Learning not to trust the All-In podcast

This year is the 80th anniversary of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, do they really need to go through the history of IDs? We need to rebuild confidence in the integrity of elections, Voter ID, which most democratic countries require, seems like an incredibly modest step.

The states that historically had the worst race issues all have voter id anyway, it is the Northeast and West coast that are refusing.

People didn't lose confidence in the integrity of elections because our elections lack integrity, they lost confidence because they were told in a way that resonates with them that our elections lack integrity.

Voter ID would just be security theater in that it's an onerous rule that does nothing to help any actual problem aside from making things look better to some people.

It doesn't even matter if you agree with the claims that were made about voter fraud, I can't think of any good faith argument by literally anyone on the political compass that it didn't cause people to lose faith in electoral process.

One of the things I used to see pushed back on, but it seems to have gone by the way side recently, is not citing the original source but rather citing the someone saying something about the source. Its increasingly pervasive in all types of research adn contributes to a giant and slow moving slide of meaning creep.

The OP mentions that reviewing the history would inform the discussion. You dismissed being informed and simply provided a truism - specifically accepted a truism common from oen side. If the issue is confidence in integrity, but there never was an integrity issue, then fixing an integrity issue is neither possible nor a solution to the confidence problem.

Again, I see this everywhere - from polite conversation to academic discourse adn it troubles me about the larger state of knowledge and knowing in the world.

As always, you should ask "what purpose does this serve?" Do we need voter ID laws? Well, is there a widespread voter fraud problem? No [1].

When you declare something to be "common sense", you betray either a lack of knowledge of why something is the way it is, you know why it's like that but you're willing to lie about it to push an agenda or you have a position of privilege where something doesn't affect you so you just don't care.

So if voter fraud isn't a widespread problem, you should then ask who is pushing for this and why? Also, why are things the way they are?

A big part is that as many as 7% of Americans don't have the documents required to prove their birth or citizenship [2]. So Voter ID laws disenfranchise a right (voting) to millions of people.

Voter ID is really about voter suppression. Why? Because you need ID to register and vote. If you don't have it, you lose that right. If you think those people are more likely to vote against your interests, you do what you can do make sure they can't vote.

As a real example, Alabama has Voter ID laws but in certain counties that have a large black population, the DMV (where you would have to go to get a valid ID) was only open one day a month [3].

That's entirely intentional. Make it difficult to get an ID then it's less likely you'll vote.

[1]: https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/ensure-every-american-c...

[2]: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/mill...

[3]: https://www.governing.com/archive/drivers-license-offices-wi...

I'm sorry, but saying "review the history," without specifically referring to things that happened in history and why they are relevant today, is absolutely worthless and a copout. If you have a reason why voters can't use ID today, say it, this "educate yourself" crap is a weaselly way to get out of defending your position while looking down your nose at the same time.

You can't work without ID. Surely that's worse than not being able to vote, not being able to eat?

Against that we have people saying we need Voter ID? Is there any more better time to use the "arranging deck chairs on the Titanic" analogy, except for perhaps on an actual sinking ship?

I've heard those arguments, but the thing is there are several cases around the country right now where ballot-level fraud _was_ caught[1].

Without doing any research I'll say that while it's easier to generate a bogus ballot than it is to generate a bogus hundred dollar bill, it just doesn't scale to the point where it's useful. It's a pain in the ass to get your hands on enough ballots, fill them out, and deliver them to a drop box or whatever. You can't just pull up with a wagon full of ballots and drop them off.

How much is it worth to somebody to flip a county? Which county do you flip? How many ballots will you need to flip it? What's the risk/reward ratio like?

[1] https://www.cpr.org/2024/11/06/mesa-county-mail-ballots-frau...

Maybe people shouldn't have faith in the electoral process, and the way to rebuild confidence in the integrity of the electoral process is to rebuild the integrity of the electoral process first and tell people about it second.

The ID check is presumably still attached to the envelope rather than the ballot, right? (Otherwise you have massive deanonymity problems). If there is fake voter registration happening, presumably obtaining fake IDs by the same methods is just as easy.

I'm sure a certain amount of e.g. individuals submitting their dead relatives' ballots happens - but anyone doing that can probably grab their relative's ID too, and go to two polling stations. I doubt any large-scale partisan fraud via in-person submission at polling stations is going on, because it's impractical to make that happen while keeping it secret - the only way it could happen would be with widespread official collusion, and again in that case an ID check wouldn't move the needle.