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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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I was going to write up the case for mass voting, even by the uneducated, but I’ll sum it up as “safety valve for political pressure.”

This makes little sense. First of all, recent events demonstrated that if there's any safety valve, it does not work. Second, most people that resort to violence don't do it because it's hard for them to vote, it's because they think voting is useless. Letting them do useless thing easier, or have more people do the useless thing, is not going to change their opinions. Third, obviously, even if all the previous arguments are false, your premise is good only if we're talking about more individual voters voting being good, not higher numbers in "vote count" column being good. The whole premise of the parent comment is that mail voting allows to disconnect one from the other, which invalidates "voting is good" as an argument for it.

What makes you say it didn't work?

I believe that those pushing for mail voting thought of it as a low-cost way to boost participation, which is viewed as an unalloyed good. This is because participation is an important part of civic pride, helping to preempt unrest or dissatisfaction. Buying into the myth/promise is important.

Given that it had larger-than-expected costs, both literal and in social trust, maybe they were wrong. I remain sympathetic to the premise.

which is viewed as an unalloyed good

This is one wrong premise. Another wrong premise is having more ballots in the box is not necessarily means having more people voluntarily and willingly participating - there's no way to actually verify that part.

This is because participation is an important part of civic pride, helping to preempt unrest

Not helping, as we witnessed having a lot of unrest, including in places like Oregon that has mail voting for a long time.

Also, I don't see how making less effort to participate makes you more proud of it - usually it works the other way.