Team 3 does need to wait until all votes are in before they perform their step, yes. (Or accept that you need to cut off before all votes are in - we’re just looking for a large dataset not a total vote count)
Cutting off before all votes are in introduces a loophole that someone coercing votes of people they live with could easily exploit.
Waiting until all votes are in introduces a delay to will not be palatable to voters when the reason for the delay is studying a problem that might not exist.
You’re free to make the argument that that group is large enough to matter.
My personal expectation would be that the majority case would look like what @Jas09 describes, not like some mustache twirling plot to double vote.
For mustache twirlers, we’re probably looking at the sort who would abuse their spouse (which is a fairly small number) and the intersection of that group who is deeply political (which is a medium small number) and the intersection of people who are good at forming and executive a coherent plot that requires patience. My sense would be that the first and last requirements turn that into such a small number that it’s not going to change an election.
In the non-mustache twirling case, we’re dealing with couples who figure that it doesn’t matter. They’ll vote the same way regardless.
Except that if mail-in voters are more similar than drive-in, then we know that they wouldn’t have voted the same way. Given the freedom to (or rather, when forced to) decide for themselves, they changed their vote.
The idea that everyone will vote the same comes from the expectation that people just vote for party A or party B, and that they’re going to do so across the board. But, sometimes, you’ll have multiple people from the same party running. Maybe the husband will overlook that the mayor was sleeping with his assistant but, once the wife finally is forced to check out her local politics, googles the guy and sees that he’s philandering with a woman that depends on him for employment, she’ll leave the spot blank for that race. There are a lot of small decisions that you can make when voting that it’s easy to gloss over as irrelevant, which really aren’t. It’s the (incorrect) belief otherwise that is liable to create the situation where it’s common for a large number of people to have their votes swapped away from what they would have done themselves, without thinking that they’ve been manipulated.
Maybe it would be easier to just, as part of the voting process, to design a form with a checkbox that the voter has to check if they live with a spouse or partner.
Then, whenever anyone checks YES, you send a couple of really big guys with badges and guns to their house to interrogate them over how they intend to vote. If they intend to vote the same way as their spouse ( I imagine you would need to interrogate both spouses simultaneously in separate rooms, so you would need two teams of inquisitors) you would need to interrogate them further as to their reasons for voting the way they did to make sure they understand the issues on their own and they aren’t just taking the lead from their spouse in how to vote.
Then, if they both intend to vote the same way and the interrogation teams determine that one of them had influenced the others vote……the interrogation teams would just leave, I guess……because it’s not illegal or wrong to vote the same way as your spouse, even if they are both voting Democratic.
But it would probably make them think twice about ever trying to vote again ……since the proposition being discussed is nothing but a cover for voter suppression and further erosion of confidence in our elections……this method would work just as well and you wouldn’t have to delve into all that computer science stuff.
Why would she be forced to check out local politics for herself ?
Exactly what I envision, and well said. There’s just no reasonable or justifiable point to doing any of this, except to further suppress or influence voters in a particular direction.
I’m sure that some would just flip a coin but if there’s a difference between partners in a relationship when they vote separately then I would expect that it’s separation that forced the person to rely on different sources and ideas than their spouse that caused the difference.
Likewise, the US was creating biolabs in Ukraine to force a war and further improve sales of military weapons to foreign nations. There’s clearly no other purpose and it’s inconceivable otherwise.
Or, you know, not that.
Possible objective: Science
Possible result: Improved democracy and increased voting participation
And nothing prevents her from asking her husband who to vote for and simply doing so.
You are looking to spend a whole lot of time, effort and money to see if there is a difference that there is no reason to expect exists. With the exception of someone actually stealing a ballot and forging a signature well enough to avoid detection * , there hasn’t been a single form of influence mentioned that can only occur with mail-in ballots and would be prevented if people had to vote in person. And as previously mentioned, you can’t even ensure that in-person voters are voting separately as they can bring someone into the booth by claiming to need assistance.
- which is actually possible even with in-person voting with ID required - my sister and I look enough alike that we could use each other’s ID without making any alterations to it.
Can you think of a way to determine if this problem exists that’s less invasive?
Like maybe asking people?
Or… this is a crime. How often is someone convicted of this crime? How about accused?
Or… there are a lot of people who get out of controlling relationships. Does this come up in divorce proceedings or restraining order applications? Or in any court proceeding around the dissolution of such a relationship?
Do you think that if person A does her own research and votes, and person B just asks her husband how he’s voting and votes the same way, that person A’s vote is somehow of a “higher quality” than person B’s vote?
I think if you engage in aa massive undertaking to study the degree that a certain type of crime is occurring and include an easy way for people who are committing this crime to opt out of the study, that the results of the study will probably be unreliable.
How is this information gathered? It sounds like exactly the sort of information the OP is looking for, and is also exactly the sort of data that can only be gotten by doing what the OP is told can’t and shouldn’t happen.
If this is based on polling data, then that’s not the same as actual voting data, which the OP is talking about.
The way I decide how to vote on local issues that I’m unfamiliar with is that I find local people who I trust and I read what they have to say on the matter. My wife does the same thing, but I’m her local person that she trusts. Granted, her vote is based on information one step removed from my information, but I can’t see that it’s appreciably lower quality.
So you expect that the results will be the same between the two groups? If so then there is no harm to knowing that, that I see. You will have evidence for continued expansion and use of mail-in voting and it will become more common and people will feel more comfortable doing it from home.
Knowing things, factually, to me is good. If we can afford to spend a billion dollars to know if you can light a candle in a space station, it’s worth spending a million to know if people are voting or proxy voting, and deciding if we accept that. Accepting that is still an option, but I’d prefer that it’s a deliberate choice.
And I would say that if you fear it being used by people you don’t trust - politicians - against you then you should remember who chose those politicians. If you don’t trust them but you’re the one that hired them then, really, the question being asked here is the tiniest and smallest concern of everything in the world in the realm of voting.
If everyone keeps voting for serial killers then trying to stop someone from doing science to figure out why voters pick blond serial killers 1% more often than brown haired isn’t really a hill you need to die on.
My expectation would be that if it was determined that we should run advertisements during elections to remind people to vote for themselves (o the horror), we would still be electing people who we don’t trust into positions of power, and so would the people on the other side.
My expectation of the exact result of this study would be that nothing would change. I would guess that men are usually the more politically motivated and more dominant in the relationship. Men also tend to lean Republican more than women. But, likewise, mail-in votes tend to lean Democratic. Reducing mail-in voting but pushing for women to vote on their own would, quite plausibly, result in a break even. The only change would be that a tiny portion of the process was slightly more philosophically defensible.
Pairing that with legislation to give people a voting day holiday and free public transportation would, likewise, boost voting to include more people than you get by having mail-in voting. People in rural zones - were there isn’t public transportation - would be at a disadvantage. In one feel swoopn of legislation, you could fix the problem (if there is one) and still lean things Democratic.
There’s a multitude of ways to skew the vote for or against your team and the desire to play politics will allow you to abuse any and all of those to your hearts desire, regardless of the results of the study. Your concern shouldn’t be that we’re checking the results of mail-in, it’s that you’re still going to end up with politicians being a class of people that no one trusts - even though we’re the ones that picked them.
The study would give us knowledge that we can use to improve our system. The system only gets improved by electing good people. That’s up to you, on voting day. Personally, I recommended leaving a lot more spaces blank on the ballot.
Yes, it’s based on polling data.
Nothing in reality is the same as what the OP is talking about.
Again, convince me that the criminal faction is large enough to impact the results. That’s not what we’re looking for. If you want to know if they’re manipulating the vote, you just go to a battered women’s shelter, look up the wives of men convincted of spousal abuse, etc. and ask them if they were able to vote freely during their relationship.
I expect that some number of them will confirm that they had their vote taken from them.
I don’t think we really need to do a study to determine that domineering, violent a-holes did bad things - including during an election. If we did, and we confirmed our expectation though, that doesn’t matter if the number is tiny.
I’m quite happy to fund that study. It’s much cheaper than mine but it probably won’t tell us anything we can’t guess at. You already probably know that that’s what result will be and that it won’t matter.
Not without it being either very obvious, or much less “wholesale” in my state at least. Signatures are checked by computer at the first stage, so the vast majority can’t be scrutinized differently. The only ones checked by humans are the ones kicked out by the computer. And, even then, if there’s time, the voter is given a chance to correct the problem. This happened to me years ago when my signature had drastically changed. I was contacted to come in and provide a new registration signature, and my ballot was then counted.
On the other hand, it makes it much easier for a person who needs assistance to get assistance from the person they want to assist them. You don’t have to coordinate two people going to the polls on one specific day, at the same exact time.
Yes. Vote-by-mail solves way bigger problems than it creates. No system will be completely perfect, but vote-by-mail is much better than most.
To the OP:
My state has been all vote-by-mail for decades. Abused spouses do get away one way or another a regular basis. There has not been any outpouring of voter fraud stories as far as I am aware. And, as was pointed out, an abuser can force the abused person to let them in the voting booth anyway, so in person voting won’t prevent it either.
By the way, what do you think it would prove if you had a higher rate of agreement between spouses’ ballots with mail- ballots than with in-person ones? Because there are multiple ways it could have nothing to do with coercion or any other bad thing.
I’ve been filling out mail-in ballots for decades now. I’ve never been coerced, and never coerced anyone. But, I’m positive that, if you could look at my pre- and post-vote-by-mail voting pattern compared with my spouse, you’d see more agreement post. That’s because we are more likely to sit down and fill our ballots out together, often talking through any votes we are unsure about, and discussing what we know about the candidates for the lower tier offices on the ballot. It’s been helpful and convenient for us to be able to do that, and we both wind up casting more informed and considered votes than we would otherwise.
Wow. Those are quite the expectations.
So you are looking to eliminate all mail-in voting over this bogus “concern?”. That is horrific on so many levels, the least being that your concerns are completely and utterly baseless.
And I guess that means NO ONE that wants to vote can EVER take a vacation or business trip that puts them away from their home on Election Day(s)? Right there, you are disenfranchising a whole new tranche of voters. Plus, airlines and resorts are hurting enough without making people chose between travel and voting a few weeks of the year.
Here’s a suggestion:
If you think that the world is full of people who are only voting the way the do because of spousal abuse or spousal arm-twisting, why not have a policy where anyone can easily have their mail-in ballot sent to an address other than their home address.
That would solve your non-existent problem right there, the mythical spouse who’s scared to vote in front of her husband can safely cast her vote at work, or at her sisters house.
Now, I really wouldn’t recommend this. I think there would be security issues -plus the whole “there’s no evidence that the problem you are trying to solve doesn’t freaking exist” thing. But, given your level of concern and your love of just asking questions, I’m wondering why you didn’t think of this.
Probably because it doesn’t make it more difficult for everyone else to vote, I assume.
There’s no harm to knowing - the harm is the money that will be expended to find out which will certainly cost multiple millions of tax dollars. If you can find some way to fund it without tax dollars and still have the results be credible , have at it.
That’s a really big “if” - and lots of people don’t think we can afford to spend a billion dollars just to know if you can light a candle in a space station. Not in the world we live in now.