You can easily do it at home ahead of time even without mail voting. All you need to do is to be able to find out who’s on the ballot; which is generally easy to do. See my previous post about that:
ETA: I still think voting by mail should be one of the options. But thinking it’s the only way to research candidates ahead of time at home shouldn’t be one of the reasons for that; because it isn’t.
I use the Ballotpedia app on my phone.
I didn’t say no one could research candidates beforehand when voting in the booth. It’s just that it takes a very dedicated voter to do that and those are fairly scarce on the ground. It’s much easier to do that when you have the ballot in front of you.
At least in Washington this isn’t easy. There could be dozens or hundreds of options in an election (levies, city, county, regional state elections and initiatives, and so on) and based on where you live you’ll only have a handful actually show up on the ballot.
The website for the election board might list every office and candidate up for election based on your address.
In theory i like in person voting, but in practice, I’ve been voting “by mail” since that became an option. Even at the last election, when i volunteered and spent much of the day at my polling place
I put “mail” in quotes, because i usually drop off my ballot at the town hall drop box. Although last time i used the mail. My state posts a list of who has voted. (it’s public record. If you even volunteer for a campaign you will get a list of who voted in which elections, including which primary ballot they took. You have to pay some administrative fee to get a dump of the data, and every campaign does so, even my neighbor who ran for town meeting.) So i start checking a couple of days after handing in my ballot to check that it’s been received by the town clerk.
The backup is that if the town clerk doesn’t get it, i am still allowed to vote in person. The election volunteers need to check and make sure a voter hasn’t already voted absentee/by mail, and if they don’t get my ballot, my name is still clear.
They don’t, not that I can find. And if it’s a pain in the butt to find that, that’s yet another downside of in-person voting.
Ballotpedia was able to estimate what my ballot might have, but it is clearly not accurate. I tested it and it said that in November my ballot will have 4 candidate races and that’s it. There is no way that is the case. Every time when we have a general election there are a lot of things on my ballot. So it looks like I’d have to wait for the ballot to arrive before knowing, which luckily is fine because we are all mail-in and we get it well in advance.
Yeah, mine will give me a sample ballot for my exact voting district. The sample shows me exactly what I’ll get in the voting booth.
Do other states not do this? or is it that people haven’t checked their local (county or equivalent) board of elections for sample ballots, and so don’t realize they’re available?
Maybe your state doesn’t bother providing sample ballots online specifically because you’re all mail in and will get it well in advance anyway.
That’s extremely likely. It’s basically a moot point in my state.
I intend to vote in person.
Australians prefer to vote in person, but in a sharply increasing trend, use the pre-poll options.
Mail options are available, there are mobile booths on the day but voting on our feet we either show up on the nominated Saturday or in the days prior.
At current rates, in the next couple of election cycles, over 50% of votes will be cast early. In some by-elections. this level has already been achieved.
We’ve got a provincial election coming up, and the Chief Electoral Officer is advertising heavily for the vote-by-mail option: billboards and bus adverts.
Link to their webpage. We can sign up now for vote-by-mail. Ballots will come out after the writ is dropped. Ballot must be mailed the last day of the election period.
I voted by mail last election in 2020, when Covid was still on. Dunno if I’ll do that this time. I like walking to the polling station and casting my ballot.
A political activist urged us to vote as early as possible, because once your vote is recorded, it’s a public record that you have voted. And that means that she can focus her efforts elsewhere, and not call (etc.) you.
Where i live, i can vote earlier by mail than in person.
We can’t vote until after the writ drops, starting the election, because the candidates are nominated during the election period.
Elections are much more compressed in our parliamentary system.
In the current election? Nope.
In the US, Republicans have finally figured out how much they’ve fucked up by trashing vote-by-mail, absentee, and other early voting methods. Their voters bought into the myth that only in-person election day voting was secure, giving Democrats an advantage in early voting that lets them better target their GOTV efforts as election day draws near. Even Trump has been urging Republicans to vote absentee and early voting, but a lot of his base remains skeptical.
I haven’t done that in decades (and I couldn’t if I wanted to). I don’t miss it one bit.
Trump is still going after vote by mail but he has to say that absentee is bigly different and much gooder once it was pointed out that’s how the military votes.
Is there a difference between vote by mail and absentee voting?
As I understand the terms, “voting by mail” is when every registered voter gets a ballot in the mail. Absentee ballots are sent do those who request them.