California turns to vote-by-mail to keep residents safe come November
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
FWIW, it was the easiest voting ever. I've been permanent vote-by-mail for many years, but usually I had to fight the crowds on election day to drop off my ballot at a polling place. This time they had drop boxes all over the county that were open 24 hours, so I was able to drop my ballot off at 10 Monday night, after I filled it out.
So this isn't actually a huge change. They're just accelerating the timeline.
Also I wanted the sticker, and the only way to get that was to drop it off at a polling place.
I also use the feature my county has to verify that my vote was tallied.
Putting partisan politics aside, I’m not sure how a rational person can look at this and conclude that it leads to fair elections.
Non cynically, I guess the idea is it increases voter turnout? I say "guess" because I've just googled "pros of ballot harvesting," "arguments for ballot harvesting," and other varieties of the phrase, and have yet to find a real argument for it. And if the argument is increasing voter turnout, I'm not sure why it's necessary if the cost of voting is no more than dropping a ballot in your mailbox.
So I guess for those who can't make it to the mailbox?
Is there a state that allows vote-by-mail and doesn't allow family members to drop off ballots?
Assuming good faith, that would be a service to those voters who can't otherwise get to a polling place.
From my research, the outrage about votor fraud is completely overblown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_North_Carolina%27s_9th_co...
Moreover, I'm from a state that regularly sees serious voting abnormalities[1]. Everyone knows the elections are rigged and nothing is ever done about it.
So no, I don't think undetected electoral fraud is implausible, any more than I think, say, undetected insider trading is implausible.
[1]: https://www.salon.com/2019/08/30/probe-of-missing-georgia-vo...
I never said anything about voter fraud; that was a non-sequitur introduced by the parent commenter.
It's a fact that voter turnout across the US is far too low. It has many causes, some political (like votes getting implicitly suppressed via brazen gerrymandering) and some not (like ballots just not being the easiest things to fill out), and some in-between (like indirect obstacles that make it difficult for some minorities to vote). The idea here seems to be to remove as many obstacles as possible to increase voter turnout. Of course if that happens to help your party then you'll like it and probably support it, and if it happens to help the other party then you'll dislike it and probably be against it. But at least on its face, it has a bona fide goal that any political party that seeks legitimate elections should be supporting. Compare that to brazenly unfair practices like the extreme gerrymandering we see that are clearly solely designed to manipulate election outcomes (and which might even discourage people from voting in the first place) and I think you can imagine why a "rational person" might look beyond the game rules when deciding fairness.
Without ballot harvesting, voter fraud is difficult to scale. It requires coordination among large groups of malicious actors. But if you allow individuals to submit ballots in bulk, the scalability problem is reduced such that one bad actor can have an outsized effect on the fairness of the election.
While I agree that increasing voter turnout is a noble goal, I do not agree it should be achieved “at all costs.” Everyone should vote, but everyone who does vote must know that their vote was counted, and that it was counted accurately. And nobody who did not vote should have a vote counted in their name. Ballot harvesting, IMO, seems to increase the difficulty of meeting these requirements of fairness.
My problem is with the idea of bulk ballot harvesting, where one person has the ability to carry a box of hundreds of ballots to a polling place. Absent any sort of chain of custody, which AFAIK does not exist, how can you be certain that person did not modify the ballots, or that they even gave them to other voters in the first place?
Compare this to the potential gain of ballot harvesting: increased voter turnout because people who could not submit ballots now can. Note that the cost of submitting a ballot is inserting it into a mailbox.
IMO, it is irrational to think there are more members of the population who are unable to submit a ballot into a mailbox, than the number of false ballots that a small group of malicious actors could submit.
In fact, it seems like any argument in favor of ballot harvesting is ameliorated by the ability to vote by mail. And in either case, I maintain that it’s crucial to introduce some system that allows provable chain of custody for ballots, so that results may be audited.
Gerrymandering does not affect whether or not you can vote. It affects which district your vote counts for.
Voter ID, where it exists, does not affect ballot harvesting because registering to vote, and actually voting, are two separate activities. Further, I highly doubt that anywhere with “onerous voter ID laws” also allows ballot harvesting, because if it does, how could the ID laws be enforced?
How we scale voting by mail in any way that protects the secrecy and security of the process eludes me.
Highly skeptical, and opposed to this, especially given the context in which the idea is proffered.
When the election is over, you should be able to use your receipt to verify that your vote was counted.
I wish there were a way to run an experiment.
Oh, there is.
Try this on a couple of test states and let one of us eat crow.
But in all seriousness, after the shenanigans during this administration (whichever side the reader fall on) let's not make big changes this election.
Perhaps this compromise in the integrity of the voting system is one we want to make in these unusual times, but I think it is important to point out that there is indeed a compromise here. Mail voting doesn't come without its own issues.
It does though. If your vote was coerced you can always request another ballot, which invalidates the first.
If you're getting paid to vote a certain way, then nothing here really changes. California already had vote by mail as an option.
Seems pretty well the same to me, but I guess the having to request the ballot makes some people feel better about it.
And whoever is coercing you could also ask for the info for the My Voter Status website [1] and verify that the ballot that the person coercing used was the one that was counted (maybe based on the date recorded as received by the county). They could definitely make sure you didn't go vote in person.
> If you're getting paid to vote a certain way, then nothing here really changes. California already had vote by mail as an option.
The number of mail in votes increases significantly, so if you believe in potential risk with those, then there is a significant increase in overall risk.
I'm not sure that'd necessarily be effective in cases where somebody is being coerced by their spouse to vote a certain way.
which invalidates the first
Second, voting fraud is exceptionally rare in the United States. Even if you tried to purchase votes, you can’t purchase enough to shade an election, and stay clandestine. It’s simply too expensive. A much more effective and efficient use of money is to encourage voter suppression — especially legal voter suppression.
Fair enough.
> Second, voting fraud is exceptionally rare in the United States
This doesn't make sense as a justification for relaxing restrictions. Perhaps it is because of the existing restrictions that fraud is so difficult and low, so then relaxing restrictions en-masse would increase the rate of fraud. I'm not saying this is definitely the case, but citing a low current rate of fraud as justification for making fraud easier doesn't make any sense at all.
> Even if you tried to purchase votes, you can’t purchase enough to shade an election, and stay clandestine
In most cases, this is true. But there are elections that are decided by a few dozen votes (maybe local elections, and more rarely larger elections), so a small amount of fraud could change the result.
One of the two major political parties there has opposed it vigorously for all that time, making these claims among others. In all that time, however, it has never offered any evidence that this happens.
In fact, when the Oregon Secretary of State audited the 2016 election, they found 54 problematic votes out of 2+ million cast; most of those were someone voting in their old district after they'd moved out of state. A handful (maybe 10 or so?) were double votes.
There just isn't any evidence that there are any widespread problems with vote-by-mail, let alone enough problems to affect election outcomes. If there were, I can't believe that the political party in Oregon that opposes it wouldn't have been publicizing such problems over the last 20 years.
Besides, it's certainly possible people could attempt to coerce people voting in booths; "take a photo of your vote and show me or we'll get your family" or whatever.
The much bigger issue is vote tampering by election officials, which does happen though still not at scale to affect election outcomes. I remember in 2016, the big scandal was a republican clerk in Clackamas county threw out a box of democratic-registered ballots. They were caught, the votes were counted, but that sort of thing is a bigger threat to electoral outcomes than vote-by-mail.
It still isn't really a threat; the real threat is voter suppression, which absolutely does happen but which Oregon does a great job at minimizing, with universal vote-by-mail and automatic voter registration at the DMV.
1987: The last time a Republican was Governor of Oregon (33 years).
1987: West German Mathias Rust lands his small plane in Red Square
1987: Square releases the first Final Fantasy video game.
I'm sure it was all due to vote by mail.
https://www.wweek.com/culture/2020/02/12/oregon-voters-no-lo...
I'll still likely make the short trip to the nearest dropoff location and drop it off in person. It's not that I don't trust the mail, it's just a paranoia thing.
Colorado’s model makes the most sense. Everyone gets a mail-in ballot and you can either mail it or drop it off to a polling center day-of. If you lose your ballot, I think you can also go in person to get it worked out. Also, you can look up online to see of they counted your ballot.
Just searching a bit, I see Santa Clara county does the same: https://eservices.sccgov.org/rov?tab=ab
I suspect that's widespread in CA.