Right to LifeBoard

Roborian wrote:

Israel is a democratic state-it's had four elections in the past two years, so democratic, in fact, that the next Prime Minister may well be decided by an Arabic party. But, because it is Israel, the same people who figuratively and even literally deify 'Democracy!', will happily support a functional dictator who has been rejecting democratic expression since the Bush administration.

Roborian wrote:

I think that you're on target in that it is just about a fundamentally different mentality, and I would even call it a 'cultural' issue. Obviously it does not fit the mold of what are typically thought of as cultural issues, but it fits as well or better than many of them, less about policy directly, more about general feelings towards a thing. It largely plays to stereotype as I see it, but I don't think it's inaccurate, fundamentally conservative vs. liberal, where the conservative sees a matter of responsibility, not agreeing with a reform to making voting easier because they think to some extent that it shouldn't be easy, they view it in the civic conservative sense where if someone 'can't bother' to take the time to vote they don't deserve special treatment. As much as the criticism of the right is that they're less democratic, in this sense it's for the opposite reason, voting is tied to sense of country, and should not be trivialized as something you can do through the mail or can just do on a day of your choosing. The liberal view is unsurprisingly the opposite, liberal in the sense of being freer, seeing the voting process as one that should be as easy as possible, and that ought to be as inclusive as possible, no need for ceremony or tradition of shuffling in on election day to fill out an in-person ballot. I think the debates over the impact of specific policies fall as secondary to the underlying motivating question of how elections ought to be, and they're an area in which American politics, which are a little wonky in what is considered conservative vs. liberal as compared to Europe, fall much more clearly into traditional right-left, traditional nationalist responsibility versus liberalized egalitarian inclusiveness.

The turnout question and you mentioning that you do not understand the GOP position I think fits this perfectly, to requote that:

"My main issue: Why cut off access to the ballot box? Increased early voting, expanded drive through voting, etc. that all increases turnout. In a state where voting is so low, you should want to increase turnout, not diminish it."

The reason for the opposition is that someone of a conservative mindset on this does not see higher turnout as an inherently desirable outcome at all, in fact it could be seen as a negative. In that mindset, the turnout of typical election-day in-person voting is the people who care enough to come in and vote, and if someone does not care enough (obviously there are other difficulties involved, this is looking to just explain the mindset) to do so is making their own choice and probably is better off not voting. If turnout is higher by mail-in ballots, ballot harvesting, or month-long early voting, the conservative mindset thinks that the people who were willing to vote the harder way are not getting overwhelmed by the lazier ones. Something like Australia's mandatory voting would be anathema. A good potential future-policy example would be the possibility of voting via the internet, which a liberal mindset would welcome as proving unrivaled broad access to the polls, and which the conservative mindset would despise as thoroughly trivializing the process: higher turnout is not an intrinsic good. It is the difference between thinking that a democracy is when all people vote, full stop, or a democracy is when all people who put in effort to vote, vote. You can see the same sort of thing in traditional conservative views on welfare, where the general liberal concept is welfare for, to quote the Green New Deal, those "unable or unwilling to work", welfare as something that everyone, or at least everyone qualifying, ought to have unfettered access to, while the general conservative concept is focused on work requirements and, while generally willing to provide some level of assistance, disdains the idea of someone living off of it: the benefits are seen as for those willing to work for them.

That ended up getting pretty long anyways, but I hope it's a helpful take. I'm not really necessarily defending the conservative mindset here, I'm definitely closer to it, though I think it can get to be too much, just looking to explain it and why it may be that right and left end up talking past each other on things like this. I think the current GOP voting reform proposals have a number of motivations behind them: some of it is likely legitimate concerns about voter fraud, some of it is probably partisan efforts to skew things their way, (I'll focus more on that when responding to the policy bits) but a lot of it, especially for the general public supporting it, your conservative uncle on Facebook sort of thing, comes down to that fundamentally different but very recognizable conservative idea: responsibilities, especially to country, should not necessarily be too easy, and they are trivialized if they are.

Horatius Cocles wrote:

Side note: I still miss the old forums and images we had on them.