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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?
My impression is that it comes down to a freedom of speech thing - it's not so much that there is a specific civil right to collect ballots as that a law preventing people from talking to their neighbors about certain subjects would be legally problematic.
That said I suspect "push for a law limiting the number of mail-in ballots a single person can mail in on behalf of others" might be a popular policy for the right to push. We don’t want to stop mobility-impaired granny from having her granson take her ballot to the post office. We want to stop an organized group from going door to door throughout a neighborhood, asking people how they plan to vote and then offering to collect ballots only from those who give the desired answer, and collecting hundreds or thousands of ballots that way.
It's already in place in a number of states, it's just a matter of the will to enforce it. The footage from 2000 mules was from states that banned third party ballot collection, but there was no will to admit that there was a problem.
Yeah, the whole "this would not be a problem if we actually enforced the laws that are already on the books" thing strikes again.
Though those cases do tend to suggest a course of action that is more along the lines of "apply political pressure towards enforcing existing laws" will be more effective than one that looks like "create yet more laws that will not be enforced".
And "existing laws are not enforced, and they should be" is, IMO, one of the strongest right-wing talking points.
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