Been voting by mail in Colorado for years. It’s very handy. Though we drop off our ballots at a drop off box.
I’m one of the lucky that can work from home and enjoy it. Had already been living an isolated lifestyle. I have no need for bars or restaurants or movie theaters.
I go to the post office to pick up mail, the UPS store to get packages the grocery store and beer store. I cook at home, walk the dogs and my Wife and I play chess or gin rummy.
I get up in the morning around 5am (my choice), work from home, do any chores or whatever, work some more and relax.
I’m absolutely perfectly happy with this set up. It’s sort of what I always thought I wanted, and it turns out working from home is great.
I also have a 91 year old mother that I care for and see her about twice a month (she’s 100 miles away) so I need to be a bit cautious.
Even in non-COVID times, I preferred to vote at home. I can sit at the kitchen table, research the issues and candidates online and decide over an evening or two which way to vote. Idon’t suspect my local election officials of mucking with the ballots but in any case, this year they have a system by which I can track my ballot as it’s received and processed. I did vote in person in the 2016 presidential election but that was only because I never received a ballot in the mail. And my first vote, when I was 18 or 22, I went to the same local grade school I attended to vote. The woman running the polling place recognized me as one of her kid’s classmates but I had no idea who she was. (This was the old-fashioned pull the curtain and flip the levers type of voting machine.) And about twenty years ago, my father ran as part of a reform slate for the local high school district board, so when they went to vote, my mother brought my nephew into the booth with her, so he could pull the lever on her behalf for his grandfather.
So, yes, sometimes voting in person is fun and social. Most of the time, it’s just a chore, particularly if there are long lines. So why not vote by mail?
Why? I work for the post office. I can assure you there is NOTHING going on that would suppress voting. Yes, equipment has been removed. Equipment that was old and needed to be removed to make space. Yes, mailboxes have been removed. They do that if say they need to be repainted or they have had vandalism or people using them as garbage cans. Is mail being delivered late. Yes. but its because of labor issues we are having which has nothing to do with republicans, Trump, or the man in the moon.
So, even to “Making it harder to vote by mail in this election is voter suppression and undermines people’s rights as well as our system of government,” you disagree? So even if you were convinced that a legislature could have blocked funds to handle a high volume mail-in ballots, and then blocked a move to allow votes to be counted late in situations where people received them after the election, in your view that still wouldn’t be violating people’s rights to participate in government?
Last I checked, going to Walmart doesn’t require standing in line with hundreds of other people for hours. In fact, when we go to Walmart (once a week, not “everyday”), we order online and then go to the outdoor pickup station and leave the hatch open for the worker to put our groceries in the back, while we wear masks.
BTW, the days when voting was a big party and turnout rates were extremely high (late nineteenth century) were not congruent with “only white male landowners”, which was only the case in the antebellum era, with the last state abolishing the property requirement in 1856.
Voting more than once in an election is illegal and in some states, including North Carolina, it is a felony not only to vote more than once but also to induce another to do so.
Not to mention that even if it weren’t a felony, what he suggested they do to “test the system” would result in a lot of false positives and stir up outrage as people wrongly assume that their being allowed to vote in person means that they are getting away with voting twice. Not so:
The first vote that is received and processed is the one that counts, he said.
“Voting twice in an election is a felony,” Gannon said. “If you put a ballot in the mail, and it hasn’t arrived yet, and then you vote in person before your absentee ballot has arrived, your in-person vote will count.”
ISTM that if it’s a felony, neither vote should count (for starters).
As states across the country scramble to make voting safer in a pandemic, Texas is in the small minority of those requiring voters who want to cast their ballots by mail to present an excuse beyond the risk of contracting the coronavirus at polling places. But the ongoing attempts by the White House to sow doubt over the reliability of voting by mail has left Texas voters in a blur of cognitive dissonance. Local officials are being reprimanded by the state’s Republican leadership for attempting to proactively send applications for mail-in ballots, while the people doing the scolding are still urging their voters to fill them out.
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“Ensuring vulnerable populations can vote by mail during a pandemic is designed to protect human life & access to the vote,” Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said on Twitter this week after the county’s mailing plan was temporarily blocked by the Texas Supreme Court. “Those who stand in the way—using voter suppression as an electoral strategy—are throwing a wrench in democracy. We’ll keep fighting.”
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Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick characterized efforts to expand mail-in voting during the pandemic as a “scam by Democrats” that would lead to “the end of America.”
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Here’s a New Yorker piece exploring the legal fight looming for us on Election Night, which helps explain why Trump is focused on having a super-friendly Supreme Court willing to bend the rules for him.
One eye-opening paragraph:
Trump’s grievance is almost certainly tied to the fact that Democrats are more likely to vote by mail in the upcoming election than Republicans are. This will contribute to a phenomenon called the “blue shift”—votes that are counted, and reported, later on tend to favor Democrats. This year’s blue shift may be particularly dramatic. In a recent poll by Hawkfish, a data firm associated with Democrats, only nineteen per cent of Trump supporters said that they planned to vote by mail, compared with sixty-nine per cent of Biden supporters. Using data from late-summer polls, Hawkfish predicted that Election Night results could show Trump in the lead, with a total of four hundred and eight electoral votes. Four days later, with seventy-five per cent of the mail-in votes counted, Biden would take the lead, with two hundred and eighty electoral votes and, with all the votes counted, the former Vice-President would win the Presidency, with three hundred and thirty-four electoral votes.
I don’t think it will be that extreme; I think Democrats are gearing up to show up early and in person, knowing that the victory totals are going to have to be indisputable. But it’s scary to think about how Dems have to do everything just right to have a fair chance of a count, otherwise we risk another four years of autocratic and minority rule. My fervent hope is that Biden is up substantially on the night of Nov. 3 and the margin only keeps getting bigger.
The “naked ballot” situation in Pennsylvania is worrying. If mail ballots arrive without the secrecy sleeve, they are thrown out and there is no process for getting them fixed in time for counting. It’s estimated that as many as 100,000 ballots could be tossed (there’s about a 6% chance of a naked ballot being received) in a state that Trump won by 44,000. The GOP legislature is fighting to keep the secrecy sleeve, Dems are mounting a voter education campaign to help voters complete the ballots within the rules.
If tossed ballots end up keeping the state in Trump’s column, then the odds of a 269-269 tie go up substantially by Biden flipping only Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan. Which makes North Carolina and Florida loom even larger in the total picture.
Wow. The secrecy sleeve is totally optional here. It even says “optional” on it. The sleeve just makes extra work for the election workers. I always skip it.
I cosign all of this, but you are giving voice to a nagging concern I have. I requested an absentee ballot (here in Minnesota, where we have a fairly high chance of being important to the final results) weeks ago, before the talk of a “blue shift” really heated up. Now I feel uneasy and wonder if it would be better to just go vote early, in person. But I don’t want to ironically set off flags that will just give Trump ammunition to say “look at these Democrats who are voting both ways”. (I have not received my ballot yet, but I do intend to send it back immediately.)
Time for another giant, collective head-slap. I’m not making this up.
The rush to vote from home this year left Maryland election judges with a burden that plagues no other state in the country: ballots delivered online cannot be read by the state’s scanning machines.
To be counted, each of those ballots must instead be hand-copied by election judges onto a cardstock ballot.
And each week, more requests for those Web-delivered ballots are rolling into election offices around the state, dramatically increasing the pressure on a system built for a far different type of election.
A month ahead of the deadline, more than 108,000 people have requested Web-delivered blank ballots — nearly twice the volume of the previous election. About 890,000 voters have asked for ballots to be mailed to them.
The Web-delivered ballots offer front-end expediency for voters, who can follow a link in their email, enter credentials on a website and download a ballot packet to print at home on regular paper.
But on the back end, that plain paper becomes a first draft, and every voter’s choices must be transcribed onto oversize cardstock that can be scanned.
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My bold.
Maybe everyone should just step outside and do a show of hands that can be counted in satellite pictures.
