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If I had been able to remember the specifics I'd have linked them, but (to my shame) I'm not a high enough level Motte-ian who curates a linkbank of every gotcha example of malfeasance I've ever seen (this sounds sarcastic, but it's not, I wish I had the diligence to do that).
The best I can tell you is that I vaguely remember second-hand discussion of the vote-by-mail rules getting relaxed in some purple state's senates at the last second and in questionably quorate circumstances, ostensibly due to Covid, read-between-the-lines-ibly because they knew mail voting helps Dems. For some this was seen as a smoking gun that Dems were planning massive mail fraud; I was of the more prosaic mind that they were trying to lower the effort bar so as to improve turnout rather than literally fake turnout. One is technically illegal cheating, the other is technically legal cheating, but in my mind it's the cheating makes it wrong, not which side of BureaucratSpeak Administrative State Law #16493B Subsection 17F you're on.
I appreciate your honesty about not having an example for Texas. I’m pretty sure the Northeast had some of the last minute changes, but can’t remember for sure.
Re: cheating, I don’t see how improving turnout can be considered cheating at all. In my mind the ideal election has 100% (real) turnout, and encouraging that is generally good. Allocating state resources holds some risk of impropriety, but just lowering the barrier to entry should be fine.
If that benefits one party...well, I’ll cite the Litany of Tarski.
When I see people talking like this my "Goodhart's Law" detector starts going off. An election is many things besides just a numbers game. It is (1) a public ritual in which people are seen to be taking part in collective decisionmaking. (2) An actual decisionmaking process, through which the public provides answers to questions put to it. (3) Symbolic nosecounting among the different tribes; a peaceful proxy for warfare. (4) A process by which political outcomes are legitimated.
Achieving each of those goals does not necessarily require progress along the exact same axis, labeled "number of unique ballots cast."
Require, no. Benefit from, I think yes. Which of those goals is not served by higher participation?
The public ritual only benefits.
Decisionmaking depends on whether the additional voters are, well, smarter or dumber than the original ones. If your best and brightest were already voting, I don't see much benefit. There's a case where turnout consists of one benevolent philosopher-voter who is always wise. In the absence of such, I'm inclined to vaguely gesture at "wisdom of the crowds".
The sublimation of violence clearly benefits as more potential rioters are included in the safe, sane, boring process.
Giving everyone a "voice," however small, seems like a pretty well-established way to get the stamp of legitimacy. Mostly for reasons 1 and 3. The classic alternative is divine-right kingship. If we constrain our solutions to the axis where ballots are being cast, I don't see how that justification is available.
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Harris county(the same one discussed here) did institute drive thru voting at close to the last minute in 2020 and may or may not have been totally within the confines of what state law allows to do so. They certainly wouldn't be to do so again. And the state did actually try to throw out a batch of Harris county ballots over the issue, which the county sued over, and won.
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Speaking generally, but when it comes to juicing turnout selectively in areas highly likely to yield "helpful" votes, i.e. with questionably-legal drop boxes on university campuses and in extremely Democratic districts (and even at highly Democratic-aligned events) as was done in Wisconsin, it seems a lot harder to defend.
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Ah, it's one of those irregular verbs: my clever stratagem, your underhanded ploy...
What is it about trying to lubricate the voting process that makes it 'cheating' compared to throwing sand in the gears of the same (e.g. by closing polling places or purging voter from the rolls on dubious grounds), or gerrymandering, or challenging the signatures on your opponent's petition to get them thrown off the ballot, or anything other bits of legal maneuvering used to push and pull electoral outcomes? If we're not alleging actual fraud, what is the objection?
When you do it at the last minute in response to an ideologically ginned-up fake crisis which you ginned-up in part precisely so you could do this, all the while complaining that other people aren't respecting "institutional norms".
That the praxis of Western democracy in it's entirety has become fake and gay, I suppose. Two wolves and a lamb voting who's for dinner may constitute above-board, by-the-numbers, all nice and legal democracy... but an autistic loyalty to the rules while shrugging your shoulders at the result has confused means with ends.
So essentially your argument boils down to 'my preferred candidates and policy preferences are losing'?
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So what? If it is legal and we're not claiming it fatally compromises election security, what is the problem? Is the claim that these people aren't entitled to vote?
What does that mean? It's not like Republicans can't win elections, and if the media memeplex blares out left-propaganda 24/7 in an effort to "manufacture consent"*, it doesn't seem to be succeeding.
*scare quotes mine
This argument assumes that "legal" is equivalent to "moral", "acceptable". Alternatively, the laws are wrong, and the laws that establish the laws are also wrong.
Our system requires buy-in for its continued operation. What you're looking at is the metastasizing death of buy-in. People conclude that the system is not capable of operating in their interests, so they stop arguing over how to tweak the fine details and start looking for revolutionary change.
The way to prevent this is to argue that the system is, in fact, capable of operating in their interests. Our society has failed to do this in a number of ways, so people turn to the solutions promised by extremism instead.
Alright, what is the moral complaint about enabling people to exercise their right to vote, especially given that per the initial point we are not positing a fraudulent election?
What does that mean? Do these people have the right to vote? If so, why does facilitating the exercise of that right undermine buy-in? I struggle to find a charitable interpretation for this.
Your question presupposes legitimacy-by-default of the existing, highly complex political system, when the system's fundamental legitimacy is the question at hand. Two wolves and a sheep voting on dinner is likewise not a "fraudulent election".
People ultimately judge systems by the outcomes those systems deliver. Convince a large, reasonably cohesive slice of the population that the system is not capable of delivering acceptable outcomes, and they will not necessarily argue indefinitely over where exactly the system is going wrong, but may simply scrap the system and try something different.
Two people are rolling dice, and get into an argument. The first guy claims that unless the other guy can prove he's cheating and explaining exactly how the cheat works, it should be assumed that he's playing fairly. The other guy points out that his dice win too often to be fair.
From that level of information, notably, one can't actually tell in a rigorous fashion who's in the right. On the other hand, the first guy's argument flies in the face of human psychology, of how people actually work, while the second guy's argument is exactly how people have always worked and always will. You should not expect this argument to result in a return to the dice-rolling, and you should especially not expect the dice-rolling to continue indefinately.
When dealing with vast, complex systems, people observe outcomes and judge the system thereby. Our current system has delivered unacceptably bad outcomes from a Red perspective, and it's done it long enough that there's no reasonable hope that the problem can be corrected within the general processes and norms of that system. Reds therefore demand significant, revolutionary change, and are not interested in appeals to the norms or processes that they have long-since grown to deeply distrust.
If this is still mysterious to you, try looking at how black people treat react to appeals to "trust the system" when it comes to questions about the police and justice system.
Maybe your policy preferences aren't that popular? The Tories in the UK are a far more successful party than the Democrats, but no-one from Labour whines about the conduct of elections (there are debates w/r/t FPTP, but they've popped up once or twice in the last thirty years and fade in the background very quickly). See also LDP in Japan. Sometimes you just lose.
Popularity is both meaningless and irrelevant. Meaningless, because propaganda exists and is effective, to the point that it can stonewall basic facts indefinitely. Irrelevant, because popularity is not the basis for our moral axioms.
But more than that, your question presumes that our government simply and faithfully implements the will of the public. There is strong evidence to indicate that this is not the case, that elected officials, members of the judiciary, and the unelected bureaucracy have agendas of their own, which are implemented regardless of how people vote.
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When the system's legitimacy is being questioned because of people exercising their right to vote, I think it's reasonably to ask why.
Why are they convinced of this?
The other guy claims that, but considering the other guy wins about half the time, we have to question whether or not his objection is in good faith or he is just being a sore loser.
What outcomes? Reds win half the time (frequently despite having less than half the electorate). If you mean the culture war, it turns out there's no vote you can cast or election you can win that will make your kids respect you.
You are the only one in this thread arguing that "the system's legitimacy is being questioned because of people exercising their right to vote". I'm pretty sure that you insist on this argument because it is one you think you can win. But in fact, what I and @Butlerian are claiming is that "there's no vote you can cast or election you can win that will make your kids respect you". You are willing to make that argument when it is convenient to you, and are not willing to recognize it when it is made against you.
Laws and votes are not the basis of a functional society. "your kids respecting you" is an overspecified description of the actual basis of a functional society, which we might generalize as "cooperation and compromise based on mutual respect and shared interests between a supermajority of the population". That happy state is the precondition for the votes and the elections to actually work their magic. But you don't appear to want to talk about that, so you keep attempting to collapse the discussion down to "people exercising their right to vote". I consider this dishonest, but hardly surprising at this late date.
I can't stop you from sticking your fingers in your ears and chanting "people exercising their right to vote". I can only note that such narrowly specified heuristics observably go away when the vote doesn't go the way your tribe likes; see the general angst over the electoral college, which you yourself hint at above. So it's all about the rules when the rules are convinient, and it's all about the principles when the principles are convinient, and as long as you're the umpire, you win every argument. And that's well enough, only you aren't actually the umpire. There isn't actually an umpire. There's just tribes, and conflict between them.
Two people can play dice, each win half the rolls, and still have one person clean the other out: simply have the one person's wins be big-stakes, and the other person's wins be small stakes. Simple stuff. "you've won half the rolls, it's just that I win the rolls where there's actually money at stake" is not a persuasive argument for keeping the game going.
Too many for the margin to contain, but to list a scant few: The difference in outcomes between Obergefell and Heller, as a case study for the inequities of the courts as a remedy generally. The manifest inability to control school curricula, even when you win elections, as a case study on the inadequacy of electoral remedy. The collapse of "free speech" norms and ideology once they became inconvenient to Blue Tribe culture as a case study in the general inadequacy of informal norms as a social remedy. Blue Tribe economic warfare against Red tribe as a case study in the inadequacy of economic remedy.
Blue tribe is determined to crush Red Tribe in every facet of social, economic and political life. When Reds object, Blues point out that what they're doing isn't illegal. When Reds point out that some of it actually is illegal, Blues point out that selective enforcement of the laws isn't illegal. The lesson to be drawn from this sequence of events isn't to try to draft laws better, it's to stop treating the law as though it were worthy of respect as an impartial, shared institution.
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In the specific context here--2020 election rules changes, justified on the basis of "COVID emergency"--I wouldn't be so quick to concede that they were legal. Many of the people making structural changes on a state or county level did not have the legal authority to do so, and while there were lawsuits after the fact, the bell could not be unrung.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/wisconsin-supreme-court-outlaws-ballot-drop-boxes-elections-2022-07-08/
Wisconsin's state Elections Commission approved the use of ballot drop boxes in the 2020 election. The above article describes the state Supreme Court's decision that this was contrary to the requirements of state law, nearly two years after the fact.
Did the people responsible go to jail? Did they suffer any consequences at all?
Does the letter of the law matter if it isn't followed? Does the letter of the law matter if the punishment for breaking it is a shrug and a sad face, maybe a brief soliloquy about how mistakes were made, whaddayagonnadoaboudit?
Despair is a sin. There is no bottom to that pit.
I've read your posts for several years, and found them to be eloquent and far far more painfully persuasive than I wished. I do not have a factual rebuttal for the broad sweep of your arguments that either of us would find adequate. I'm not here to blow sunshine up your ass, but for your own sake, please don't reject the ability to see hope when (or if!) it arrives, even in the smallest amounts.
We should not hope only when it is reasonable to do so. Perhaps the horse will learn to sing.
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This is always horrible. The petition requirements should only be there to prevent random nutters with no support from making the ballot massive and unreadable. Anyone who's expected to get 5% should be allowed on without question.
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I wouldn't consider this to be a republican tactic, given that it was the VRA that enshrened it into law.
I don't know what relevance this has to my point, which is that it seems weird to identify lubricating the voting process as technically legal but actually illegitimate while ignoring the myriad of other technically legal things done to de facto disenfranchise voters unless you are alleging that it fatally compromises election security.
The VRA and associated case law impose specific requirements on how you draw districts with respect to minority populations. They do not in any way mandate the partisan gerrymandering you see in numerous states (including, prominently, Texas).
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Not to mention that "gerrymandering," both the term and the practice, predate the founding of the Republican Party by several decades. Elbridge Gerry, the politician that the term was named for during his lifetime, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and later Vice President under James Madison. The Republican Party wasn't founded for fifty years after Gerry's death. Ironically in this case, Gerry was a member of the precursor to the Democratic Party.
It's tedious when people get so worked up over gerrymandering. The practice is universal and has been for literally centuries. It's also better than the alternatives, because those either rely on myths like "actors outside the political system" or reduce accountability to the electorate, or both. Gerrymandering is aesthetically ugly, but better that than moving to systems more prone to capture.
Or you decrease the size of districts such that it becomes harder to effect certain results based on demographic projections. If the original first amendment had been fully ratified, we'd have congressional districts an order of magnitude or more smaller than what they are now. Much easier to draw compact districts when they're that tiny.
True, though you end up hitting scaling issues wherever you end up on that balance. Larger districts put more distance between the citizen and his representative; smaller districts make for a different mix of coordination issues at the elected level. I realize this is moving away from strict "how to draw district lines" analysis, but there are second and third order knock-on effects.
This was one factor deliberately introduced that contributed to different organizational cultures in the US House and US Senate. The House was always the larger body, with correspondingly smaller districts (in most cases). While there were other factors adding to the effect and some ebb and flow over time, the presiding member of the House always had more centralized power than in the Senate, due to how the coordination issues were resolved differently.
Over the past couple of decades, the Senate has shifted organizationally to become closer to the House; one reason I find Senator Sinema (D-AZ) interesting is that she appears to be an institutionalist who wants to reverse that trend and bolster the individual-Senator prerogatives against Senate leadership.
If House districts were downsized substantially, increasing the size of the House accordingly, a strong institutional effect would be to empower the Speaker, other House leadership, and the parties. The House is already prone to party-line voting now; this change would push further in that direction.
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Gerrymandering has been around in some capacity for centuries, but a) that's not a defense of an odious practice b) it is false to say that it is universal. Numerous states have independent redistricting commissions and even when they don't they don't always gerrymander.
Relative to what? I would remind you that hardcore partisan gerrymandering is a relative novelty and for a long time one of the major aims of gerrymandering was protecting incumbents. And what basis do we have to think gerrymandering is superior to boundary commissions?
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Do you include computer / algorithmic generated districts that use compactness and county / geologic boundaries to compute and score districts?
I've seen proposals I would prefer to those drawn by committee.
Yes, I'm familiar with the "set rules, draw by algorithm" method. (And there are rules that people find generally agreeable for this process; compactness and existing political/geological boundaries are good examples.) One issue is that when you make a list of popular and well-justified rules, it becomes hard to simultaneously satisfy them. The bigger deal is that someone has to code the setup, and someone has to approve the result, and these are capturable positions. Unfortunately, it is very very hard to make a job "apolitical" and also retain accountability in cases where a partisan sneaks in--Madison et al. tried their best at this exact problem with judges, and various controversies with the judiciary only emphasize the limited success you can have.
...There's another, and much bigger problem, though. If you district by naive algorithm like this, Republicans win the districting process an overwhelming majority of the time. The reason is the actual, on-the-ground political map--Democrats tend to cluster in cities, Republicans dominate the towns and rural areas. The goals with political gerrymandering are sometimes known as "packing and cracking"--pack one district with all the opponent voters you can stuff in, 90%+ if you can get it, and crack other concentrations between districts, with no more than 40-45% opposition. If your opposition is already clustered, packing and cracking are much easier to accomplish using inoffensively shaped districts.
If compact districts favoured Republicans as much as you think they do, then Republican legislatures would draw maps with compact districts. The fact that Republicans are drawing salamander-shaped districts suggests that the bias inherent in compact districts (which is real) isn't enough to satisfy them.
Incidentally, if you measure bias as "who gets more seats when the popular vote is a 50-50 split" then the largest natural bias is the one if favour of the party whose safe seats have lower turnout.
...or that there are other considerations in play, such as that it's been illegal for them to do so for some time, in large part because of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which mandated racial demographic consideration (a requirement for gerrymander) and federal approval of changes (an obstacle to breaking it). Federal preclearance was only voided for a number of Republican-controlled states in 2013. There has literally only been 1 census cycle, and one congressional district reorientation, since then.
At which point you not only have the specter of (already ongoing) lawfare, but the secondary implications of working from the inertia of already-existing political subdivisions, like state counties, which themselves are often the anchoring points of congressional districts, and the political power structures that exist within and amongst these that interacts with what the legislatures can do. Even if an entire legislature was held by the Republicans, just the nature of the patronage network disruption and individual self-interests would make it a fratricide-heavy environment to pick the winners and choosers.
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I agree it's hard to fill any political position with non-partisans, not too different than what we have presently.
I also agree it's difficult to 'optimize' for many inputs / variables simultaneously.
Given that; I think having a set number of candidate maps perhaps with different measures of compactness and / or different weightings of the well justified rules. The apolitical / political could then vote / choose among the candidate maps. This I believe would still be a more apolitical and transparent process than what we have now.
That members of one party may choose to live in cities, disproportionately, doesn't strike me as an argument in favor of not adopting a more transparent process. Nor do I find the argument that if we don't gerrymander, Republicans win, convincing.
With regard to voting on a selection of maps--one of the issues here is you can get pretty big effects from nudging lines a relatively small amount, or at least what looks like a small amount from looking at a map. As a practical matter, voters are just going to be considering big-picture aesthetics, and no matter how you rigorously define a "fair map," the difference between a fair map and an artfully-drawn map is really difficult to detect, much more so than I'd expect voters to want to master. It's actually a strong example of a policy area better handled through representation, which just takes us back to politically-drawn maps.
I should explain my last point better. It's not that there's a problem with Republicans winning a disproportionately large amount of the time--I would cough prefer that, myself. The problem is any specific party winning way more reliably and more often than relative vote totals suggest they should. Even if--as here--it would only be a result of neutral rules applied to the aggregate of people freely deciding where to live, the disproportionate result looks and feels unfair, which undermines popular happiness with the system and societal stability. Some of that is inevitable! But elections are supposed to generate results broadly reflective of underlying support over time, and an institutional skew in one direction cuts against that.
From the maps I've seen i don't know that Republicans would be more likely to win in cities. I think they would be more likely to win in rural districts areas that sometimes include pie slices or slivers of the nearest city.
My preference would be to have the computer nudge the line based on publicly available inputs, weightings and published algorithm. Now the line is nudged due to a wink and a handshake or a horsetrade to keep / make a safe seat.
I'd rather argue over the inputs and design of the algorithm to be used over the entire state than the boundary or shape of any specific district. I'd expect wins and losses in any redistricting. If you believe compact non-gerrymandered districts would benefit Republicans that suggests to me they're disadvantaged presenty.
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The usual ‘better idea’ than gerrymandering seems to be proportional representation, which is probably a poor fit to the US political system but for reasons other than the ones you’ve just described.
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And challenging the signatures shouldn't count either, because you shouldn't have to be in power in order to do it.
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