As mentioned I get the NYT's morning newsletter. Today's is a true classic. It is a meditation on 'why the anti-democracy movement' is going on. The obvious problem is that there isn't, in fact, an anti-democracy movement in the United States. But let's not let that bother us!
“What is striking about the movement around the supposed theft of the 2020 election,” Charles writes, “is how much of it — the ideas, and rhetoric, and even the people involved in it — predated Trump’s presidency, and in some cases even his candidacy.”
Indeed, except the newsletter never mentions the name "Stacey Abrams" even once, nor the controversy she engendered about whether the election in Georgia was stolen by then-Secretary of State now-Governor Brian Kemp. As a consequence, they make two key errors that lead the whole piece into paranoid musings about anti-democratic fascists endangering America.
1) That suspicion of elections is per se an anti-democratic expression, and,
2) That it is only the right wing that does it.
Because of these errors, they never get around to asking whether there might be something about the nature of our elections that might be causing people not to trust the results. Abrams had a pretty good case that the Georgia election was extremely suspect: I know, I voted in it and wrote about it at the time. The voting machines did not produce printed receipts that might be used for an audit. Ballots were a plastic card with a magnetic strip on the back, which allegedly recorded your votes but had no visible signs of having done so -- and which were immediately wiped and re-used all day after they were swiped in the 'counting' machine.
The process was thus completely opaque and impossible to audit, but no worries: one of the candidates for the office being voted on was in complete charge of the election, and swore that he would oversee any recount efforts as well.
That doesn't mean Abrams won, of course. It does mean that suspicion of the election being dishonest was extremely well-grounded. If this is a terrifying prospect, there are easy things we could do to ensure that elections were more trustworthy. Having a print-out ballot so you can see that your votes were correctly recorded, and which can be compared against electronic returns in an audit is a good start. Voter IDs are a good start. Real IDs are connected to proof of citizenship centrally maintained, so that voting officials can check the ID both against your face and signature in person, and then verify that your birth certificate or passport is on file.
On the left people worry that these are voter-suppression efforts (and occasionally on the right as well), but there is no need that should be true. We could embark upon a campaign to make sure that all eligible voters have proper IDs and their proofs recorded in the system. We could establish -- pre-election -- independent bipartisan bodies tasked with auditing the returns. We could do the sorts of things we would do, in a system that was designed to be carefully audited to prevent abuse.
If we did those things, a lot of this would evaporate.
Finally, 'anti-democracy' is arguably a bipartisan impulse (if not on either side a movement). Democrats are working very hard right now to try to prevent democracy from informing abortion laws, leveraging courts, bureaucracies, and executive orders to derail efforts by actual democratically-elected legislatures. The Republicans do, certainly, benefit from the Senate and the Electoral College to some degree, but until this very year Democrats benefitted from the Supreme Court being willing to strip the democratic branches (and direct democratic votes, as in the case of California Propositions passed by referenda) of the power to rule on major questions. There's no anti-democracy movement, but there is a real impulse on both sides to try to set one's preferences beyond question.
7 comments:
The thing about Voter ID being a requirement to vote as being a tool for voter suppression is a bunch of horse crap. All those supposed disenfranchised voters don't have bank accounts, don't buy beer or liquor, don't cash checks or go to local courthouses where ID is required? It's a canard used by the left in order to allow illegal immigrants to vote. Democrats are losing their once guaranteed voting base and need to replace them somehow.
If we did those things, a lot of this would evaporate.
I'll raise the same objection that I did in the comment string over at AVI's post on mandatory voting.
The problem is not procedure, it is perception.
Democrats such as Abrams believe they are losing elections they should win because people are unfairly being denied the ability to cast ballots, and cast any attempt to ensure voter validity as an attempt to restrict access to ballots. Which it is, because you can't just go through the motions and then permit people who don't have valid credentials to vote anyway.
Republicans such as Trump believe they are losing elections they should win because fraudulent ballots are created either through direct manufacture or by voter manipulation and cast any attempt to ensure broad ballot distribution and collection as an attempt to enable fraudulent voting. Which that also is, because anything that degrades ballot security and voting privacy either before or after the ballot is marked introduces a point when ballots can be manipulated or manufactured.
So both are correct in their analysis of the unintended outcome of the other party's preferred procedural change. And both are wrongly using the partisan logic that a disputed election was fair if the party I identify with won the election without recognizing that neither party has any idea about which elections they should be winning or losing.
This conundrum will survive until the completion of the ongoing political realignment returns both parties to a semblance of a stable identity.
Don't forget Hillary Clinton's accusations...and John Kerry's theft of Wisconsin...or the accusation that the SCOTUS gave the election to Bush. This is a growing problem, but it is not a new one.
I think we would be a whole lot better off as a country if we just decided to interpret any suggestions to relax election security, under any circumstances, as a prelude to election fraud - and take measures accordingly to nip it in the bud.
We patiently devote careful attention to cries of 'Unfair' whenever they are broadcast, especially from protected groups. But I notice that the leadership of those groups usually makes no investment in addressing those concerns, once expressed - rather, they attack the system with net effect being to defeat security measures instead.
As the New Neo has pointed out, the effect of relaxing election security simply facilitates more extensive fraud while simultaneously making it nearly impossible to prosecute & prove it. There simply is no excuse for allowing it, for any reason. It's an issue that should be kept in sacred space by mutual bi-partisan agreement in the interest of Faith in Elections.
Don't you understand? They **like** the panic this creates- on both sides.
Anything that drives people to make donations is a good to them. Why would they want to fix something that, to them, isn't broken?
As an election judge, I loved the electronic ballots for the ease they brought to tallying the votes at the end of the day and enabling the county to publish its results very quickly after the close of voting.
But I was never comfortable with the phenomenon Grim rightly describes as opaque and unauditable procedures. The former election administrator here never understood that concern; she would blithely state that there was no way to hack the machines. I don't think she was diddling the vote; I think she genuinely believed they couldn't be hacked. Periodically I would urge the county to use machines that created an auditable paper trail, but the votes were never there: too expensive, and too hard to comply with state rules requiring ever more arcane devices to enable people with a wide variety of disabilities to vote without assistance--up to and including a little air-puffing device that would allow a quadriplegic to manipulate the controls without using his hands. I never saw anyone use that thing, but it sure made us a captive of the only vendor that was willing to manufacture it.
Fortunately, the Texas legislature has taken the matter out of our hands and mandated that we buy all new voting machines that create a paper ballot that is scanned electronically. This gives us a fast and convenient way to mark and tabulate ballots, a paper ballot for the voter to inspect before feeding into the reader (but not a paper ballot that can be marked defectively by voters who have trouble filling in the little circles, a surprising number), and a parallel repository of paper ballots that can be compared to the electronic tally later.
It's still possible to commit fraud, obviously, but the more parallel trails of evidence there are, the more elaborate the fraud has to get, and the greater the danger of being caught. We're always talking about credible deterrents, not perfect security.
Here to endorse Tex99's experiences with new Texas voting machines.
Note these are great at securing in person voting, whether early or on election day. As a means of securing mail ballots, there's no point. The bad guy gets hold of ballot intended for someone else and votes as he is paid. Or in a more subtle case, the ballots harvested from "preferred" precincts are delivered while ballots from "deplorable" precincts are delayed.
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