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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   31618 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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Can you please connect the dots from “punishing people for trusting bogus information” to “ensuring government officials are trustworthy”?

At the most basic level this thread is about whether "a government official told me I could do X" ought to be considered an affirmative defense for illegally doing X. @ymeskhout appears to be taking the position that, yes it should, but to me this position seems untenable. To flip your scenario on it's head, If a cop pulls me over driving without a no license or insurance on a car with expired tags and I tell them that the lady at the DMV told that I didn't need any of that stuff, would you expect the cop to just say "my mistake" and let me go on my way? I wouldn't. Fact is that regardless of whatever some unnamed official at the DMV might have said, the cop has his own instructions.

There's a line of thinking here (Scott's posts on In Defense of Fauci and Bounded Distrust being central examples) that seems to go; the public trust is a public good ergo there is a moral obligation to trust public officials regardless of the truth value of their statements.

While this makes a certain amount of inductive sense if one takes the view that hierarchies as imposed, and that public officials are on the balance impartial. In practice it creates an environment that erodes trust because what real incentive does some unnamed official have to ensure that they get things right?

and I tell them that the lady at the DMV told that I didn't need any of that stuff

This discussion has been particularly frustrating because it seems that people are just assuming facts about a system they're not familiar with. This is not a case of a felon caught voting claiming someone "told" them they could vote. The problems with Florida's voting restoration system have been well known for a really long time. It would be helpful if you were at least somewhat familiar with the system, and you can learn a lot by just skimming this court opinion. 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.

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