About mail-in ballots

[slash2k]

@SCAdian

@Drum_God

It is illegal for an election worker to hand the ballot to the voter – the voter must choose his/her own.

Not here. I’ve worked the polls a few times, and my job was to hand each voter a ballot after their eligibility was verified.

Not here in Kansas, either: I’ve been an election worker, and we pick the next ballot off the stack and hand it to you. There are no barcodes or serial numbers on individual ballots, although we do stamp the polling place on each ballot (so one mailed as an advance ballot will have a different marking than one handed out at the poll on election day or one voted in-person at an early-voting site).

For an advance (mail) ballot, the return outer envelope has a serial number and must be signed by the voter; if that check passes, the sealed inner envelope is then handed off to another person to be run through the counting machine.

We do keep track of the count of how many ballots are voted versus left over, void/spoiled, etc.

Part of the difficulty in cross-state database comparisons is how the different states record voter registration information. Kris Kobach’s widely-touted Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program identified voters as potential matches if they shared a first name, last name, and full date of birth. Social Security numbers were not considered, nor were slight variations in name (Steve and Steven were not the same person, e.g.). The program ended as part of a consent agreement with the ACLU, after admitting they’d mishandled personal data and didn’t have proper data security procedures.

Because of differences in naming patterns and the distribution of surnames among African-American, Latinx, and Euro-American voters in the US, matching only on first name, surname, and DOB tends to flag persons of color as potential duplicates more frequently than whites. For example, in the 2000 census, 2.5% of the 211 million self-identified “white” Americans were named Smith, Johnson, Miller, Brown, or Jones. Meanwhile, 8.26% of people identifying themselves as black/African-American had one of the five most common black surnames (Williams, Johnson, Smith, Jones, Brown), and 9.82% of Latinx had one of the five most common Hispanic surnames (Garcia, Rodriguez, Martinez, Hernandez, Lopez). (See most common black, and white and Hispanic surnames.) For another example, the number of Hispanic voters whose legal first name is Angel, Maria, Juan, Jose, or Jesus is very high,even if they go by other names day-to-day.

[Rick_Kitchen]

Individual 1 campaign sues Nevada after the state announces all November votes will be mail-in.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/510611-trump-campaign-sues-nevada-over-expanded-mail-in-voting?

[eschereal]

@Hari_Seldon

It is handles very differently in Canada. The poll worker hands you a ballot and records the serial number which is on a tear-off tag. You go behind a screen and mark your ballot and fold it in such a way that the tag is visible. You hand your ballot to the poll worker who tears off the serial number and hands you back the ballot which you insert into the box. Simple and apparently foolproof.

Fine, but if going to the voting place takes eight hours out of your day, or even just two, how simple/foolproof is that? In some precincts in the US, the state government under-provides, because those people tend to vote in an unpreferable way, whereas the preferable precincts get more resources leading to lower-hassle voting. Mail-in balloting makes that a non-issue.

[Hari_Seldon]

@eschereal

Fine, but if going to the voting place takes eight hours out of your day, or even just two, how simple/foolproof is that? In some precincts in the US, the state government under-provides, because those people tend to vote in an unpreferable way, whereas the preferable precincts get more resources leading to lower-hassle voting. Mail-in balloting makes that a non-issue.

I absolutely agree. I think the longest line I have seen were three ahead of me.

A friend of mine who lived in Ohio at the time told that in 2000, the authorities took a load of voting machines out of Cleveland and relocated them in rural areas where they were not needed and that some people in Cleveland waited till midnight to vote and many didn’t get to vote at all. That, not Florida, is where the election was stolen.

[DesertDog]

@eschereal

In some precincts in the US, the state government under-provides, because those people tend to vote in an unpreferable way, whereas the preferable precincts get more resources leading to lower-hassle voting. Mail-in balloting makes that a non-issue.

In Arizona the push for mail-in voting has been going on for a couple decades now, under both Democrat and Republican governors. It received a big impetus here in Maricopa county – the most populous – when the county registrar done fucked up and cut the number of polling places by two-thirds for the primary election. I don’t think anything nefarious was going on as the poll shortages were everywhere and not clustered in blue areas (the registrar was Replublican).

Between that and the Rona, statewide roughly 85% ot ballots cast this primary were mail-in and the percentage in the county a bit higher.