Vote by mail is a good idea for many reasons. It’s more convenient, so increases participation somewhat, and especially with a virus out there it reduces exposure at the polls.
But what’s bugging me is Democrats going on and on about voter disenfranchisement when it comes to voter ID laws and crowded polling places.
While there are no firm estimates of how many voters are disenfranchised by voter ID laws, the estimates we have are pretty small. What’s not small is the % of mail lost by USPS, which would of course include ballots. The fact USPS loses mail isn’t something people don’t know. And yet the question is never brought up when Democrats display their enthusiasm for voting by mail.
Voting by mail increases turnout, because it is so much more convenient. Particularly for people whose work hours coincide with polling station hours, who have transportation challenges, who cannot stand in line easily, and who don’t feel like risking their lives from an extremely contagious virus (i.e. the poor, the old, and the ill). Increasing turnout by just 1 or 2% would mitigate the lost mail effect, 5% would efface it completely.
Being a democrat, I believe that voting should be as safe and convenient as it is possible to make it, so that everyone who wants to can easily vote, as is congruent with a democracy.
But again, that’s not what Democrats have argued about voter disenfranchisement at all. This is more motivated reasoning. If there’s more voting overall, it doesn’t matter if more are disenfranchised?
Im in an 100% vote by mail state. If you don’t receive your ballot, you can contact the elections office. If the elections office doesn’t receive your completed ballot, you can notify them and resolve the problem from there.
I vote by mail and can check the status of my ballot after I’ve returned it online.
Voting by mail is much more convenient than voting at the polling place, and in these days of pandemic, it’s much, much safer. The latter point is much more important in the upcoming elections.
Since you don’t know, and apparently don’t care, how much mail is lost by the USPS, there’s really no means to determine how many people might be inconvenienced by a ballot lost by the USPS.
What’s important is to have a ballot tracking system where sent and returned ballots can be tracked and any lost ballots can be fixed.
Here is a Realclearpolitics article about lost ballots.
Most of the article is a response to right wing panic mongering about millions of “lost” ballots (they are obviously not lost, they are people who didn’t vote, turnout is obviously not 100% with mailed ballots just like it isn’t for in-person voting).
But the article also says this:
So does anybody have the data on how the ballot tracking worked for a given state (say, Oregon) and a given election?
How many people reported that they didn’t initially get their ballot, how many reported that they didn’t get it even after asking for a new one, how many people reported that their vote wasn’t registered even after they sent it in the mail?
How do you know? You’ve started with a couple of assertions that you have provided no cites for:
That the percentage of voters affected by disenfranchisement efforts (voter id, closing polling stations, etc.) is “small”. How many people are not voting due to those impediments?
A sufficient amount of mail is lost to outweigh those efforts. What is the percentage of mail lost by the USPS?
How about this? Compare the percentage of voters who actually cast a ballot in vote-by-mail states to those in states with more vigorous requirements. That would probably address your “concerns” adequately.
Except the concern isn’t total numbers, unless you’re a Democrat who cares only that as many people vote as possible and isn’t worried about individual disenfranchisement at all. Which seems to be the case here.
It’s not just voter ID requirements that disenfranchise voters, it’s also reduction of hours and fewer polling places.
When I go vote in my upscale suburban neighborhood, it takes me 10 minutes or less, maybe 15 minutes if it’s a presidential election. However, people wait in line for hours in poor neighborhoods. The ironic thing is, I (and most of my upper middle class neighbors) could spend hours waiting to vote and not lose a penny of income or get in trouble with work, whereas people in poorer neighborhoods are more likely to have hourly jobs and will and do lose money when they wait to vote.
Can you explain your “motivated reasoning” comments? If voter ID laws and reduction of polling places disproportionately affect poor, elderly, and minority voters, but voting by mail affects all people equally, isn’t the latter better? Even if you are (hypothetically, please provide a cite) losing more votes overall, if they are evenly distributed throughout the voting population, that seems better than affecting some demographics worse than others.
Plus, I don’t see people calling for mail-in voting only, just make it easier to do so. You can still have in-person voting, for those people worried about their letter getting lost in the mail, right? Then, everyone is happy!
Can you explain why it’s not important to increase the total numbers? If mail-in voting increases turnout by 5%, but loses 1% of those votes (randomly, not targeting any specific demographic), this seems like a win to me.
It feels like the motivated reasoning is mostly from you.
For the past ~25 years I’ve urged my employees to participate in elections and have given anyone who wants it an hour off on Election Day to vote. I don’t know if it’s the fact that we’re in a rural location or just general apathy, but I’ve never had anyone take me up on the offer.
I vote by mail in Colorado. Have done so for years. It’s great. You get to take your time and do it as you please. Make wise choices. Then, I don’t mail it in, I am able to drop it off in specific vote mail boxes at a convenient/location when I can. They are administered by the County Clerk. And are at libraries county buildings and a few other locations. We now have security cameras on them.
Safe, convenient and secure. I suppose you could vandalize the thing, or run it over with your car or something, but voting by ‘mail’ is much, much better.
See, fair elections benefit the nation, and Democrats are the ones who want to benefit the nation, so benefitting the nation helps Democrats, so that means that we must assume that the only reason why Democrats would want to help the nation is to help Democrats, which means that we shouldn’t trust Democrats, which means we should hurt the nation, because that’s the only thing that isn’t motivated reasoning.
See, fair elections benefit the nation, and Democrats are the ones who want to benefit the nation, so benefitting the nation helps Democrats, so that means that we must assume that the only reason why Democrats would want to help the nation is to help Democrats, which means that we shouldn’t trust Democrats, which means we should hurt the nation, because that’s the only thing that isn’t motivated reasoning.
Then let’s see you’re analysis. You forgot to put it in your OP. And now you’ve heard about tracking and remediation, in case you hadn’t bothered to look that up before.
