In-fighting on the wrong side

This, I hope, will be a quick post.

I was just listening to a video of Patrick Byrne talking about election-related issues. On several substantive points, I found myself agreeing with him because I had seen things that justified his statements. Other items I was less sure about but they seemed plausible. Yet others sounded implausible, though not impossible.

The one item that stood out as true is that conservatives fight each other frequently, possibly more than they do battle with progressives/communists. I have multiple X correspondents that send me DMs to bad mouth each other. I hear the same kinds of things in election integrity groups, and am aware of at least one person that wasn’t exactly saying flattering things about my work.

My attitude is that I don’t want to engage in that myself, though I am certainly curious where the faction boundaries lie. So I do listen, and sometimes listening requires sharing my own positions, so I’m not an ivory tower of rectitude myself. I’d like to think that I refrain from the more extreme remarks, but I do have my own opinions of who is or isn’t as effective as they could be.

There are two people I know, both influential in this space, who concern me a great deal — not because of anything they’ve done, but because of what I hear about them. I won’t name them, because I don’t want this to be an argument about them or their positions. But here’s the shape of it: one faction calls the first man a deep-state do-nothing; another calls him a tireless defender of the republic. A third calls him not deep-state at all, just ineffectual — in over his head rather than compromised. The second man gets the exact same three verdicts, from different corners, in the same proportions. Two men, six accusations, and almost no agreement on which four of the six are false.

My gut feeling is that one of them is the good guy and the other is the do-nothing. That, or the one I’m less sure about is doing his best within his ability to comprehend the situation and his comfort level for risk. Regardless, there are some very prominent people with exactly the opposite opinion of mine.

My rule for all human behavior is that everyone does everything they do because it meets their definition of “good.” There are psychos out there who perversely do things for the express purpose of evil, but most people you run into are doing what they think is right. Which means most of these arguments aren’t really about character at all — they’re about policy dressed up as character. Someone is described as a “bad guy” not because of anything he did, but because he isn’t doing, or isn’t supporting, the specific policy his critics favor. And which policy a person favors depends heavily on their risk tolerance, their read of what’s politically survivable, and their capacity to analyze the underlying problem in the first place. None of that makes one side right and the other wrong. It just means “he’s a bad guy” is frequently doing the work that “I disagree with his approach” should be doing instead.

I say this in the context of conservatives who have roughly the same goals. I still think it is empirically sound to say that all progressives and communists are evil, even if they see themselves as saints.

To illustrate this, I’ll use one of my own positions that is not universally held. I think the only true solution to the problems I’ve seen in about a dozen state voter rolls is to destroy the existing data, the software that made them, and the machines they reside on. Then rebuild from scratch by having every eligible voter who wants to vote re-register in person with ID and proof of address. That process should take place at least every two years.

Yes, it would shrink the voter rolls considerably, but that is good. It isn’t disenfranchising people who want to vote, but eliminating almost all fraudulent records and low-propensity voters whose registrations can be appropriated by bad actors. In my view, the problem when only 60% of available voters vote isn’t solved by registering more people, but by knocking the 40% who don’t vote off the rolls. A near-100% voting rate would represent equilibrium between qualified voters and actual voters. The lower that percentage is, the more opportunity exists for fraud.

My view isn’t shared by everyone on “our” side. Many think it is too severe — not because it will disenfranchise legitimate motivated voters (the Democrats’ faux-argument) but because it is either mechanically or politically impossible. I don’t really care if either of those things is true; I am only stating that any real solution requires the elements I just described. Anything less is a partial solution, or a panacea with no effect. And this is exactly the mechanism I described above: my supporters will say it has to be done my way, someone else’s supporters will say it has to be done his way, and before long each side is calling the other’s champion a bad guy for wanting something different — when the actual disagreement was never about good and evil at all.

This is the same dissension in the ranks I mentioned earlier. If I had the authority, I’d simply say, “This is what we’re doing,” and that would be the end of it.

Here’s the part that isn’t as simple as it sounds. Our Constitution assigns authority to specific officials, and so do the state constitutions — elected officials genuinely have authority granted to them at both levels, and the ability to delegate it to subordinates for limited purposes. I’ve made that argument before, and I stand by it. But having the authority and being able to exercise it aren’t the same thing. Practically speaking, that authority is so easy to interfere with — through lawsuits, impeachments, investigations, scurrilous accusations, and the rest — that it gets diluted down toward invisibility. Both things are true at once: the authority is real, and it’s also so easily contested that it might as well not be. That’s not a contradiction. It’s two sides of the same coin, and it’s a big part of why elected officials who could act often don’t.

This is well-known among political operatives. It is the reason we have back-room deals and compromises. And compromise is precisely where all of this — the infighting, the character attacks, the diluted authority — ends up funneling, because compromise is what happens when no one can make their preferred fix stick on its own. Unfortunately, any compromise on election integrity means we don’t get election integrity. There is no such thing as partial integrity, or at least, partial integrity that has any value.

What does “partial integrity” mean? It means fraud to the exact degree the integrity is partial. If 95% of the election process is secure, there will be 5% fraud. This is why the successful position must incorporate no compromise on anything structural to genuinely secure elections.