Don Moynihan Profile picture
Feb 12 8 tweets 3 min read
New Texas voting laws are seeing 25-40% of mail ballots rejected in some counties. Predictable outcome of new administrative burdens leading to disenfranchisement. 1/
washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/…
If you add novel and unexpected requirements to the voting process - asking people to write down their social security number or a special TX id number with the ballot - some people will miss them. 2/ Image
At a polling place, a pollworker might be able to help you fix this oversight. But with mail voting, they have to contact you, get you a new ballot or ask you to come in. Again, this increases the cost of voting, and makes it more likely some will not vote. 3/ Image
This is an example of new policies imposing new administrative burdens both on the public and administrator who face new and more complex tasks - not just checking IDs, but also outreach, and helping people cure their defect ballot. Offices with fewer resources will fail more. 4/ Image
Who will these policies most affect? Most obviously, older and disabled voters, who are the primary users of TX mail ballots. Also voters less aware of the changes, and those living in less well-resourced counties where VBM might be more attractive. 5/ Image
The new ID mail requirement is just one part of a broader effort to make voting more onerous. The state added criminal penalties to errors in voter registration, and then delayed sharing voting registration materials. (It subsequently said old materials would be allowable). 6/ Image
What is the point of all of this? Some say "election integrity" but they are unable to provide evidence of significant failures that the laws resolve. And so instead, having ginned up fears about fraud, they say its restoring "confidence" in the system. 7/ Image
If you say your goal is confidence in the election process, consider this:
How much confidence can people have in a system where their vote is not counted? Where the state has deliberately made voting more confusing and more difficult, rather than simple and accessible. 8/ Image

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More from @donmoyn

Feb 14
New from me: early signs from Texas suggest that its new voting laws will be disastrous for vote-by-mail, leading to a significant increase in spoiled ballots. Some counties are rejecting 25-40% of ballots.

What are the broader lessons? 🧵donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-to-think…
A savvy take about new voting laws is that the actually won't change much, based on analyses of previous election laws. See, e.g. this piece from Nate Cohn (which cited my work!)

But I think that view may be the wrong way to think about such laws. 2/ nytimes.com/2021/04/03/ups…
Just normatively, we should not condition access to the right to vote on anticipated partisan effects on turnout. But empirically, I am not sure we know as much as we think we do about how the new laws will work for a few reasons. 3/ donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-to-think… Image
Read 7 tweets
Feb 14
Countdown to the half-time show backlash begins now.
It will take them a while to figure out what they are outraged about, but don't worry, they will get there ImageImage
Not much to say about this beyond observing that performative outrage and aggrieved victimhood about stuff that doesn’t actually affect them is assumed to be a central feature of getting ahead in MAGAworld ImageImageImage
Read 4 tweets
Feb 4
I wrote about the effort to both-sides current threats to American democracy, focusing on Ross Douthat's claim that liberal belief in expertise is akin to right-wing populism. 1/
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/at-least-its…
Douthat's core argument is summarized below: right-wing populism is democratic in ways that liberalism is not. This is, I think both wrong and misleading. It understands the anti-democratic nature of populism and the value of expertise to successful democratic societies. 2/
Douthat picks three examples of how expertise is at odds with democracy, all of which fail in some fundamental way. First, libs want you to listen to Anthony Fauci and public health guidelines. Well...3/ donmoynihan.substack.com/p/at-least-its…
Read 9 tweets
Feb 3
Here, Douthat offers what is intended to be a parody of liberal reliance on expertise and autonomy. Instead, it is a parody of Douthatism: the tendency to waive away the excesses of radical right and equate them as equivalently dangerous the basic aspects of running a democracy.
Douthat: Trump attempting a coup and managing to create massive distrust in US elections is not good, no, but it's complicated. Cast in a certain light it reflects intellectual traditions on the right.
Also Douthat: Now let me tell you about the dangers of schoolteachers.
There is so much in this single paragraph that it falls apart on the slightest inspection. Did Fauci "lead" pandemic decision making? No, the President does, and is free to discard Fauci's adivce.
Better ?: would we have been better off granting Trump the power to fire Fauci? No.
Read 8 tweets
Feb 2
Lisa Cook's work documenting how a collapse in Black personal security dramatically undermined innovation is amazing. It speaks to the value that an empirical approach and different perspective provides a deeper understand of the economy. paulromer.net/lisa-cook/
What struck me looking that Cook's graph documenting a Reconstruction-era spike and Jim Crow era collapse in Black patents, is you see the same pattern in political participation (graph on the right documents voter registration in Louisiana, from Keele, Cubbison, and White, 2021)
This historical data had to be painstakingly assembled to provide a broader picture of US history. They speak to the enormous long-term costs of the abandonment of Reconstruction in terms of not just equality but human innovation and prosperity.
Read 4 tweets
Feb 2
Started my morning doing a zoom panel hosted by the OECD presenting research about US government performance improvement reforms to a group of international finance officials. What I didn’t mention is that Congress is no longer sharing the data that the research is based on.🧵
Bit more background. Every few years the GAO surveys federal employees about how they use performance data in government. Here is an example of a report based on those surveys. 2/ gao.gov/products/gao-2…
I have used that survey data to understand what sorts of factors make it more likely that public employees use performance data, and how they use it. The resulting studies provide insights into US government, and specific variables like the effects of ideology or training. 3/
Read 12 tweets

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