Personally I don’t have a problem with anyone who wants to vote by mail being able to request a ballot. Most states already allow no-excuse absentee ballets.
I think the problem arises when the State automatically mails ballots to every registered voter at an address.
If too many ballots show up at a house because someone requested it, there’s a paper trail. If too many ballots show up at a house automatically, there’s zero paper trail to be able to tell if they were all filled out and mailed back, besides the overall voter participation rate going up, which surely it will do.
Voting is a responsibility and a civic duty. It need not be effortless, and in fact it should not be effortless. It should be economical, practical, predictable, safe, and secure.
Registering to vote is one step in the process. It’s something anyone who wants to vote can and should know about. Typically cities/towns will send out a census every year which if you do not complete will result in you being removed from the voter rolls, but I’m sure it varies by state.
Once you’ve registered I think most people would expect they can lookup their designated polling time and place and arrive then to place their vote. You would not want someone who has registered and expects to be registered to be unexpectedly removed from the rolls, for example, and only discover this at the last minute.
This also doesn’t address the auditability concern. I would be extremely wary of any system which can associate a serial number on a ballot with who it was mailed to. Such a system is totally unacceptable in my opinion.
By comparison, I have absolutely no issue keeping a list of who requests a mail in ballot, just like I have no issue with keeping a list of who votes in person. Obviously people who receive a mail-in ballot cannot also vote in person, right?
So I don’t particularly like the idea of banning in person voting either. I’m sure many people will find voting by mail convenient, but I’m sure there are also people who find that physically voting in person is both an important ritual and more reassuring that their vote actually is being counted, but also could be more convenient for them.
In particular, I recall there being a very popular article/blog post that went hugely viral on Twitter comparing Trump's election margins in key states with the number of supposedly "suppressed" votes in that election, allegedly demonstrating that Trump won the election that way, where it was clear that the author knew the supposed voter suppression scheme wouldn't even work as described. Part-way through, after the breathless claims about hundreds of thousands of voters, was a careful ass-covering disclaimer about how what actually happened to voters on the purge lists which would supposedly stop them from voting would depend on the state. That disclaimer was because, in at least one of those key states Trump had to win and probably all, being put on the list didn't stop people from voting at all - they just had to confirm or update their address when they went to vote.
Politics gonna politik. Neither team red nor team blue is above slimy tactics. That's not an excuse not to push for a viable, non-partisan solution.
I personally don't think periodically scrubbing rolls is either the right solution nor a good one. When they are scrubbed, the scrubbing is usually done by elected officials (who are almost certainly not above the corruption temptation) and who generally choose to over-scrub given too little confirmable data (causing false positive to be removed and increasing the burden on the average voter who doesn't know what happened or how to assure that their ballot isn't invalidated).
Citizens should demand that the government actually use the data is already has on us and keep our address and eligibility current. One simple PubSub system with {Post Office, DMV, Credit Bureaus} as publishers of address changes and {Elections, IRS, etc} as consumers would fix this pretty quick.
1. Ballots contain: a ballot, a serial number, a small envelope and a large envelope. 2. The voter fills in the ballot and stuffs in the small envelope and closes it. 3. Voter now needs to get a code from a webpage and add to the serial number card. Here's the part where infrastructure in Iceland is excellent. Nigh everyone has personal electronic certificates on their phones so authentication is easy. I must admit I have no idea how easy or hard this would be in the States. 4. Puts the small envelope and the serial number card in the large envelope and closes it. 5. Mails in the large envelope. 6. Precinct opens the large envelope and validates the serial number. If it is valid, puts the small envelope in box headed for counting. 7. Count the votes. Declare results. 8. Investigate the "bad serials and validation number".
There are fun things to think about doing to increase confidence in the voting process. In this scheme I describe the validation code could be a hash of the serial and a salt. Then you could actually release all the validation cards so voters can actually verify that their ballots were counted.
It’s a complex and laborious process, including multiple partially automated steps both in sending, receiving, and processing an application for an absentee ballot, as well sending, receiving, and processing the absentee ballot itself (in one of several possible languages, as requested by the voter).
This includes a manual step of comparing the voters signature on an outer envelope, which is scanned by machine and presented to remote data entry techs for side-by-side comparison with the signature on the scanned application for the absentee ballot. If the signatures aren’t a good enough match as decided by the human, the ballot is rejected (and the voter eventually notified).
So if you’re not sending applications for an absentee ballot out to voters, where is this signature coming from that you are comparing against? It can’t possibly be the electronically captured signature on the drivers license, because that one is chicken scratch...
[1] - https://www.ocvote.com/election-library/docs/2007%20Grand%20...
* The tampering envelope is extended to weeks instead of hours.
* There is a non-zero risk of vote secrecy violation.
* There is a non-zero risk of voter pressuring.
Coming from a country that earned the right to vote through violent revolt, it is strange how established democracies, especially the US, are cavalier with weakening the voting process: vote on a Tuesday [???], no paper trail voting machines [???], mail-in voting [???].
In a perfect world I would execute elections in the same manner we do in Iceland. Voting booth, paper ballots, pencils for marks. We have a presidential election this summer and everyone was worried if COVID would suppress the vote. Looks like it won't since we only have 2 active cases and new cases are almost none (can't find the numbers atm but iirc we had 7 new cases in the month of May).
[0]: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/auto...
