@louis sure. the modal effect of most interventions is nothing. for every 10 people you pay, 4 would’ve voted Trump anyway, 2 will vote Harris anyway, 2 wouldn’t have voted and still won’t, 2 wouldn’t have voted and now vote for Trump. Pennsylvania votes are worth the $500 per.
a voter registration drive conditioned on prospective voters views, like, say signing a pro 2A petition, would i think be illegal. you can do your GOTV at a gun fair, but you can’t ask then filter.
@louis i think that prohibition is dumb, but don’t think it’s a big deal.
the big deal in places like Georgia is engineering very long lines in blue precincts that renders water a helpful amenity, but the lack of free water is not going to keep a lot of people who are willing to brave those lines from persevering.
@louis no one’s gonna give back the money. it’s not a contract. but if someone gives me $100 — even a very wealthy person — because they want me to do something i think is fine to do, i’m going to try to do it, because i’m not a sociopath. sure, there will also be Elon haters who’ll sign a petition as meaningful as any petition attached to a campaign donation e-mail just to take the money, vote for Harris as they would have anyway. but statistically, you’re buying votes.
@louis @mattlehrer red states already do shutdown GOTV efforts — see Florida — and legit GOTV efforts look nothing like paying registered voters for anything, or paying people to become registered voters. i’m fine prohibiting ice cream conditional on “I voted.” stickers. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/politics-elections/2024/07/08/florida-voter-registration-law-has-major-impact
@louis come on. $100 per voter is crazy money for contact info, and surveillance brokers have gotten pretty good.
do you seriously not share the inference that engendering a sense of reciprocity will provoke some marginal voters to vote who might otherwise have stayed in their butts? are you going to tell me it’s plausible that expensive, high quality contact info is the sole intended motivation and any other effect would be a well-golly unanticipated consequence?
@louis if you give me $100 and i know what you want me to do, and i’m open to what you want me to do, i don’t think it’s horrible, then i’ll do it. you will too. we don’t need an enforceable contract. not because we are corrupt, but on the contrary, because we are honest people who believe in and aspire to reciprocity. 1/
@louis you’ve invented this motivation of harvesting contact information. that’s bullshit. contact information is much, much cheaper than this. and it’s not “more honest” to pay the voter rather than a broker. it creates a sense of obligation under norms of reciprocity, which a third party spying on you much more cheaply would not. that’s the only thing Musk is plausibly paying for. /fin
@louis @mattlehrer I don’t think any of us or a Slate author can resolve this. Musk is intentionally parsing the law to walk as close to the line of vote buying as he can without quite doing it. Perhaps Musk has consulted his expensive lawyers, and there is a strong legal history of similar operations that courts have found acceptable. Or, it wouldn’t be out of character for him to just risk it. An assumption that impunity can be purchased has worked for him.
@louis @mattlehrer I think it’s quite obviously an attempt to outright pay people with particular views to vote and vote in particular ways, even the quid-pro-quo is not enforceable. I hope his balls-first approach results in a well deserved crushing. You could make a chills free speech argument against, but money-as-free-speech, especially in an electoral context, has always been a terrible idea. I’d risk that slippery slope.
what if the enemy within is a conscience?
@louis it is very different. it’s explicitly targeting only voters, not customers, immediately before a critical, contested election, with a payout from a person who openly advocates particular candidates. there’s deniability — it’s not explicitly requesting a particular vote — but it’s really, really close. even if it were, one point of a secret ballot is to make such agreements difficult to enforce. that doesn’t mean they’re lawful as gentlemen’s agreements or ingratiations.
i hate to screenshot the bad place and its pimp. but… is this legal? https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1847115389676740899
Tweet from @elonmusk: If you're a registered Pennsylvania voter, you & whoever referred you will now get $100 for signing our petition in support of free speech & right to bear arms. Earn money for supporting something you already believe in! Offer valid until midnight on Monday. 11:20 PM • 10/17/24 • 1.1M Views
i have created this content for you.
@Hyolobrika the seatbelt was just an example. my self perception is not “the nanny state changed its mind and ticketed me, so i conformed”, but “well, actually, it’s right on the merits” and so eventually i did conform. but i don’t know my behavioral shift ever would have happened if norms broadly hadn’t shifted, and i do attribute norms broadly shifting to a campaign by the state (which included the laws under which i was ticketed). 1/
@Hyolobrika smoking norms are a more “ethical” example, in the sense of affecting others. when i was a kid, people could smoke anywhere, and objecting (except apologetically, referring to some very personal special circumstance like asthma) seemed more like imposing on others’ legitimate rights than defending ones own. as laws changed, norms changed sharply. now even without overt objection, exposing others to second-hand smoke requires permission, or seems a violation. 2/
@Hyolobrika norm changes, of course, happen all the time, and can be independent of state action. but in that case, smoking was a pretty entrenched habit, and attempts to shift those norms without the state putting a thumb on the scale by regulating smoking out of most shared public spaces would i think have been unlikely. 3/
@Hyolobrika (during the transition in the US, there were lots of quotes by restauranteurs saying that they thought the non-smoking regime was better, but they would never have unilaterally shifted to it, because parties with a even one smoker would disprefer their restaurants in ways that parties with nonsmokers, then accustomed to tolerating smoke, would not insist.) /fin
it’s not the choices per se made by organs like The New York Times that delegitimates them, as much as the sense they are triangulating — between their audiences prejudices, risks of blowback from disingenuous operatives, desire to retain access and privilege (and bodily freedom) regardless of the next administration.
that’s all understandable, but quite a different basis for decisionmaking that disinterested evaluations of truth, importance, and the public interest.
@Hyolobrika (i’ll take what i can get!)
@Hyolobrika yes! but in modern states, the law changes a lot. sure, i sometimes break laws i think are wrong, but the evolving sensibilities expressed by overt state action have a surprising sway over what i think right or wrong. 1/
@Hyolobrika as a kid, wearing a seatbelt in a car was for punishment. now i always wear a seatbelt. it’s the law, and there was a period when i had to remind myself, and i got ticketed for forgetting. but i now agree, and voluntarily buckle up. would i have done the same, knowing the same social science, if the law hadn’t changed? i don’t know. 2/
@Hyolobrika but i think much of what it means for a state to be legitimate has to do with an unobservable propensity for its publics to internalize state action in forming their own sense of right and wrong. /fin
@Hyolobrika and i wouldn’t characterize conformity of an oppressed group as necessarily being “too scared/weak/oppressed to rebel”. one might also say “too wise to rebel”. the choice to conform to a state so imperfect + unjust “oppressive” is an accurate modifier might well under some circumstances be wiser, not just in a narrow sense of avoiding pain but in a longer-view sense of working towards much more just, less oppressive outcomes, and comparing against actual alternatives.
@Hyolobrika I don’t want to say they “legitimised” the state in a plain-language normative sense. but i do claim that in a functional sense, their conformity did help legitimize the state.
@Hyolobrika is it, in practice? Israel has overwhelming might relative to the Palestinians in Israel/Palestine, yet they can’t engender internal legitimacy. one can compel conformity always at the point of a gun, but no army can constantly point guns at the whole of a population. or persuade those who see the army only as illegitimate (in the fuzzier sense) oppressors to resort to them to resolve disputes. i think it is less kraterocratic than you think. 1/
@Hyolobrika in the United States, much, perhaps most, of the public claims to detest the government. i claim the Supreme Court is currently entirely illegitimate, in a subjective sense. but i still conform to the law in the US, much more than physical coercion can enforce, and would rely upon US courts rather than other means to resolve disputes. 2/
@Hyolobrika normative notions of legitimacy have very little predictive power i think. but that doesn’t mean legitimacy collapses into “might” alone. however the Supreme Court or the American state as a whole might be illegitimate from a variety of normative or subjective perspectives, that illegitimacy is of an entirely different character, evident in human behavior, than Israel’s illegitimacy as government to Palestinians. 3/
@Hyolobrika an interesting case is the Jim Crow South in the US. unlike the Palestinian case, i think the American state in 1950 had internal legitimacy, despite overt oppression of a self-conscious minority. so despite being profoundly immoral, i’d call that government “legitimate” in the senses i describe. 4/
@Hyolobrika why/how was it so? i don’t know. it’s an interesting question. what i do claim is it comes down to more than “might makes right”. blacks in the Jim Crow south faced a regime of pervasive brutality and coercion, but i think it hard to argue they faced that more than Palestinians have in I/P. 5/
@Hyolobrika yet they mostly conformed to law and resorted to the US state to address disputes. in that sense conferred internal legitimacy upon the state that oppressed them (and that arguably still does to a lesser degree). i don’t think a claim that US Blacks were inherently or culturally more pacifistic can be a sufficient explanation. 6/
@Hyolobrika legitimacy resides in and emerges from the relationship between states and publics. the factors that engender it are “soft” — situational, difficult to objectively characterize — rather than “hard” — things we might objectively observe and run regressions on. that’s why i suggest we judge it from the result, rather than from conditions about which we might have normative views or misleading hypotheses. /fin
@Hyolobrika (in any case, thanks a ton for reading and giving these issues some thought!)
@kentwillard we invented corruption and called it progress. that was the whole “shareholder value revolution”.
@kentwillard we need to restructure our industries. we tend to aim our opprobrium at our shitty firms that do shitty things, but it’s an industrial organization problem, not a the-CEO-is-a-bad-guy problem. competing down profits isn’t supposed to be a choice, but a requirement firms face in order to survive.
