Voting
Just a reminder to readers: I have no dog in this fight; I'm not a Republican or a Democrat although I was nominally registered in both parties at some point in my adult life. I will point out on principle I see local control of elections as a primary Constitutional principle. I'm very wary of any federal intervention for any purpose beyond dealing with state-enforced discrimination denying an eligible citizen the right to vote. This doesn't mean that voting has to be user-friendly or convenient; there may be economy of scales in deploying election security, although as a proponent of usability, I am wary of Procrustean systems design for the convenience of bureaucrats.
But I'm listening the other day to Biden's first Presidential press conference, he's pushing for the partisan HR Voting Rights Act, and he's talking presumably the recent electoral reform act in Georgia; he says something like, "They want to close the polls at 5 PM; can you image John Doe getting off work and trying to vote. Come on, man!" Biden is either incompetent or deliberately misleading or both. There's no evidence I've seen mandating early shutdowns on Election Day, which Biden is clearly implying. What if I said this refers to the two WEEKEND days for EARLY VOTING? Certainly some businesses operate on weekends; according to this source, up to 1/3 of workers work on weekends. Not to mention there is an option for counties to expand hours to 7am-7pm. Over 80% work on weekdays. Not to mention many states, including Georgia, require some employer accommodations on Election Day itself depending on work schedule relative to poll hours. So you can certainly argue Georgia, with a variety of other restrictions, makes voting less convenient, certainly compared to pandemic 2020. But compared to Jim Crow type policies like poll tests, etc., these policies apply to voters across the board, not against one segment of citizens. (Maybe some will argue disparate effects, e.g., more blacks work on weekends, etc.)
Now of course the Democrats would have you think the Georgia reforms are all about Trump's alleged election fraud 'lies". Let's be clear: yes, many Republicans are concerned about fraud and unhappy with the razor-thin margin of Biden's clinching electoral win. But, for example, Georgia's GOP governor and Secretary of State stood behind Biden's win (to the point Trump wants to primary them next). This is not a referendum on Trump's election loss and crackpot conspiracies. I have not followed the nuances of the evidence motivating restrictions on drop boxes, limits to early election days, and the nature and extent of absentee ballots. But let me explain in my own experience with IT security, there is a clear focus on limiting the attack vector and the attack surface. For example, we might disable certain unused functionality which provides opportunities to mount a stealth attack. There are some intrinsic issues with mail balloting and chain of custody issues that are explicitly controlled for in election day balloting on site. There are risks, however minor or technical, of lost ballots. ballot substitution, ballot mishandling (rendering ballots unusable, etc. Election officials cannot certify the USPS handling of mail ballots. There could also be staffing issues in handling and certifying mailed ballots or extending voting hours beyond Election Day. There are other issues as well, for example, there could be late-breaking events that could change a voter's decision, an early voter may have passed away in the interim, etc. I also think that the election process should not be weaker than say providing IDs for banking transactions or at airport security.
It may be true that despite risks in making elections more voter-friendly, the incidents of fraud are rare and/or hard to defend or prove. I'll give an example from 8 years of university teaching as a graduate fellow and professor. I personally came across probably up to a dozen students who cheated on assignments or tests. I suspected many others but the universities had due process procedures and requirements of evidence. I don't know a single professor who caught as many. Did I simply draw the worst students to my class sections? Not likely. In past essays, I had caught one Asian (foreign) student who plagiarized literally every paragraph in his graduate class report; the only thing original may have been the title. The next semester DN, who had inherited my (other) DSS class, came to me with a student essay he said sounded "too professional" I quickly realized it was from a classic group DSS paper by GD; guess who the student was? Yup. After that, I went to my other junior colleague RL and name-dropped the student's name. RL froze at the mention, recalling he had him the prior semester. I asked if he had any samples of the guy's work. He said not unless the guy didn't pick up his paper at the end of the semester. Yup. He had given the student a B on the paper. I quickly gave the paper a glance and was immediately angry. Every single (unattributed) paragraph had been stitched together from an IEEE reading collection I had required in my systems analysis course. (I was somewhat amused he gave the IEEE authors a B.) RL was obsessed and asked to borrow my copy, clearly unhappy that he had been duped. The senior professors accused me of trying to sabotage their foreign student program and of violating the student's "right to privacy" (in pursuing academic fraud). It's just I remember challenging this student in my office the earlier semester, and he was unrepentant, dismissing plagiarism as an American cultural bias.
The one thing common for all the students who I busted for cheating: they wanted to know how I caught them. (I wouldn't say I have a photographic memory, but I have an unusually detailed one). It was obvious why: it wasn't because they realized the error of their ways; they just didn't want me catching them next time.
Another example I've blogged about before from my graduate school days at UH: an MBA student for some reason had a desk in our doctoral student cubicle suite. The guy was having a problem with net present value problems; I had had the same finance professor who gave these ball-buster multiple choice exams. He just couldn't pick up on the concept, and personally I didn't think he had a shot at the exams because these were the easier type problems; I had aced the course, but I worked my butt off. So after his first exam I asked how he did, expecting the worst. He said he made a 96 and that he had missed a question on purpose, to throw off the professor; he was done like in 10 minutes but waited another 20 minutes or so before turning in his paper to avoid suspicion. He later confessed that there was a small group of students who had a history of my professor's old exams and he had a tendency to reuse the same questions. The students in question knew they could only sell a small number of exams so the professor wouldn't realize what was happening and destroy their niche market.
I wouldn't have participated even if I had known about it; I just resented the fact it was unfair to the rest of us who had earned our A's the old-fashioned way. So I wasn't going to fink on my office mate, but I stopped my former professor in the hall one day and tipped him off about the black market in his old exams. His initial comment was dismissive: "How industrious of them!" He later asked me something to the effect, "What do you expect me to do about it?" I said something to the effect, "Why don't you have one of these geniuses go to the board and show their work in solving the problem?" A few weeks later, he stopped me in the hall and said, "I see what you're saying... I'll be changing things."
The point I'm making is election fraud can happen without "experts" knowing about it and improving internal controls. If and when it happens, people who successfully breach security may want to exploit their know-how in future elections.
If and when election fraud occurs, it undermines American democracy. How successful will Georgia election reforms be? It's hard to tell, but they are limiting the attack surface, and that's a step in the right direction. Personally, I didn't think voting in person was any riskier than a trip to the supermarket. I personally took advantage of the ability to vote by mail last year, but as I've trended more libertarian, I've become more sympathetic to Don Boudreaux's moral principles against voting. I voted for Jorgensen more as a protest against Trump and Biden. This didn't mean I endorsed all her views; for example, I'm pro-life.
HR 1, favored by Biden, is a dubiously constitutional grab bag of Democrat election policy preferences, including national mandates on state governments and campaign finance reforms. I oppose these things based on the principle of subsidiarity and the First Amendment right of anonymity.
Biden is trying to posture himself as the apolitical avuncular voice of reason ("common-sense gun control" and other trite political rubbish), whose policies enjoy broad bipartisan support. He is nothing of the sort; he's a 47-year partisan professional political hack. He's still in his honeymoon phase and has gotten majority job approval that Trump never enjoyed but his overall approval is just a modest improvement over his election percentage.
Guns
Technically, Biden didn't say much on gun policy in his first presser, largely just paying lip service to his gun control campaign promises. But given recent mass murder incidents in Georgia and Colorado, he has commented recently in other contexts, underscoring policies like an assault weapon ban (and he proudly highlights his role in the Clinton-era ban) and the usual talking points of closing loopholes in universal background checks, etc. First, let me point out as a libertarian, I'm opposed to violations of the nonaggression principle, including gun violence and murder. My thoughts and prayers to the survivors and victim family members. Still, the mainstream media heavily saturates coverage, blurring the line between news and advocacy. Second, I'm far more concerned about the unintended effects of policy restrictions against the rights of people to defend themselves and other reasons to acquire firearms, whether it's for hunting, collections, deterrence or other politically correct reason. I take a dim view of other people interfering with my property rights as if my liberty is contingent on their approval. The figure I've heard is there are nearly 500 M firearms in America; you can even make your own with 3D printers. So the genie is out of the bottle on pipedreams on gun confiscation. and restrictions just push transactions into the black market.
But more to the point, police power is reserved to the states in our federal system, and I oppose federal measures on the principle of subsidiarity. Not to mention Biden's claims of assault weapon ban effectiveness are at best dubious correlated with overall violent incident downtrends, not to mention assault weapons account for a tiny fraction of violence victims. Biden's feckless policies are more a politics of desperation, an Obama-like "we can't afford to do nothing". Just an observation here: "First, do no harm." And regulations harm liberty.
Immigration
Filibuster
I do appreciate Biden's more moderate take on filibuster reform, unlike Trump who considered it a thorn in passing his agenda. Yes, the Constitution does not require the filibuster, but it has existed in theory in the Senate and/or the House since the Jefferson Administration. No, Obama is wrong in calling it a relic of the Jim Crow era, although it was used by the segregationist South to defer civil rights reform. For example, the Dems used it to fend off ObamaCare repeal. (Not a good thing, but I'm making a point.) As a libertarian-conservative, I'm for any speed bumps on overreaching federal policy.
