Comment by cosmicgadget
3 hours ago
As I understand it, one of the main disenfranchisement tactics is to challenge ballots already cast. It's potentially very effective because the voter must see that their vote was challenged and then proactively contest it.
Does the decision make this easier?
Based on this NPR article, there are only about 28k voters nationwide on the "potentially fraudulent" list. And when Texas tried pursing theirs, they only ended up being able to act on ~100 of them.
Realistically, the rate of fraud nationwide is actually really low and this database would just a waste of time for the states that pursue it. But by holding it off the courts would be doing more to cover the administration (by giving them a plausible excuse) than letting it proceed.
Thank you, it makes me wonder why the administration is pursuing this at all. Optics? Or is there something more Stephen Miller-y going on here?
100% I think it's optics.
It reminds me of those police drug busts where they take a picture of all the drugs and it's just like a couple small bags, but they'll run the press release like "hundreds of lives saved!"
Acting like there are going to be millions of voters purged serves both party messages right now.
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> it makes me wonder why the administration is pursuing this at all.
Why do we pursue murderers? There are not that many.
Either the law matters or it does not. Pick your own world to live in, but be consistent.
Challenging cast ballots is non-scalable because it requires a lot of formal judicial process separately for each ballot challenged. Realistically a State could go after less than a thousand.
Even if you know with high certainty that a million ballots are fraudulent it is effectively impossible to challenge them because the judicial capacity required to do so doesn't remotely exist. There are adversarial scenarios where someone dumps vast numbers of fraudulent ballots and those ballots cannot be contested.
State legislatures have historically been empowered to vote in place of the people if the vote becomes infeasible or unreliable. People voting in Federal elections is largely a 20th century invention; the old methods are still available.