As a sidenote about voting, John is a brilliant man but what I find so frustrating about him in these conversations is that his views on election integrity can only be described as "100% Unconstrained," to borrow Sowell's vocabulary.
I don't know whether or not election fraud is a serious issue in the US. I don't know in part because you can't know unless there are restrictions in place. I also don't know what the correct restrictions are. But the idea that anyone, after the saga of the Trump and post-Trump years, who has concerns over the truthfulness and validity of our elections, is just trying to 'suppress voters'--well, I'm sorry John, but it's outrageous. It's slanderous. It's pie-in-the-sky liberal utopian thinking. Conservative Republicans who want more restrictive voting laws might be wrong, but they're not crazy, and they're not racist.
Any argument that we don't need any restrictions on voting, which is effectively what John has argued in the past, boils down to the premise that no one would want to commit election fraud. This is insane. I know people who were so hysterical over Trump that they would have gone out to vote against him twenty times if they could've gotten away with it--and in places like CA, they could have. It seems like a truism to me. If the Democrats could cheat, they would. So would Republicans. Lax voting laws make it easier to cheat. Cheating is bad. Therefore, a certain amount of restrictions are good and necessary.
Again, that's a debate to be had. I personally think that the fact that Democrats go BERSERK at the mere suggestion of simple and completely reasonable limitations like voter ID--when they want to literally turn our country into a papers, please society--or flip their shit because AZ and WI want to audit their votes....well, I gotta be honest, that make me very, very suspicious. If having to show our IDs to get vaccinated to show our vaccine cards to go to the movie theater isn't racist, I'm struggling to see why Dems think that voter ID laws are racist--except because they know that voter ID reduces election fraud, and they think election fraud benefits them more than Republicans. The principle does not seem to be rigorously observed internally.
And can someone express to me why it's an outrage to audit an election? Why wouldn't we audit every election? Let's do it right now! Let's go back and make sure every single election ever held was legitimate and fair! I don't think they weren't, but I'll tell you what: the conservative Republican I'm envisioning right now? Shrieking and name-calling when he suggests doing a recount, and refusing access to the ballot box, is doing nothing but continuing to undermine his confidence in elections. And that is a serious issue.
Glenn is right. Politicized elections are bad. In democracies, we've agreed to settle conflicts with ballot boxes instead of firearms, and we're better off for it. But if people don't have faith in elections, it no longer will suffice. And if you're a lawless president, who regularly and openly disregards the Constitution and the rulings of courts, doing something I'm disinclined to comply with anyway--like vaccine passports--then that blow to the legitimacy of the sitting government is going to prove fatal. War, or secession, is inevitable. It won't look like the North vs. the South, but it will be bad. I hope we never find out.
As a sidenote about voting, John is a brilliant man but what I find so frustrating about him in these conversations is that his views on election integrity can only be described as "100% Unconstrained," to borrow Sowell's vocabulary.
I don't know whether or not election fraud is a serious issue in the US. I don't know in part because you can't know unless there are restrictions in place. I also don't know what the correct restrictions are. But the idea that anyone, after the saga of the Trump and post-Trump years, who has concerns over the truthfulness and validity of our elections, is just trying to 'suppress voters'--well, I'm sorry John, but it's outrageous. It's slanderous. It's pie-in-the-sky liberal utopian thinking. Conservative Republicans who want more restrictive voting laws might be wrong, but they're not crazy, and they're not racist.
Any argument that we don't need any restrictions on voting, which is effectively what John has argued in the past, boils down to the premise that no one would want to commit election fraud. This is insane. I know people who were so hysterical over Trump that they would have gone out to vote against him twenty times if they could've gotten away with it--and in places like CA, they could have. It seems like a truism to me. If the Democrats could cheat, they would. So would Republicans. Lax voting laws make it easier to cheat. Cheating is bad. Therefore, a certain amount of restrictions are good and necessary.
Again, that's a debate to be had. I personally think that the fact that Democrats go BERSERK at the mere suggestion of simple and completely reasonable limitations like voter ID--when they want to literally turn our country into a papers, please society--or flip their shit because AZ and WI want to audit their votes....well, I gotta be honest, that make me very, very suspicious. If having to show our IDs to get vaccinated to show our vaccine cards to go to the movie theater isn't racist, I'm struggling to see why Dems think that voter ID laws are racist--except because they know that voter ID reduces election fraud, and they think election fraud benefits them more than Republicans. The principle does not seem to be rigorously observed internally.
And can someone express to me why it's an outrage to audit an election? Why wouldn't we audit every election? Let's do it right now! Let's go back and make sure every single election ever held was legitimate and fair! I don't think they weren't, but I'll tell you what: the conservative Republican I'm envisioning right now? Shrieking and name-calling when he suggests doing a recount, and refusing access to the ballot box, is doing nothing but continuing to undermine his confidence in elections. And that is a serious issue.
Glenn is right. Politicized elections are bad. In democracies, we've agreed to settle conflicts with ballot boxes instead of firearms, and we're better off for it. But if people don't have faith in elections, it no longer will suffice. And if you're a lawless president, who regularly and openly disregards the Constitution and the rulings of courts, doing something I'm disinclined to comply with anyway--like vaccine passports--then that blow to the legitimacy of the sitting government is going to prove fatal. War, or secession, is inevitable. It won't look like the North vs. the South, but it will be bad. I hope we never find out.