Rage Against The Machine

The Georgia election law's restrictions on voting are unlikely to discernibly affect turnout or the resulthttps://t.co/SrDAFexWCN

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) April 3, 2021

NY allows only 9 days of early voting. Georgia’s law allows 17 days of early voting. NY doesn’t allow “no excuse” absentee voting. Georgia does. It’s also illegal in NY to serve food & water to people in line. Senator, it sounds like it’s harder to vote in NY than GA. How come? https://t.co/YFBEL1Z5TB

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) April 3, 2021

It occurs to me that while the Georgia laws are undoubtedly pernicious and malicious in intent (so I still support the MLB boycott), the business of handing out water in line to voters could be justified.

Texas has a law against electionering within a certain distance from the polling place (it usually places the limit well outside the doors).  Generally it means no signs, but also no volunteers seeking to influence a last-minute decision.  So within that limit, you couldn't hand somebody a bottle of water with a candidate's name on it.  If you got that bottle handed to you outside the electioneering limit, you couldn’t carry that labeled bottle into the polling place (just as you can’t wear campaign swag, or a shirt with a political message on it, etc., in the polling area).  So there’d be a trash problem, at a minimum.  And what if somebody dragged up a cooler full of bottles on ice and began selling them?  Allow?  Disallow?  What if it became a competition?  I’ve seen people do this on the roads, at intersections:  walk up to waiting cars offering cold bottles of water, sometimes under the guise of being a charity (ah, but are they?).

Again:  allow?  Disallow?  Do you want the lines turning into an open air market?  Do you think that wouldn't happen?  If Joe Walsh has his legal facts right (arguendo; I don't know that he does), NY State decided to disallow, because you can easily imagine an impromptu street market happening on the streets of NYC.  Well, I can, anyway.

You know, I thought that new provision in Georgia law inexcusable and unacceptable.  Upon reflection, I'm not so sure.  I also think voting should be as easy as possible, and as open as possible.  I'm dead set against Voter ID, especially when the state (Texas, and other states, I'm sure) won't make it easy to get an ID, although a Concealed Weapon License is acceptable (!).  But eliminate as many barriers as possible to voting:  will turnout increase?  Or erect as many barriers as you can get away with (as Georgia has done):  would the result in 2020 and early 2021 likely be any different?

Here, let me quote the NYT article on one point:

There’s essentially no evidence that the vast expansion of no-excuse absentee mail voting, in which anyone can apply for a mail absentee ballot, had any discernible effect on turnout in 2020. That shouldn’t be a huge surprise: Even universal vote by mail, in which every registered voter is automatically sent a mail ballot (as opposed to every voter having an opportunity to apply for one), increases turnout by only about 2 percent with no discernible partisan advantage.

Believe it or not, turnout increased just as much in the states that didn’t have no-excuse absentee voting as it did in the states that added it for the first time. Similarly, Joe Biden improved over Hillary Clinton’s performance by three percentage points in the states that added it, compared with 2.9 points in the states that did not.

A more rigorous study by political scientists at Stanford found that no-excuse mail voting might have increased turnout by a whopping 0.02 percent in the 2020 election. The study used a novel approach: The researchers compared the turnout among 65-year-olds in Texas, who were eligible to vote by mail without an excuse, with 64-year-olds in Texas, who weren’t. The turnout among 64-year-olds was indistinguishable from that of 65-year-olds, even though the latter group voted by mail in large numbers.

Like Georgia, Texas did not require an identification to vote by mail, but has a strict ID requirement for in-person voting.

I seem to remember Trump screaming about that last point, that mail-in ballots don't come with a strict ID requirement.  But his demands for a "signature" audit got nowhere, and I don't think even the changes in voting law proposed in Texas are going to change the way we vote by mail (which is the only way I'm voting for the rest of my days).

We can rail against voter suppression tactics all we want.  Mostly, thanks to e-mail, I've come to see it as another outrage goad meant to get me to sign up for recurring donations to Act Blue or some other Democratic-aligned organization.  I trust them a bit more than I would trust Trump, but the whole purpose of fund-raising is pretty much:  fund-raising.  It's like commerce and capitalism, forever demanding I feel the need to buy something else even after I just bought something else.  The tactics of political outrage are just another way of manipulating you into responding:  with money, with tweets, with rage against the machine.

Funny how there's alway a machine.  Very convenient to rage against.