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With Milwaukee County giving other areas of the state the heads up that they're going to be reporting their final results after the rest of the state is done, I'm expecting another episode of whatever this is.
To clear, I'm not darkly hinting - I expect Milwaukee to count things up late, I expect that Milwaukee is 80% Democrat or higher, and I expect a similarly goofy looking curve to result. Republicans will look at this as obvious fraud, Democrats will look at it as a totally normal thing to happen with a large tranche of D votes dropping late at night, and it might be enough to push Evers and Barnes to victories. I don't really have a strong opinion on whether anything shady is actually happening, but I think it looks awful and should have been reformed as soon as the bizarre 2020 result happened. This isn't even difficult to do - nearby Dane County has almost as many absentee ballots, but counts them quickly because they don't centralize the process. No one familiar with Dane and Milwaukee Counties will be surprised that Dane's handling is fast and efficient while Milwaukee's is comically ridiculous and damages trust.
I maintain, the best way around this trying to glean information out of vote totals almost minute by minute is simply that no vote tallies are released anywhere until all counting is complete. There is too much noise for anyone watching externally to know whether something is legitimate, fraudulent or just weird. All it creates is the opportunity for narratives to be fitted (either way!) We can do reveal parties with Red or Blue cakes or balloons or whatever.
The switch over doesn't happen for months. There is no need to actually know on the night who wins what.
I would also advocate mandatory free federal government IDs for all citizens, mandatory ID checking for voting and mandatory voting. Massively reduces opportunities for fraud AND boosts democratic legitimacy because everyone has to vote. Hits the Republican "make it more secure" AND the Democrat "Don't disenfranchise people" buttons. Then we can really see how America would vote as a whole.
I have reservations about mandatory voting, but if implemented, I think it might have the effect of improving the quality of the national political conversation.
Basically, I get the sense that, at some point around the late '90s, national political campaigns came to understand that changing someone's vote from R to D (or vice versa!) is actually really hard, and it's more effective for the D campaign to encourage high D turnout. Driving D turnout requires impressing upon D voters that the upcoming election is crucially important, which means convincing D voters that an R victory will be a total catastrophe (the end of democracy).
Mandatory voting would change campaigns' incentives to reward actually changing voters' minds, which could help lower the temperature in the country.
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Mandatory voting would permit massive law enforcement harassment, particularly if the mandatory voting is only in person (as insinuated by your id-check requirement). With that said, I think the free government ID and mandatory ID check to vote, plus "make election day a federal holiday" and "standardizing election days" would all be good ideas.
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Mandatory voting is probably unconstitutional and is in any event likely to be hugely unpopular with Republicans, since conventional wisdom is that Republican demos usually have better turnout.
Likewise, free federal voter IDs are likely to be opposed on pragmatic grounds (e.g. NC voter id laws, which were targeting at obstructing Democratic demos) and on ideological grounds (federal voter ID means federal voter ID database).
I know, that's why I had both in there. Things both sides want as well as things both sides don't want.
Almost certainly will never happen of course. If you want really good security when voting that means a Federal database. One pulling from the IRS and other things so that people who move are properly tracked. It's pretty much how it works in the UK when updating the electoral register we could pull directly from death registrations, Council Tax info, the equivalent of Section 8 (housing benefit records) and the like. If you want to be sure someone is eligible to vote in place A and cannot vote in place B, then you need to track where they are and when.
It would be a bitter pill for both parties to swallow, but also gives them something they want. Higher turnout for Democrats and Increased security for Republicans. Whether it is unconstitutional wouldn't be a problem because in whatever world we were in where both parties agreed the compromise they would have the ability to make an amendment or just kludge it at the Supreme Court level. That world just to be clear is not this world though.
It seems to me that this could be accomplished without compelling states to do anything - create a federal database, assign federal IDs, allow states to participate on a voluntary basis. I would certainly advocate that my state sign up for it, and by participating in such a system, you could increase confidence that your state isn't getting illegitimate voters.
I am vigorously against compulsory voting because I think the marginal non-voter is (to be blunt) an absolute moron. I would generally prefer driving down participation in any way that doesn't seem likely to cause social upheaval. Of course, at some point we're bumping into the more basic question of what the point of democracy is in the first place, but none of the answers that I come up with make true universal voting sound appealing to me.
Morons are citizens too. Smart productive citizens can navigate whatever setup happens. Morons should have a say in making sure their society is set up for them. Democracy isn't about getting the best answers in my opinion. It's about getting the answers that work for the majority of your people. And those may be stupid and counterproductive. And that is ok.
I've heard an alternative take, which is: "Democracy is how we get different groups of people with widely-varying value systems to live in the same place without violent conflict." It's like, every N years, we have a mini civil war, except instead of actually shooting/stabbing/punching each other, we just line up everybody's troops on opposite sides of the battlefield, and whoever brings the biggest army wins, and we all agree to go home without bloodshed until the next regularly-scheduled civil war.
One can argue that there's no point in including people who are indifferent to politics in this process, because they're not the ones likely to start an actual war over anything.
On the other hand, one can argue that if we did make everybody show up, the issues being discussed would be more mainstream and less fringe. Wedge issues like trans rights, gun control, and abortion might be much less salient.
That definitely is another consideration, agreed. I think though that people's level of disengagement of politics can be a warning sign. They might not start a war, but they may very well opt out of the social contract entirely, if they feel they are not represented.
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I read /u/walterodim as saying something like “Whether or not anything shady is happening, it’s going to look like it is. My point is that this appearance is bad in itself. However, I don’t want to get sidetracked into an object-level debate about whether anything actually shady is happening, so I’ll refrain from expressing a view on this” (probably because they have neither time nor inclination, something I can empathise with).
That was more or less my feeling, but here I am, getting sidetracked anyway! That anyone looks at that 2020 graph and thinks, "yeah, probably a good plan, let's run it back with no changes" is wild to me.
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That was my understanding as well.
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The 2020 election had quite a few actual irregularities in addition to the aesthetic I presented, such as a quarter million people doing an end-run around normal ID procedures by claiming to be indefinitely confined. The sitting governor has consistently vetoed bills targeted at reducing fraud; in some cases, I think the pretexts for doing so are incredibly thin and it mostly just comes down to oppositional defiance. Edit - In other cases, I think the bills are pretty stupid, I'm not saying these are all good measures.
If you want me to state my best guess, it's that I don't think there is very much actual vote fraud in Wisconsin. My reason for saying that I don't feel strongly about that position is that while I don't see great evidence for there being widespread vote fraud, I don't think it's great that we have a system that plausibly could be exploited and actual results that are pretty weird looking. In my dream world, we'd knock it off with the adoption of mass mail voting, or at least knock it off with the loophole that allows avoiding identification. Given the current procedures, I have no idea how you'd go about detecting many types of fraud; if I moved out of Wisconsin next year, it seems like I'd have zero trouble continuing to vote in Wisconsin and the governor opposes measures that would prevent that.
So again, I don't personally think there's actually widespread fraud, but I think we're going to have shaky optics and plausible reasons for Republicans to be pissed off.
I agree. I don't think that was actually legal and I'm highly skeptical that these people actually confined themselves to their homes indefinitely, but I will absolutely grant that this is both the mostly likely reason for the spike and could reasonably be tolerated in 2020. My complaint isn't that it was tolerated in 2020, but that this loophole wasn't closed in 2022, which gives the appearance of bad faith and allowing avoidance of IDs.
They actually did. There probably is some cogent explanation for the weird patterns there, but they are actually are weird!
Again though, I really don't need to relitigate 2020, I would just strongly prefer that we stop using a system that's more or less guaranteed to get results that have terrible optics when it's pretty easy to just not do that. The refusal to correct these sorts of things is actually more suspicious to me than anything that I see in 2020.
It was a recent switch. Note that the other two counties in the initial picture that were still counting (Brown and Kenosha) are also on the list of counties that switched. I'm sure there is a logistical reason that they wanted to do so and it probably simplified something, but it seems more like it should be, "we tried that and it worked poorly" than something that has to be maintained for historical reasons.
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