Election Security: an overview of the state of the debate

7 min readSep 28, 2023

As a red co-chair of the San Francisco Braver Angels alliance, I am preparing for a debate on election security.

As I prepare for this debate, I’ve done research on this frustrating issue. I’m tired of how Americas are going round and round and seem to take more pleasure in vilifying our rivals than attempting to reach a national consensus.

I want a fair discussion of the issues so we can make the hard choices necessary for our country. The best forum I’ve found for such a discussion is Braver Angels.

The way I prepare for a national debate or any tough moral issue is the same.

I first seek to set my perspective in an open and dis-passionate manner.
Second, I explore how others consider the issue.
Third, I seek to understand how we got to our current state of dispute.
Fourth, I seek to see how other countries/states have dealt with the issue.
Finally, I look to a reasoned analysis of how to resolve the issue.

Here is what I’ve found out.

In 2020, for the first time in this nation’s history, over 159 million people voted in a presidential election. This demonstrates that objectively speaking more Americans than ever are exercising their right to the franchise.

BACKGROUND:

Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The act was designed to make sure state and local governments could no longer pass laws or policies that denied citizens the right to vote based on race and other immutable characteristics. This monumental voting rights legislation was expanded several times: in 1975 to protect language minorities, in 1982 to require accommodations and protections for voters with disabilities, and in 1993 to permit voter registration at the motor vehicle departments.

In 2013, the Supreme Court weighed in on the Voting Rights Act in a significant way in the Shelby County v. Holder case. At issue was whether Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act –a provision of the act that required jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to submit proposed changes in voting procedures to the U.S. Department of Justice — was constitutional. A majority of the court held Section that 4(b) — the provision that determined which jurisdictions were covered by Section 5 — was unconstitutional because it was based on an old formula. In effect, Section 5 became unenforceable until Congress designated a new formula. Shortly thereafter, states such as North Carolina, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Virginia began to implement policies previously denied under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

In the past, many of the jurisdictions that are accused of making it harder to vote would have had to clear their changes with the Justice Department or a federal court under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That requirement applied to jurisdictions, mostly in the South, with a history of voting discrimination. But in 2013, the Supreme Court invalidated a key provision of the law, eliminating what is known as “preclearance” and ushering in a wave of voting changes in once-covered jurisdictions.

What is preclearance? Congress was given veto power under the Constitution’s Elections Clause, state legislatures would be responsible for running federal elections, but “the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.”

STATE OF THE NATION: 30+ states have made these voting changes since the 2020 election Changes concern mail-in ballot deadlines, ID requirements, and the early voting period.

Nine states made changes to their voter registration systems. Many of these changes involve improving online registration sites, expanding pre-registration for teenagers, and creating programs for the recently incarcerated to learn how to restore their right to vote. Montana changed registration requirements to provide guidelines on what is an acceptable ID to register.
Twelve states changed their deadlines for mail-in ballot applications and/or returns. Five of these states decreased the amount of time available for voters to apply for and/or return a mail-in ballot. Georgia decreased the deadline to apply from four days before the election to 11 days.
Six states increased the amount of time voters will have to apply for/return ballots. Two of these states, California and Massachusetts, extended 2020 laws that sent all registered voters in those states a mail-in ballot. Texas clarified the reasons voters can and cannot request an absentee ballot.
Many states passed laws regarding official ballot drop boxes, which are set up by election officials for voters to return absentee ballots in-person. Three states decreased the amount of ballot drop boxes allowed per county and added regulations such as monitoring of drop boxes by county election officials. Three other states passed laws to increase ballot drop box locations.

https://usafacts.org/articles/30-states-have-made-these-voting-changes-since-the-2020-election/

Here’s a summary graphic from the Center for Election Innovation & Research on the voting early process:

https://electioninnovation.org/research/early-voting-availability-2022/

So there it is FACTS hard and confirmed — is that enough?

NO, not in our post-rational era. As humanists, we are driven by our emotions, therefore, we need to find a way to recognize our drift from rationality and find a way to return to it. Here is how I do it.

I have been San Quentin schooled. I’ve used the circle to learn to acknowledge and respect an individual’s emotions with groups like VOEG and NVC. At AA and Restorative Justice, I’ve discovered how to make hard choices in our society. I respect emotions, but I will not submit to allowing emotions to make my hard choices ever again.

Often we use competition to make choices. We compete for views, likes, and followers. Even a democratic vote is a type of competition. Prison has taught me much about competition. Humans are emotional and we like to win. I can be so caught up in winning that I fail at communicating. I do not want to ‘win’ a dispute on election security.

I admit that prison has made me a hard man; not cruel, but hard. I work every day to keep my passions in check. Prison is full of men who can’t control their passions.

As a nation, we create laws and institutions to give us the means of controlling these emotions/impulses. We have laws against murder not just to discourage the act, but also to stop the cycle of revenge all too common on the street. Each side feels JUSTIFIED in seeking to quench its thirst for PAYBACK.

The point of courts and laws is to distance the individual from the act — to tame our passions — both revenge and mercy. It is the best way for the United States to make hard choices.

Empathy isn’t simply sympathy; it’s a powerful pre-verbal form of communication. A form of communication that humanity has only recently learned to mitigate with reason in large group settings.

Here’s how empathic communication works:

Empathic communication is an involuntary process if you are not actively resisting it. As a result, this form of communication is usually limited to children (it’s critical for socialization) and for intimate groups (family).
In empathic communication, we build an internal model of the other person’s feelings based on cues (face, body, screams, etc.). We feel what the victim feels: their fear, anger, and pain. Our faces grimace in pain like the victim, and we can feel the knee on our necks (George Floyd). We connect at a deep level.
When we empathize with victims, they are no longer strangers; we form a fictive kinship with them. They are now part of our tribe, and they are being threatened.

Empathy Triggers

Empathy triggers are used to mobilize network swarms, which is, as we have seen with the response to the invasion of…

Any important decision — criminal justice, diversity policies, immunization programs, gun control, or immigration — will inevitably have winners and losers. Decision-makers should resist the pull of emotional empathy and identifying with EITHER SIDE OF THE ISSUE. This is counterintuitive. For example, a felon furlough program might lead to an overall drop in crime. However, it can take one news report of a furloughed prisoner assaulting someone to trigger the emotional empathic response that drives society to shut down the program. It’s hard to feel emotional empathy for a statistical shift in crime rates.

A great book that sets out how to achieve a dis-passionate state for facing hard moral issues is Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom.

Against Empathy — Wikipedia

Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion is a 2016 book written by psychologist Paul Bloom. The book draws on…

Allowing emotional moral mathematics to guide our legal, ethical, or political decisions can lead to perverse outcomes. Recent research in neuroscience and psychology shows that emotional empathy makes us biased, tribal, and often cruel. For example, empathy shuts down when you believe someone is responsible for his or her own sufferings. Look at the delay in addressing the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s as a recent example.

We face the same serious moral issue with the current debate.

Comprehensive abortion reform will require hard choices. The danger we now face is that loyalty to a compromise is seen as disloyalty to some supposedly higher interest.

Nevertheless, America has to make a decision. This is why we use institutions to make and enforce our laws. Much of what I have heard on this issue is an attempt to circumvent any dis-passionate critical thinking on the issue by appeals to emotion. This is not the way to govern a country or determine comprehensive abortion reform.

We use our institutions and laws to control emotions, both revenge and mercy. Government institutions should allow the cooler heads to prevail to make the laws we are to follow.