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That is a tendentious appeal to consensus that doesn't exist. Oregon has been doing vote-by-mail since 1996.
FYI, I think my comment is what @sliders1234 is referring to when he says that it's been discussed here before. In that comment, I survey international pro-democracy organizations which set out what it means for an election to be fair and free. It is clear that a consensus did exist across these organizations. That some locations have been bucking that consensus and that some groups have now turned entirely against that consensus does not mean that the consensus did not exist.
The consensus that you point to is for a different topic than the one you are claiming.
You are trying to manufacture a consensus against VBM by pointing to universal support for the notion of secret ballots. The core of the disagreement is whether VBM (especially optional-VBM where anyone that wishes can go in person if they choose!) is sufficiently protective of the right to a secret ballot.
If anything, the point that one can derive from this is that mandating VBM is not good policy. On that, sure, we can easily agree.
Those cites were pretty clear that the only consistent way to ensure the secret ballot and voter faith in such is in-person voting, with only one person being allowed in the voter booth at a time. They explicitly call out weaknesses of VBM in these terms. I am manufacturing nothing. It's there, in black and white, preserved by the beauty of the internet.
You can't see that a bunch of consensus in favor of the secret ballot is not a consensus against VBM unless one also believes a separate fact about it?
Maybe it's best to return to pragmatics. I got my ballot in the mail, I filled it out at home where no one was here. I sealed it and dropped it off personally at a drop box inside the police station. I am totally satisfied in the secrecy of this ballot, and I don't even think that going in person (which was a choice I could have made) would have further protected it.
In terms of attack modeling, if the police and the registrar are in on the scheme, then neither method would have protected it.
One that the consensus explicitly states.
Obviously not, given the current state of affairs.
Refusing to actually accept that people disagree on a key point is no way to go through life.
Oh my. Let me ever so slightly rephrase. One that the consensus explicitly stated as of a few years ago. Refusing to accept what the public historical record unambiguously states on a key point is no way to go through life.
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It's not only about whether you are satisfied with secrecy of your voting. It's also about whether other voters are satisfied that your vote was not coerced. What evidence other than your own testimony could you offer?
I can say, in the counterfactual that I was coerced, I could still have gone to vote in person which would have invalidated my mail-in ballot.
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Ok then I assume you don’t believe the secret ballot is important to free and fair elections.
No issue if spouses pressure their partners or children fill out ballots for grandparents with dementia.
Sure perhaps saying it was considered the standard pre-2020 is an appeal to consensus, but I agree with the logic the experts were using in before 2020.
Sometimes I think it’s fine to reference prior work and assume people have familiarity with it. You don’t need to rewrite every argument.
Bruh, this idiotic “so I guess (a bunch of crazy shit I don’t believe)” is tiresome.
Yes I believe in the secret ballot. I do not believe that the option to do mail in seriously erodes that.
Less antagonism. You've been warned about this repeatedly. Next time is going to catch you a ban.
I've asked at least 5 times in this thread for folks not to reply to a post saying X with "oh so you believe Y and Z and beat your wife". That seems like the minimal amount of non-antagonism required as well.
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And if we defund the police. Crime won’t skyrocket. If we get rid of the SEC - no one will insider trade. If the MLB isn’t enforcing bans on steroids then even those who don’t want to do steroids will (like Barry Bonds a later user) because the players getting ahead are cheating. Maybe I just know more people who are willing to cheat that if you remove the enforcement preventing cheating that people will cheat.
If you remove the enforcement even if society is 99.5% trustworthy those who abuse the commons are going to rise in power.
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I’m going to jump in to ask, why?
I agree that VBM by itself doesn’t really enable classic vote-buying: if someone offers you money to vote a certain way, sure the buyer can verify your ballot before it goes in the envelope prior to handing over the “wages”, but you can easily get another ballot (unbeknownst to the vote-buyer), vote however you want, and invalidate the previous ballot.
But the examples given above (spouse pressuring spouse, filling out ballots for non compos mentis elderly relatives) seem to be much easier to pull off when mass VBM is the norm. To belabor the point re: the spouse example, if you live with someone, you presumably have access to their mail and can see whether they have received another VBM ballot with which to try and evade your spousal pressure to vote a certain way.
Not to mention, “ballot harvesting” seems vulnerable to unscrupulous harvesters steaming open the envelopes, changing the ballots that don’t vote for the right candidate (e.g. by filling in all the bubbles, so the ballot gets rejected) and then re-sealing the envelope.
Those are all valid points!
I agree that there is the possibility of fraud in VBM, but the original bombastic claim was that VBM is itself intrinsically fraudulent:
There is a huge difference your nuanced points and this blanket statement.
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