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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. It's tit-for-tat. Moderate Democrats won't push back against the "community organizers" when they push highly questionable practices such as ballot harvesting or allowing ballots to be counted that arrive days after election day. Moderate Democrats also never pushed back on two decades of claims about election fraud and stolen elections from the likes of people like Terry McAuliffe and Stacey Abrams: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/terry-mcauliffe-sprea...

That, in turn, has destroyed trust. Now, moderate Republicans won't push back against Trump's outrageous claims of voter fraud and stolen elections. Nobody trusts each other to act in good faith and do the right thing.

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The last major story about ballot harvesting was a conviction for a Republican operative doing it in North Carolina.

Great. We can get behind it being a bad thing, right?

First, can we agree on a set of premises --- for instance, that "ballot harvesting" is not an idiosyncrasy of the Democratic party? It's an article of faith among conservatives that the Democratic Party is the party of voter fraud, but that's empirically untrue.

When we agree on what the facts are, it should be straightforward for us to work out what good changes would be.

What does that have to do with ballot harvesting?

I don’t think democrats are “the party of voter fraud.” I do think they overvalue activist rhetoric about voter access while undervaluing the importance of overt displays of trustworthiness in building trust in elections. The whole point of elections is so people who don’t trust each other can agree on the result, and ballot harvesting pretty much screams untrustworthiness.

Voting isn’t rocket science. Plenty of advanced democracies do it well. My point of reference is basically: is this practice common in the EU, or Japan/Taiwan/Australia/Canada? As far as I can tell, ballot harvesting isn’t.

I guess I'd ask why I should care about that particular wrinkle of vote casting. I took the time to go read up on state ballot harvesting laws, and there's essentially no apparent correlation between state parties and ballot collection laws. I learned that ballot collection is kind of a big deal for Native Americans (who rely on collectors for far-flung reservations, where otherwise getting to a sanctioned ballot box might involve a multiple-hour drive) and for elderly voters in assisted living homes. There seems to be no studied connection between lax collection laws and incidence of fraud.

Why do you care about this? I'm asking sincerely; I don't get it. I know about the Bladen County thing in NC (Bladen County was the subject of the last Serial podcast) --- again, that was Republican election fraud. But my reaction to that isn't that we should make it harder for people to cast ballots.

There is a basic data science question here. What kind of data errors exist in the US system.

Precision error = invalid voter voting

Recall error = valid voter unable to vote

You can look up detailed definitions on wikipedia.

US is plagued by recall errors. Like tptacek pointed out miniscule precision errors identified so far are by Republicans. The errors trade off with each other. Reducing precision errors will increase recall errors and vice versa.

When someone makes a song and dance about virtually non existent precision errors and tries to worsen recall errors - the intent is not to reduce the errors, but increase it to subvert the democratic process.

This is where truth and "truthiness" diverge, I suppose. "Two decades of claims about election fraud" shares character with "two decades of high rates of Stop-and-Frisk detainments of black New Yorkers." The rest of the world looks at the reasonable behavior of liberal election workers and would be reformers - no the "Moderate" Democrats, who as recently as last week were working to gerrymander one of their own party members out of office because they're a progressive - and the way they're received by certain subsets of the electorate, and justifiably consider us insane. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29071163]

This statement

>That, in turn, has destroyed trust.

Is useful, though not in the way you probably think. The notion of "trust" in American politics is an important and powerful one, and the root of much of our history. Our basic structure as a federation is built on interstate trust. Our major flirtation with dissolution was not predicated on actual legislative action, but a lack of trust that certain actions wouldn't eventually be taken. So, trust is both a bedrock of our society and a curiously fragile thing.

As far as that notion goes, an examination of our history can yield the following statements:

That the Left has not always trusted the Right to make the "correct" decisions, but has always trusted them with the right to vote.

and

The Right has never trusted the Left with the right to vote.

The rest of the world gets an extremely biased view of what’s happening in America. They may view “liberal election workers and would be reformers” as the good guys based on that, but the best way to tell what they think is reasonable is from the rules they impose on themselves. French people might not like Georgia Republicans, but France banned mail in voting in the 1970s, while Georgia has extensive mail in voting. Germans might not like Georgia Republicans either, but residency registration there—which is required for voting—requires shlepping down to a citizens office in person with a bunch of paperwork. Meanwhile you can register to vote in Georgia completely online.

You can see this for many other issues as well. International media portrays American Republicans as crazy religious fundamentalists. But Mississippi’s 15-week abortion law is less restrictive than the laws in France or Germany. (In the latter country, abortion is technically still illegal under the basic law, though not punished.)

I agree referencing international norms is a good way to sanity-check what’s within bounds. But obviously the way to do that is to look at the actual rules in place in other liberal democracies, not how people in those countries perceive Americans. On that front, the American left is outside the liberal democratic mainstream on many issues: voting, abortion, religious education, etc.

Cherry-picking restrictive (and, might I say, somewhat off-topic?) policies doesn't change that some form of postal voting is associated with national freedom and wealth, which is both an image I imagine that we'd like to project and a reality level-headed lovers of democracy support. Japan has it. Australia has it. The UK. Canada. Germany. It's a good thing.

Many foreigners recognize this, just as they recognize the truth that "liberal election workers and would-be reformers" ARE the good guys, because they are not bombarded with cynical, horse race-style coverage of the minutiae of our collective political life. When they learn of our goings-on, they usually receive facts, like:

There has been no widespread election fraud in American federal elections at any point in living memory.

and

Certain US states have a documented history of voting discrimination.

and

A 2013 SCOTUS decision struck down key provisions of a law meant to protect people from this discrimination.

and

The conservative governments of those very same states immediately enacted new restrictive voter laws.

and

Officials have admitted that, in some cases, these laws were expressly designed not to enhance election security, but to lower turnout of "undesirable" voters.

So, if non-Americans come away with the impression that conservatives are married to a century-and-a-half-long campaign of doing whatever it takes to try to restrict voting along lines of identity (sex, race, class, location), and that liberals are the ones trying to get the citizens, of a country that prides itself on its free and fair democracy, to... vote? It would be an accurate impression. It would be the truth.

You completely ignored the bulk of my reply, probably because there's no getting around the fact that American conservatism, historically, radically diverges from liberalism on voting rights. They don't hold the same values at all, and the delineation is clear, as I'll state again:

Liberals want people to be able to vote.

Conservatives want to withhold the right to vote.

Now, you can argue the merits of each stance. I would probably counter your likely argument that undue and onerous restrictions, which substantially resemble capricious tactics of the past, run counter to the most basic American ethos, and that our national experiment has been one of slowly uncovering the diamond of liberty that is recognizing and assuring the right of all sound-minded adults to agency and self-determination and a voice in the public square. It's a really pretty diamond. People around the world think so, too. I'm going to ask you to put down the shovel you seem intent on using to cover it back up again.

> Japan has it. Australia has it. The UK. Canada. Germany. It's a good thing.

Sure, but Texas, Georgia, and Florida have no excuse-needed absentee voting. Democratic rhetoric about “Jim Crow on steroids” is precisely about these restrictions such as number of days of early voting—which are still generally more liberal in these states than in advanced western countries.

> Many foreigners recognize this, just as they recognize the truth that "liberal election workers and would-be reformers" ARE the good guys, because they are not bombarded with cynical, horse race-style coverage of the minutiae of our collective political life.

But that’s exactly what’s happening. Foreigners aren’t looking at the actual laws in Florida or Georgia and comparing them to their own laws, they’re hearing Biden call those laws “Jim Crow on steroids.”

> When they learn of our goings-on, they usually receive facts, like:

Except, apparently, the “facts” regarding the actual content of these laws.

> Sure, but Texas, Georgia, and Florida have no excuse-needed absentee voting.

I do not think this is the case for Texas I voted absentee in the last presidential election and I was only able to do so because I was out of state during the election. If I had not been out of state I would not have qualified for absentee voting. That does not match what I would call 'no excuse-needed absentee voting'.

>Democratic rhetoric about “Jim Crow on steroids” is precisely about these restrictions such as number of days of early voting—which are still generally more liberal in these states than in advanced western countries.

We are supposed to be the flag-carrier for free and fair elections. That means fairness with respect to the capability of all voters to "get to the polls", however that may be. We meet them where they are, not the other way around. The alternative opens the door for nominally-unrelated-but-practically-critical barriers to voting - like underfunding public transportation, for example.

>But that’s exactly what’s happening. Foreigners aren’t looking at the actual laws in Florida or Georgia and comparing them to their own laws, they’re hearing Biden call those laws “Jim Crow on steroids.”

>Except, apparently, the “facts” regarding the actual content of these laws.

Let's be clear: I am glad that foreigners recognize the righteousness of American elections when they're at their most free, regardless of how that might impugn their own processes. But that's not where my argument draws its legitimacy. It comes instead from the appropriateness of less restrictive election laws in the face of America's particular values and America's particular history. The actual content of restrictive voter laws allow conduct that is substantially similar to the Jim Crow-era conduct - of the segregationist governments that today's Texas and Georgia and Florida and others are heir to - that the VRA was meant to curb.

If you don't want to be accused of conjuring Strom Thurmond's ghost, don't pass laws he would have applauded for reasons he also would have applauded. You accuse others of not looking at the content of laws when you refuse to critically examine the content of our history.

> That the Left has not always trusted the Right to make the "correct" decisions, but has always trusted them with the right to vote.

Packing the Supreme Court because you can't trust the justices appointed by the right to vote the right way?

That crazy plan to make a separate state out of each DC neighborhood, so that DC would have dozens of senators?

Yeah, they trust the right with the right to vote, as long as the left can finagle a way to outvote them. (Yes, I know, neither of those passed, nor has any likelihood of passing. Still, there's a profound distrust of democracy on the part of at least some of the left.)

> The Right has never trusted the Left with the right to vote.

That is so ridiculously wrong that it looks like you're just making stuff up to fit a totally slanted worldview. In particular, the word "never" is a dead giveaway.

>Packing the Supreme Court because you can't trust the justices appointed by the right to vote the right way?

As much as I wish we would have breached this point of trust by now, liberals have never actually packed the Supreme Court.

>That crazy plan to make a separate state out of each DC neighborhood, so that DC would have dozens of senators?

I have never heard of this.

Please focus on things that have actually happened, and not wild conspiracy theories.

>That is so ridiculously wrong

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_suffrage#Dates_by_co...

Each point of contention, hard fought by conservatives, who were dragged kicking and screaming into the future of a country that ever-so-slightly further embodied its highest ideals, despite their protests.

I'm not sure what you think that article demonstrates. It certainly doesn't demonstrate that "The Right has never trusted the Left with the right to vote".

I will give you that there have been times when the Right has not trusted the Left with the right to vote. I will give you that in some places, that is true right now. But a general, sweeping statement? "Never"? C'mon. You're simply wrong.

It demonstrates that

>conservatives are married to a century-and-a-half-long campaign of doing whatever it takes to try to restrict voting along lines of identity (sex, race, class, location), and that liberals are the ones trying to get the citizens, of a country that prides itself on its free and fair democracy, to vote

The protected classes in question tend to vote with the Left. Therefore, the Right has largely, generally, in sweeping fashion, resisted the extension and protection of major portions of the Left's right to vote. "Never" is the correct word. You are wrong.

Ultimately, it is almost always the fault of Democrats- whether it is fake electoral fraud allegations, gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement. Stacey Abrams and fauci are the true villains here. /s

Btw, electoral fraud via voter disenfranchisement is a well established reality. Voter disenfranchisement has been a Republican tactic for decades that Democrats are finally fighting against. Yes, this is fraud - which is why Republicans are now upset that their fraud is being shut down by Stacey Abrams. Georgia already proved this.

Your partisan colors are showing.

Strong election processes and voting processes can go both ways.

> Your partisan colors are showing

Is this the best counter argument to support voter disenfranchisement that you were able to come up with?

What exactly is the problem with ballot harvesting if they’re legitimate votes? Maybe the State shouldn’t make it hard to vote. And your source is not exactly unbiased, stating without evidence that “ Updating the voter rolls by removing dormant registrations does not “disenfranchise” voters; it is necessary in order to keep the rolls accurate and up to date, as many people move or die every year.” How do they know that? Just a gut feeling? White conservatives have for centuries tried everything under the sun to stop Black people from voting, that’s just one more try.

Are you tracking what just happened in Wisconsin?

> What exactly is the problem with ballot harvesting if they’re legitimate votes

It destroys the chain of custody. See section 5.2 of the Carter-Baker report, which recommended banning the practice: https://www.legislationline.org/download/id/1472/file/3b5079...

Also what does this have to do with Black people? Most older people in the country who supposedly would benefit from this are white—the median white person is a decade older than the median Black person.

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