In a true democracy, the legitimacy of an elected official depends on the validity of the election that put them in office. While properly defining a valid election is a subject worthy of a book, I will endeavor to lay out some obvious standards and briefly discuss their state going into the 2020 presidential election.
First, every eligible citizen must have reasonable and reliable access to the voting process. This includes registering to vote and the actual casting of the vote. A citizen can freely choose not to participate but if this choice is due to unjust barriers, then this would undercut the legitimacy of the election.
While registering to vote is easy, it should be automatic for eligible citizens—the default should be that every eligible citizen is registered with an option to opt out. This would increase the number of registered voters and might slightly increase participation.
Republicans have focused considerable effort on suppressing voters, most especially minority voters. These efforts take various forms and include such tactics as voter ID laws, closing of poling stations, limiting early voting, and restricting voting hours. Experts disagree about the actual impact of these tactics but even if they had little impact, they would serve to damage the legitimacy of elections—especially when Republicans win. After all, one can always ask whether the Republican only won because voters were suppressed.
Republicans contend that their efforts are aimed at preventing voter fraud. They are right to consider this matter since the second standard is that those who are justly ineligible to vote must be prevented from voting. If ineligible people vote (or someone votes for them), then the legitimacy of the election is damaged. Fortunately, voter fraud is all but nonexistent in the United States, despite concerted efforts to find it. As such, while election officials should remain vigilant against the possibility, an official is more likely to be struck by lightning than witness actual voter fraud. There have been cases of election fraud, which is the third standard: the election must be run properly to ensure that each legitimate ballot is counted, and no illegitimate ballots are counted.
Somewhat ironically (but not surprising) the most recent election fraud was conducted by a Republican operative in North Carolina. The fraud was detected and addressed, but the same Republicans who cry wolf about voter fraud remained silent about this episode. Democrats did, of course, run some rather famous election frauds in Chicago over the years—this is a bipartisan thing. Fortunately, election fraud is still relatively rare—but recent and past occurrences show that elections need to be diligently policed to root out such fraud.
The fourth standard deals with the election equipment. If the means of collecting and tallying the votes are not secure and reliable, then the legitimacy of an election is in question. Unfortunately, this area is a disaster.
One major concern is that the voting machines are woefully insecure and most can be easily hacked with very basic skills. Even if no one is actively trying to sabotage an election, the machines can fail, and errors can occur that impact the election. As such it is reasonable to wonder if votes are being properly recorded and counted. Since Russia and other foreign actors seem to favor Trump and the Republicans, this vulnerability favors them. The possibility of errors favors neither party, since errors could benefit either. Also of concern is the fact that many of the machines do not create a paper trail, so the results cannot be confirmed.
While a perfect machine is impossible, a better machine is certainly a very real possibility and machines that create a paper trail can be easily made. Unfortunately, the Republicans have not been very interested in addressing these matters, most likely because they have been winning. However, this should be a bipartisan concern since the next election shenanigans might not favor the Republicans.
In addition to outside actors and machine failures, there is also the concern that 85% of voting machines are manufactured by two vendors. Both vendors are owned by private equity and hence their funding and control are unknown. This raises the worry that the machines could be manipulated by the vendors to swing elections. While this might sound like a movie plot, a Global/Diebold machine “lost” 16,00o Gore votes in 2000 and there are connections between these companies and Paul Manafort. While errors are to be expected, the voting machines issues of these companies seem to have consistently favored Republicans—thus raising serious concerns about the integrity of the election.
One proposed solution is to develop an open source voting machine and having the machine’s manufacturers operate with transparency would go a long way. While some might think that open source would make them vulnerable, this is actually the opposite—open source software is, in a seeming paradox, more secure.
Given that the legitimacy of elected officials rests on the legitimacy of the elections, these problems should be addressed. To the degree they are not, officials will lack legitimacy—especially those in the party engaging in election misdeeds.
Mike, you may want to be careful what you wish for. I frankly don’t believe that more democracy is always better. Trump is a good example of “more democracy.” I remember reading articles about 70 year olds who voted for the first time — for Trump.
And all those minority voters the Dems take for granted may decide they like Trump better than Liz Warren.
Trump lost the popular vote.
If they like Trump more, that is how democracy works. It is the worst government type, aside from the others.
Mike, you do realize that Dems cheat even in their own primaries?
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/14/16640082/donna-brazile-warren-bernie-sanders-democratic-primary-rigged
So it is hard to swallow all that “we want each vote to count” malarkey.
Yes; I’m familiar with how the parties work.
I agree with all four points, with some redistribution of emphasis, though its not entirely clear to me where your second and third points begin and end. I will number my own points.
1. “Automatic voter registration” as I see it implemented in the US, with an opt-in at government services like the DMV, is a good thing, because it leads to maximum accuracy in the voting rolls.
However, for the sake of the same accuracy, that needs to be balanced with a mechanism for removing people who have died or moved, or for whatever other reason are no longer eligible to vote in that district, It’s not clear to me that such mechanisms are widespread. I have seen many accounts of state registers that are known to be polluted with leavers and people who died. You didn’t mention that. Accuracy should cut both ways.
It surprised me somewhat to find that about an estimated 76% of people eligible to vote in national elections are indeed registered, From all the talk about it, I assumed the number would be lower. It would not surprise me at all to think that a quarter of people don’t want to be registered, or don’t care about being registered, and there are ample opportunities to register all year, even without automatic registration, so while this would be a good thing, I would not regard it as terribly important.
2. “Reliable access to the voting process”, like accuracy, is a two-edged sword. Postal voting and ballot harvesting, which I will discuss later, certainly make the process easier for legitimate voters, but also make fraud and intimidation and vote-buying easier. Naturally, Democratic operatives focus on allegations of “suppression” – a very vague term – while of course Republican operatives emphasise fraud.
We see complaints from Democrats that Voter ID laws and polling statrion positions make voting harder for their potential voters, and call this “suppression”. Looking from outside, I have to say that these complaints seem very overblown. This is a video I found entertaining, about White Leftist students worrying that black people wouldn’t have ID, wouldn’t be able to find their polling station, or wouldn’t know how to use the Internet, followed from a wonderful response by black people who have a perfect “What PLANET are these people from??” reaction:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW2LpFkVfYk
Since “suppression” is never quantified, I believe it is relatively unimportant. There does seem to be a genuine problem with a few thousand Native Americans on tribal reservations having a postal address that is not recognised, but other than that, I see a lot of smoke and no fire.
3. Fraud. Like “suppression”, the evidence for “fraud” is nebulous. While there certainly have been some cases, they seem to be in small numbers that do not affect many places. So far.
4. Future reliability, As a successful computer professionsal over three decades, I say that anybody who would trust a computer voting system without a human-readable paper ballot backup is insane, and/or deeply stupid, and/or criminal. I could go on for quite a while about this, but I won’t.for now.
Postal voting is clearly subject to fraud, bribery, and intimidation, and I predict it won’t be long before we see a major election scandal based on it.
“Ballot harvesting” is as wilfully insane as election computers without human-readable pape backup. I came across a video from California, where, following a change in the law to allow ballot harvesting, many unexpected results were recorded in favour of Democrats. The video shows an anonymous woman ringing a doorbell and offering to “collect” the hoiseholder’s ballot – a “service but only for people who are supposrting the Democratic Party”. Since I would avoid the wrath of the link-counter, I will say you can find it on Youtube searching for “Picking Up My Ballot? Miranda Morales”. I find this even more reprehensible than the unauditable voting computers.
True, the lack of a paper trail is crazy and there will be foes of democracy who will exploit it.
And your response to “ballot harvesting”?
I really wonder about your abilities as a critical thinker and a researcher. If you actually read the articles you link in support of your arguments, I have some serious concerns about your reading comprehension; however, in your defense (I guess …) I don’t think you really read your support material beyond whatever headline seems like it agrees with you.
This underscores my frequent critique of your entries to this blog – that they have far less to do with logic, reason, or critical thinking and more to do with the willful acceptance of left-wing talking points and virtually any accusation against Trump or Republicans as indisputable fact.
Once again, I think you could just solve this inconsistency by retitling your blog. Why not just call it “I hate Trump” or “A Left-Wing Playbook” ? To intimate that it has anything whatsoever to do with philosophy or real thought is disingenuous, dishonest, and an affront if not a gross insult to anyone in academia who honors valid research methodologies and pursues results to inquiries that are unfettered by foregone conclusions.
Your first statement – “Republicans have focused considerable effort on suppressing voters, most especially minority voters.” is presented as fact. There is no indication whatsoever that this is an opinion; no suggestion that this is anything but a proven fact. You even provide a link, as though you are citing some legitimate source to support your premise.
You have a PhD; you have to know about citing sources in academic research; I have to assume that the spirit of the rules of determining the legitimacy of citations, if not the rules themselves, is something that you would hold dear – yet here is this statement, and the link to which it points.
In fact, the statement is a direct quote from the headline of the cited article – but with one pretty important omission. The actual headline reads, “Republicans have focused considerable effort on suppressing voters, most especially minority voters, journalist says”.
“Journalist says”.
That in and of itself destroys any legitimacy behind the statement. But to add to that, the journalist in question is Ari Berman, from Mother Jones magazine. “Mother Jones” is a self-described Socialist magazine that continually espouses anti-Republican tropes backed by bias, ideologically motivated conclusion, and thin, if even existent, research.
How can you, as a PhD in Philosophy, who writes a blog that is supposedly dedicated to truth, logic, reason, and deep thought, make a statement like that and cite the opinion of someone who is most likely more opinionated than you? Did you think that your readers wouldn’t bother to click on the link?
When you make a statement like that and pretend, as you do, that it is a fact – and then link the citation that you do, it completely undermines any legitimacy to any and every one of your premises.
But, as long as you cite the source, it would be disingenuous of any critical thinker to dismiss it on reputation alone, so I’ll make a couple of comments.
In the article, Berman decries the requirement of Photo ID for voting, and the so-called “Use it or lose it” laws, calling them both “suppression”. Do you really believe this?
The arguments against the Photo ID laws are in and of themselves racist – that African Americans can’t seem to figure out how to get an ID, that they lack the ability to use the Internet, that they can’t find their way to a DMV …
“Coffee Time” presented a YouTube video that showed the reactions of members of the African American community that agree with this observation – everyone that was asked for an opinion said that they had photo IDs, they knew where to get them, no one they knew lacked one, they knew how to get to the DMV, how to use the Internet, how to use the US Postal Service … and that to draw the conclusion that they did not was insulting and racist.
Of course, this is no more a legitimate citation than the one you used – but it certainly presents a compelling counter-argument to the rash assumption that Berman makes in his article, and demands further investigation – unless you just want to accept the conclusion as part of your partisan narrative, and are willing to roll the dice in hopes that no one will check your sources. I guess it comes down to what’s more important to you – your legitimacy as a PhD and a professor, or the spread of unresearched, invalid and emotion-driven partisan hatred of a politician or party that you disagree with. I guess your choice is clear.
The second “suppression” argument Berman cites is the “use it or lose it” law, which involves the removal of voters from the rolls if they have not voted within a prescribed period of time. What Berman fails to mention is that this action was upheld by the Supreme Court, as part of the federal mandate that individual states take specific actions to ensure that their list of registered voters is current and accurate. In other words, this is not “suppression”, it is “compliance” with federal law; and to cite it as anything else is dishonest, disingenuous, partisan, and nothing short of an outright lie. Were you to cite this in an academic paper, your research would be at best questioned – but any academic peer review board would likely cite you themselves as being neglectful of even the most basic standards of ethics in research, and producing biased work based on foregone conclusions.
Is there reason to continue?
“Voter Fraud is all but nonexistent in the US”.
Yes, another statement of fact. An unequivocal conclusion. Not an opinion, not the result of a survey, not a finding by some agency – but a fact. Backed by …. What? A link. Well, if there’s a link – can I not assume that this link is inconclusive proof of the veracity of the statement? I would think so. Why bother to look?
But the problem is the same as the first one – the link doesn’t offer proof, it offers a far more accurate statement, one that actually does point to a fact – “Report: Trump Commission did not find widespread voter fraud”. But the fact that a commission did not find fraud, as you well know, does not mean that fraud does not exist – in fact, you have said repeatedly that to conclude that something is true based on a lack of evidence to the contrary is one of the most basic of fallacies. And while we’re on the subject, since when did you ever take anything that Trump or his administration does as remotely legitimate?
It goes deeper than that, though. Did you read the article you cited, or just the headline? The article cites an investigation fraught with politics – that Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach presented substantial evidence of voter fraud that was ignored by the commission, stating, ““For some people, no matter how many cases of voter fraud you show them, there will never be enough for them to admit that there’s a problem,”
“Kobach said there have been more than 1,000 convictions for voter fraud since 2000, and that the commission presented 8,400 instances of double voting in the 2016 election in 20 states.
“Had the commission done the same analysis of all 50 states, the number would have been exponentially higher,”
But in the legal wranglings, certain evidence was repressed, other evidence was not allowed, and the result was an incomplete report which shows sections of the report based on evidence which is “glaringly empty”.
The problem here has little to nothing to do with whether or not there is voter fraud, of course, but rather your citation of an article that you clearly did not read, or that you read and did not understand. You cite the article as support for your statement “Voter fraud is all but nonexistent in the US”, but the article merely says initially that a Trump commission did not find evidence of fraud, and continues to discuss some serious accusations about the commission itself, that certain evidence was omitted or repressed, and states that those who presented such evidence were rebuffed and ridiculed.
In fact, the link at the end of your own link indicates that the findings of the Trump commission (that there is no evidence of voter fraud) is being challenged in court by Maine Secretary of State Dunlap, who is suing for access to materials withheld – saying that “the commission violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) by excluding Dunlap and others from much of the commission’s work. The Executive Office of the President (EOP) was also a named defendant, as the office staffed the commission and maintained its records”
As an academic myself, and one who must adhere to very strict standards of research, I find your essay to be not only damaging to all of academia, but embarrassing and offensive. You cite as fact articles that are nothing more than opinions that you think agree with you, that are no more researched than your own, that in some cases actually contradict your premises – leading careful readers to wonder about whether or not you read, or understood, the articles you cite.
“Somewhat ironically (but not surprising) the most recent election fraud was conducted by a Republican operative in North Carolina.”
This statement is very telling. Voter roll accuracy, election fraud, the legitimacy of registered voters is a national, not a partisan problem. You begin your essay by saying that it doesn’t exist, that Republicans are using the idea as a false premise by which they can repress votes that they assume would be Democrat votes – and then you contradict yourself by saying that it does exist, but is perpetrated by Republicans! Is there no end to your willingness to abandon any semblance of logic and reason in the service of your abject hatred and partisan views?
I’ve pointed out these inconsistencies in many of your posts; shown how you use the very fallacies you decry in support of partisan views, pointed out how you are willing to abandon any and all tenets of academic research and the processes of logic and reason that are your very profession in order to further your emotion-driven partisan bias.
Please note that I am not disagreeing with your conclusions, nor am I agreeing with them. I am taking no sides in this issue – at least not for the purposes of this post. I am simply questioning your credentials, dismissing your essay as nothing better than the Facebook posts of passionate schoolgirls who know nothing of forensics, of logic, of critical thinking.
Apparently you can’t help yourself – but there is a very simple way to make it all right, without abandoning your partisan passion and without compromising your credentials as a philosopher.
Re-title your blog.
Stop pretending that it’s a blog produced by a “Philosopher”. Stop trying to give these biased opinions legitimacy by putting your PhD behind them, and hoping that no one reads further than the fact that you provide links, and definitely hoping that no one actually reads the links
When your blog actually addresses “Philosophy”, it’s challenging and interesting – but when you drift into politics, you’re no different from Rachel Maddow or Joy Behar – spouting left-wing talking points and unfounded and unsubstantiated accusations that are all too common all over the media, both mainstream and social. It is far from incisive, it lacks originality, and presents no point of view or observation that does anything other than parrot what we can read elsewhere – and would, if it weren’t so damned tiresome.
I’m sorry for being so harsh here, but I am no more harsh with you than I am with my own students who produce thesis papers that draw all sorts of conclusions that lack substance or legitimate citations. I’m harsh because I’m angry – angry because others who participate on this forum form opinions about all of academia based on your posts – and as an academic who is very careful about distinguishing opinion from fact, as one who is very fastidious about checking my resources and setting my passion and opinion aside in order to keep a mind open enough to accept whatever conclusion ensues from legitimate logic and reason, I strongly resent being lumped in with that vision of “academia”. Some of us continue to fight the good fight – and realize that that fight is not “Impeach the Motherfucker”. (Nor is it “Keep the Motherfucker” – it has nothing to do with the motherfucker in question).
Point of clarification – I am not saying that the opinions of academia held by some others is based entirely on your posts – in fact, I’ll walk that back and say that those opinions are based on far more widespread observation – but that your posts do nothing to dispel that view of academia – and in fact, support it.
Um, yeah. Like I said. What? Not sophisticated enough? Been there done that. Logic and reason are not the field of play, thus the tactics of logic and reason are as unsuited for this purpose as my scuba equipment is for a round of golf. Though come to think of it, the way I play…gimme a minute…
To be fair, logic and reason are very hard to apply to a field like politics, or social issues in general, unless everybody – and I mean everybody – involved agrees to tight rules of evidence.
I think that we humans are simply not sufficiently smart to deal with such issues. It’s an inherent design limitation we can’t overcome. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to do our best, but we should have due humility.
Error of Overgeneralisation: When we talk about “men”, “women”, “blacks”, “whites”, “Democrats”, “Republicans”, “minority (everybody is a minority of one) voters”, we are already wrong. Simply wrong. Everything from that point forward is invalid. We have made an initial error that cannot be corrected. Like a 10-page calculation of a trajectory where we have made an error in the centre of mass or the air resistance on page one, we are hopelessly lost. There is so much variation within these groups, even if we make a formal operational definition, that apart from measurements actually embedded in that definition we have an unknown error bar.
Argument by Adjective: “X is a BIG problem”. “No, X is a SMALL problem; X is RARE.” “But X serves to damage (bonus implied adjective: how much?) the legitimacy of elections.” We can do this all day without getting anywhere.
And so Mike puts forward a fuzzy, inadequately supported, overgeneralised assertion by a partisan journalist, and I answer it with an amusing but cherry-picked video showing some anecdotal evidence, and we entertain ourselves, but are no closer to facts.
I am sure there are problems with fraud, even if we can’t quantify them exactly because an unknown number of fraud cases go undetected. I am sure there are problems with suppression, even if we can’t quantify them exactly because we don’t have a solid definition of suppression.
I am sure, though, that ballot harvesting makes it easiet to perpetrate fraud and undue influence of various sorts. I am also sure that there is no computerised system that can be deployed securely over such a wide distribution and conditions of use.
Forgive late reply as I’ve been rather busy, but wanted to get back to this…
To be fair, logic and reason are very hard to apply to a field like politics, or social issues in general, unless everybody – and I mean everybody – involved agrees to tight rules of evidence.
Well, true. When tearing things down to the most basic root level. But it’s a bit of a cop out. For any society to function productively, we need to be able to communicate about things in a manner that respects the context of the matter at hand and not fall back on teenage logic, gotcha games, and even tactics that a teenager would be ashamed to use, all in the context of being an honest “philosopher”? One who actually teaches ethics on the taxpayers dime? No, we don’t need the rules to be that tight for this level of discussion or analysis. In general, in a real deep, truly philosophical discussion, I understand that the lines blur and that we start to push the limits of human understanding. But not at this level. We’re nowhere near close to deconstructing Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Not that he wasn’t flippant at times himself in other regards.
Error of Overgeneralisation: When we talk about “men”, “women”, “blacks”, “whites”, “Democrats”, “Republicans”, “minority (everybody is a minority of one) voters”, we are already wrong. Simply wrong.
Agree. The problem does at some point become that we need a handle for the ideas and nature of these concepts, thus we should be very careful when getting into details. Which of course, is a big part of the problem here. Not to reference Wittgenstein himself, nor to sound like a huge fan, just read him once decades ago and while it didn’t so much stick with me it helped with the perspectives problems I was, and still often do, struggling with. But yeah, Investigations.
And so Mike puts forward a fuzzy, inadequately supported, overgeneralised assertion by a partisan journalist, and I answer it with an amusing but cherry-picked video showing some anecdotal evidence, and we entertain ourselves, but are no closer to facts.
This. THis THIs THIS THIS. I would greatly enjoy using these sort of issues as jumping off points to discuss these sort of things in detail with yourself, DH, TJ, where ever Magus is, and anyone else interested in a serious discussion of them. It’s probably the main reason I get so damn frustrated with this nonsense. These are serious issues with very serious consequences to our shared culture and environment and we treat them as inconsequentially as if they were happening on some ant farm we are observing from the outside. As if the only problem is a few ants might escape and cause us some minor bother.