From the site Guidelines: "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon..."
I'd say that rampant voter suppression in the United States is a an interesting new phenomenon.
Why? Because when you and you alone go into the voting booth, take that red pencil, and tick the box, it is guaranteed you and you alone who casts that vote. You can only be allowed by two other people to vote for them. We also have no voting computers so maybe my country is just old fashioned.
In any case, if something needs to chance in the USA it is far too late for that. The current elections cannot be allowed to be compromised so voting by mail should be facilitated.
Historically, voter ID laws have been associated with disenfranchisement.
Also, people who do not want to risk their lives to vote the option to vote remotely in a manner that is proven as secure is quite a bit of hyperbole in many ways. The risk[ing] their lives part should be clear, there is no reason for a visit to a polling station to be more risk-filled than a visit to the supermarket. Those who really can not vote in person can still request absentee ballots as far as I can tell, it is not as if the USPS is being dismantled. The part about a manner that is proven as secure is just untrue as can be seen by the percentage of mail-in votes which are marked as invalid (up to 10%) and the fact that the registers used to send out ballots seem to be heavily polluted with ballots being sent out for dead people, for previous inhabitants, for pets (!) and more. The system suffers from a garbage-in-garbage-out problem, as long as those registers are polluted that part of the problem remains. Mail-in voting also suffers from the problem of enabling voter coercion in which someone - say a gang leader - uses a threat of force to coerce people into voting for 'his' candidate.
The key thing here is not that any voter ID law is necessarily voter-suppression. Some may argue that any ID law is, but most people would evaluate these on a case-by-case basis. For example, in many of those states, you can still vote without the appropriate ID. Some of these laws include alternatives like simply having a person working at the polling place vouch that you are who you say you are. We could argue the merits of such a law, but it's fairly clear that it's still possible to vote in many places without ID.
On the other hand, some laws have been found by the courts to be disenfranchising. Therefore, we should take the skeptical position and assume that new Voter ID laws would disenfranchise legitimate voters, and force the state to provide evidence that such a law's benefits outweighs the rights of the people it injures.
> The risk[ing] their lives part should be clear, there is no reason for a visit to a polling station to be more risk-filled than a visit to the supermarket
This seems ignorant of how polling places work in some neighborhoods. I've never seen lines like this outside of a grocery store. Many polling places will have people waiting for hours to vote, and these issues tend to effect predominantly black neighborhoods... for reasons. https://www.texasobserver.org/lines-wait-vote-texas-primary-...
> Those who really can not vote in person can still request absentee ballots as far as I can tell, it is not as if the USPS is being dismantled.
Yes, but the USPS has said that they will likely not be able to deliver those ballots in time for the election. This combined with having less in-person voting places. When you place your vote, and that vote isn't counted... then you've been disenfranchised. So what will happen to those people who waited in those long lines to vote in the past? Will they go wait for hours with dozens of other people? or will they vote by mail and risk the USPS not delivering it?
Here are some recent facts I tied together based on the current state and Trump's actions. Trump doesn't want mail-in voting because he knows that it will result in more democrats voting and him likely losing the election. Every decision he's made about the USPS has been with that concept in mind. He even said in an interview on Fox news last month that if mail in voting is allowed you'll never see another Republican in office again. He knows it. Everyone in politics knows it. The right will never admit they know this, and will look for any and every excuse to hold back the USPS without directly saying that its because they don't want more democrats than republicans voting.
With mail-in voting being accepted in a majority of states, and even set as the primary method for a few with COVID present, it really screws things up for the GOP. Couple that with Trump's gamble that convincing his voters the virus is no big deal will get them to the polls, while the scaredy cat democrats will stay home. So he spent a very long time building up this giant "virus hoax" to calm his masses. He is simultaneously trying to train them to believe that mail-in voting is fraud, even though he, himself does so, as have many, many of his voters, historically.
It worked. But what he didn't account for was states creating blanket acceptances of mail-in voting applications. That instantly turns the tables, because not only does it undo the removal of polling places, but it also allows the democrats (and the GOP, if they so choose) to vote from the safety and comfort of their homes while avoiding lines, saving time, and not risking COVID. His supporters, however, will be going to polling places in full force, in what will likely be a very bad time for the country as COVID starts to rear its face again between flu-season and school openings (especially in red states that are in denial and have entirely in-person classes).
So then, what happens, is a ton of his voters are going to be against voting by mail, and most will have not applied to do so, forcing them to go to the ballots, in what will most likely be a time that the pandemic is gaining speed. His advisors basically laid out the future for him of his silly comments, and where they were leading. So, in recent weeks, you've seen him compliment "absentee voting", trying to making it a completely separate thing from "mail-in voting", as not to look like an incompetent liar to his voters. But he knows his advantage still lies at the polling places, so he is simultaneously trying to hinder the USPS from delivering ballots. The number of mail-in voting applications for democrats FAR surpasses those for republicans, so while it may cost him a few votes, he is betting that it will cost democrats so many that his supporters who do show up will be able to tip the scales. He is also taking the approach of preparing to call the election invalid due to the amount of mail-in voting, should he lose.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-locations/so...
[2] https://civilrights.org/democracy-diverted/
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/02/texas-pollin...
[4] https://www.governing.com/topics/politics/sl-polling-place-c...
Then there are those who do not support the DNC - which is not the same as stating they support the GOP - who claim that it is actually the DNC which intends to contend the results in case their candidate looses on base of mail-in voting being thwarted. Add to that the fact that the USPS workers union has voiced its explicit support for the DNC candidate [1] and the story gets even more muddled.
Meanwhile Fauci has stated he sees no problems in people going to polling stations [2] which should give rise to doubts about the reasoning behind the urgency of mail-in voting.
I am not an American and as such consider myself to be an interested bystander in this drama. What I can state with certainty is that this type of manoeuvring is extremely unlikely to happen in my country of birth (the Netherlands) but is in some ways comparable to the situation in the country where I currently live (Sweden). The Swedish voting system has come under criticism from the OSCE [3] partly due to irregularities in the way ballot forms are being distributed - forms for specific parties have a tendency to 'get lost' in the mail or otherwise end up missing at the ballot stations, often to be found in garbage containers or dumped in some ditch somewhere. There are other criticisms but this one comes the closes to the current conundrum with mail-in voting in the USA. Sweden accepted OSCE inspectors to watch the election procedures, it remains to be seen what the country will do with their recommendations. It would be enlightening to have an external, non-partisan organisation do the same with the coming elections in the USA. Which organisation that would be I do not know, it will be hard if not impossible to find an American organisation which is truly neutral towards all parties and probably even harder to find a foreign one which is neutral towards the USA as a whole.
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/512128-union-represent...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2020/08/07/fauci-w...