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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   3762 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 20, 2023

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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?

  1. The line between "acceptable" political campaigning and "unacceptable" ballot harvesting is hard to define.
  2. People will argue that systems which are already in place are enough to make coercion and vote-buying sufficiently difficult to pull off that there is not a need to restrict voting to secret ballots. The proper response is to argue that no, those systems are insufficient, but we will make up for the lost easiness of mail-in voting by something like establishing voting holidays.
  3. If the right argues that it is unfair for Democrats to go knocking on low-propensity voters' doors to try to get them to vote, the left will argue that it is unfair for Republicans to spread ideas like Qanon that are not believed in by the vast majority of Republicans who actually make policy but that can also be persuasive to low-propensity voters.

  1. It's easy for me. Have people vote in person, then we don't have to worry about this at all. Ballot harvesting is just a way for political machines to cheat.

  2. Agree, I'm in favor of these sorts of actual compromises.

  3. I don't know of anyone that argues that door-to-door campaigning is an illegitimate tactic. If you can get the idiots from your side, whether they're welfare slugs or Qanon to show up to the polls, more power to you.

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