My wife and I voted by mail in the Aug. 12 primary here in Minnesota, and we intend to do so for the general election (getting our ballot sent in September, hopefully). It’s crucial to have widespread mail voting during the pandemic, and Trump’s crude and (thankfully) typically hamhanded and blundering attempt to sabotage the USPS must be countered as forcefully as possible.
But I hope we don’t use this as an excuse to implement widespread mail voting even after the pandemic is over, something many progressives have favored for years (succeeding in the Pacific Northwest and a couple other places). It is more vulnerable to fraud (the fact that it has not yet been proven to occur in a widespread manner is not disproof of this), and it just fundamentally torpedoes one of the most fundamental and crucial innovations of modern democracy: the secret ballot.
In what way? The ballot is separated from the outer envelope with the signature before the ballot is looked at. I was an election worker in 2008. Every phase was overseen and observed by representatives from each party.
Let’s start with wives of conservative, domineering patriarch types. What chance does Edith Bunker, or the wife of a conservative Muslim man, have of voting her conscience without her husband overseeing it? If there are adult children living at home, they are going to be expected to sit down with Pops at the kitchen table as well so he can “help” everyone get their ballot filled out “correctly”. And this is something you can’t investigate or prosecute. The patriarch in question probably doesn’t even think he’s being coercive or doing anything wrong, and the other people in the household might not really think about it either. But if they are required to go into a private voting booth to vote, they can vote however they like and he’s none the wiser. (For this reason, I also don’t love the common setup you see that’s about as private as a urinal: I prefer toilet-stall level privacy, like those classic booths where there’s a curtain that doesn’t open until you’re done voting.)
Churches and employers can also host gatherings where they “help” parishioners or employees fill out their ballots. As long as people are technically free to refuse to do this, there’s no crime being committed. But there is subtle social pressure. Once again, do you want to tell your boss or minister (and the peers in your “church family”) that you don’t want their “help”? That is going to make them pretty suspicious of you.
And of course you can literally sell a mail ballot. You could try to bribe people to vote the way you want with a secret ballot, but you can’t control what they will actually do in the voting booth.
FWIW, this is a position I have held for many years, way before Trump slimed all over it. (My heart sank when I saw this happening, primarily because of the clear and present danger to our democracy, but secondarily because I knew it would raise the popularity of vote-by-mail among Democrats more broadly, just to be reflexively anti-Trump.) Here’s an example from four years ago, but it was already a longstanding pet peeve of mine:
It’s before the ballot is even sent. Everyone in the household can see what you’re voting for, unless you make specific steps to vote when nobody is around.
I even know of case where the husband fills out the wife’s ballot, seals it up, and then she signs it. She doesn’t even know what she’s voting for.
That’s not to say that we should abandon vote by mail. The advantages are overwhelming. But there are these issues.
I’ve been pondering this since I read SlackerInc’s post yesterday evening. This is worrisome.
He also mentioned
In the case of churches, I suspect that the parishioners at any church that would do this are probably already onboard with the church’s favored candidates.
But I’m having a lot of trouble seeing a way to avoid paid vote harvesters. I don’t doubt for a minute that republicans would take advantage of that.
I’ve been swamped with work today and haven’t had time to research how other countries handle. Will be interesting.
You don’t think there are “on the DL” contrarian voters who don’t want to publicly buck their families and communities by leaving the church? In some of the most hardcore conservative churches (ultra-orthodox Jewish and conservative Muslim mosques for instance) they may even feel doing so would put them in physical danger.
You’re misinformed. In most counties, any person can bring someone into the voting booth with them to “assist” them with their vote. All they have to do is ask and designate that person.
In any household where the spouse is so controlling, do you imagine they wouldn’t seek to exercise the same sort of influence in an in-person voting booth as at home? Do you think a pastor wouldn’t dictate a list of how votes should be cast in the voting booth?
I think people who are vulnerable to be led will be led.
And incidentally, absence of evidence is very often the same thing as no evidence. No one can prove a negative. Quite a number of in-depth studies have shown, again and again, that widespread manipulation of ballots through mail-in balloting is so rare as to be non-existent.
For a non-disabled person to designate someone like that would be awkward, involve extra hassle, etc. I feel confident that in practice, this is rarely done. Whereas I feel confident that in universal mail-in states, those ballots are not filled out and sealed in private by these kinds of wives. It’s not even that the husband is suspicious of the wife and even imagines that she would try to defy him. He just wants to oversee it, make sure the silly dingbat doesn’t fill it out incorrectly, etc.
As for pastors making a list of whom to vote for: yes, they do things like that. So what? If the parishioner is in a private voting booth, they are free to disregard such a list (they can even make a show of bringing it in with them and then ignore it once in there).
You never got the memo that the personal IS political? However you want to describe it semantically, the fact remains that there are going to be people who would vote one way if they had automatic privacy, and a different way if they don’t. We shouldn’t throw away the secret ballot! Not once the pandemic is over.
I’m sorry, but your “feelings” are not what matter here. If you have evidence that this situation widely occurs in vote-by-mail states, by all means, present it.
Incidentally, vote-by-mail is something that is heartily supported in the State of Oregon by both sides, not just the liberals, as you previously asserted.
–It shouldn’t matter whether it’s widespread or not.
–It’s pretty obvious and requires only common sense.
–As you know (which is why you make this bogus request), it would be very hard to show evidence about what people do in the privacy of their homes, when doing such leaves no evidence that leaves the home.
In the NPR story I cited, the expert they interviewed (a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine) said (in scoffing that voter IDs do much to fight voter fraud), “if you really wanted to get rid of the most prevalent form of voter fraud, you would not allow people to vote by absentee ballot, to vote by mail unless they had some kind of excuse, like they were out of the country or disabled.” Yes, this is exactly what we need to do! But the pandemic should count as an excuse.
Also, not that it really matters, but what I said I was “confident” about was that people in these households are not filling out the paperwork or whatever to make their husbands legally allowed to go into the voting booth with them. Again, common sense: I shouldn’t have to go on some Gish Gallup chase to find statistics about the prevalence of this practice.
Do you seriously imagine vote-by-mail states such as Utah, Colorado and Oregon are rife with wives who are entirely mindless and simply turn over their sacred right to vote to their husbands? No offense, but are you married?
When I was married to an American man who possessed the right to vote in this country, we often had enthusiastic discussions over how we planned to vote. More often than not, I won my husband over to my point of view simply by presenting my perspective. Sometimes he won me over to his. We rarely disagreed in our politics. It’s one reason we got married! We saw the world from a common perspective. Neither ever needed to strong arm the other to persuade in political matters. It gives me a chuckle to imagine any of the women in my circle ever ceding their vote over to their husbands. Not going to happen, not ever.
By the way, I was raised in Utah. Those women may play a subservient role to their husbands, but that doesn’t mean the husbands would ever have to employ the tactics you envision to get their wives to vote as their husbands wish. That’s going to happen whether in the home or in the voting booth.
“Common sense” often leads us to erroneous conclusions, which is why it is never regarded as useful in determining the facts of a matter. It’s “common sense” that voter ID laws will prevent voter fraud – but the facts demonstrate that in reality, it serves to suppress voting in far more instances than solving any non-issues of voter fraud.
You are making ill-informed arguments in this thread based solely on your feels. I hope you take time to educate yourself about how universal vote-by-mail really works in states that actually practice it. I think you’ll find that states that have adopted it are loathe to give it up.
By the way, we have about 80% voting participation in this state. That is a goal to which to aspire by other states.
It’s not “based solely on my feels”. I have repeatedly cited the expert interviewed on NPR.
And yes, I’m married, for the second time. But I’m an atheist, not a Muslim, or Scientologist, or ultra-Orthodox Jew.
Have you seen the miniseries Unorthodox, based on Deborah Feldman’s autobiography? They didn’t explicitly cover voting in that, but it’s pretty obvious how it would go in those households. And we have seen how ultra-Orthodox Jews in East Rampopo, NY have gamed the local political system to take over the school board and funnel resources into their religious schools, at the expense of the mostly black kids at the local public schools. You think if they had universal vote by mail, they’d let their wives go off and fill out their ballots privately? Get real.
Then there’s conservative Muslims. These days, they probably tend to lean pretty strongly Democratic, so on the one hand I’m not specifically worried about the effect of their oppressive familial interactions on the outcome of elections. But the principle is still the same, and as Ex-Muslims of North America notes:
Though not required by law, individual families have demanded their daughters adhere to strict religious principles such as the wearing the hijab. Girls and women who refuse run the risk of being disowned by their family or killed.
Don’t tell me they are this hegemonic about the hijab, but they don’t care how their wives and daughters vote?
ETA: I live in Minnesota, where we led the nation in voter turnout “the old-fashioned way”, long before your state ginned up those kinds of artificially high numbers.
You mean this guy? HASEN: There are problems with voter fraud such as with absentee ballots being stolen or sometimes people bribed to vote in a particular way…Well, if you really wanted to get rid of the most prevalent form of voter fraud, you would not allow people to vote by absentee ballot, to vote by mail unless they had some kind of excuse, like they were out of the country or disabled.
But I think that’s something that society probably wouldn’t tolerate because we recognize that there are trade-offs. There’s no perfect election system, but these laws are not even targeted at the little bit of fraud that actually is happening.
No where does he mention " wives of conservative, domineering patriarch types"