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Today in weird election arguments, Wisconsin has an ongoing dispute about the legality of ballot drop boxes and with a shift in Supreme Court seats, there is a big stare decisis is for suckers revisiting of it:
I have my usual objections to encouraging more absentee voting, but they're not the point from a legal perspective. Instead, let's just look at the actual statute:
To fulfill that clause and allow remote ballot drop boxes, the new court would need to discover that these remote drop boxes are actually the municipal clerk. That might sound like a stretch, but they're willing to enact the labor:
This is being characterized as a big win for democracy. To be clear, I don't really think there's anything going on here that's a problem or poses a threat, but it just remains very weird to me how there are all these arguments in favor of doing weird things that don't really seem necessary with solutions in search of a problem. What exactly is the situation where someone can't drop a ballot in the mail or swing by the clerk's office? Why is it so critical to Our Democracy^tm that there be more drop boxes? I suppose one could easily ask the same of Republicans, wondering why it's so critical that clerk's offices not put out boxes, but it seems like the simple answer in this case is simply that the statute pretty obviously doesn't allow it.
I mean, I sort of have the same argument that I do for dentists - clerks, especially government ones, generally have workday hours at best. Most working people are, uh, also at work at those times. Few people either can or want to leave work just to drop off a ballot. Thus, accessibility to voting to basically a massive portion of the population (plus the ones we kind of want to vote in the first place) is obviously a big deal. Drop boxes neatly solve this issue by allowing consolidation with other errands, often conveniently done before or after work, and without relying on the capricious hours of government employees who keep their own annoying hours more out of selfish desire rather than a true desire to serve the people their job is to serve. This is more understandable for dentists, who really want to get paid more than to help people, but less understandable for government agents, whose entire purpose is to help people, which makes one wonder why they are often so bad at it.
But at what costs? Seems like drop boxes open up ballot harvesting.
Also maybe voting should be moderately hard. If our elections are important, maybe citizens should have to undertake a modicum of effort to vote.
Most people are fairly law-abiding and reasonable. Especially when it comes to elections, we aren't in the midst of Gilded age party machine shenanigans. Regular people are fairly likely to give ballots to a trusted family member to drop off, and that's fine. Some ballot harvesting laws make this illegal, which is dumb. They are already less-likely to give these ballots to some partisan (or non-partisan) rando to drop off. That's a strong natural disinclination. I'd argue there's already a strong disincentive for abuse in place due to that alone. And if states pass laws making this kind of non-casual ballot harvesting illegal, as is their right, I think it would be very effective. Really, our model for abuse is that organized groups do organized bad things to ballots. So it's not only unlikely, but also easily preventable. Some states might also want to codify some sort of official or semi-official ballot harvester, and I think that would be a bad idea, but it's not a flagrantly bad idea, depending on implementation.
"Voting should be hard" is, like, maybe fine as an idea, but in practice it's extremely vulnerable to various kinds of unethical voter suppression efforts. It's more fair and more just for everybody to simply keep voting on the easy side. Just like how we have a long history of arguments like "only landowners can vote". Some of those arguments were even half-decent! But at the end of the day, a government is by the people, for the people, and so a person is a person and a person should be able to vote. Social contract, and all that. Governments should represent their people, even if we might not want them to. That's just what's fair and natural. And (IMO) desirable, but that's just a bonus.
I agree with you in general, but when people say that widespread voter fraud ended in the Gilded Age, I am reminded of Robert Caro's magnificent biography of Lyndon Johnson. His 1948 election to the Senate was characterized by massive fraud - which was in fact the norm in Texas at that time , complete with jeffes telling their underlings how to vote (and supervising the votes to make sure they did it correctly), ballots collected by party apparatchiks, and illegals shipped across the border to vote en masse.
Voter fraud really isn't some hypothetical bogey man that's a relic of ancient times. Our elections are probably a lot cleaner today than in the 1940s and 1950s, but the potential and the motivation is most definitely still out there.
Fair point. Not saying it ended precipitously, just was giving a contrasting example, though most numbers I’ve seen do indicate a low rate over recent decades. Worth noting that locale might make a difference. New Jersey, for example, might need some very strong fraud laws in a way that Oregon might not.
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