[lmm]

> If true, that obviously cuts both ways.

It does, but ultimately it adds up to a drift towards what a typical government employee would want to do rather than what the elected representatives decided - and government employees are not a representative sample of voters.

> If you really think any low-level minion, or even middle-manager apparatchik, will risk their jobs by substantially fiddling numbers against the will of their boss

What's "substantial" though? There are a lot of things that are just a nudge at any given layer. Your boss tells you that there's some new bullshit requirement that says you have to check voter rolls against the juror database, but he doesn't sound particularly enthusiastic about it, and the department's already understaffed. So maybe you stick it on the pile, or you send an email to your subordinates late on Thursday afternoon, and maybe your boss never follows up on it and neither you do, and maybe the end result of that is that the checking never happens and your state's election laws are perhaps violated (and maybe some people who shouldn't have been able to vote got to do so), but even if the Reps win their lawsuit against your department the chance of anything getting pinned on you is essentially nil.

[toyg]

As you say yourself, those things are typically bullshit anyway (mostly targeted at disenfranchising minorities), and they're definitely not something that can substantially and continuously influence a presidential election in a single direction in a country of 400millions.

[lmm]

> As you say yourself, those things are typically bullshit anyway (mostly targeted at disenfranchising minorities)

Maybe, but I do think it's a worsening of partisanship - time was when the civil service felt a responsibility to remain strictly neutral and implement the policies of our elected leaders, right or wrong. Now people put their personal morals first and are less willing to implement a law they disagree with, and while there are good sides to that, it's also reducing trust in government services.

> they're definitely not something that can substantially and continuously influence a presidential election in a single direction in a country of 400millions.

Could they overwhelm a popular landslide? No. Could they nudge the vote enough to tip the balance in a knife-edge election? Perhaps.