Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.
...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).
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If there's anyone watching strangers' ballots be marked and taking them to ballot boxes, that's massively illegal and they should be serving jail time, excepting maybe some cases where people legitimately need help filling out their ballot (mainly thinking some elderly/blind people here), which should be handled very carefully.
My understanding of "ballot harvesting" claims is merely that activists were delivering the ballots, with similar GOTV concerns that activists can selectively give rides to the polls to only people they expect to vote the way they want.
Do you have a source for this?
The exact laws are state-level, but this very weird website provides the following:
You can go read the election laws for any state online. For example, this appears to be the relevant section of Oklahoma's voting laws, although I'm not quite sure how to interpret it. My non-lawyer interpretation is that I see requirements that the ballot be secret, and that description of "ballot harvesting" may cover watching someone fill out an absentee ballot, although it's not clear. And the punishment is not specified there.
Right, that's why I asked. I looked up the relevant statute for my own state and while "Solicit a person to show how his or her vote is cast" is a prohibited practice, the prescribed punishment is effectively a citation, certainly not a felony.
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I thought you couldn’t fill it out; I thought some states allowed leeway to seeing someone fill out the ballot.
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