I usually mail my ballot, but this year I'll drop it off at the official ballot box at city hall. And I'll confirm online that they received my ballot.
Because even if the post office wasn't deliberately crippled by management (in my area, 40% of sorting machines were disabled in August, I don't know how many were able to be put back into service), this election will likely have much
higher than normal mail-in ballet counts, so by delivering mine by hand, that's one less piece of election mail the USPS needs to handle.
Oh, and though this is probably obvious, I'm dropping at the box at City Hall, because I know that one's legit.
You’re assuming that your city hall is even remotely competent. Most city halls are no better than the Parks and Recreations TV show. Don’t believe me? Go to your next city hall meeting.
This is how you get the FBI to raid your home and business. I'd hope that parties that interfere with our elections would be held to the same level of scrutiny as counterfeiters.
Reminder for non-American readers that all of these voting stories are newsworthy because they’re so strange and bizarre, not because it’s the norm here.
The vast majority of Americans are going to vote completely normally. Many of us are going to simply drop our ballots off in the mail. The mail is still running fine in the vast majority of locations.
Don’t get me wrong, these weird stories and edge cases are concerning and must be addressed, but it’s hardly the normal state of affairs for the vast majority of Americans.
In this case, the ballot harvesting efforts, however ill-advised, are likely not created with ill intent. Given the way ballots are sealed, it’s unlikely that these operators are somehow going to open the ballots, check votes, selectively discard them, reseal selected votes, and not invalidate all of them in the process.
Note that many of these drop boxes are popping at at weird places like gun shops, candidate headquarters, churches, and other locations that are likely to have voters skewed in a specific direction. However, it doesn’t make any sense that a political candidate or a gun shop would go out of their way to discard ballots collected at a location that skews toward their own constituency. Instead, it’s more likely that these people have consumed too much fear-mongering media about election tampering and believe that they are helping the situation by collecting and protecting the votes from like-minded people.
Messing with the mail in votes is perhaps new, but suppression of progressive voters - especially minorities - has long been the norm in the U.S. This is actually worse than it sounds because of our electoral college system. Only a relatively small absolute number of votes need to be suppressed to change the outcome of the election.
This is an important point, and there are plenty of recent elections that affirm it.
If the Florida panhandle were part of Alabama, and Michigan's upper peninsula were part of Wisconsin, the result of the 2016 election would have been reversed.
The 2000 election was decided by ~500 voters in Florida.
This is the normal state of affairs for the vast majority of republicans trying to get elected where they are in fact the minority. History has show that fraudulent practices are not below them. Why would it be any different this time?
These unofficial ballot drop boxes are largely placed at Republican leaning locations (gun shops, churches, candidate headquarters) to collect Republican-leaning votes. It wouldn’t make any sense for them to self-sabotage their own voter base. They’re just making an ill-advised attempt to protect their own voters’ ballots against imagined voter fraud at other locations.
Indeed, not having a nationally approved and consistent voting process across the country is strange and confusing to me. Here in Canada, Elections Canada is responsible for federal elections across the country. Voting is pretty much the same everywhere, and unofficial polling stations and ballot boxes are prohibited. The only machines involved in the voting process scan and count paper ballots that humans can recount, making electronic tampering much more difficult than having giant blobs of untrusted software accepting votes. As a software developer, having the option of a low tech option for recounts is quite reassuring.
Reading the ballots and resealing them is hard, but reading the names on the ballots and throwing out the ethnic ones, or even looking up party registrations in the public voter registry, or correlating addresses to party affiliation is pretty easy. You'd introduce a pretty big bias using nothing more than zip codes.
Am I the only one to find it strange that a country without a central, government run, citizen registry, has a public voter registry with actual party affiliations?
> Am I the only one to find it strange that a country without a central, government run, citizen registry, has a public voter registry with actual party affiliations?
It doesn’t. The United States has no such voter registry.
(Individual states do, but individual states aren't the country.)
For those of you in California, be aware that there is a QR code at the top of your ballot, which you can tear off, which takes you to a website where you can track your ballot and make sure it was counted.
If it wasn't counted you can use that receipt to file a complaint, and possibly get a chance to submit your votes again.
The tracking is separate from the ballot. When the ballot arrives they mark that they got a ballot from voter Alex who lives at 123 Main St, and then separate the ballot from the tracking info.
It's a very well defined, legally biding process that is monitored by members of both parties.
So basically yes, you have to trust that the law will be upheld and that the Democrats and Republicans who monitor the process together won't be corrupted at the same time.
Genuinely Secret ballots aren't actually that common in elections. For example Britain doesn't use them. Periodically the Parliament gets people to come in and talk about this, basically the discussion always goes like this:
Expert: We should probably use a secret ballot
Politician: Do you have any evidence we've used the fact that ballots aren't secret in the modern period?
Expert: No, but that's sort of the point. Courts are allowed to use this but they never do, so, just use secret ballots.
Politician: There are rumours that Military Intelligence uses it to find out who votes Communist and so on right?
Expert: Yes, there are rumours but we aren't able to substantiate them.
Politician: How about you, ex-spy, can you do better?
Ex-spy: I have heard these rumours too.
Politician: So they're true?
Ex-spy: Well like I said, they are rumours. I've never seen it personally.
And then the politicians decide actually maybe we'll think about this some more before making a decision and another decade passes with the ballots still not actually secret.
[In England you will notice that the ballots are identical on a big pile when you arrive, but then when you show them or tell them who you are, they read out a number (a locally unique voter registration number), that number is written on a serial paper counterfoil, and the current number from the counterfoil is written to the ballot paper. This means that in principle it is possible (but laborious) to unwind parts or the entire election if you wanted to until the counterfoils are destroyed, a year later typically.]
In general (there are small differences in procedure, but the basic method is the same) American absentee ballots are put in an envelope by the voter. The ballot itself does not have ANY traceable markings on it. It is a true secret ballot, just like the ballots voted in person in precincts that use paper ballots. (Electronic ballots with no paper trail are a different issue but thankfully, for now, don't apply to absentee voting.) The envelope is where the voter's name/address or other identifying information is written. Often that envelope is then put in a second envelope along with other identity documents, etc - this is the part that varies greatly between jurisdictions.
When the absentee ballots are received, the outer envelope is opened if present and then the validity what's written on the inner envelope plus whatever supplemental materials were enclosed is evaluated according to local rules. The ballot remains inside its sealed envelope at this step and is not examined.
The validation is such things as making sure that someone with that name and address is on the voter rolls, no other ballot has been cast for that person, as well as more nitpicky local requirements like that an affidavit form was signed in the correct places and/or that the signature "matches" the voter's signature on file. If the ballot is accepted at this stage, then and only then is the envelope opened and the ballot put in a ballot box to be counted.
All of this is supervised by elections officials representing both major parties, which in practice makes it very difficult for either side to stuff the ballot box or "lose" ballots. There is still room for suppression via those extra rules - if the local rules are biased towards rejecting any challenged ballot, for example, one party can just claim that people with names they think are less likely to have voted for their side "doesn't match" - this is all highly dependent on the exact jurisdiction you're in and many states have rules biased towards accepting ballots, wherein unless the challenger can present a VERY good reason ("The identified person is dead" for example) the ballot is accepted.
Anything rejected should then get kicked, still unopened, into the "provisional ballot" process which technically has a way for voters to appeal the decision and present evidence that their vote should be counted - this is the same process used for people who aren't on the voter rolls but think they should be, or who weren't able to present any ID at the polls to come back and show their ID the next day, etc. In practice almost no one bothers unless the election-night returns were so close that the provisional votes might actually swing things.
There is, once the ballot has been accepted and the envelope opened, absolutely no way to trace an individual ballot back to a specific person. The ballots themselves may be retained in case there's a recount, but nothing can be "unwound" after a vote is cast.
For in person ballots, after the voter shows their eligibility, they are handed a ballot, or the equivalent such as being authorized to cast one ballot on a voting machine. No identifier stays with the ballot itself in any case; once they've passed the first station and been approved to vote that's it, there is no way to "unwind" or revoke that vote.
I can only speak to my state but this process is done in public and under the scrutiny of both parties. The outer envelopes are recorded and then discarded before the inner envelope is stored in a separate room. Somewhat amusingly the room requires two keys -- one from a Democrat and one from a Republican.
The inner envelopes are then opened and counted, again with scrutiny from both parties, in public.
They're collecting them to turn in en mass. They're putting them in places Republican voters are more likely to already be going to make it easier for Republicans to vote.
This is arguably legal under California's ballot harvesting law.
The problem though is that they are claiming it as official which it is not. It's also easy to see how a few ethic names might get lost in this process...
> Couldn't someone gain access to a registry of voters for the dem party, cross reference w/ ballots, and purge non-GOP votes?
If one was a little more motivated, one could also get FEC donation records and also purge GOP voters whose donation history in the current cycle indicate that they were likely to vote out of line with the party endorsements.
I don't understand why we even have ballot drop boxes. The ballots are all sealed in postage paid envelopes already and surely the majority are placed in regular mailboxes which are everywhere. So what's the point in having special drop boxes at all?
I don't see a security argument since centralizing the collection of ballots would seem to me to make it easier, not harder, to attack. Fake boxes are one attack discussed in the article, but even straightforward stealing of ballots from boxes would be much easier when you only have to attack one collection box containing thousands of ballots instead of thousands of individual mailboxes distributed all over.
In California all ballots do not require a stamp AFAIK. Mine didn't. Even if you do drop it in a drop box, you still have to seal it in the provided postage paid envelope.
This isn’t true in California and I don’t know of any other state that requires stamps to mail in ballots. Driving any distance to drop off a ballot is more expensive than mailing it from home. It’s more likely that these people have consumed a lot of exaggerated news stories about the mail system and therefore think that dropping it off is safer. Meanwhile, we’re all getting the rest of our mail on time without exceptional delays.
I've never had a mail in ballot that didn't have the postage prepaid, although when I lived abroad I had to obviously cover the international cost.
I've voted by mail in nearly every election since my first in 2008 and never had a problem. This year when the president knew a large amount of people were going to vote by mail he installed a mega donor with no experience and I began receiving my mail extremely late. I absolutely did not trust it this year and turned my ballot into a drop box at a polling site. Drop box usage was thankfully expended this year in my state.
The ballot drop boxes exist largely because certain government officials have worked to undermine faith in the postal service: Both with rhetoric suggesting postal balloting is susceptible to fraud and through active steps to make the post office slower and less efficient, so it might in fact struggle to deliver mail-in ballots by election day.
They are not as "everywhere" as you'd think though. The closest mailbox to my house, for example, is on an unremarkable parking lot in about a mile from my home, in geographical distance, and about two miles if you follow the roads. And I live in relatively dense suburb. If someone lives in a more rural setting, it could easily be further and harder to locate, especially if you aren't good with online searches (I would never think to go look for my closest mailbox in that specific location otherwise, there may be some logic in why it's there but I for sure don't know it). So if you have a location that you know is frequently visited by a lot of people (such as, e.g., church) it may make sense to place a collection point there to ensure you do not lose anyone.
I can. If I don't care too much whether it arrives or not, and whether it's stolen or not. When I was young and reckless, I tried to send a check out to pay a bill (water or something like that) this way. Next thing I know, I get a call from Wells Fargo in San Francisco (I am not in San Francisco) asking me if I really want them to cash a check for $MUCH_BIGGER_SUM_THAN_INTENDED. Good thing they called, because I didn't. Of course, the scammer fled immediately after the bank clerk touched the phone, so that was the end of it, except that I am smarter now, and no longer send checks in the same location as I receive my mail.
Earlier this year the president appointed a new head of the US Postal Service. This person may just hate the USPS and have no intention of subverting an election, but regardless of their intentions, their actions undermining the USPS during the exact couple months when people were realizing they were going to have to vote by mail have made many people understandably suspicious of the USPS.
These people want to not have to go to a crowded polling place during a pandemic, but also are worried that a ballot sent through the mail may not arrive on time. So they are seeking to ensure their vote is counted as well as possible by dropping their ballot off in person.
Regarding the security arguments you propose: The list of official boxes is generally on the local board of elections’ official website. Also, many boards of elections notify the voter upon receipt of their ballot, so if you drop off your ballot but never receive notification, you can call them and find out what’s up. The boxes are locked, many are near places like schools or banks that have CCTV.
And the kicker: If anyone catches you tampering with the very obviously marked box, you risk jail time. To really swing an election, you’ll need multiple people who are willing to risk jail time in return for possibly but not certainly swinging an election in their preferred direction.
> The list of official boxes is generally on the local board of elections’ official website
> If anyone catches you tampering with the very obviously marked box, you risk jail time
> The boxes are locked
These are all true of any public mail drop box. Mail tampering is a felony with prison time, the list of official mail drop boxes is public, and they are all locked. I remain unconvinced. A centralized box with marginally better security is still easier to attack than thousands of distributed mailboxes.
Not sure what you'll think of this, but in my jurisdiction, there isn't one centrally located drop box (although there also are not thousands). Here's a PDF with the drop box locations, as a citizen of Baltimore I can use any one of these (not just the one closest to me): https://boe.baltimorecity.gov/sites/default/files/2020-10-01...
Apparently the state GOP set them up and has admitted as much on Twitter. They say they are justified under California's law that allows ballot harvesting.
They're putting them outside places usually frequented by GOP voters (gun stores, churches, etc) to help make it easier for them to vote.
They may have a pretty solid argument. But more importantly, like most of these types of shenanigans, it probably won't be resolved until after the election.
There's a difference in someone giving their ballot to a trusted person that will drop it off (and having signed the ballot over to that person to execute it) and having unofficial ballot boxes that the persons running can wholesale tamper with by say cross referencing the names with some other demographic information to disenfranchise some parts of society. these particular boxes might be operated without ill intent but that's not to say this practice should be allowed... especially since you can just put it in the mail now.
These boxes are labeled as Official and fashioned as if administered by some relevant level of government. That's already a huge problem, especially because these boxes have nobody responsible guarding them. I could steal them and nobody would be responsible for the negligence.
Better yet, buy a voter registry, cross reference GOP/Democrats, and depending on your affiliation, toss the ones from people who are not your party leanings... who would know? (sarcasm, don't do this, cause it's effed up!)
Please leave the profanity in Reddit, it doesn’t serve you well in this audience. What you bring up is one of the elephants in the room regarding any mail-in ballet scheme. Manageable as a small out-of-band exception process, problematic for broad implementation.
A lot of COVID risk avoidance is reasonable, if annoying. In-person voting, however, may be a hill worth dying on, metaphorically speaking of course...
Sure (on profanity, and edited). Sometimes forget my audience and who I'm talking to.
Mail-in-ballots are basically the norm where I'm from (Utah), we get a ballot, and drop it off at the city building. It's nice. Nobody complains on either side of the aisle here, it just works. If we were a swing state, I'm sure someone would complain if it meant more/less votes for 'their side'.
I lean left, the state leans right, it is what it is, but why can't the rest of America have such an easy system of voting?
The state of Texas won't give you a mail in ballot except under verify specific an restrictive rules. Then the governor has restricted ballot drop offs to one per county including very large counties with millions of people. Anything to restrict the number of voters that may not vote in their favor.
> I have no idea why state election officials would say that these are illegal when they allow people to in person collect other peoples ballots.
Because it is, in fact, illegal; there is a significant difference between each of these things, with a descending degree of voter knowledge and ability to make an informed choice about the security of their ballot:
A voter electing to entrust their ballot to a specific person.
A voter placing their ballot in a a known-unofficial collection box operated by an unknown person.
A voter placing their ballot in a fraudulently-labeled-as-official ballot box.
Allowing the first does not imply that the second should be legitimate, much less the third.
It's not, really. Third party ballot collection is allowed but the voter has to designate someone to collect said ballot. The return envelope has a section for the third party's name, signature, and relationship to the voter. If they had a named volunteer at hand to sign the ballot envelopes under their name for collection, it'd probably be on the level. Moreover, that volunteer would have to return only those with their signature.
Instead, they have unattended flimsy collection boxes labeled, "Official Ballot Drop Off Box".
Welcome to social media, where the facts don't matter.
Ballot harvesting is not only legal but standard procedure... for the Democratic Party. The only difference wish these boxes is social distancing. But because ballot harvesting mostly happened in... different neighborhoods than the typical HN reader live in, therefore it's strange and unfamiliar and this didn't really happen, apparently. So naturally when the wrong team does the same thing (but with social distancing) it's the end of the world. And you can bet your last dollar that if the wrong team had collected the ballots in person, that would have been evidence that they're endangering peoples' lives with COVID.
I could believe it. I ran a very poorly designed online telephone number directory for some years.
The number of people that thought I was their bank or phone provider and gladly typed in their details into the Comments box...
Then there's the (smaller group of) people that dug down enough to find my phone number that I put on a page when I first set it up. Took me a while to figure out how they got that.
82 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadAlso, reminder that you can track your ballot online and make sure that it is received and counted, whether you mail it or drop it off.
Oh, and though this is probably obvious, I'm dropping at the box at City Hall, because I know that one's legit.
Try selling unofficial nikes or use unofficial dollars and see how that gets reported.
The vast majority of Americans are going to vote completely normally. Many of us are going to simply drop our ballots off in the mail. The mail is still running fine in the vast majority of locations.
Don’t get me wrong, these weird stories and edge cases are concerning and must be addressed, but it’s hardly the normal state of affairs for the vast majority of Americans.
In this case, the ballot harvesting efforts, however ill-advised, are likely not created with ill intent. Given the way ballots are sealed, it’s unlikely that these operators are somehow going to open the ballots, check votes, selectively discard them, reseal selected votes, and not invalidate all of them in the process.
Note that many of these drop boxes are popping at at weird places like gun shops, candidate headquarters, churches, and other locations that are likely to have voters skewed in a specific direction. However, it doesn’t make any sense that a political candidate or a gun shop would go out of their way to discard ballots collected at a location that skews toward their own constituency. Instead, it’s more likely that these people have consumed too much fear-mongering media about election tampering and believe that they are helping the situation by collecting and protecting the votes from like-minded people.
If the Florida panhandle were part of Alabama, and Michigan's upper peninsula were part of Wisconsin, the result of the 2016 election would have been reversed.
The 2000 election was decided by ~500 voters in Florida.
It's news because it's ... new.
This wasn't "ill-advised", they're doubling down after being told to cease & desist. It's part of a bigger plan.
It doesn’t. The United States has no such voter registry.
(Individual states do, but individual states aren't the country.)
If it wasn't counted you can use that receipt to file a complaint, and possibly get a chance to submit your votes again.
Nothing ensures that they do.
So basically yes, you have to trust that the law will be upheld and that the Democrats and Republicans who monitor the process together won't be corrupted at the same time.
Expert: We should probably use a secret ballot
Politician: Do you have any evidence we've used the fact that ballots aren't secret in the modern period?
Expert: No, but that's sort of the point. Courts are allowed to use this but they never do, so, just use secret ballots.
Politician: There are rumours that Military Intelligence uses it to find out who votes Communist and so on right?
Expert: Yes, there are rumours but we aren't able to substantiate them.
Politician: How about you, ex-spy, can you do better?
Ex-spy: I have heard these rumours too.
Politician: So they're true?
Ex-spy: Well like I said, they are rumours. I've never seen it personally.
And then the politicians decide actually maybe we'll think about this some more before making a decision and another decade passes with the ballots still not actually secret.
[In England you will notice that the ballots are identical on a big pile when you arrive, but then when you show them or tell them who you are, they read out a number (a locally unique voter registration number), that number is written on a serial paper counterfoil, and the current number from the counterfoil is written to the ballot paper. This means that in principle it is possible (but laborious) to unwind parts or the entire election if you wanted to until the counterfoils are destroyed, a year later typically.]
When the absentee ballots are received, the outer envelope is opened if present and then the validity what's written on the inner envelope plus whatever supplemental materials were enclosed is evaluated according to local rules. The ballot remains inside its sealed envelope at this step and is not examined.
The validation is such things as making sure that someone with that name and address is on the voter rolls, no other ballot has been cast for that person, as well as more nitpicky local requirements like that an affidavit form was signed in the correct places and/or that the signature "matches" the voter's signature on file. If the ballot is accepted at this stage, then and only then is the envelope opened and the ballot put in a ballot box to be counted.
All of this is supervised by elections officials representing both major parties, which in practice makes it very difficult for either side to stuff the ballot box or "lose" ballots. There is still room for suppression via those extra rules - if the local rules are biased towards rejecting any challenged ballot, for example, one party can just claim that people with names they think are less likely to have voted for their side "doesn't match" - this is all highly dependent on the exact jurisdiction you're in and many states have rules biased towards accepting ballots, wherein unless the challenger can present a VERY good reason ("The identified person is dead" for example) the ballot is accepted.
Anything rejected should then get kicked, still unopened, into the "provisional ballot" process which technically has a way for voters to appeal the decision and present evidence that their vote should be counted - this is the same process used for people who aren't on the voter rolls but think they should be, or who weren't able to present any ID at the polls to come back and show their ID the next day, etc. In practice almost no one bothers unless the election-night returns were so close that the provisional votes might actually swing things.
There is, once the ballot has been accepted and the envelope opened, absolutely no way to trace an individual ballot back to a specific person. The ballots themselves may be retained in case there's a recount, but nothing can be "unwound" after a vote is cast.
For in person ballots, after the voter shows their eligibility, they are handed a ballot, or the equivalent such as being authorized to cast one ballot on a voting machine. No identifier stays with the ballot itself in any case; once they've passed the first station and been approved to vote that's it, there is no way to "unwind" or revoke that vote.
The inner envelopes are then opened and counted, again with scrutiny from both parties, in public.
This is arguably legal under California's ballot harvesting law.
If one was a little more motivated, one could also get FEC donation records and also purge GOP voters whose donation history in the current cycle indicate that they were likely to vote out of line with the party endorsements.
What guarantees do you have that a random gun store is going to deliver your vote to the proper authorities?
How can you be sure that all of the people using these boxes know they are handing their ballots to someone not involved in the election at all?
I don't see a security argument since centralizing the collection of ballots would seem to me to make it easier, not harder, to attack. Fake boxes are one attack discussed in the article, but even straightforward stealing of ballots from boxes would be much easier when you only have to attack one collection box containing thousands of ballots instead of thousands of individual mailboxes distributed all over.
https://www.sos.ca.gov/administration/news-releases-and-advi...
I've voted by mail in nearly every election since my first in 2008 and never had a problem. This year when the president knew a large amount of people were going to vote by mail he installed a mega donor with no experience and I began receiving my mail extremely late. I absolutely did not trust it this year and turned my ballot into a drop box at a polling site. Drop box usage was thankfully expended this year in my state.
They are not as "everywhere" as you'd think though. The closest mailbox to my house, for example, is on an unremarkable parking lot in about a mile from my home, in geographical distance, and about two miles if you follow the roads. And I live in relatively dense suburb. If someone lives in a more rural setting, it could easily be further and harder to locate, especially if you aren't good with online searches (I would never think to go look for my closest mailbox in that specific location otherwise, there may be some logic in why it's there but I for sure don't know it). So if you have a location that you know is frequently visited by a lot of people (such as, e.g., church) it may make sense to place a collection point there to ensure you do not lose anyone.
These people want to not have to go to a crowded polling place during a pandemic, but also are worried that a ballot sent through the mail may not arrive on time. So they are seeking to ensure their vote is counted as well as possible by dropping their ballot off in person.
Regarding the security arguments you propose: The list of official boxes is generally on the local board of elections’ official website. Also, many boards of elections notify the voter upon receipt of their ballot, so if you drop off your ballot but never receive notification, you can call them and find out what’s up. The boxes are locked, many are near places like schools or banks that have CCTV.
And the kicker: If anyone catches you tampering with the very obviously marked box, you risk jail time. To really swing an election, you’ll need multiple people who are willing to risk jail time in return for possibly but not certainly swinging an election in their preferred direction.
> If anyone catches you tampering with the very obviously marked box, you risk jail time
> The boxes are locked
These are all true of any public mail drop box. Mail tampering is a felony with prison time, the list of official mail drop boxes is public, and they are all locked. I remain unconvinced. A centralized box with marginally better security is still easier to attack than thousands of distributed mailboxes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/10/12/california-...
Apparently the state GOP set them up and has admitted as much on Twitter. They say they are justified under California's law that allows ballot harvesting.
They're putting them outside places usually frequented by GOP voters (gun stores, churches, etc) to help make it easier for them to vote.
They may have a pretty solid argument. But more importantly, like most of these types of shenanigans, it probably won't be resolved until after the election.
Edit: That it says "official" but is not official government is questionable.
These boxes are labeled as Official and fashioned as if from government. Nobody should be allowed to pose as government.
Nobody should be allowed to pose as government.
A lot of COVID risk avoidance is reasonable, if annoying. In-person voting, however, may be a hill worth dying on, metaphorically speaking of course...
Mail-in-ballots are basically the norm where I'm from (Utah), we get a ballot, and drop it off at the city building. It's nice. Nobody complains on either side of the aisle here, it just works. If we were a swing state, I'm sure someone would complain if it meant more/less votes for 'their side'.
I lean left, the state leans right, it is what it is, but why can't the rest of America have such an easy system of voting?
Because it is, in fact, illegal; there is a significant difference between each of these things, with a descending degree of voter knowledge and ability to make an informed choice about the security of their ballot:
A voter electing to entrust their ballot to a specific person.
A voter placing their ballot in a a known-unofficial collection box operated by an unknown person.
A voter placing their ballot in a fraudulently-labeled-as-official ballot box.
Allowing the first does not imply that the second should be legitimate, much less the third.
Instead, they have unattended flimsy collection boxes labeled, "Official Ballot Drop Off Box".
Ballot harvesting is not only legal but standard procedure... for the Democratic Party. The only difference wish these boxes is social distancing. But because ballot harvesting mostly happened in... different neighborhoods than the typical HN reader live in, therefore it's strange and unfamiliar and this didn't really happen, apparently. So naturally when the wrong team does the same thing (but with social distancing) it's the end of the world. And you can bet your last dollar that if the wrong team had collected the ballots in person, that would have been evidence that they're endangering peoples' lives with COVID.
This sickens me.
"Market-liberal party legally jostles for votes with welfare-liberal party in strongly welfare-liberal state, news at 11."
The number of people that thought I was their bank or phone provider and gladly typed in their details into the Comments box...
Then there's the (smaller group of) people that dug down enough to find my phone number that I put on a page when I first set it up. Took me a while to figure out how they got that.
“Grand jury transcripts give peek into minds of OC deputies who lied about booking evidence” (10-3-2020)
https://www.ocregister.com/grand-jury-transcripts-give-peek-...