The Unproven vs. the Non-Falsifiable

I found Nicholas Grossman’s post at Arc Digital entertaining in a perverse sort of way, exemplifying as excellently as it does projection. Here’s the portion I wanted to focus on:

Democrats have focused on what happens before elections, making voter suppression their top concern. As Big Lie-pushing Republicans pass bills that change election rules at the state level — nominally to fight mass voter fraud, an imaginary problem — Democrats have highlighted measures that make voting less convenient and disproportionately burden urban areas (which tend to have more minorities). Biden called Georgia’s new law “Jim Crow on steroids.”

That’s a gross exaggeration. The law makes voting less convenient than in 2020, especially in cities, but it’s no less convenient, or in some aspects more, than in 2018. New restrictions, such as Georgia curtailing the number of ballot drop boxes and Texas trying to ban drive-through voting, are driven by lies about these methods, which have proven as secure as others. That’s wrong on principle — voting should be convenient for everyone — but it’s unlikely to impact outcomes, especially without a pandemic.

When Georgia passed the law in March, Democrats fixated on rules restricting the ability to hand out water bottles within 150 feet of a polling place. Proponents claim that counters last-ditch attempts to buy votes; opponents claim it burdens voters stuck on long lines in densely populated areas (which are disproportionately black). However, even assuming the worst, it’s obnoxious, but not a major threat to democracy. How many people go to the polls and leave because the line is long, but would have stayed and voted if someone gave them a water bottle?

Democrats are right to oppose burdens on voting, especially when those burdens fall disproportionately. As Adam Serwer explains, political parties are power-seeking organizations, and disenfranchising a wide swath of black citizens after Reconstruction made it so neither party valued them.

I selected this passage because it juxtaposes two different election problems: vote fraud and vote suppression. As this Ipsos/Reuters poll found, a majority of Republicans think the election was stolen by voter fraud. I don’t know how many Republicans continue to believe that but, clearly, many do.

Vote fraud is well-defined and is against the law. Hundreds or thousands of cases of vote fraud have been successfully prosecuted over the last decade or so so it’s hardly “imaginary”, “mythical”, or a “Big Lie”. The dog in the diehard believers in a fraudulent election’s manger is that it’s unproven and being further disproven on a near-daily basis. The audit of the election conducted in Michigan should be taken as proof-positive that the election there was not decided by fraud. Will the audits being conducted in Arizona and Georgia come up with the proof that they need? Georgia is looking decreasingly likely. Arizona?

However, that’s not the end of the story. Mr. Grossman is worried about “vote suppression”. From my perspective the problem with the charge of “vote suppression” is that it appears to be completely subjective and, indeed, non-falsifiable. Is it imaginary, mythical, or a big lie? I have no idea how you would assess it. You can always make a claim that more people would voted for you if your voters hadn’t been suppressed.

Additionally, I find identifying literacy or land ownership tests (to give two clear examples of vote suppression) with not giving water to people standing in line to vote as something of a stretch.

What all of this demonstrates to me is just how much Republicans and Democrats distrust each other. How is that to be remedied? I don’t think that calling each other fascists or defending people engaging in violent protests are steps in the right direction.