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Comment by jetrink | Hacker News Reader

I think Missouri's policy is the most correct.

> 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.

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We don't have to think of elections as being just a single 'day', and then just guide our laws around that. For example, India's elections took place over 44 days this year.

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.

I've always considered it ridiculous that so many states only allow voting on a single day.

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.

We haven't done it in the US, but technically there isn't much stopping Congress (especially after the New Deal) from passing a law banning various forms of commerce on election day.

We even have a category for it now: essential workers would be the only ones who aren't banned.

Switzerland has mail-in voting since forever and it's trusted. Was the mail-in voting an issue in the US before Trump?

Mail-in voting is not uniformly allowed in all states in the US, because US elections are a primarily state responsibility (with oversight and constraint placed by the federal government).

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.

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