What happens if someone votes by absentee/mail-in and dies before Election Day?
ballotpedia.org
ballotpedia.org
I suppose there's some noise in any voting system, and it's fine if the magnitude is small and its distribution random. Looking at the US, I'd be more worried about gerrymandering than a few votes from the dead.
This is the right answer. It's amazing how many people insist that elections have absolutely no fraud or other sources of error. In most elections throughout the world, it's apes counting paper with their squishy hands and blurry eyeballs. It's remarkable that we even get 3 significant figures reliably.
Voting matters. Individuals matter.
We should aim for no one being 100% wrong
Then again, I disagree with him. It’s just he was a customer.
Please correct this sentence.
If someplace permits early voting, then I don't see a moral or ethical justification for nullifying a vote cast by someone who's already legally cast those votes and submitted that ballot, which is now out of their hands and in custody of the State.
If they want to disenfranchise dead people, then discontinue mail-ins and early voting, and compel everyone to show up in person again.
(I detested in-person election days, because I do all my research ahead of time with actual ballot in hand, and I'd never make good decisions in a claustrophobic little box, standing up, with dozens in line waiting for me.)
> Missouri prohibits such ballots from being counted if it is proven that the voter died before polls opened and the ballot envelope has not yet been opened.
It seems reasonable to me that to be an eligible voter in an election, you must be alive. A ballot filled out in advance is merely a piece of paper until it is officially cast by an eligible voter on election day. If a voter dies before the polls open and there is a system in place to detect this, their vote should not be counted because they are no longer eligible. Conversely, if the voter is alive even one second after the polls open, their vote should be counted.
If we consider voting to be a period of weeks rather than a day (absentee, early voting & election day), then any vote cast legally during that time is valid, and we don't have to have edge cases where a vote was initially valid, but then invalid, but yet have no way to actually remove them.
What's worse is then people argue that we should make Election Day a national holiday, as if that would actually improve turnout (HINT: Ask your local retail, food, or other service worker how easy it is for them to get other holidays like Labor Day or Memorial Day off)
Mail-in voting is great, but I acknowledge that a lot of people don't trust it.
So why don't we do the actual best thing? Make voting open for multiple days. If you need to vote in person, then it only makes sense to keep polls open long enough so that no matter what job you do, no matter what shift you work, you should be able to find the time to vote.
IMO, making the polls open 24 hours for 3 days, or maybe 9 AM to 9 PM for a week, should cover basically everyone except those that travel a lot for their jobs (ie, long haul truckers), but they'd be voting absentee anyways.
So the short answer is "yes; states disagreed on whether it was secure." The longer answer is that states that were doing it didn't have any mathematically-detectable fraud patterns distinguishing them from states that didn't, and states that just started in 2016 didn't seem to have any major systemic execution issues that would suggest fraud occurred.
We even have a category for it now: essential workers would be the only ones who aren't banned.
If the County Elections Office doesn't learn someone died before their ballot is decanted into the general collection for counting, that's it. No way at that point to pull the ballot back out because the source of the vote is anonymous.
federalism, as a crude form of polyculture, is probably more boon than bane.