In Oregon, the entire state votes by mail in ballots, which we receive like 2 weeks ahead of election day. This means I can vote when I am not at work, and don't have to miss work to do so. It's amazing, more states should implement this.
As a kid in Michigan I remember my parents waiting in long lines to vote. After 20 years as a voter in Oregon I have to say our system is great. We recently received the voter guide by mail, and will receive our actual ballot shortly. Take your time filling in the scantron circles while you peruse the guide, put it in the anonymity envelope, sign it to attest, drop it at city hall or the library. I work for a major internet company, including on election systems, and yet I still love this paper system. If there is any discrepancy, they just recount.
No missed work, no lines, no profiling. I read all the articles about issues with polling stations and all I can think about is systemic disenfranchisement.
There are two envelopes. The outer envelope has your name on it, you sign that and return it. You can mail it in if you like, or drop it at special drop boxes around town (I always do this because I'm prone to waiting to the last minute.)
The inner envelope is anonymous. They verify the outer envelope and open it, then pass the inner envelope to a separate area/volunteers to do the counting.
The contents of the voter guide are submitted by the candidates. For ballot measures, pro- and con- statements are submitted by sponsors or members of the public. I don't have mine handy but I think they actually print several pro/con statements for each.
I'm not sure how unique this is but ballot measures actually have brief statements printed on the ballot explaining what they will actually do, preventing issues where you're like "wait should I vote yes or no on this if I want this thing banned?"
> A YES vote will: Instruct the legislature to write a law preventing future taxes on groceries. A NO vote will: not send any recommendation to the legislature.
Yeah, I moved to Oregon recently and found the ballot structure to be pretty good.
It outlines the different propositions, explains what happens for a yes or no vote and then has multiple pages devoted to showing arguments for and against mailed in by concerned citizens and organizations.
Parties are allowed to enter their own party descriptions. I haven't read the sections on candidates yet
Access to voting is _so_ Oregon. The rest of us are into voter suppression this year, silly hippies.
Seriously, yes, that system is preferred to increasing access and activity in our democracy, but it seems there's a large contingent that feel it's in their party's best interest to not make it easier to vote. I'm sure it's fair to claim that they honestly believe their party in power is for the good of the country, but then everyone feels that way about their desired political trajectories.
You might be thinking of Colorado where they somehow failed to notice that a truck with a bunch of ballots to be sent to voters wasn't unloaded at the post office until people started complaining that they didn't get a ballot. This is quite different from losing voted ballots or not recording a vote correctly.
I question whether the vote coercion/purchase opportunities opened up by mail voting are actually "huge" compared with in-person voting. But even if so, these opportunities don't scale easily and potential damage is limited.
If some malefactor wanted to buy 1 million votes at an average price of $50 each, that's $50 million of somewhat traceable money and 1 million people, some fraction of whom are certain to reveal they were paid. It won't remain a secret, and it will leave numerous evidence trails.
Contrast with fully electronic voting fraud - scalable, hard to detect, and (when well-executed) leaves little evidence to support nullifying an election and forcing a do-over.
IIRC, last I checked something like half the states in the US allow you to get a paper ballot ahead of time for no particular reason so in those states vote by mail wouldn't change anything.
I would say that vote by mail isn't always the best option depending on circumstances but today in the US there is not much vote buying or coersion and it seems like a clearly less bad option than any of the alternatives considering how they are actually implemented. I would not recommend it for Mexico, which already has widespread vote buying even without being able to verify who voters actually vote for.
I don't disagree, but considering that everyone has a camera in their pocket at all times -- including in the votig booth -- these days, I wonder if the opportunity gap for coercion is really all that big.
> On the other hand, voting by mail opens up huge opportunities for coercion or vote buying/selling.
Not any more than any current systems do. You have to sign the ballot, and if the signature does not match what you submitted in your voter registration thing, they kick it back to you.
Unless you are insinuating that the USPS mail folks could collect them all and send in forgeries?
The phrase "opportunities for coercion or vote buying/selling" in the above post refers to opportunities for a malefactor to be physically present while a voter is filling out the ballot and coerce/bribe the voter to fill out the ballot a certain way. Voting at a polling place guards against this by requiring that the voter cast a ballot privately, out of the view of anyone else.
You don't sign the ballot. You sign a paper that gets sent along with the ballot. If things are done properly, the person checking your signature doesn't see your vote and the person counting your vote won't see your signature.
Yea I wasn't totally accurate in my response. The point is, voter fraud by mail requires accurately forging a LOT of signatures.
Alternatively, the state can pay for the return stamp, but will likely have to pass some tax measure to fund it (in Oregon, state budget must be balanced), so in the end voters would still be buying the stamp. This is less efficient since now there would be stamps bought that folks have no intention of using since they drop them off.
No need to forge signatures, you just order all your kids and grandkids to vote like you say, or they will be ostracized by the rest of the family.
Or you order all your employees to vote like you say, or they will be fired. If they don't snap a pic of a ballot filled out to your liking, out the door they go.
Or you just buy the votes of anyone. $50 for a pic of a "correctly" filled out ballot. That scales pretty nicely.
I see your point, but don't agree that it 'scales pretty nicely' since it would rely on all participants keeping quiet about it, which definitely prevents it from scaling at all since you won't be able to openly advertise you are doing this without drawing fire from election officials.
Washington state has had vote-by-mail for everyone for a while now too. This year they made it free to mail back the return envelope, which made a good experience even better.
IMO it should be called voter suppression when this isn't done (as in Oregon) since rural voters are less likely to have convenient drop boxes. Mild voter suppression compared to what some states are doing but still politically motivated voter suppression.
Rural voters are likely not strangers to buying a $0.40 (or whatever they cost now) stamp and putting things in the mail, since they almost certainly have to mail other things in (e.g. bills).
Another Oregon voter here. I just finished filling out my ballot in the privacy of my home, with the voter pamphlet at my side for reference. So simple and sane.
