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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   5649 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 13, 2022

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Can someone steelman mass mail-in voting for me? I racked up reports and a mild mod wrist slap over the weekend for referring to Nevada system as a "fucking stupid way to run an election" without further elaboration. In retrospect, I agree with the reports and with @cjet79 for the callout on it - it's an admittedly low effort swipe and I didn't do anything meaningful to justify it. Nonetheless, I really do think that this is an incredibly stupid way to run elections and I genuinely forget that other people apparently think it's basically fine. The reasons that it seems obviously stupid to me keep popping up in this election. A few of them:

  • Not requiring the ballots to arrive on or before election day means that we don't have a reliable denominator, which will persistently fuel speculation of cheating.

  • Colorado is apparently going to have to need to deal with tons of ballot curing, a process that also strikes me as absolutely bizarre, in which documents that are missing information or filled out incorrectly are remedied after the fact.

  • Mail-in ballots pretty thoroughly demolishes the ability to vote without coercion. This could be exploited in abusive relationships or with people lacking the mental capacity to determine their own vote.

  • Mail-in eliminates the near guarantee of a one-to-one relationship between voter and vote that is ensured by in-person identification.

Maybe I'm wrong about these being big problems, but what exactly are we getting in return that makes it so valuable? I can see the case when it comes to military ballots and people who genuinely can't leave their homes, but why create these sorts of potential problems for people that can just head over to their local poll place? I have some criticisms of early voting, but it still seems substantially more secure than spamming ballots out to the last known address of every registered voter. I know I'm still being fairly snarky, but I'm also trying to actually understand why anyone thinks it's important to do elections this way.

An argument you can make against mail in voting is that voting is a proxy for a civil war without the associated costs and so requiring people to get off their asses and vote in person is good, while letting anyone with a heartbeat vote is actually bad.

This of course must be understand in the context of trans- and cis-democracy.

@QuinoaHawkDude stole a lot of my thunder, but I suspect that the attitude of "Why can't people just head to their local polling place?" comes from being in a position where doing that isn't particularly inconvenient. I can empathize with this because I, too, live in a place where voting is convenient and additionally I work from home most of the time which means I can usually waltz in mid-morning and not wait at all. That was the plan this year until I had to make an unanticipated trip into Pittsburgh and I didn't get to the polling place until after 6pm by which time there was a line. Not a long line, mind you, but it was still probably 10–15 minutes, and was rather irritating. The one time I went early it was a longer line, probably 45 minutes to an hour, for the reasons @QuinoaHawkDude says.

Unfortunately, people in other places aren't so lucky. While stories of people waiting ridiculous amounts of time to vote certainly aren't representative of a typical experience, the fact that it happens at all is cause for concern. Numbers I saw from 2020 suggest that a little under 15% of in-person voters had to wait more than a half-hour and a little over 6% had to wait over and hour. While these may not seem like terribly high percentages, keep in mind that that equates to about 12 million people, or a population the size of Pennsylvania, that had to wait more than 30 minutes. And this is in an election where nearly 50% of the electorate voted remotely. Now imagine that you know that you'll be waiting in line to vote at least a half-hour and possibly an hour, and your polling place is like mine where there's nowhere to wait inside and it's 38 degrees outside and raining a little, and you have to work all day and can't risk being late so you'd have to wait until after work, sit in traffic on the freeway, come home, pet the dog, kiss your wife, frisk the kids for marijuana, eat dinner, and get motivated enough to stand in line to cast a ballot that, on its own, it almost certain to be statistically insignificant. Maybe you'd still go, but it's understandable that a lot of people would forget about it at that point.

Not requiring the ballots to arrive on or before election day means that we don't have a reliable denominator, which will persistently fuel speculation of cheating.

So don't count them; a lot of states don't. But even in ones that do they make up an extraordinarily small proportion of the total. In PA in 2020 there were about 10,000 of these, or about 0.19%, and this was the state with by far the largest proportion of them. The ever-changing denominators that have fueled fraud speculation this go around in Arizona and Nevada all involve ballots that arrived on-time.

Colorado is apparently going to have to need to deal with tons of ballot curing, a process that also strikes me as absolutely bizarre, in which documents that are missing information or filled out incorrectly are remedied after the fact.

Again, ballot curing isn't an essential part of the process. Pennsylvania law is silent on the issue so in 2020 we had to deal with a situation where some counties offered it and others didn't. It wasn't an issue that would have affected the vote totals, but if it bothers you that much then just get rid of it.

Mail-in ballots pretty thoroughly demolishes the ability to vote without coercion. This could be exploited in abusive relationships or with people lacking the mental capacity to determine their own vote.

Is this a real issue? I'm sure it happens but the theme of all of my responses is whether these problems are big enough that it's worth making substantial numbers of people wait in long lines over them. If someone could show me that the number of coerced votes was at least somewhat in the ballpark of the number of people who waited over an hour to vote, then I could take some arguments seriously. But no one has done that yet.

Mail-in eliminates the one-to-one relationship between voter and vote that is nearly guaranteed by in-person identification.

Does it? For all the hand-wringing over people casting multiple mail ballots in 2020, all that could be uncovered was a few isolated instances. In Pennsylvania, at least, the number of phony mail ballots in 2020 was IIRC comparable to the number of phony in-person ballots in 2016, though we're talking single-digits here so make what you will of it. And this was in an election where one side was loudly proclaiming fraud and had every incentive and motivation to do the necessary legwork to uncover these fraudulent ballots that were supposed to be so easy to cast, and they came up empty-handed.

That was the plan this year until I had to make an unanticipated trip into Pittsburgh and I didn't get to the polling place until after 6pm by which time there was a line. Not a long line, mind you, but it was still probably 10–15 minutes, and was rather irritating.

I don't find this very responsive. OP was criticizing mail-in voting, not early voting. Why not simply go early vote in person a week or two ahead of time, on a day and time that is convenient for you?

Because Pennsylvania doesn't have early voting. Okay, we sort of have early voting, but it's a cumbersome process that's really just an extension of mail-in voting. I would have had to find time to go to the Board of Elections office in the county seat during business hours (I'm assuming; the BoE website doesn't have any information about the process or even post hours), apply for a mail-in ballot in person, the fill it out there and have a guy check the security envelope before he turns it in. This whole process, had I even figured out how to do it properly, would have been significantly less convenient than simply standing in line. It also ends a week before election day, at which point I was still under the assumption that I would have been free that day. In any event, it wasn't a huge deal for me personally; I was simply making the point that a lot of people don't have any choice but to vote at peak hours, and I understand how that can be inconvenient in some cases.

The recurring theme seems to be that it's a less than optimal way to counterbalance frictions in the voting process that don't exist in countries with more efficient elections. If there was much less on the ballot to vote on, and if polls could be provided with sufficient density on a weekend, the case for universal mail voting would be less likely to stack up.

Related to the point around 'dramatically increasing election funding' per @urquan below, a lot of what reduces the number of polling places on the margin, is the cost of hiring venues for each new location. Moving elections to the weekend makes it vastly easier to cheaply expand polling places, because you can use basically every public school at cost, which are already ideally distributed across the electorate.

Before I moved to a state with universal vote-by-mail, I pretty much only ever voted in Presidential and (maybe) midterm elections. Since moving, I've voted in every single election I get a ballot for. Being able to vote by mail, without having to ask for the privilege, removes a lot of friction from the voting process. You might say it's not that big of a deal to go vote in person, but where I was living, even if I did early voting it was going to mean about an hour standing in line (either because I got there way before the polling location opened to be first in line, or because I didn't do that and had to queue behind everybody else who did).

For those concerned about fraud, it's perhaps worth noting that I was kind of casual about my signature on a recent ballot, and my ballot got challenged because the signature didn't match my driver's license signature, and I had to go re-sign in person.

Thanks for the reply.

You might say it's not that big of a deal to go vote in person, but where I was living, even if I did early voting it was going to mean about an hour standing in line (either because I got there way before the polling location opened to be first in line, or because I didn't do that and had to queue behind everybody else who did).

That is, indeed, exactly what I would tend to say! But yeah, if it's actually going to an hour of standing in line, that's not great. I'm inclined to agree with @urquan below that the appropriate solution isn't to give up on in person voting, but to figure out why it's not working correctly and endeavor to fix it. I would be highly supportive of measures that make it quick, easy, and secure to vote in person. Solutions that include weekend voting and/or voting holidays seem entirely reasonable to me.

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We need more polling places, and more poll workers. "Ending universal mail-in voting, and dramatically increasing the number and staff of polling places in urban precincts" seems like a great compromise that would make everyone happy.

If nothing else, we'd find out whether Republicans really favor in person voting or just want it be difficult to vote and Democrats really just want it to be easy or have other reasons for wanting mail-in.

Like you, I haven't experienced the giant lines in person. In fact, I've now voted in:

  • Rural village with heavily red voting

  • Moderate sized city that's about half black demographically and votes blue

  • High income suburb that votes fairly (but not exclusively) blue

  • Downtown in Madison, Wisconsin, one of the bluest places known to man

In in none of them have I ever had any meaningful wait at all. The extent to which I've never had to wait makes it very hard for me to believe that the problem with in-person sites is fundamentally intractable. Maybe it gets harder in very dense urban areas, but it also seems like the available infrastructure in these areas should be excellent.

Can an American please explain to me how very long voting queues can be an issue in practice? So from what I understand this happens in very Democratic urban polities, where both voters and the politicians are Democrats. Why not make it as easy as possible for your own voters to vote? Is it just incompetence?

The only datapoint I have here is that a lot of the places that supposedly experience this are places with incompetent administration in general.

Surge planning for anything is tricky.

Couple that with limited funds, dependence on volunteers, and procedures which may be set by a hostile state government, and city or county hands may be tied.

Living in a small town, there are probably single buildings in NYC that house more people than my entire precinct. In order to have a polling station you need some common/semi-public area like libraries or whatever, and there are probably fewer of these per Capita in cities than suburbs/rural. That's what makes cities more efficient in the first place--usuay fine except the when Everyone simultaneously needs to do a thing.

This doesn’t convince me. Aren’t elections mainly held in schools there? (That’s what happens in Turkey at least) Surely the ratio of population to school space is roughly equal in almost everywhere

I dont think they are "mainly" held in schools, although I assume some are. Election day is a school day here, so much of the school space would be otherwise occupied. Cities also will have fewer children per capita, and per square foot building cost is higher in cities, so I don't see why school floor space would proportional, as a rule.

People voting is good.* Therefore, if we can lower the burden of voting at a reasonable cost, we should.

I don’t think proponents expected this sort of mess, or plotted to exploit it. Instead, we took an immature technocratic solution and rushed its implementation, since there was a hard deadline involved. The reasoning was something like “we already do this for the strongest cases (military), how hard can it be?”

The one-to-one ratio doesn’t strike me as a big issue. Not compared to loss of surety or consensus. Similar arguments apply to Voter ID and other laws claiming that in-person doesn’t cut it.

We’re also seeing the long tail of the worst-prepared, least organized counties, which I think detracts from the number which managed it fine. It only takes one to ruin it for everyone.

* I realize that some may disagree with this. I was going to write up the case for mass voting, even by the uneducated, but I’ll sum it up as “safety valve for political pressure.”

I was going to write up the case for mass voting, even by the uneducated, but I’ll sum it up as “safety valve for political pressure.”

This makes little sense. First of all, recent events demonstrated that if there's any safety valve, it does not work. Second, most people that resort to violence don't do it because it's hard for them to vote, it's because they think voting is useless. Letting them do useless thing easier, or have more people do the useless thing, is not going to change their opinions. Third, obviously, even if all the previous arguments are false, your premise is good only if we're talking about more individual voters voting being good, not higher numbers in "vote count" column being good. The whole premise of the parent comment is that mail voting allows to disconnect one from the other, which invalidates "voting is good" as an argument for it.

What makes you say it didn't work?

I believe that those pushing for mail voting thought of it as a low-cost way to boost participation, which is viewed as an unalloyed good. This is because participation is an important part of civic pride, helping to preempt unrest or dissatisfaction. Buying into the myth/promise is important.

Given that it had larger-than-expected costs, both literal and in social trust, maybe they were wrong. I remain sympathetic to the premise.

which is viewed as an unalloyed good

This is one wrong premise. Another wrong premise is having more ballots in the box is not necessarily means having more people voluntarily and willingly participating - there's no way to actually verify that part.

This is because participation is an important part of civic pride, helping to preempt unrest

Not helping, as we witnessed having a lot of unrest, including in places like Oregon that has mail voting for a long time.

Also, I don't see how making less effort to participate makes you more proud of it - usually it works the other way.

It’s being done that way because anti-red tribe hysteria is more important than good sense.

There’s plenty of examples of it the other way around, but on the specific issue of ‘how to run an election’, it’s anti-red tribe hysteria that causes insane policies.

I think the US might have to relearn a few hard lessons about why voting was done the way it was. People removed a bunch of Chesterson's Fence type rules around voting because of the pandemic.

I wouldn't be surprised if we get a blown up culture war story in the next year or two about some caregiver illegally mailing in a bunch of ballots for the people they take care of. Or a business owner coerces a bunch of their employees. I'm sure the particulars won't much matter in the end.

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