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Dispatch → Factbook → Miscellaneous
Real-Life Political Commentary
On the Conservative Perspective on Voting: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.
On the Inherent Weaknesses of the Republican Party: