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.

https://electionfraud.heritage.org/

Is the above site BS?

Notice how there’s no cries of election integrity problems for this election? Because the “right” party won.

I don't think anybody thinks there is zero voter fraud.

The position of OP was that there is not widespread voter fraud.

There are pretty strong arguments that many states illegally (according to their own rules) expanded the scope of postal ballots in 2020, added people to the voter rolls without adequate checks that resulted in people getting added who shouldn't have, etc., which could very plausibly have added up to enough to tip the knife-edge election.

> Notice how there’s no cries of election integrity problems for this election? Because the “right” party won.

I don't think anyone seriously disputes that the civil service has a partisan imbalance. If (and it's a big if) the "deep state" were to cheat, it's pretty clear which side they would cheat for. Well before the results came out this time, it was widely reported that the Republicans had filed hundreds of lawsuits questioning various election irregularities and the Democrats... hadn't. So yeah, only one party doubts the integrity of the election (or, if you want to be more cynical, only one party cares whether it's being rigged, since both parties know which way any rigging is going). That's exactly what we'd expect, whether it's being rigged or not?

How does checking an ID ensure eligibility better than what's already done? And similarly for ballot casting - how would IDs make a better uniqueness/registration check than what we have?

> a) id requirements disenfranchise voters and b) official collusion is the “only way” are structurally and by evidence unfounded

It's well documented that many legitimate voters do not have IDs. And it's widely accepted that large-scale in-person voter fraud is not happening and there's no real plausible way for it to happen; if you want to claim that it is or it can, the onus is on you.

> In your argument they provide only hand-wavy service for an otherwise unsupported conclusion.

Please grow up. The over-the-top rhetoric doesn't make you more convincing, quite the opposite.

- felon (this appears to be far & away the most common)

- moved

- shouldn't have even been allowed to register

- voted twice

- illegally delivered absentee ballot for another person (while not claiming to be that person)

- etc.

The common theme, aside from the absolute rarity of these events (e.g. 36 total in GA over perhaps 40 million votes over ~25 years), is that none of them would be addressed by more stringent identity verification checks at either registration or at the polls.

Clicking through the site, I actually am unable to find a single instance where enhanced ID would have helped. Not saying they aren't in there, just that apparently they are very rare events, even in a dataset of extremely rare events.

Ironic though because lefty social media just spent a solid year telling people that both candidates were trash and Gaza would suffer regardless of who got elected.

Also consider that maybe only Republicans filed suits because their presidential candidate lost.

But more direct to your point: No consequential voting irregularities were found, and this time around the Democrats arguably had an even stronger incentive to commit widespread voter fraud than before, while the current President is a Democrat, and yet somehow all the fraud from 2020 is now just gone. That stretches credibility, to say the least.

... that the federal "deep state" doesn't matter, since elections are handled at the lowest level by state authorities - which are tightly controlled in red states, as much as in blue states (if not more, arguably), by the locally-dominant party. This is just how business has always been done in good ol' Murica.

Writing sweeping statements like the one you make, indicates that one lives in a partisan bubble.

The top LGBT-friendly employer these days is Raytheon. Even pre-Trump the Dems were the party of big government, unions, urbanity, education...; now they're also the party of military interventionism, the media, and really most of the establishment.

> Also consider that maybe only Republicans filed suits because their presidential candidate lost.

I'm talking in the run-up to this election before the outcome was known.

> No consequential voting irregularities were found

Now you're subtly narrowing the goalposts a whole lot. Voting irregularities, no (other than that ballot box getting set on fire, but I guess you're saying that's not "consequential"), but plenty of potential crime in the overall process (lists of names being added to the rolls at the last minute, that sort of thing). The legal challenges will likely be dropped, if they haven't already, because the Republicans won the election anyway, so what relief could they possibly ask a court to grant?

> the Democrats arguably had an even stronger incentive to commit widespread voter fraud than before, while the current President is a Democrat, and yet somehow all the fraud from 2020 is now just gone

Some of the alleged misdeeds of 2020 were only possible because the pandemic created an excuse - rapid expansion of postal voting in violation of the law and/or under "creative" executive orders was something that could happen in plain sight then, but would be rather harder to brush under the carpet now. But, again, a lot of the same allegations were being made in the run-up to this election - we're only not hearing so much about them because the Republicans won.

The whole point of the "deep state" concept is that it's not controlled by the formal political structures at all - yes the state bureaucracy is nominally accountable to the elected executive, but in practice it's made up of humans who are unlikely to be 100% loyal to their boss or their organisation's stated mandate (and with the chain of command being pretty long, there's plenty of room for small disalignments to compound). Even in red states (and red counties), the offices of the state bureaucracy are, systematically, often in blue islands. It's got nothing to do with state vs federal, because it's the same kind of people who work in government jobs[1] either way.

[1] OK, "government office jobs" or something, yes the typical military employee is quite different from the kind of people I'm talking about. But you know what I mean.

If true, that obviously cuts both ways.

But really I think you're just being paranoid and somehow biased against state employees - who are definitely not all "blue" by any stretch, particularly in red states. If you really think any low-level minion, or even middle-manager apparatchik, will risk their jobs by substantially fiddling numbers against the will of their boss, there is no argument that will ever cut through your ideological lenses.

It does, but ultimately it adds up to a drift towards what a typical government employee would want to do rather than what the elected representatives decided - and government employees are not a representative sample of voters.

> If you really think any low-level minion, or even middle-manager apparatchik, will risk their jobs by substantially fiddling numbers against the will of their boss

What's "substantial" though? There are a lot of things that are just a nudge at any given layer. Your boss tells you that there's some new bullshit requirement that says you have to check voter rolls against the juror database, but he doesn't sound particularly enthusiastic about it, and the department's already understaffed. So maybe you stick it on the pile, or you send an email to your subordinates late on Thursday afternoon, and maybe your boss never follows up on it and neither you do, and maybe the end result of that is that the checking never happens and your state's election laws are perhaps violated (and maybe some people who shouldn't have been able to vote got to do so), but even if the Reps win their lawsuit against your department the chance of anything getting pinned on you is essentially nil.

Yes and no. Mostly yes [1].

The first thing to note is that it comes from the Heritage Foundation. Project 2025 [2] comes form the Heritage Foundation. Trump's 3 Supreme Court nominees were chosen from a Heritage Foundation list [3][4]. The Heritage Foundation is largely responsible folr the 50 year Republican project to turn the USA into (quite literally) a white theocracy.

Now that doesn't mean they're necessarily wrong. it's just like a reverse appeal to authority fallacy. But you should be immediately skeptical and scrutinize everything they say because there is obvious and historic bias.

Nobody, including myself, has calimed there is zero voter fraud. There are isolated cases and that's impossible to prevent. Interestingly, if you look into those individual cases, it's largely right-leaning people doing things like being registered in two states and voting twice or filling in their ailing parents' absentee ballots.

So the Heritage Foundation is just blowing isolated cases of voter fraud to imply it's a widespread problem in order to push an agenda aimed at voter suppression.

[1]: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/peop...

[2]: https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FUL...

[3]: https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/cre...

[4]: https://www.heritage.org/impact/supreme-court-nominee-brett-...

We have multiple sitting Congressmen and other government officials still refusing to admit Trump lost in 2020.

Papers referring to voter ID disenfranchisement rest almost entirely on address-field-correctness deficiency (people move), which is a minimal problem other fields requiring human resolution.

To nurture your aside: People who achieve things identify the factual and structural nature of problems. Articulation is a scale factor. Good luck!

The what? Slapping a pride flag on a jet engine isn't exactly a political bias, it's a marketing / reputation-washing gimmick.

> Even pre-Trump the Dems were the party of big government, unions, urbanity, education

"Even pre-Trump"? This goes back to the 1950s.

> now they're also the party of military interventionism, the media, and really most of the establishment.

You are implying that the Republican party is not also this. That implication is utter nonsense beyond what can be excused by ignorance.

> Now you're subtly narrowing the goalposts a whole lot. Voting irregularities, no (other than that ballot box getting set on fire, but I guess you're saying that's not "consequential"), but plenty of potential crime in the overall process (lists of names being added to the rolls at the last minute, that sort of thing). The legal challenges will likely be dropped, if they haven't already, because the Republicans won the election anyway, so what relief could they possibly ask a court to grant?

Voting or voter registration -- citation needed. Voter fraud is a criminal offense, the courts can do plenty.

> Some of the alleged misdeeds of 2020 were only possible because the pandemic created an excuse - rapid expansion of postal voting in violation of the law and/or under "creative" executive orders was something that could happen in plain sight then, but would be rather harder to brush under the carpet now. But, again, a lot of the same allegations were being made in the run-up to this election - we're only not hearing so much about them because the Republicans won.

You don't think the Democrats would love to make a stink about it if there was any hint of real irregularities? Or are you claiming that the irregularities only were irregular in the Democrats' favor, and that they lost in spite of committing widescale voter registration fraud?

OK, and what is it that ID checking would change about this?

> Papers referring to voter ID disenfranchisement rest almost entirely on address-field-correctness deficiency (people move)

And? Supposing that's so, what difference does it make?

Oat milk lattes and pride parades were your chosen example. Raytheon is there.

> You are implying that the Republican party is not also this.

In the Trump era they're not - the media/establishment has been firmly anti-Trump, and he's been loudly calling for scaling back overseas military activity.

> Voting or voter registration -- citation needed.

I mean the 70+ lawsuits are widely reported.

> Voter fraud is a criminal offense, the courts can do plenty.

Against an individual who voted fraudulently, if they can prove it was wilful and if they can even find the person, sure. Against an official who "forgot" to make a required check, or "accidentally" allowed someone to register past the deadline, or didn't manage to connect up a database that was supposed to be connected up? Very hard to prove anything, and hard to get past qualified immunity too.

> Or are you claiming that the irregularities only were irregular in the Democrats' favor, and that they lost in spite of committing widescale voter registration fraud?

No fraud of the sort that you'd find a smoking gun for - no-one directly lying, no orders to break the law in so many words. Just a bunch of procedural errors and mishaps, probably not even coordinated, that add up to nudge the vote a few tenths of a percentage point in one direction. Not enough to tip the balance when the margin is as big as it was this time around.

Maybe, but I do think it's a worsening of partisanship - time was when the civil service felt a responsibility to remain strictly neutral and implement the policies of our elected leaders, right or wrong. Now people put their personal morals first and are less willing to implement a law they disagree with, and while there are good sides to that, it's also reducing trust in government services.

> they're definitely not something that can substantially and continuously influence a presidential election in a single direction in a country of 400millions.

Could they overwhelm a popular landslide? No. Could they nudge the vote enough to tip the balance in a knife-edge election? Perhaps.

B) It’s administrative and readily-solved.

So what is the concrete difference an ID check makes to the process, and what concrete attack does it prevent? You already get your name checked and crossed off the list, in a world with an ID check you would... get your name checked and crossed off the list?

> It’s administrative and readily-solved.

Then why hasn't it been?