In most or all cases, the state legislatures approved the current state constitutions giving the governor the right to veto their bills, as well as establishing the state Supreme Court.
If any actual conservatives still exist, I’d think they wouldn’t want a long-established practice like popular voting for electors to be changed, at the last minute, after an election held under different laws, for partisan advantage. It might even come under the US Constitution’s ex post facto law provision — unless, I suppose, someone believes in a living constitution.
I don’t understand their reasoning (but I admit I know very little about Constitutional law).
It seems to imply that any state legislature could decree (for example) their state’s electors shall be chosen by a vote of only land-owning white males in the state.
If that happened surely there would (and should) be a court challenge. Is SCOTUS saying that that particular state’s courts would have no standing in whatever lawsuits ensued?
Are they saying that ONLY federal courts (or even only SCOTUS?) could rule in such a situation??
This is kinda wacky, methinks. Consider, by comparison, that only Congress can make federal law. Yet, they can’t just make any law they feel like. It has to pass constitutional muster which would, if need be, be decided by courts.
Hmm… I’m losing my grip on the points I wished to make. I’ll simply conclude by saying: this doesn’t seem right, but who am I to “judge”?
ETA: (I’m thinking too much) So would the originalist interpretation mean that state and local authorities have no right to make rules about, say, whether campaign literature is allowed inside a polling place? Could that only be decided by the state legislature or SCOTUS? I mean, it affects the selection of electors so no one but the Supremes and the state legislature can decide?
… a U.S. appeals court in Minnesota ruled Thursday that absentee ballots received after 8 p.m. on Election Day have to be segregated, which risks those votes potentially being invalidated through the courts. The court’s opinion overruled a consent decree order that allowed absentee ballots postmarked on or before Election Day to be counted if they are returned up to seven days after Election Day.
I don’t know how much power a blue Congress will have in these matters but this shit has to cease.
I know its too late now but why would anyone risk their vote not being counted by waiting until the last minute to mail it in? Doesn’t every state have the option of either drop boxes or in-person voting for those who don’t trust USPS or can’t make up their mind until election day? The voter has to take some responsibility for making certain that their voice is heard.If you don’t trust the courts and want to vote by mail, you should have done so long ago.
Of course, in those places it may not be possible for someone to get to the drop box or the polling place on Election Day ( which is going to be your normal polling place, not the single early voting location) But that’s not really the question - or at least it’s not my similar question. Barring someone who was suddenly hospitalized or something similar , I don’t understand why they wouldn’t request a ballot and mail it back early enough that the postmark/received date wouldn’t even be an issue. I find it very hard to imagine that there is anyone who hadn’t made up their mind about who to vote for by mid-October and I don’t understand why someone would wait so long to decide to vote by mail that they would have only received the ballot a few days before Election Day.
Never underestimate the powers of procrastination.
For many people, voting is not the most important thing, they have a job, a family, a house to maintain. It’s not all that hard to justify putting it off until tomorrow, when you have just a bit more free time.
Keep in mind, also, that the ballot isn’t just about Trump and Biden. Most people have many other races and initiatives to consider.
My wife (American in the UK) is a very committed public citizen and has always been diligent in exercising her voting rights each time an election came up. But this time round it took constant badgering by me to get her to get round to filling in the ballot. She’s a tense ball of stress about the election and didn’t want to face it.
She normally goes to great lengths to research all candidates in all elected positions she’s voting for and routinely voted for both parties and third party. But this time? Straight Dem. The GOP are too compromised for her.
I know this isn’t a super common reason, but, normally, I want to read the newspaper editorials on the least significant offices. Those editorials come out last.
In some cases, I suspect that people have the mail ballot in hand but are so motivated about the election that they prefer to vote in person. And then, now, they can’t vote in person due to a cold or family situation. (COVID precautions reduce the chances of catching a cold, but both my grandchildren have recently gotten them. One was tested to be sure – negative.)
Thus - last minute mail-in.
As for lock boxes, my DA’s threat at the bottom here is a turn-off:
I’m curious about this, as there are eight drop box locations in my city and I think 19 in my county. Are we an outlier? In the average US county, there’s only ONE drop box?
In most states ( not all, but most ), each absentee ballot is linked to a ballot request made well before Election Day. So the states will know how many ballots are outstanding, the maximum possible number of late votes. It’s possible it won’t be significant.
I can believe it. NYS is providing drop-off boxes only at early voting sites and county Board of Elections offices. The minimum number of early voting sites ranges from 1-7 depending on the county population. There are apparently only 300 early voting sites in the whole state, and 90 or so are in NYC . Add in 10-15 each for the NYC suburbs and that pretty much guarantees that many counties will have only one early voting site- and in the three I looked up, the early voting site is the same address as the BOE office so that’s really only a single drop box location. There will be many more drop boxes on Election Day when they will at each polling place (not only the early voting locations)
Wow. We just had a provincial election, and by my count, there were 238 advance poll locations for the province. That’s 1 advance poll site per 5,000 people, roughly.
With a state population of 20,000,000, and 300 early voting sites, that’s 1 advance site per 66,666 people.
Wow, that’s awful! Was all this decided before NYS realized how many people would want to drop off ballots early? I can’t figure out why they’d limit drop boxes so much with a pandemic surging.
Now, our province is considerably bigger than New York State in terms of land area, so greater need to spread the polling places out, but still, the population to polling booth ratios are stark.
There are probably a number of reasons - last year was the first year we had early voting, so it was probably hard to predict how many people would want to vote early even in the absence of a pandemic, you can’t just put the drop boxes out in non-secure locations and probably the biggest of all - although it was absolutely expected that many more people would request absentee ballots this year ( since fear of getting COVID was a valid reason to request one), I’m not at all certain that many people are using the the drop boxes. I’m in NYC, and I’m hearing about long lines for early voting , and people complaining that they must go to early voting site A when B is more convenient but not one single complaint about the lack of drop boxes. I still don’t understand why anyone would want to drop their ballot off at an early voting site rather than mailing it a week or so before election day and I certainly wouldn’t have expected large numbers of people to do it. The whole reason I got an absentee ballot was because I didn’t want to be in a large crowd of people on Election Day - walking through or past a large crowd of people at an early voting site to drop off my ballot isn’t any more appealing.
I don’t know about all states, but that is the case here in Ohio, and my understanding is that is the case in Texas as well.
Ohio’s counties aren’t all that large, geographically, so it’s not that unreasonable, but for Texas it’s pretty absurd.
Of course, they have no way of knowing how many are late or lost in the mail, versus how many were requested and then never actually filled out or even opened.
People are lazy. Clicking a link and requesting a ballot is easier than actually filling it out and mailing it in.
But didn’t you say that it was only 5 days of early voting? Most US states have considerably more than that. Ohio had pretty much a full month.
My county has one early voting site for over 800,000 residents.
Depends on how well they are run. In 2008, I seem to remember that the voter check in area had 4 stations, only 3 of which were manned. This year, they had a couple dozen, with about half of them manned.
You can drop off your absentee ballot at any polling location. One thing that I had considered doing was to request my ballot by mail, fill it out, and then turn it in on election day, as my polling location is basically at the end of my street. If I did not have adequate transportation, or the ability to potentially spend a few hours on one of my very few off days to wait at an early voting location (fortunately, it turned out to be a pretty quick and efficient process), that probably would have been my strategy.
The main reason that I did it the way I did was because I got to fill it out, and feed it into the scanner myself. Then go home and look online to make sure that it had been accepted. If I had dropped it off for someone else to scan, that introduces more chances for something to go wrong and my vote to not be counted.
If I had requested it, filled it out, and then planned to take it to my polling location, but something happened to prevent me from being able to turn it in, whether that be Covid related or civil unrest related or a bunch of political supporters preventing me from accessing the drop box, then I would have wanted to mail it at that point, and would like for it to be counted.
A Washington Post article explaining the contradictory Supreme Court decisions:
"And when he wrote a short opinion, it was somewhere between liberals who believe dramatic accommodations are warranted during a pandemic and conservatives who say the judiciary should not second-guess state legislatures, who are entitled to set the rules.
Roberts is skeptical of federal judges intervening in those decisions, but defers when state courts and election boards step in.
So Roberts, along with his fellow conservatives, has blocked changes imposed by federal judges in Alabama and Wisconsin. But he has been open, along with the court’s liberals, when state actors — the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and election officials in Rhode Island and North Carolina — agree to loosen restrictions."
I’ve used drop-off boxes exclusively (no in-person voting here). They seem more secure to me than trusting the mail, and I’m not alone: more than half the voters here in WA State use them. The boxes themselves have been called “tank-like” in design and materials.
“Washington’s experience is that they are very secure. We haven’t had any issues with lost ballots or fraud — and our voters love them.”
There are all kinds of built-in safety measures:
•must be two people so one’s a witness
•must record date, time, and their names
•there’s a tamper-evident seal on the door
•all seals are numbered
•the transport containers also have tamper-evident seals
•only trained elections officials can empty ballot boxes: no volunteers
•and many more.
So my question is, Why would anyone in WA State use the mail instead of the more secure drop boxes?
