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Notes -
I know we've discussed voting policies at length, but something I keep returning to mentally is how it ever became an acceptable norm to implement mass mail-in ballots. Republicans (especially Trumpy ones) go on and on about susceptibility to fraud, and I certainly think there's something there, but it's not even my real objection. Even if you implement a system that I think incontrovertibly filters out all examples of identity fraud in voting and manage to get a full 1:1 match between the name on the ballot and the voter, I will still think that mass mail-in voting is an inherently corrupt system. The secret ballot is of such importance that it is enshrined in multiple international law settings; not that long ago, without the current valence of mail-in voting, I think I could have gotten almost everyone to agree that removing the secret ballot in favor of "assisted" voting inherently increases opportunities for coercion and vote-buying. Once we include ballot-harvesting, where low-propensity voters are "assisted" by people from campaigns, this is unmistakably a serious weakness to the traditional concept of secret ballots, with ample opportunity for intimidation, coercion, vote-buying, or using the mentally incompetent.
What puzzles me isn't so much why my opponents have decided that having people go door-knocking to collect ballots is a very important civil right, but why I don't really see anyone from the broader right arguing against this as a form of corrupt machine politics. Instead, they harp on about fraud, which might be a real concern, but is hard to prove and can't be scaled up the same way as sending political operatives around to do now-legal corruption. Why is there no organized campaign on the right to restore the secret ballot?
Huh. That is a good question.
My best guess is a side effect from Trump boosting specific claims. If the court cases and Raffensbergers had found fraud, his gamble would have paid off. Since they didn’t, it became an attack surface. Now complaining about the election is coded as defending Trump’s claims, specifically.
It’s a shame, because I’d like to see emphasis on the secret ballot. I’d vote for that platform like I’d vote for FPTP reform.
I would too, actually; if polling places where selected at random then pared down by population density and there were mandatory voting holidays.
The voting place where I was got fucking annihilated by population density on the weekend and I'm not even in the city, it was actually faster to drive out into the country then drive back than to wait in line in the 'burbs.
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