5 ms·

IMHO, it's been an escalation of tit-for-tat from both sides of the aisle. News sources, 'Community organizers', corporate activists, religious leaders etc. ha

IMHO, it's been an escalation of tit-for-tat from both sides of the aisle. News sources, 'Community organizers', corporate activists, religious leaders etc. have all been increasingly brazen as they take increasingly polarized positions to counter actions from the other side. What's missing is common decency and sympathy for the other person's point of view. We won't find it by clinging to our own political party or news sources. We're going to have to interact with real, actual people who are different than we are and learn to strike a balance between their needs and our own.

rayiner 5y ago
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-spreads-another-stolen-election-conspiracy-theory/ 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.
- random314 5y ago
  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.
  - OrvalWintermute 5y ago
    Your partisan colors are showing. Strong election processes and voting processes can go both ways.
    - random314 5y ago
      > Your partisan colors are showing Is this the best counter argument to support voter disenfranchisement that you were able to come up with?
- tptacek 5y ago
  The last major story about ballot harvesting was a conviction for a Republican operative doing it in North Carolina.
  - angelzen 5y ago
    Great point. Mail-in voting is a disgraceful corruption of the voting process. You'd think that the elementary task of getting rid of it would be a shoe-in bipartisan issue. Not so fast, this is USA, the beacon of hope for democracy in the world. Or have we moved on to identity based rights instead? I'm losing track of the excuses. Tribal brain kicking in 5... 4... 3...
    - mthoms 5y ago
      Why is mail-in voting a “disgraceful corruption of the voting process?”. Lots of people can’t vote in person (eg military and others temporarily overseas). Note: I’m not American and have no stake in this. I’ve just never seen such a strong negative opinion about mail in voting in principle.
      - angelzen 5y ago
        I live in WA state. All vote is mail-in. I can't vote in-person even if I want to. This is not democracy. Some further thoughts: * I was raised in a country with a single party and 99% outcome elections. People, kids my age (at the time), sacrificed their lives for the right to vote. I don't take voting for granted, but I do take voting seriously. * The mail-in argument is predicated on the postmodern "the exception is the rule". I reject that on principle. A small minority has special needs, we can find many ways to accommodate that without disrupting the vast majority. And if we can't, too bad for the small minority. * The custody chain is fundamentally broken. The reason I marginally trust election results is because representatives of both parties keep a hawk eye on each other to prevent foul play. This can be done in at in-person polling locations for a day or two, but cannot logistically be done for weeks over the area of an entire state. * As a corollary, him who delivers the mail has weeks to either make certain votes appear from thin air, or disappear / delay blocks of votes from areas likely to vote against his party. Oops, we just printed 10k ballots too many... * The vote must be secret. Mail-in vote sits with your signature on it for weeks who knows where. In the era of cancel culture, possibly worse, the doxxing risk is non-negligible. Remember Brendan Eich? * There is no confirmation that the vote was filled by the person receiving the ballot. Perhaps their spouse / elder guardian / etc. filled it in for them? * Ballot harvesting, the process of pressuring people into voting by knocking on their door or downright bullying them into collecting the blank ballots. Done selectively in areas leaning towards your party it can easily turn an election. Note how both parties complain about this when they are at the receiving end of it.
- bsanr 5y ago
  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 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.
  - rayiner 5y ago
    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.
- xphilter 5y ago
  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.
  - OrvalWintermute 5y ago
    Are you tracking what just happened in Wisconsin?
  - rayiner 5y ago
    > 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/3b50795b2d0374cbef5c29766256.pdf 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.
freeopinion 5y ago
Almost like they were cooperating?

rayiner 5y ago

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-spreads-another-stolen-election-conspiracy-theory/ 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.

random314 5y ago
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.
- OrvalWintermute 5y ago
  Your partisan colors are showing. Strong election processes and voting processes can go both ways.
  - random314 5y ago
    > Your partisan colors are showing Is this the best counter argument to support voter disenfranchisement that you were able to come up with?
tptacek 5y ago
The last major story about ballot harvesting was a conviction for a Republican operative doing it in North Carolina.
- angelzen 5y ago
  Great point. Mail-in voting is a disgraceful corruption of the voting process. You'd think that the elementary task of getting rid of it would be a shoe-in bipartisan issue. Not so fast, this is USA, the beacon of hope for democracy in the world. Or have we moved on to identity based rights instead? I'm losing track of the excuses. Tribal brain kicking in 5... 4... 3...
  - mthoms 5y ago
    Why is mail-in voting a “disgraceful corruption of the voting process?”. Lots of people can’t vote in person (eg military and others temporarily overseas). Note: I’m not American and have no stake in this. I’ve just never seen such a strong negative opinion about mail in voting in principle.
    - angelzen 5y ago
      I live in WA state. All vote is mail-in. I can't vote in-person even if I want to. This is not democracy. Some further thoughts: * I was raised in a country with a single party and 99% outcome elections. People, kids my age (at the time), sacrificed their lives for the right to vote. I don't take voting for granted, but I do take voting seriously. * The mail-in argument is predicated on the postmodern "the exception is the rule". I reject that on principle. A small minority has special needs, we can find many ways to accommodate that without disrupting the vast majority. And if we can't, too bad for the small minority. * The custody chain is fundamentally broken. The reason I marginally trust election results is because representatives of both parties keep a hawk eye on each other to prevent foul play. This can be done in at in-person polling locations for a day or two, but cannot logistically be done for weeks over the area of an entire state. * As a corollary, him who delivers the mail has weeks to either make certain votes appear from thin air, or disappear / delay blocks of votes from areas likely to vote against his party. Oops, we just printed 10k ballots too many... * The vote must be secret. Mail-in vote sits with your signature on it for weeks who knows where. In the era of cancel culture, possibly worse, the doxxing risk is non-negligible. Remember Brendan Eich? * There is no confirmation that the vote was filled by the person receiving the ballot. Perhaps their spouse / elder guardian / etc. filled it in for them? * Ballot harvesting, the process of pressuring people into voting by knocking on their door or downright bullying them into collecting the blank ballots. Done selectively in areas leaning towards your party it can easily turn an election. Note how both parties complain about this when they are at the receiving end of it.
bsanr 5y ago
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 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.
- rayiner 5y ago
  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.
xphilter 5y ago
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.
- OrvalWintermute 5y ago
  Are you tracking what just happened in Wisconsin?
- rayiner 5y ago
  > 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/3b50795b2d0374cbef5c29766256.pdf 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.

freeopinion 5y ago

Almost like they were cooperating?