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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.
@QuinoaHawkDude stole a lot of my thunder, but I suspect that the attitude of "Why can't people just head to their local polling place?" comes from being in a position where doing that isn't particularly inconvenient. I can empathize with this because I, too, live in a place where voting is convenient and additionally I work from home most of the time which means I can usually waltz in mid-morning and not wait at all. That was the plan this year until I had to make an unanticipated trip into Pittsburgh and I didn't get to the polling place until after 6pm by which time there was a line. Not a long line, mind you, but it was still probably 10–15 minutes, and was rather irritating. The one time I went early it was a longer line, probably 45 minutes to an hour, for the reasons @QuinoaHawkDude says.
Unfortunately, people in other places aren't so lucky. While stories of people waiting ridiculous amounts of time to vote certainly aren't representative of a typical experience, the fact that it happens at all is cause for concern. Numbers I saw from 2020 suggest that a little under 15% of in-person voters had to wait more than a half-hour and a little over 6% had to wait over and hour. While these may not seem like terribly high percentages, keep in mind that that equates to about 12 million people, or a population the size of Pennsylvania, that had to wait more than 30 minutes. And this is in an election where nearly 50% of the electorate voted remotely. Now imagine that you know that you'll be waiting in line to vote at least a half-hour and possibly an hour, and your polling place is like mine where there's nowhere to wait inside and it's 38 degrees outside and raining a little, and you have to work all day and can't risk being late so you'd have to wait until after work, sit in traffic on the freeway, come home, pet the dog, kiss your wife, frisk the kids for marijuana, eat dinner, and get motivated enough to stand in line to cast a ballot that, on its own, it almost certain to be statistically insignificant. Maybe you'd still go, but it's understandable that a lot of people would forget about it at that point.
So don't count them; a lot of states don't. But even in ones that do they make up an extraordinarily small proportion of the total. In PA in 2020 there were about 10,000 of these, or about 0.19%, and this was the state with by far the largest proportion of them. The ever-changing denominators that have fueled fraud speculation this go around in Arizona and Nevada all involve ballots that arrived on-time.
Again, ballot curing isn't an essential part of the process. Pennsylvania law is silent on the issue so in 2020 we had to deal with a situation where some counties offered it and others didn't. It wasn't an issue that would have affected the vote totals, but if it bothers you that much then just get rid of it.
Is this a real issue? I'm sure it happens but the theme of all of my responses is whether these problems are big enough that it's worth making substantial numbers of people wait in long lines over them. If someone could show me that the number of coerced votes was at least somewhat in the ballpark of the number of people who waited over an hour to vote, then I could take some arguments seriously. But no one has done that yet.
Does it? For all the hand-wringing over people casting multiple mail ballots in 2020, all that could be uncovered was a few isolated instances. In Pennsylvania, at least, the number of phony mail ballots in 2020 was IIRC comparable to the number of phony in-person ballots in 2016, though we're talking single-digits here so make what you will of it. And this was in an election where one side was loudly proclaiming fraud and had every incentive and motivation to do the necessary legwork to uncover these fraudulent ballots that were supposed to be so easy to cast, and they came up empty-handed.
I don't find this very responsive. OP was criticizing mail-in voting, not early voting. Why not simply go early vote in person a week or two ahead of time, on a day and time that is convenient for you?
Because Pennsylvania doesn't have early voting. Okay, we sort of have early voting, but it's a cumbersome process that's really just an extension of mail-in voting. I would have had to find time to go to the Board of Elections office in the county seat during business hours (I'm assuming; the BoE website doesn't have any information about the process or even post hours), apply for a mail-in ballot in person, the fill it out there and have a guy check the security envelope before he turns it in. This whole process, had I even figured out how to do it properly, would have been significantly less convenient than simply standing in line. It also ends a week before election day, at which point I was still under the assumption that I would have been free that day. In any event, it wasn't a huge deal for me personally; I was simply making the point that a lot of people don't have any choice but to vote at peak hours, and I understand how that can be inconvenient in some cases.
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