I do and will always advise my friends and family to vote by mail in ballot (if allowed).
On the other hand, voting by mail opens up huge opportunities for coercion or vote buying/selling.
Not any more than any current systems do. You have to sign the ballot, and if the signature does not match what you submitted in your voter registration thing, they kick it back to you.
Unless you are insinuating that the USPS mail folks could collect them all and send in forgeries?
Alternatively, the state can pay for the return stamp, but will likely have to pass some tax measure to fund it (in Oregon, state budget must be balanced), so in the end voters would still be buying the stamp. This is less efficient since now there would be stamps bought that folks have no intention of using since they drop them off.
Or you order all your employees to vote like you say, or they will be fired. If they don't snap a pic of a ballot filled out to your liking, out the door they go.
Or you just buy the votes of anyone. $50 for a pic of a "correctly" filled out ballot. That scales pretty nicely.
If some malefactor wanted to buy 1 million votes at an average price of $50 each, that's $50 million of somewhat traceable money and 1 million people, some fraction of whom are certain to reveal they were paid. It won't remain a secret, and it will leave numerous evidence trails.
Contrast with fully electronic voting fraud - scalable, hard to detect, and (when well-executed) leaves little evidence to support nullifying an election and forcing a do-over.
Instead of money changing hands, there will be a threat of money ceasing to change hands, and that's much harder to prove
I would say that vote by mail isn't always the best option depending on circumstances but today in the US there is not much vote buying or coersion and it seems like a clearly less bad option than any of the alternatives considering how they are actually implemented. I would not recommend it for Mexico, which already has widespread vote buying even without being able to verify who voters actually vote for.
Seriously, yes, that system is preferred to increasing access and activity in our democracy, but it seems there's a large contingent that feel it's in their party's best interest to not make it easier to vote. I'm sure it's fair to claim that they honestly believe their party in power is for the good of the country, but then everyone feels that way about their desired political trajectories.
No missed work, no lines, no profiling. I read all the articles about issues with polling stations and all I can think about is systemic disenfranchisement.
And most importantly, who gets to write what goes into the voter guide?
The inner envelope is anonymous. They verify the outer envelope and open it, then pass the inner envelope to a separate area/volunteers to do the counting.
The contents of the voter guide are submitted by the candidates. For ballot measures, pro- and con- statements are submitted by sponsors or members of the public. I don't have mine handy but I think they actually print several pro/con statements for each.
I'm not sure how unique this is but ballot measures actually have brief statements printed on the ballot explaining what they will actually do, preventing issues where you're like "wait should I vote yes or no on this if I want this thing banned?"
> A YES vote will: Instruct the legislature to write a law preventing future taxes on groceries. A NO vote will: not send any recommendation to the legislature.
It outlines the different propositions, explains what happens for a yes or no vote and then has multiple pages devoted to showing arguments for and against mailed in by concerned citizens and organizations.
Parties are allowed to enter their own party descriptions. I haven't read the sections on candidates yet