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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   31617 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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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.

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