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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28724 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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Naive policy engineering again, American electoral reform edition:

Team Red claims to want "reinforced" elections, where the risk of people casting a vote who shouldn't be able to is minimized or eliminated. A common proposed mechanism is to use state IDs to validate that the holder has the right to vote in that state or federal election, and (I imagine) to enforce one-vote-per-person. They prefer the decision to be biased in favor of minimizing false positives at the cost of increased false negatives and possibly true positives.

Team Blue opposes this with rhetoric about wanting to maximize access to the electoral systems at all levels. They prefer to maximize true positives and minimize false negatives at the cost of false positives, the symmetric opposite of Red, as in all things.

Left unstated is the assumption, seemingly held in common by both Red and Blue, that people who have a hard time obtaining state IDs are likely to vote Blue.

A compromise solution seems to exist, and I don't understand why it's not being pursued: increase funding for voting accessibility programs, in exchange for tighter requirements for voting authorization. Have, literally, a list of people who were born in state, can't be accounted for as having left the state, and authorize a spend of $10k or whatever to find them and Get Them Registered No Matter The Cost.

One thought: spending on this is a continuous value, whereas a policy state IDs as a bearer authentication token are boolean. Fine, hold state IDs out as a carrot, and offer improvements in, I don't know, signature matching in mail-in ballots.

In summary, two symmetrical problems exist, there exist opportunities to progress towards solving both of them, no serious efforts are being taken. Why? Per the meme, are they just stupid?

Of course they aren't stupid. They both know that both sides will start bending the new regulations to benefit them as soon as the bill is signed, so they don't bother with creating new opportunities.

Yes, an impartial benevolent dictator could rule by decree and create a mandatory national ID that requires a proof of citizenship to obtain while at the same time requiring a sufficient amount of polling stations in every populated place plus making the voting day a holiday or moving it to Sunday.

This wouldn't really change the result. California wouldn't turn into a battleground state if all illegal immigrants were 100% prevented from voting.

Republicans don't really care about election security, so the idea of spending piles of money to improve election security is unappealing to them.

and...

Democrats dont really care about poor people, so the idea of trading minor barriers to voting to improve the lives of poor people is unappealing to them.

If the parties were honest about what they cared about, it would be obvious to trade voter-ID for a program that provided grants and assistance to people for getting IDs. But they're not honest.

South Carolina offered free rides to voters to get their IDs, all of 22 people took advantage: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/nikki-haley-s-south-carolina-to-give-rides-to-22-voters-to-get-photo-ids

North Carolina's current iteration of Voter ID includes providing IDs to voters for free.

When you make a sweeping claim that someone is lying, you should at least do a little work to back it up. Throwing similar shade at the other guys doesn’t make that any better.

I think as far as elections go it’s fair to say both parties just want to win and they requires getting that 2% of the population marginal vote.

I don’t think either party has any strong belief about Democracy being the true “good” versus their ideology, own power, own profits being the “good”.

As far as this post goes I think GOP has taken steps to make ID’s free and more available because I think they rightfully belief getting people to show up on Election Day strongly favors them. And that left rightfully believes that even if we had a secure way to get you ID for free at 7-eleven in 5 minutes they would on net lose votes on Election Day.

And it has a lot to do with the barbell strategy for the Dems now of winning the college vote and winning the bottom 20%. They think they dominate the demographic that can’t hold a 9-5 job which in tight elections do change elections.

The thing about Democracy is you never like everyone in your coalition. But you can’t win without them.

If either Democrats or Republicans really cared about the poor and electoral security respectively, they would call the other on their reapective claims. This equilibrium only holds if they both don't value what they claim to value.

What does “calling each other on it” look like? Sponsoring bills, even if they won’t go anywhere? Making it the flagship of the latest spending bill? Whatever this shit was?

You don’t have to believe politicians hold ending poverty or getting everyone to vote as a terminal value. But they clearly are willing to expend time, effort, and money on the subjects. Dismissing that as “not caring” is sophistry.

I think the answer is, ironically, the thing team Red always says about government overreach: giving the government the power to do something new is dangerous because even if the guy currently in office has a perfect plan to do it well and you trust him not to misuse it, the next guy could do anything he wants with it.

Giving the states the power to take away voting rights or put restrictions in front of voting is just a really dangerous thing to do, because it gives politicians a lever they can use to manipulate elections. This isn't hypothetical, we've seen it in the past with poll taxes and the like, and spent decades/centuries of vicious fighting to reform the system to prevent it.

I'm sure you could propose a system right now which, if implemented correctly, would improve the calibration of the system and get more true votes while excluding more false votes. If we imagine a benevolent philosopher-king with pure motives and perfect ability to see his will implemented, that is indeed not hard to do.

But government programs rarely see perfect implementation, what if the normal bureaucracy and stupidity gums up the works and makes is chaotic and inefficient in ways that lead to more lost votes?

What if that bureaucratic chaos preferentially affects a demographic that's aligned with one side over the other? (ie, what if poor people get screwed over because they have less power to object, which is what ussually happens for all government programs)

What if some non-benevolent actor takes advantage of that bureaucratic chaos to make things a little less efficient in the constituencies of their opponents, suppressing their vote (as we already see with things like number of voting centers, the hours they are open and whether they get shut down for weather, etc)?

What if 10 years from now you still need a voter ID, but a new politician cancels all the provisions you put in place to make them easy for everyone to get?

What if 20 years from now you still need voter ID, but a new politician decides that english should be the national language so the 20 pages of forms you need to fill out to get it will only be available in English and can only be completed in-person and you can't get an interpreter to help you?

Etc.

Basically we have lots of historical experience with governments trying to suppress the vote of their opponents and you don't want to give them any levers to do so. This isn't even a Chesterton's Fence scenario because the fence isn't mysterious, the things we're trying to prevent are well-known and in recent memory.

A compromise solution seems to exist, and I don't understand why it's not being pursued: increase funding for voting accessibility programs, in exchange for tighter requirements for voting authorization.

Because ‘voting accessibility programs’ are just funding for democrat political machines, and tighter requirements for voter authorization are totally off the table for democrats.

Because ‘voting accessibility programs’ are just funding for democrat political machines

I mean. Yes? That's the point, to give both sides part of what they want. Democrats want funding for democrat political machines.

tighter requirements for voter authorization are totally off the table for democrats

This I'm more ignorant on. There really aren't any minority sub-parties that don't care about the topic that can't be peeled off?

I mean the counterpoint is ‘why should we have to fund partisan democrats and only partisan democrats in their political operations in order to have the same election security measures as every other developed democracy on earth’.

and the counter-counter point is that most other developed democracies on earth don't have hours long queues to vote so if you want the level of security measures they have you should be willing to accept the accessibility standards that they have also.

Can’t we just…open more polling stations?

Because horse-trading is necessary to achieve anything in politics no matter how strongly you feel that your political opponents should just give you what you want with no concessions on your end?

Horse trading implies you get something of equivalent value for the horse. In this metaphor, the charge is that the person you trade horses with is a horse-thief, and that their horse-trade is that you hire more of their possible horse-thieven associates to guard future horses in exchange for a current horse.

What compromise could the right offer the left that they would want? And what compromise could the left offer the right that they'd be willing to give up? The right would probably want stricter voter harvesting laws and some kind of approval system for vote-by-mail, and better oversight for vote counting in exchange for what checking IDs at the voting site? Most reasonable right-aligned people I've seen do not believe that voter fraud in that sense of someone voting twice or without the legal right to vote voting is rampant or affecting the election count to a changeable degree. The left has all the power, is already in the lead for the most part, and gets a political issue that at worst makes them seem naive in that they're defending the poor and downtrodden.

Also, even discussing the compromise will shift the debate landscape and it will suddenly not be about what the unreasonable people are saying. It's easier to come at this saying, well if the problem is just people who shouldn't be voting having a higher barrier of entry to committing voter fraud then why couldn't they come to some compromise? Because the people that seriously want to do something about this topic have serious changes in mind and most of them have nothing to do with how their opponents characterize their position. So, the people that think thousands of people illegally voted to a degree to change the outcome of an election are not going to want this because they're likely unreasonable because they are the caricature their opponent uses as an example of the other side and the people who would make the compromise probably wouldn't see the value in compromising toward something that amounts to giving themselves a worse position because making it easier for people to vote doesn't work in their favor: most people are left, why would they compromise to get more people IDs to vote when they're likely to not vote for their side by two metrics because they're more likely to be left-leaning in general and also specifically more likely to be left-leaning because of the situation they're in. It makes no sense to give your opponent a win like that to get some law about people checking state-IDs which probably from the evidence, I suspect, would not change anything, and even if it would it wouldn't be enforced anyway.

And that state census solution of finding people for 10k and forcing them to register sounds like it would be insanely disapproved by both sides as being authoritarian government overreach that would likely never be fully finished. It sounds like a make-work investigatory bureau would be created for the purpose and they'd likely antagonize many people, accomplish very little, and end up being used for things entirely unrelated to its stated purpose because its purpose would be impossible to accomplish anyway.

I don't know what the solution is but from my perspective it seems like mostly people entrenched in this aren't looking for solutions because the issue is more valuable existing than a resolution of the issue because most people don't care. I'm against voter fraud (so is most everyone), I want to help the poor (so does most everyone). It's probably a political issue of magnitude precisely because it's really hard to politically step in it because the issue is so seemingly contained to itself. Other soundbyte positions like being "for jobs" (but what about free trade?) or wanting to lower taxes (but how will you pay for anything?) require much more complex solutions. The issues without compromise are the easiest to represent yourself with the more compromise that leaks into whatever the issue is then the harder it would be to take a stance or even talk about at all. I think politically wedge issues are too easy to give up because most of them have two positions with no real nuance that you can talk about while appealing to your base, if they start talking about compromise then they're talking to people who won't vote for them so what's the advantage in an election? And what's the advantage of making the compromise when it comes to governing for that matter?

I mean, surely from the left's point of view the compromise of 'we'll make it easy to vote if you agree to ID checks' is a massive win? Soft voter suppression is a real issue wheras election security is a nothing-burger. "we'll solve this issue that loses you blues a fuckton of votes if we can also solve this issue that loses us reds basically no votes"? Ka-ching!

Of course, the left could always argue that even free and easy-to-get ID is still suppression as it might be too high of a hurdle for some of their voters (and they'd probably be right) but I don't see why they'd be opposed to the deal in principle.

Question is why don’t the democrats make that offer explicit? Perhaps one of your premises are wrong.

Soft voter suppression is a real issue

No, it isn't. Claims of voter suppression hurting democrats, where falsifiable, have been falsified. Even liberal journalist rags admit this, the evidence is so overwhelming that it isn't happening. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/21/18230009/voter-id-laws-fraud-turnout-study-research

"Get rid of voter suppression" would do nothing except empower the federal government to throw more snitfits about state level policies. One almost suspects that putting more things under the remit of federal bureaucratic micromanagement is the actual goal.

The study, (...) found that voter ID laws don’t decrease voter turnout, including that of minority voters. Nor do they have a detectable effect on voter fraud

I will admit I'm surprised at the results of that study, But if anything it backs up my point, or at least doesn't contradict it. Voter supression is more than just ID requirements, it's the general inconvenience of voting. Any compromise that the Reds could offer the Blues along the lines of "everyone needs voter ID but we'll make election day a day off" would be a massive win for the Blues. The Reds stand to gain nothing (as per your study) but the Blues get to defang a major Red talking point while gaining no votes at worst and a boatload of them at best.

Well concerning what the right wants, I suppose we've moved to "any verification at all that a mail in ballot is from who it says it is from" now that signature verification is waylaid.

So at this point it is a game of force and boots on the ground I suppose, a hard prisoner's dilemma.

What compromise could the right offer the left that they would want?

Did you actually read the (offhanded, I admit) proposal? It was short. It involved creating a state-level capacity to locate disenfranchised (read: poor, illegal, disabled, low-executive) people and extend state services to them. Inside five years it'll be the premier way to access lumpenproles to buy votes from them. What compromise is possibly better than actually, actively, implementing your opposition's agenda for them?

EDIT: You reacted to it, so you must have. I am confused.

Because why create a whole infrastructure of voter verification where it isn't needed? If a compelling case that voter fraud is anything more than a very minor problem can be made then fine, but I haven't seen one yet, and if that continues to be the case it's best not to legislate solutions looking for problems.

Team Red wants fewer people to vote. Team Blue wants more people to vote.

A compromise solution that targets the nominal justification for their policy while preserving the balance of the thing they care about (that's why its a compromise) is uninteresting, so no serious efforts are being taken. It would be difficult to spin it as a bipartisan feel-good agreement, because both sides will have their share of internal critics complaining the other side got too much.

In my opinion, the Blue take is more honest in that the advertised benefits of their policy better represents the actual effects of their policy. They say they want more legally enfranchised people to vote, and this is basically what would happen in their preferred world. The Reds, on the other hand, are basically lying, because voter fraud is pretty much a non-issue. Voter fraud is trivial now and will continue to be trivial under their preferred policy; its the legally enfranchised people that matter. This doesn't make the Blues any less shrewd than the Reds, they just have the luxury of relative honesty in this matter due to the circumstances. But if you asked them about the proposed compromise, they would say you're wasting resources by defending against voting fraud that doesn't exist and then implementing social programs to repair the disenfranchisement that didn't need to happen, and they would be pretty much right.

I agree that the left has a more simplistic and perhaps even more coherent argument.

Children in public schooling are brought up with the idea that everyone should be able to vote easily. We're hammered with the sins of the past where ballot access was conditional at best and often outright discriminatory.

As I've gotten older, I continually wish that the bar was raised for voting. If you can't muster up $12 and a ride to the DMV in 4 years, you shouldn't be able to vote.

Likewise with illegal immigrants. I wouldn't call a bloc of 25 million potential voters "trivial". This isn't legal in every jurisdiction or context, but getting around it (especially without ID and even with ID) is trivial. I'd still consider that voter fraud lite.

"Every mentally competent adult citizen is entitled to vote" is a Schelling point because basically every proposal to "raise the bar" winds up being a veneer over "people I disagree with shouldn't vote" or "people I like should have privileged status".

Sure, and this may be biased of me, but I don't think people incapable of making it to a DMV are responsible enough to manage their own lives, much less a fraction of anyone else's.

The problem with the left's narrative is that it makes clear the inverse correlation between what almost anyone (in a vacuum) would consider positive traits in a voter and who they want to get to the ballot box. Extremely low bars are unacceptable, like:

  • Speaking English
  • Understanding civics
  • Understanding math
  • Transporting yourself to a voting location
  • Budgeting time to vote early if you can't get vacation on the last day

At the end of the day, though, I recognize that what would start as reasonable tests to exclude the irresponsible and stupid would gradually ratchet up. It's the same concept with gun control - I don't trust anyone to pass "reasonable" laws on that front, so I understand the reluctance to cede ground to even basic shit like ID.

The latter two are much more difficult for poor people than for most people here.

I understand that, and maintain that if you can't make it to a booth to cast a ballot sometime in 3 weeks you're not responsible enough to vote.

Not true. In India, like the majority of the world, you need to show some kind of ID to vote, and things work just fine. This is a uniquely American (pointless) quibble.

The difference is, in the US, for a long time, you didn't need your ID in most places, and calls for ID's only came when a certain group of people began voting in far higher numbers.

Now, personally, I'd be fine w/ voter ID, as long as it was a national ID, given out for free, sent out as an update to your SS card.

Calls for voter ID’s came about in Obama’s first term, long after African American voter participation had become commonplace.

Alright: Discarding basic verification like signature matching was a mistake and should be reversed.

I mean maybe this was true prior to the Covid times but it is a much easier sell now.

Is their any good evidence that taking election security measures which are standard in developed democracies actually results in fewer people voting? AFAIK it’s a progressive fever dream getting repeated as fact.

Is it standard, though? I've never presented any ID to court in any Canadian or UK election—and I have voted in many. I understand that the UK will now be requiring ID in future elections, but this is a novel development that the current government seems to have cribbed (like many of their more dubious electoral engineering projects) from the US Republicans.

The more hoops you make people jump through, the more advance thinking and organisation that is required to vote (i.e. to get a photo ID months prior to the election), the fewer people will clear those hoops and actually vote. That's hardly a stretch.

Mandatory ID would solve this problem handily and is common in other developed countries but that would of course be a non-starter in America.

It kinda follows from "people who aren't legally allowed to vote voting" doesn't it?

Both ends of the argument are arguing that more people are voting, just one arguing that they aught not to.

Research is inconclusive, but it doesn't really matter because conservatives equally believe this "fever-dream".

Whether a state adopts strict voter ID laws correlates to number of Republican legislators, but this correlation is much-stronger in competitive states.

MIT Election Labs has some good analysis on various election topics, including voter identification. Both liberals and conservatives largely support voter ID laws in theory.

From their analysis, most states that actually adopt strict voter ID laws share the following:

  1. A Republican takeover of the state government after years of Democratic control,
  2. Being a “battleground state” (i.e., a state hotly contested by the political parties), and
  3. Being racially heterogeneous.

I think it’s a big assumption that voter fraud is trivial now.

The Democrat strategy if you think none of it is fraud does rely heavily on basically no information voters. People getting the votes “harvested” or get the message republicans are white supremacists but only put the effort to check a box on a mail-in ballot.

We didn’t even do signature matches to any great extent on mail-in votes so the idea there is no fraud would seem to be false.

Two arguments for no illegal fraud:

  1. The cost-benefit is hilariously bad for the individual. It's a serious crime, you're leaving a paper trail, you basically achieve nothing on the margin. Why would you do it?
  2. There is great benefit for the Republicans for finding this sort of fraud if it exists. Voting is a joint Blue-Red operation. Why don't they do signature matches? I do not think it's because there is a Blue conspiracy to suppress closer inspection (correct me if I'm wrong). It's that the Reds know they won't find what they are looking for, so it would be counterproductive to do so.

If there was fraud, I think it would need to be perpetrated by a institution, and again, since the Reds would benefit hugely by being able to point at any single significant thing, I think that absence of evidence is evidence of absence here.

As for ballot harvesting and no/low information voters, I rate this as the Blues doing what they are advertising. They want to enfranchise more people and presumably the ways they are doing it are not technically illegal or else they would get in trouble. So the bottom line is that you don't want these legally enfranchised people voting when they otherwise would not under a different policy decision. Well, yeah, its understandable why one might think so, but it's a difficult argument to sell! Massive voter fraud is an easier one. And if "voter fraud" is to be construed as code for Blue institutional shenanigans, then Voter ID requirements is fighting systemic bias with systemic bias. Which is what it is, but you can't say it out loud. The optical advantage is in the hands of those who advocate for more voting, so the Reds are forced to be more dishonest about it.

Why don't they do signature matches?

Because the courts don't let them.

Signature rate matches on mail-in voting disappeared in 2020 as mail-in voting surged. Some of that is likely fraud. Like a granddaughter helping her nursing home grandmother vote and leaning heavily on the scales. Or a wife voting her husband. Personally, I had my ex-gf ballot and easily could have just filled it out and it would have counted.

I would call all those fraud. Violation of the concept of secret ballot. And I bet they happened widely in 2020. And wouldn’t show up on any fraud investigation that was done.

Funny thing is in my opinion if a bag of fake votes were found nothing anywhere would have changed. Courts still wouldn’t want to interfere in an election. Reddit would still be reddit and deny the bag of fake votes found.

Ideologically motivated decentralized gangs are notoriously difficult to crack, and ballot harvesting can be done with minimal risk to the harvester -- particularly if he has the implicit cooperation of the people counting the votes.

presumably the ways they are doing it are not technically illegal or else they would get in trouble.

The letter of anti-ballot-harvesting law was broken in many states in 2020, and nobody got in any trouble.

Why don't they do signature matches?

This one always strikes me as a silly question. In theory it sounds like a tolerable system in the same way that paper cheques or signatures on credit card receipts do. But there is a reason we don't tend to use those anymore: as best as I can tell forging a signature to at least pass within a large dataset isn't hard -- we aren't going to deploy credentialed handwriting experts for every ballot -- and many, if not most, of your obvious signature mismatches are probably going to come from medical issues like dominant hands in casts or motor control issues in older people.

I suppose it might catch a whole building or block of voters all signing with an X, but I'd be curious to see someone argue the cost-benefit of checking is worthwhile.

Cryptographic signatures is a whole different can of worms.

Each time someone has insisted that there is massive voter fraud, sued, kicked off an investigation…it’s come up more or less clean. Is that not evidence against fraud?

It isn't every time, though it is rare. For example, a judge tossed the results of the '97 Miami mayoral election due to voter fraud.

While Suarez was not personally implicated, the prosecuting circuit court judge cited the district as ''the center of a massive, well-conceived and well-orchestrated absentee ballot voter fraud scheme.'' People working for Suarez's campaign were found forging voter signatures, including at least one of a dead citizen.

If the most salient example is 26 years old, but the more recent investigations have come back negative, I think it’s still evidence that “voter fraud is trivial now.”

Not perfect evidence, of course. We didn’t “signature match” every vote. We just spent thousands of man-hours hunting anything that looked vaguely like it could be abused. Plus the sitting POTUS turning it into a household debate.

By design, there is limited evidence that is retained after the fact, which makes after-the-fact proof unusually difficult. As such, I am less persuaded by no-finding results than I would be in many other investigations.

Well there was the 2018 U.S. House election in North Carolina that was voided because of illegal ballot harvesting. By Republicans... So these things do happen.

Team Red wants fewer people to vote. Team Blue wants more people to vote.

This seems true with respect to strategy, but I haven't seen any compelling data that these strategies actually improve their electoral outcomes: I don't see any hugely-compelling trends in, say, presidential election voter turnout and which party tends to win. I think there's a fairly minor bias toward Republicans in low-participation midterm elections, but I'm less convinced that this carries all the way to marginal voters in terms of whether or not they hold valid voter IDs.

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