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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
People voting is good.* Therefore, if we can lower the burden of voting at a reasonable cost, we should.
I don’t think proponents expected this sort of mess, or plotted to exploit it. Instead, we took an immature technocratic solution and rushed its implementation, since there was a hard deadline involved. The reasoning was something like “we already do this for the strongest cases (military), how hard can it be?”
The one-to-one ratio doesn’t strike me as a big issue. Not compared to loss of surety or consensus. Similar arguments apply to Voter ID and other laws claiming that in-person doesn’t cut it.
We’re also seeing the long tail of the worst-prepared, least organized counties, which I think detracts from the number which managed it fine. It only takes one to ruin it for everyone.
* I realize that some may disagree with this. 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.
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link