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Notes -
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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