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Regarding the elections... Legolas Send a noteboard - 15/07/2022 07:28:07 PM

View original postWhy are you saying Republicans plan to the steal the elections ? The ballot harvesting in the US seems very suspect. Not to mention dropping requirements for ID instead of issuing a national ID is insane.

like on many other topics in the crazily-polarized US, it's too simple to say one side or the other is right, because even the less crazy side, i.e. the Democrats, are being massively disingenuous and using the actual nutcases on the Republican side to dismiss the valid arguments of sane Republicans.

On ID requirements, it's really all a question of what you're used to - over here and I take it in Israel as well, a national ID is the most normal thing in the world, and requiring it for voting is too. I agree that if they had the same thing in the US, then we wouldn't have all those hysterical rants about voter fraud on the one hand and voter suppression on the other. But given that it doesn't exist and, since nothing ever gets decided anymore in the US, probably won't exist at any point in the foreseeable future, that's a purely hypothetical scenario. And in the US as it actually is, it is in fact pretty clear that what Republicans are really trying to do is making voting harder and discourage categories of voters who tend to skew Democratic, for electoral gain. Of course, Democrats trying to make voting easier with expanded voting hours etc. are also doing that for electoral gain - but even if both sides are doing what they do for electoral gain, still it's a lot more ethically dubious to discourage less motivated voters than to encourage them.

But when I'm talking about them planning to steal the election, I'm not talking about voter ID requirements, nor about them reversing various measures taken during Covid (which, you know, fair enough - as they rightly point out, differences between states are so big that the red states reversing those measures may still have more possibilities for voting than some blue states do). I'm talking about them trying to put conspiracy theorists on every board, local authority or appointed position that has anything to do with elections, people who take it for granted that if the Republican candidate lost the election in their district, it's per definition wrong and a result that must be overturned. And them trying to give state legislatures more power to tamper with election results - in many cases state legislatures where they gerrymandered enough to give themselves a bigger edge than actual election results justify (of course Democrats are also guilty of gerrymandering wherever they can, but the Democrats aren't trying to let legislatures overrule the actual vote results).

I think if Trump runs, it's very possible that he actually wins fair and square - but it's a certitude that if he loses, or if the result is unclear on election night, there will be Republican attempts to cheat and get him electoral college votes through underhanded means. And rather stronger attempts than last time.

Edit: Forgot to add another valid Republican point that is being unfairly ignored/dismissed by Democrats: regardless of the merits of the measures proposed, Republicans have a right to object to the principle of federal legislation telling states how to organize elections, instead of letting each state decide for itself. That's a perfectly valid objection to the voting laws the Dems in the Senate are proposing, and it's just not fair to act as if everybody objecting to those laws is automatically a cheating Trump supporter like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

This message last edited by Legolas on 15/07/2022 at 07:32:18 PM
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