I disagree.
The state is handing you a ballot and then telling you to pay some money to register your vote.
Granted it is a minuscule amount of money but I do not think poll tax jurisprudence rests on an arbitrarily small amount of money to be ok. No amount is ok when it comes to a poll tax.
IANAL
Only if they check for a stamp before they count the ballot. Which of course they won’t.
They’re not 'telling you to pay some money to register your vote". There are options you can pursue that let you do it for free, like walking your ballot to a polling place or, at least in my state, a ballot drop-off location. If you want someone else (the USPS) to deliver your ballot to the correct location for you, you may have to pay the pittance, but that’s not the only way available to you to get your vote counted.
Missed the edit window: I just voted absentee, and even though my state doesn’t pay postage, I returned my ballot without going through the postal system at all, by dropping it off in person. That will be too inconvenient for some people, so they’ll choose to pay a third party to deliver their ballot on their behalf, but that’s no more of a tax than someone having to pay for gas or a bus fare or an Uber because their polling place is too far away to walk for free. (And just to be clear, I think paying postage is a good thing. Hell, let’s talk about transportation access on e-day too! But it’s not because someone is being taxed when they decide that paying for postage is the most convenient way to deal with something.)
Unfortunately states can (and do) make it difficult to get to a polling place. Here’s one where the state closed the only polling place in a city and the nearest polling place was more than a mile from the nearest bus stop.
So here’s a cite: (Disclaimer - The American Spectator leans heavily to the right):
In the 2016 presidential election, Democrats led by 7% after a few days of early voting. But this time around, Republicans are ahead by this stage of early voting.
So it probably means one of two things: Either Republican voters who would normally wait until Election Day have decided to vote sooner this time around - in which case it makes no difference to the eventual outcome - or, Republicans are going to pad a lead in the early vote AND still have substantial turnout on Nov. 6, portending a possible elephant stampede.
You keep comparing off-year elections with Presidential year elections. They are incredibly different, and these analyses hold little weight.
Keep hoping for that stampede though. Most special elections since 2016 should probably be arrested for trophy hunting, considering how much the GOP has been getting killed.
Not to mention, for some reason I get emails from the American Spectator, so I regularly see their take on current events. I’d trust them for factual coverage about as much as I’d trust Breitbart or InfoWars.
Put simply, Nate Silver says that early voting information has never been shown to reliably predict the results of elections, and that’s why he ignores it in his models.
Are they actually tabulating and releasing vote totals from early voting? Seems kind of, I don’t know, wrong.
They’re releasing the numbers of party affiliates who voted. It’s a safe bet that the vast majority of Ds will vote D and Rs will vote R, though. The big unknown is the 20% of independents.
Those numbers are kind of suspicious, though. I’ve read that in Texas, for example, party affiliation of voters isn’t recorded, so where are those numbers coming from?
That’s why Silver said only in Nevada and Florida can they be taken even a little bit seriously. Because in other states the figures are completely bogus.
Virginia’s another state where they don’t record any party affiliation when you register.
My thinking is that if Democrats turned out huge for special elections, they can’t possibly fail to turn out for the midterm, right? Then I remember that we’re talking about Democrats here, whose ardor to vote can wane rather abruptly.
Can. But historically has not. Special elections turnouts have usually been fairly predictive. Past performance does not … blah blah blah.
I don’t think the odds of D turnout falling off from special election numbers is huge. The wildcard in my mind is whether or not GOP turnout will increase from it.
Nate Cohn of the NYT just posted a Twitter thread explaining how the early voting information and the polling information is not contradictory at all. For example, if the independent vote is largely Democratic this year, it could easily lead to a Democratic win even if the votes by registered Republicans is greater than those of registered Democrats.
His thread has a few other points as well, but the idea is that he and Nate Silver agree that you can’t tell anything about the election results from the early vote.
Not much comment in that linked article, either.
Quote, from the article:
Bolding mine.
The article then explains why the data is limited, why it is skewed, and why you can’t draw any conclusions from it.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
I recall that in 2006, Democrats didn’t turn out, independents just voted for Democrats. So Democratic turnout could actually disappoint and they could still have a pretty good night.
Although their voters not turning out is never good news, because independents can’t normally be counted on to get Democrats across the finish line.