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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   31616 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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Can't imagine why you'd want to chance it in a state where races can be extremely close.

I don't disagree that this is the motivation behind the current system. Black voters are much more likely to be disenfranchised because of a felony record, and that demographic heavily votes Democrat. It's true that in total, there are way more white voters who lose their right to vote, but the voting pattern of the ex-con in general is not as lopsided as it is for the black demographic. So there's good reason to suspect that allowing felons to vote would benefit democrats, even slightly, but as you note there were enough close-call elections for that to be a real risk for republicans. Therefore, it made sense for the Republican legislature to do as much as it did to kneecap the implementation of the 2018 felony voting restoration amendment. Given the demographics, it was better for the republican party to keep as many felons disenfranchised as possible than to take a gamble with election results.

As for the rest of your post, I struggle to understand how it's relevant. You post about some election precincts in Florida having problems around keeping track of ballots. Assuming these were legitimate issues, I don't see how you solve that problem by targeting individual voters who are mislead by election officials. If I understand your argument correctly, you believe that prosecuting individual felons who were mislead by the government will have a collateral dissuasion effect on other (potentially higher-up) voter fraud that could happen, right? If so that seems to me to be needlessly attenuated. Why wouldn't these investigations just focus directly on the election officials responsible instead? What kind of messaging is sent by the government taking random nobodies to jail because they were dumb enough to believe something the government told them? I don't get it.

If so that seems to me to be needlessly attenuated. Why wouldn't these investigations just focus directly on the election officials responsible instead?

What makes you think they won't, or haven't?

Perhaps they've identified possible suspects but lack sufficient evidence for prosecution?

The Electoral Crimes Unit has only existed for LESS THAN A YEAR. This is the first election they'll be able to investigate directly while it happens.

How about this, if they DO make broad arrests of various public officials based on voter fraud allegations in 2022, would you then agree that this process was justified?

I am actually predicting the opposite, I expect very little fraud to occur in 2022.

But if it does, doesn't this, by your own standards stated herein, show that Desantis was doing the right thing?

What makes you think they won't, or haven't?

Because the problems with how voting restoration works are not going to go away, as they're baked into the system the Republican legislature intentionally chose to implement. The problems that exist with tabulating the records are also not the result of any malicious behavior. The 20 people who were arrested were given faulty information by local election officials. All those local officials did was rely on faulty information that the state gave them. And as far as I can tell, the people working for the state appear to be doing the best they can in tabulating this information. For an ex-felon to get erroneously registered to vote, no one involved in the chain needs to have acted maliciously. Again, the record-keeping problems are inherent with the system DeSantis and the Florida GOP wanted to see implemented, so there's absolutely no surprise that mistakes were made, this was precisely the issue that was litigated! Again, here's the 125-page court opinion that details the problems on Pg 53:

The case of one named plaintiff, Clifford Tyson, is illustrative. An extraordinarily competent and diligent financial manager in the office of the Hillsborough County Clerk of Court, with the assistance of several long-serving assistants, bulldogged Mr. Tyson’s case for perhaps 12 to 15 hours. The group had combined experience of over 100 years. They came up with what they believed to be the amount owed. But even with all that work, they were unable to explain discrepancies in the records.

And see page 65 about the workload the state estimated for itself:

Even without screening for unpaid LFOs, all the Divison’s caseworkers combined can process an average of just 57 registrations per day. The LFO work, standing alone, is likely to take at least as long as—probably much longer than—the review for murder and sexual offenses and for custody or supervision status. Even at 57 registrations per day, screening the 85,000 pending registrations will take 1,491 days. At 261 workdays per year, this is a little over 5 years and 8 months. The projected completion date, even if the Division starts turning out work today, and even if screening for LFOs doesn’t take longer than screening for murders, sexual offenses, custody, and supervision, is early in 2026. With a flood of additional registrations expected in this presidential election year, the anticipated completion date might well be pushed into the 2030s.

So this is a system that can eat up dozens of hours from experienced staff for a single registration and still give the wrong information. There's no connection to actual voter fraud here either, because so much resources are incinerated towards a doomed mission of trying to make sense of a mess that was entirely man-made. There's no reason for me to expect criminal conduct from officials to be at play here, so there's no reason for me to expect any officials to be arrested.

The only honest response from DeSantis here should've been to admit the problem. Any of the system's supporters should be willing to defend it on its merits, and explain why the headache is worthwhile and what important interests are advanced. Instead they're taking out their frustrations on random nobodies and putting them in jail.

So if we see arrests of actual public officials, with actual evidence that said public officials were involved in voter fraud schemes, would that be something you would support?

Would that justify Desantis' actions thus far?

Just saying. This is the first year the Election Crimes Unit will be active during an election.

If they're decent at their jobs, and some amount of fraud occurs, one would expect them to catch it.

Do you think they're going to keep on arresting only Felons who got misled about their voting status?

What is your prediction, here?

So if we see arrests of actual public officials, with actual evidence that said public officials were involved in voter fraud schemes, would that be something you would support?

Sure, but I don't see any reason to believe anyone related to the felony voting restoration process acted with criminal intent. So I don't see why this should be the focus of a law enforcement agencies. Arresting random nobodies does not advance the goal of addressing voter fraud. DeSantis is using the spectre of voter fraud as a pretext to scare a portion of the electorate he does not like away from voting.

What is your prediction, here?

I predict that the voter restoration process for felons will not get appreciably easier. I predict the backlog for processing felony registration will continue to pile up. I predict that out of the million or so felons who are potentially eligible to have their voting rights restored, very few will even bother to apply, and even fewer will get approved. I predict that even the ones that do get approved to vote, even fewer will bother voting because they'll have the threat of prosecution dangling over their head. I believe all these effects are intentional.

I'd be curious to know how other aspects of the felon demographic intersect with its racial makeup. Although they are disproportionately black, it's also disproportionately male and not college-educated. I suspect it'd still solidly favor Democrats, but less lopsidedly than someone might imagine.

[I'll just repost a comment I wrote on this]

There have been multiple studies, but it's difficult to get a clear picture because every state is different and there are a host of confounding variables.

It's relatively straightforward to get a good perspective from Vermont and Maine, because those are the only states that allow people currently incarcerated to vote from prison. The Marshall Project surveyed that population and did not find that they leaned heavily Democratic.

Elsewhere however, a common problem is that it is very difficult for felons to know exactly their right to vote is restored, so many of them don't bother trying even if they are legally allowed to. If you asked me right now to answer without looking up whether felons can vote in my state, I literally have no idea whether they regain their right upon release or after a judge restores it, and I'm a public defender who has processed hundreds of guilty pleas! All I know is that felony convictions take away your right to vote, and you get it back "someday".

Besides the lack of knowledge, felons face higher hardships (finding housing, finding employment, not committing more crimes, etc) than the general population, and their appetite for voting is a fairly low priority. You can see why something as heavily publicized as a referendum on a constitutional amendment for voting right restoration would draw a lot of attention and get people with convictions coming out of the woodwork to register. In a state that is as purple as Florida and with razor-sharp electoral margins, this is bound to be a catastrophic risk that just isn't worth it for the party that expects the short-end of the stick.

Vermont and Maine are ~95% white. Their state prison populations are overwhelmingly white. It's not reasonable to infer that the same political preferences follow for the nationwide prison population.

If you read the article, the prison population was 'roughly half' nonwhite. It also claims the POCs were "20 percent identifying as black, 14 percent as Latino, 17 percent as Native American and 19 percent as Asian or other races" (which adds up to 70%?), and that they polled at 20% trump / 30% novote / 50% dem, while whites 40% trump / 25% novote / 35% dem.

Then at least one of three possibilities must hold true:

  1. The interviewed population was far broader than Vermont and Maine state prisoners.

  2. Serious cherry-picking of interviewees took place.

  3. Vermont and/or Maine have diversity quotas for their prisoner population; gangs of New England slavers roam the country to fill said quotas.

Seriously, I have a hard time picturing any state except maybe Alaska with that kind of minority breakdown in its prison population.

I agree, and would never claim otherwise. It might still be a useful sample if compared against that specific state's average. But besides that my main point is that we don't know much on this topic, and finding out more information is very hard.

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