laws will Make The Problem Go Away, but I do agree(?) with you that my use of voter ID was imprecise at best. (I'd say the pause in the election count was worse for Election Integrity Vibes than the state of voter ID laws – most people don't care to grok the nuances of voter ID law but they are impatient to know who won the election.)
Fair. I didn't think you considered voter ID a complete solution either, I just focused on it to dig into one point.
Fixing perceptions/actualities of vote counting unfairness in blue machine run cities is either a coup-complete problem or near enough that it makes no difference. It requires probably allowing/forcing city government to annex suburbs such that the political unit becomes significantly more ethnically and politically balanced, but idk if that is remotely politically or practically possible. Any procedural changes short of that will still leave too much room for unaccountable actors to exercise influence on the process. Certainly it is not achievable by anyone by November.
At the end of the day it's very hard, in my mind, to square the anonymous ballot with election security, since the only way to be 100% certain that someone voted for a person in an environment where fraud is possible is to ask them.
I'm sure smart people can come up with a system using cryptography that preserves anonymity and ~guarantees secure elections, but most people won't be able to verify the security of the system themselves, so it's not actually helpful.
A slightly lower-IQ (and easier to understand) solution might just be to make all voting in-person and have a video feed that keeps a running headcount, and tally the voter headcount with the votes at the end of the day, or something like that. (I actually imagine similar measures are already used, though, but I've never looked into it.)
But at the end of the day I think the problem is more vibes-related. This is detached from whether or not the vibes are onto something or not – you can have a situation where lots of voter fraud doesn't cause a legitimacy crisis because it's not suspected in a high-trust environment, and you can have a system where there's a crisis of legitimacy because people suspect that elections are being rigged even if their security is airtight.
I'm not sure there's a way to fix a vibes problem quickly. I suspect the only way out of that is through.
I think it’s possible. If you have a barcode on an object that allows you to track it across a network, and you don’t necessarily have To know what the contents are. UPS can track millions of packages from warehouse to multiple locations to your front door by scanning the barcode on the box and uploading that to a server. Blockchain can be tracked without needing to know what the “package” contains or represents. This isn’t a ned to invent new technology. We could do things like this now with pretty muc( off the shelf technology. Scan the barcode on every ballot on paper at the point it’s cast. Scan every time the ballots move. If you see ballots arrive that cannot be traced to a precinct, then you’re likely seeing fake ballots.
Yep, that definitely makes sense to me. I think the point of failure there is "Okay, how do we prevent someone from backdooring the entire system and just filling in fake data?" And while I suspect there are answers to that, I'm not sure they are answers everyone will buy in a low-trust environment.
This doesn't mean interventions like this aren't worth doing, though. Perhaps that's precisely what's needed to end Voter Fraud Discourse, I don't know. I just expect that simply rolling some fancy whiz-bang foolproof and fast voter counter Rube Goldberg machine won't by itself be enough to Save Democracy – you'll need to prove that it works, and that might take many election cycles.
I mean wouldn’t that just be plain old ordinary network security protocols. I’ll agree that you aren’t going to get to 100% trust here, but the point I’m making is that we can do a pretty good job with similar things all the time, yet somehow in the case of securing the election, it’s like there’s a bizarre mental block where it’s not worth trying to do these kinds of things because we won’t get to 100% trust or 100% hack-proof immediately. We trust that kind of technology to get packages around and to validate property transfers and bank transfers all the time. Nobody I know is thinking that UPS is going to lose their packages. The big problem isn’t UPS losing packages, it’s porch pirates.
Now secondly, providing that you keep the original ballots, finding the back door hack is dead easy because you have the data that produced the original count, and if you recount the same ballots, you get the same numbers and if you don’t, there’s a problem. There are also fraud detection techniques that are known in statistics and forensic accounting that would be fairly useful in determining whether the results on the computer are likely fraud. Even if none of that in isolation is enough, if you do good chain of custody, have good network security, have the original ballots, and use forensic accounting and data science, this system would probably be more secure than most other systems that we use daily. At some point, it’s good enough.
And I think a lot of the distrust is exact that nobody is willing to put forth the effort to secure the election to the same standard as even my Amazon order. In fact, when someone tries to add a layer of security, even fairly common sense stuff like government IDs, the resounding answer is NO. And so you can’t shakes the suspicions because it often looks like the government is hostile to the idea of making the system harder to tamper with or vote without having the right to do it.
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Indeed. The problem is that the people who don't want voter fraud discourse just want the people engaged in such discourse to accept fishy procedures and results, and there isn't really a good way of doing that. They've tried everything from jeering them in the media to inventing novel legal theories to imprison advocates of such theories for long periods, as well as disbarring and otherwise cancelling some of them, but while that may silence a few, it doesn't convince very many.
But have they tried them hard enough. If the current level is silencing "a few," then why wouldn't doing more of this silence more people? And thus, intensify the jeering, the cancelling, the jailing as necessary until the problem goes away.
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How does voter ID work in connection with mail in ballots
Usually you write the ID number somewhere on the ballot, ie. Putting your driver's license number on the inside of the outer ballot.
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You'd have to ask the Republican majorities in PA and GA that passed laws allowing for extensive mail in voting while also advocating voter ID laws.
It'll always be something.
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