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Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 13, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Can someone steelman mass mail-in voting for me? I racked up reports and a mild mod wrist slap over the weekend for referring to Nevada system as a "fucking stupid way to run an election" without further elaboration. In retrospect, I agree with the reports and with @cjet79 for the callout on it - it's an admittedly low effort swipe and I didn't do anything meaningful to justify it. Nonetheless, I really do think that this is an incredibly stupid way to run elections and I genuinely forget that other people apparently think it's basically fine. The reasons that it seems obviously stupid to me keep popping up in this election. A few of them:

  • Not requiring the ballots to arrive on or before election day means that we don't have a reliable denominator, which will persistently fuel speculation of cheating.

  • Colorado is apparently going to have to need to deal with tons of ballot curing, a process that also strikes me as absolutely bizarre, in which documents that are missing information or filled out incorrectly are remedied after the fact.

  • Mail-in ballots pretty thoroughly demolishes the ability to vote without coercion. This could be exploited in abusive relationships or with people lacking the mental capacity to determine their own vote.

  • Mail-in eliminates the near guarantee of a one-to-one relationship between voter and vote that is ensured by in-person identification.

Maybe I'm wrong about these being big problems, but what exactly are we getting in return that makes it so valuable? I can see the case when it comes to military ballots and people who genuinely can't leave their homes, but why create these sorts of potential problems for people that can just head over to their local poll place? I have some criticisms of early voting, but it still seems substantially more secure than spamming ballots out to the last known address of every registered voter. I know I'm still being fairly snarky, but I'm also trying to actually understand why anyone thinks it's important to do elections this way.

Before I moved to a state with universal vote-by-mail, I pretty much only ever voted in Presidential and (maybe) midterm elections. Since moving, I've voted in every single election I get a ballot for. Being able to vote by mail, without having to ask for the privilege, removes a lot of friction from the voting process. You might say it's not that big of a deal to go vote in person, but where I was living, even if I did early voting it was going to mean about an hour standing in line (either because I got there way before the polling location opened to be first in line, or because I didn't do that and had to queue behind everybody else who did).

For those concerned about fraud, it's perhaps worth noting that I was kind of casual about my signature on a recent ballot, and my ballot got challenged because the signature didn't match my driver's license signature, and I had to go re-sign in person.

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Can an American please explain to me how very long voting queues can be an issue in practice? So from what I understand this happens in very Democratic urban polities, where both voters and the politicians are Democrats. Why not make it as easy as possible for your own voters to vote? Is it just incompetence?

The only datapoint I have here is that a lot of the places that supposedly experience this are places with incompetent administration in general.

Surge planning for anything is tricky.

Couple that with limited funds, dependence on volunteers, and procedures which may be set by a hostile state government, and city or county hands may be tied.

Living in a small town, there are probably single buildings in NYC that house more people than my entire precinct. In order to have a polling station you need some common/semi-public area like libraries or whatever, and there are probably fewer of these per Capita in cities than suburbs/rural. That's what makes cities more efficient in the first place--usuay fine except the when Everyone simultaneously needs to do a thing.

This doesn’t convince me. Aren’t elections mainly held in schools there? (That’s what happens in Turkey at least) Surely the ratio of population to school space is roughly equal in almost everywhere

I dont think they are "mainly" held in schools, although I assume some are. Election day is a school day here, so much of the school space would be otherwise occupied. Cities also will have fewer children per capita, and per square foot building cost is higher in cities, so I don't see why school floor space would proportional, as a rule.