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But at what costs? Seems like drop boxes open up ballot harvesting.
Also maybe voting should be moderately hard. If our elections are important, maybe citizens should have to undertake a modicum of effort to vote.
Most people are fairly law-abiding and reasonable. Especially when it comes to elections, we aren't in the midst of Gilded age party machine shenanigans. Regular people are fairly likely to give ballots to a trusted family member to drop off, and that's fine. Some ballot harvesting laws make this illegal, which is dumb. They are already less-likely to give these ballots to some partisan (or non-partisan) rando to drop off. That's a strong natural disinclination. I'd argue there's already a strong disincentive for abuse in place due to that alone. And if states pass laws making this kind of non-casual ballot harvesting illegal, as is their right, I think it would be very effective. Really, our model for abuse is that organized groups do organized bad things to ballots. So it's not only unlikely, but also easily preventable. Some states might also want to codify some sort of official or semi-official ballot harvester, and I think that would be a bad idea, but it's not a flagrantly bad idea, depending on implementation.
"Voting should be hard" is, like, maybe fine as an idea, but in practice it's extremely vulnerable to various kinds of unethical voter suppression efforts. It's more fair and more just for everybody to simply keep voting on the easy side. Just like how we have a long history of arguments like "only landowners can vote". Some of those arguments were even half-decent! But at the end of the day, a government is by the people, for the people, and so a person is a person and a person should be able to vote. Social contract, and all that. Governments should represent their people, even if we might not want them to. That's just what's fair and natural. And (IMO) desirable, but that's just a bonus.
I agree with you in general, but when people say that widespread voter fraud ended in the Gilded Age, I am reminded of Robert Caro's magnificent biography of Lyndon Johnson. His 1948 election to the Senate was characterized by massive fraud - which was in fact the norm in Texas at that time , complete with jeffes telling their underlings how to vote (and supervising the votes to make sure they did it correctly), ballots collected by party apparatchiks, and illegals shipped across the border to vote en masse.
Voter fraud really isn't some hypothetical bogey man that's a relic of ancient times. Our elections are probably a lot cleaner today than in the 1940s and 1950s, but the potential and the motivation is most definitely still out there.
Fair point. Not saying it ended precipitously, just was giving a contrasting example, though most numbers I’ve seen do indicate a low rate over recent decades. Worth noting that locale might make a difference. New Jersey, for example, might need some very strong fraud laws in a way that Oregon might not.
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Are we sure that doesn’t happen? There are of course other failure modes.
To be totally transparent, I grew up in Oregon which has for many years been almost exclusively vote by mail, and so VBM literally is normal voting for me. I’ve voted in person once in my current state, and that was because I forgot to mail my by-mail ballot on time (plus I was curious about the in person experience).
That is a plausible sounding failure mode but no, I don’t think it’s very common at all. One, there actually aren’t all that many poor community activists. Activism tends to be, contrary to media idealization, roughly correlated to actual voting propensity and roughly proportional to free time. Which happen to both be in short(er) supply in poor neighborhoods.
Finally, many of these activists that do exist are typically fairly well organized and not very ad-hoc. If ballot harvesting is of questionable moral or legal status, it’s highly unlikely to be part of their spiel or to be organized (which would also leave a paper trail). Instead they will say things like “I can help tell you if you have trouble with the instructions”, “let me make it easy by letting you know the deadlines without figuring out the complicated questions”, “here are the nearest drop locations” and “call me if you are confused about anything”. They might do something at most like “at 5pm we’re going to get a bunch of people rides/ all walk over to drop off our ballots, want to come? (Though that would be rare)” I’ve seen one or two door to door scripts in my time plus a few more online and they almost always look like this. If someone digs up a door to door script that actually contained ballot harvesting instructions that might shift my prior a bit, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t happen in any significant way. (And, not to move the goalposts or anything, but a law cracking down would make any vestiges disappear very fast, which I’m not opposed to as long as it doesn’t accidentally criminalize too many of the family casual modes I mentioned)
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How do drop boxes make ballot harvesting more likely than mailboxes?
Probably not more likely. Both are part of the same problem.
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