It's almost like the republicans would be better off if they paid attention to their constitutional duties instead of just burning things down.
This will clearly hurt them in statewide elections, but I wonder how it plays out in local rural elections. I can imagine the rejected ballots leaning more blue than average in heavily red areas.
I can also imagine the opposite: Older folks have less mobility on average, and are probably more likely to mail the ballots in. The Propublica article doesn't say anything about this, but I imagine some election officials track it.
Their ID requirements in Ohio blew back a similar way a few years ago. They made it extremely hard to vote without a driver's license, thinking it'd hit college kids, but it mostly hit retirees that no longer drive.
"Their ID requirements in Ohio blew back a similar way a few years ago. They made it extremely hard to vote without a driver's license, thinking it'd hit college kids, but it mostly hit retirees that no longer drive."
This just isn't true and has never been true. You can see the requirements here:
I'm not sure when you are talking about, but I have family that's voted in Ohio for decades and this was never an issue.
"It's almost like the republicans would be better off if they paid attention to their constitutional duties instead of just burning things down."
The problem is that Democrats won't do ANYTHING to stop potential cheating and then act dumb when you bring up actual ways to exploit the system.
Example one: Ballot harvesting. Judges allowed ballot harvesting in many states leading up to the Trump election, even though it is illegal. They also ignored signature verification rules during this time.
Example two: Voter ID. In every country in the world, you need ID to vote. Democrats have pushed to completely remove it for years.
Example three: Mail-in voting. Mail-in voting is fine. It should be setup so you need to request it for each election. It's too easy to get ballots for people that never wanted to vote in the first place and send it in. Reddit and social media have made it pretty easy to coordinate with strangers.
Example four: We've had a decade of voting machine vulnerabilities and exploits at Def Con and somehow all of the leading security researchers ignored this and/or removed mention of it on social media after the 2020 election. I witnessed Tweets getting deleted in realtime.
Trump originally proposed sane and reasonable protections, and those were squashed by Democrats. This is the result.
Ignoring these problems isn't helping our Democracy, even though you somehow think it gives your side an advantage.
Voter ID was an issue in my country. By law everyone has to carry valid ID on them at all times.
But it is considered vital that every citizen gets the chance to vote including homeless people so they had to find a compromise. Although ofcourse the number of hobos who want to vote is largely theoretical.
In my country that group of people is surprisingly active voters (where I live there a lot of discounts for disadvantaged people to get ID - hard part is queue in migration office) and coincidentally there good people which organizes buses to make easier travel for vote.../s On more serious note is very open secret especially in small counties .
It's always funny to me how it feels like no one applies critical thinking when it's their "team" making the argument. By "no one" I mean "no one Republican".
If Trump lost by 200000 votes and claimed "There were 210000 illegal votes!", wouldn't it be easy to present at least one? But they'd scrape the bottom of the barrel of "evidence" in court for one count of fraud...
And Donnie, if you knew the exact number (which is oddly the number you lost by, plus a little bit), doesn't that mean you tallied all the fraudulent votes, well, where's the list then?
Unfortunately, it's a well-known psychological phenomenon that many (most?) people will start to believe a statement they hear repeatedly.
Before the 2020 election Trump primed his base by claiming over and over again that he could only lose if the election was rigged. Then, immediately after the 2020 election results were tallied, he and every right-wing media outlet spent the bulk of their airtime announcing that the election was stolen. It comes as no surprise that a significant fraction of the Republican voter base started to believe it was true, despite multiple investigations and dozens of court challenges about fraudulent votes failing to produce any evidence.
It's also not surprising that a significant fraction of the Republican base believes election fraud in general is rampant, which conveniently allowed Republican legislatures to make sweeping changes to how future elections would be held... like their standard voter suppression fare of closing polling locations, removing large blocks of voter registrations without notice, slowing processing of mail-in ballots and changing the rules regarding postmarks and late ballots, adding ID requirements, and, in some cases, revoking the validity of existing IDs.
All while the reality is that only around 1:10^6 votes are ever substantiated as fraudulent (e.g., Arizona has proven 36 cases of voter fraud among 42 million votes cast over the last 25 years).
Remember, Trump was mentored by Roy Cohn, who had been Joseph McCarthy's chief counsel in the 1950's. And McCarthy was famous for waving around "lists of known Communists" in the government and never actually showing them to anyone who could prove or disprove the claim.
Most of the cheating historically happens in the American South and that cheating, making it harder for people to vote continues to be a time-honored tradition in that part of the United States still.
Donald Trump and the current Republican Party does not care about anything other than winning at all cost. And if they don’t win, they will cry like Little Lord Fauntleroy.
How about you recognize that historically the most important voting problem in the USA, by far, has been voter suppression -- which is increased by voter ID mandates?
I think the plan is to declare all Democratic wins as false and go from there. To give that some veneer of respectability, they need to sow some distrust beforehand. The ID requirements serve that purpose well, if nothing else.
I fear that you are right. To me, it feels like 2020 - the same laying the groundwork for disputing the election. It's too early to tell how far it will go this time.
It's so frustrating. If I want to mail something out, it sits for over a day in the local post office. Even Priority Mail Express can no longer get something out locally overnight. If I need overnight service, I have to drive a significant distance to get to a UPS station to get something into the network.
If something mis-sorts to the wrong post office, it sits for over a day at that remote post office before it can re-enter the stream.
I have had more and more late and missorted packages that compound the late deliveries and all I want to do is cry that I can't get the mail anymore in a reasonable fashion.
people still fall for this Republicans “fixing” shit election after election after election, quite fascinating to watch when you don’t give a hoot who is in power
Of course a few rural votes will be rejected, but rest assured plenty more of the urban votes will be rejected too, for a net gain of many rural votes!
There'd be enough to do that if the USPS wasn't busy burning thousands of tons of Diesel fuel to haul Verizon and Citi card advertisements to everyone else.
Or the 5+ oversized "vote for me" flyers that have been coming everyday for weeks (even after doing the early in-person voting). If one didn't change my mind, 10 from the same candidate isn't going to change my mind either. Election season is terrible for USPS and my phone's text messages.
Luckily my apartment has a recycling bin next to the mailboxes so all of the oversized stuff like that ends up there immediately, the rest I keep in a box until it's shredding time.
Supposedly mail is so rare now that those bulk mail advertising items are the only thing sustaining the USPS' daily delivery operations. Without the, stamp price would have to be far higher.
Perhaps they should increase the stamp price then? I don't think I get ANYTHING of value in stamped/prepaid envelopes at this point (I just throw all my mail in a box and shred it when it fills up). In the past year, I think the mail I actually wanted to receive could be counted on two hands, far outweighed by credit card offers, political flyers, and other crap.
Sure, and tell us how/if you don't care about email providers generating "interest" for commercial reasons when half of anyone's inbox is full of crap no one wants or requested.
10 years ago, mail service used to be great. Than Trump brought in the idiot from FedEx who "upgraded" the mail service. Even though the volume of mail has dropped 50%, the USPS now struggles to properly process the remaining mail on a timely basis.
Local deliveries used to be overnight; now they take up to a week. Transnational deliveries can take months.
I hope the primary effect of this will be that millions of MAGA votes go uncounted this year and in 2028, because they're the ones that voted for this in the first place.
This has nothing to do with the Fedex guy. It's because they aren't allowed to increase the cost of postage due to a federal mandate from decades ago.
"I hope the primary effect of this will be that millions of MAGA votes go uncounted this year and in 2028, because they're the ones that voted for this in the first place."
With all of the cheating and dirty tricks from the Democrats (picking the same name as your opponent to confuse voters), I hope the Democrats never take power again.
It's because they aren't allowed to increase the cost of postage due to a federal mandate from decades ago.
That's false. The USPS has raised postal rates a number of times in the past several years, without requiring Congressional approval. Hell, they literally just increased rates less than a month ago. https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2026/0825-...
With all of the cheating and dirty tricks from the Democrats (picking the same name as your opponent to confuse voters),
LOL the best and only example you can come up with is the one legal "trick" the Democrats did, and they got the idea from the Republicans. In 2024, Republicans encouraged two guys with the same name as the WA state attorney to run against him in the gubernatorial election. The Dem employee behind the Alaska stunt was working for him at the time.
Meanwhile, the GOP DOJ keeps trying to take away the voting rights with knowingly false claims that U.S. citizens are illegal immigrants, even after an analysis showed that more than half of the names on their list were U.S. citizen and the remainder were never registered to vote. https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/doj-california-...
Keep your MAGA propaganda on 8chan where it belongs.
Plus with the magic of ranked choice voting those few "confused" voters would likely still end up voting for their intended candidate in the end, assuming they ranked both people with similar names over everyone else.
Sure seems like this ranked choice voting solves a lot of problems over the first past the post style we mostly do.
> With all of the cheating and dirty tricks from the Democrats (picking the same name as your opponent to confuse voters), I hope the Democrats never take power again.
You apparently don't realize that this is not something new, Republicans have done the same thing. So do you hope Republicans also never take power again?
Could you clarify whether you expect the ballot to confuse a zero or non-zero number of people. If zero, why did their campaign staffers go out of their way to find an exact named person to put on the ballot for, in your view, an obviously futile effort. If non zero why shouldn't we care that these confused voters got disenfranchised.
It never ceases to amaze me what information is online. There's a Wikipedia article on the history of US postal rates [0], which lists several increases in the last few years alone.
It apparently has one small mistake though, because it says the postal regulatory commission (PRC) sets rates, while the PRC website says they only set rate limits and the USPS sets their own rates [1].
All this ballot-this and ballot-that is so easily solved if only those who oppose showing ID would drop their objections. Here's how it works:
1: show up at polling location, either on voting day or within the early voting period.
2: show ID to poll worker who verifies it and hands over the ballots for the elections in which you have the right to vote
3: fill in the ballots, put them in the envelope(s) and hand these over to a poll worker
4: poll worker checks again whether you have voting rights for the specific elections and drops the envelopes into the correct voting urns
Done. No postal service involved. You can vote at any (early) voting location for national elections, for local ones you'll need to go to a local voting location where the required ballots are available. Early voting can start a few weeks before election day so nearly everyone should have the possibility to set aside half an hour to an hour to do their civic duty.
That leaves those who really can't make it to the polls. For these people there can be a verified postal ballot system, i.e. they get one sent home on request, fill it out and send it back in the required envelopes. Voting by mail always adds risks but since it would only be needed for a small fraction of the voters that risk is manageable. Mail-in votes need to be counted on election day so they need to be in the mail about a week before election day. Why you ask? Because the fraud risk of mail-in ballots makes it all too easy to use them to add enough votes to push a close race towards a specific candidate. Count them early on election day and publish the results, these need to be final results, before the rest of the votes are counted. There's plenty of countries where votes are counted this way, this is not rocket science. I have voting rights in 2 different countries in northern and western Europe, both use something resembling this scheme. Everyone shows his or her ID either to get the ballots or to have them deposited in the voting urns, this has never been contested and the mere thought of voting without ID is so clearly outrageously silly that nobody brings it up. All the arguments against showing ID have been proven to be specious at best, you need ID to do just about anything related to the government so insisting on voting without it only serves to undermine trust in elections.
voting should be frictionless and not have to go anywhere
it's a constitutional right, not something you should have to jump through hoops
people don't have the time to take off work and not get paid and wait in line for hours which is exactly what many places do now by reducing voting location radically
many people can't even afford a car these days or to fill it with gas
if you insist on in person voting, make it a paid day off
the ID thing is a false narrative, it's not ID that's the problem, it's that it costs money to get the ID and now they want your birth certificate saying the ID doesn't even prove you are a citizen with "realID"
I don't think people who want to exercise their first or second amendment right accept friction over it. In fact it seems to me that's been one major source of political unrest.
But those same people who don't want their first and second amendment rights to be infringed are okay with voting having high friction so a lot of people can't do it.
When you say "why change it" are you not aware that many US states vote by mail (and/or ballot drop boxes) and have for decades? Or are you ignoring it?
Yes I'm aware. By change it I mean the gradual shift from in person to mailed ballets. This is shift toward isolation. Bubble preservation.
Standing inline with your neighbors to exercise our vote is empowering. It reminds us of our status as voters. As equals. It crosses boundaries. It's beautiful.
Sure there's cases where appearing in person isn't practical and I'm not suggesting we close the door to that. But I think it should be needs based.
I appreciate the vibe you're going for, but standing in line with your neighbors is also a massive time sink that directly costs people money via lost wages. Making drop-box voting needs-based just places democratic participation in the hands of those who determine who 'needs' and why. A democracy is only as real as its citizens' access to ballots.
ID is already required in the US to vote. You are required to register to vote, and that registration includes an identity check. Performing the check at this stage allows the time to verify identity and correct any issues, well before voting day.
To the down-voters: get a life, nothing in my post is downvote-worthy. Just because The Party doesn't allow you to agree with anyone who points out that this is a solved problem in most nations doesn't mean you need to press that button, you're not getting any brownie-points and you won't get a cookie other than the one from the web server.
To all those who reacted with 'ID required to register to vote': you're missing the part where the postal services need to get involved to deliver ballots which this article is about. You're also missing the part where 'registering to vote' does not mean the ballot is filled in by the person registered to vote, let alone the part where voter rolls are heavily polluted with people who moved or died still registered at an address to which ballots get delivered. You know this to be the case, you've seen the reports on the voter rolls, you may even have received ballots for people who used to live on your addresses. Denying it doesn't make it go away. Maybe that's the point? It is getting harder and harder to take the reasons to refuse voter ID at face value given that, as said, this is the way it works in a large part of the world. Checking ID at the polling location is normal in most countries. It is the sane and smart thing to do, never mind the bollocks excuses The Party makes up against it. Once person, one vote (per election), close to guaranteed.
The United States barely has a standard ID system across states, no federal system of ID besides the passport, and a horrible history of using every single possible opportunity to turn any requirement into a racist, discriminatory system.
Somehow folks who call for voter ID laws seem to also be opposed to making getting a photo ID free and easy
0. Make polling day a public holiday for everyone who isn't super essential. Make another polling day for super essential workers which they get as a holiday instead (people who aren't super essential will cover their shifts).
-1. Give everyone an ID. Actually give them one and don't just pretend to do it.
> if only those who oppose showing ID would drop their objections
You're not even wrong.
I worked as a poll judge for a long time. I know a little bit about election administration.
Most every jurisdiction has required ID for a very long time. And the exceptions prove the rule. (IIRC, North Dakota?)
I also strenuously objected to closing the local polling sites in my county and state. (We activists were only able to delay it 2 years. Mostly by exposing lies of vendors and their lackeys.)
One of the (many) reasons was the long term decline of USPS, mostly caused by the decades long revanchist campaign to dismantle it, to further undermine our democracy.
You are probably getting down voted because you are assuming that what works in other countries would work in the US. Maybe it could, but it would take a lot of effort which the people who are pushing for voter ID in the US are not willing to put in.
Those countries have robust and long establish national ID systems, and they do go a good job of making sure citizens easily obtain their ID.
The US has no such system.
There are millions of adult citizens without valid government issues photo ID acceptable and who cannot reasonably afford to get it. Before you say that states offer free ID, it is not the cost of the ID itself that is the issue. It is the cost of getting supporting documents.
Often getting copies of the supporting documents requires showing ID. Oops. There are alternate procedures, which often involve hard to find documents, often not digitized or centralized.
The only way to do a voter ID system in the US without disenfranchising a large number of voters is to establish a system similar to other countries with a national ID that is easy for every citizen to obtain and we grandfather in existing citizens by making the new system only required for people who are born after it is instituted.
It's also possible to craft a comprehensive law. My state allows all of the following, even expired versions as long as it expired within the last year, or if the voter is over 65 as long as it was unexpired on their 65th birthday regardless of how long it has been expired now:
1) Driver's license, even expired if expired within the last 2 years
2) State Non-Driver's ID
3) Out of state Driver's License
4) Passport
5) Free Voter ID
6) College / University ID
7) School employee ID
Additionally all the following are valid, without any limitations on expiration as long as they are photo IDs:
1) Military / veterans ID
2) Tribal enrollment ID for Native tribes
3) Any other photo ID issued by any federal or the state's government agencies
In addition to all of that, if you still are unable to produce an ID, you can still vote with a "provisional ballot" and sign an affidavit declaring your inability to obtain an ID. All of the following are valid reasons:
1) Lack of transportation
2) Disability or illness
3) Lack of supporting documentation to obtain an ID (birth certificates etc)
4) Work or school schedule
5) Family responsibilities
6) A lost, stolen or misplaced ID
7) Applied for an ID but haven't received it
8) Other impediment (write in)
9) Religious objection to being photographed
10) Victim of a declared natural disaster within 100 days of the election
All provisional ballots must be counted before the state can certify the vote count and a provisional ballot can only be rejected by unanimous vote of the board of elections commission that the ID exception form was filled out falsely.
That seems a pretty reasonable system to me given how it's pretty much impossible to interact with the state, the federal government, banks or employers without a photo ID these days.
> There are millions of adult citizens without valid government issues photo ID acceptable and who cannot reasonably afford to get it. Before you say that states offer free ID, it is not the cost of the ID itself that is the issue. It is the cost of getting supporting documents.
To use Sweden as an example, there is no need for supporting documents. When a person here want a passport or national ID, and they don't already have a valid id, all they need is someone else with an valid ID to sign the paper. It can be a coworker, a teacher, a relative, or basically anyone with some form of relation to the person. The same apply for voting, so someone can go and vote as long they have a second person with an ID willing to sign that they are who they claim to be. Not a single paper required and all they need to do is say their name and date of birth.
No birth recipient, no electrical bill, no tax receipt, no money, nor any other paper which is honestly a less secure system that simply having already identified person signing a legally binding paper.
Right? The person who you impersonated would then be marked as having voted twice, which would pretty quickly get noticed and investigated. So somehow you'd have to get away with that, plus do this at scale so as to actually influence the outcome. Doesn't make sense.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 44.1 ms ] thread* https://www.propublica.org/article/mail-ballot-delays-postal...
This will clearly hurt them in statewide elections, but I wonder how it plays out in local rural elections. I can imagine the rejected ballots leaning more blue than average in heavily red areas.
I can also imagine the opposite: Older folks have less mobility on average, and are probably more likely to mail the ballots in. The Propublica article doesn't say anything about this, but I imagine some election officials track it.
Their ID requirements in Ohio blew back a similar way a few years ago. They made it extremely hard to vote without a driver's license, thinking it'd hit college kids, but it mostly hit retirees that no longer drive.
This just isn't true and has never been true. You can see the requirements here:
https://www.ohiosos.gov/elections/voter-ID-requirements
I'm not sure when you are talking about, but I have family that's voted in Ohio for decades and this was never an issue.
"It's almost like the republicans would be better off if they paid attention to their constitutional duties instead of just burning things down."
The problem is that Democrats won't do ANYTHING to stop potential cheating and then act dumb when you bring up actual ways to exploit the system.
Example one: Ballot harvesting. Judges allowed ballot harvesting in many states leading up to the Trump election, even though it is illegal. They also ignored signature verification rules during this time.
Example two: Voter ID. In every country in the world, you need ID to vote. Democrats have pushed to completely remove it for years.
Example three: Mail-in voting. Mail-in voting is fine. It should be setup so you need to request it for each election. It's too easy to get ballots for people that never wanted to vote in the first place and send it in. Reddit and social media have made it pretty easy to coordinate with strangers.
Example four: We've had a decade of voting machine vulnerabilities and exploits at Def Con and somehow all of the leading security researchers ignored this and/or removed mention of it on social media after the 2020 election. I witnessed Tweets getting deleted in realtime.
Trump originally proposed sane and reasonable protections, and those were squashed by Democrats. This is the result.
Ignoring these problems isn't helping our Democracy, even though you somehow think it gives your side an advantage.
Would just like to point out that here in .au you don’t need ID to vote (as in to show up and cast your vote, not talking about registering).
But it is considered vital that every citizen gets the chance to vote including homeless people so they had to find a compromise. Although ofcourse the number of hobos who want to vote is largely theoretical.
If Trump lost by 200000 votes and claimed "There were 210000 illegal votes!", wouldn't it be easy to present at least one? But they'd scrape the bottom of the barrel of "evidence" in court for one count of fraud...
And Donnie, if you knew the exact number (which is oddly the number you lost by, plus a little bit), doesn't that mean you tallied all the fraudulent votes, well, where's the list then?
Before the 2020 election Trump primed his base by claiming over and over again that he could only lose if the election was rigged. Then, immediately after the 2020 election results were tallied, he and every right-wing media outlet spent the bulk of their airtime announcing that the election was stolen. It comes as no surprise that a significant fraction of the Republican voter base started to believe it was true, despite multiple investigations and dozens of court challenges about fraudulent votes failing to produce any evidence.
It's also not surprising that a significant fraction of the Republican base believes election fraud in general is rampant, which conveniently allowed Republican legislatures to make sweeping changes to how future elections would be held... like their standard voter suppression fare of closing polling locations, removing large blocks of voter registrations without notice, slowing processing of mail-in ballots and changing the rules regarding postmarks and late ballots, adding ID requirements, and, in some cases, revoking the validity of existing IDs.
All while the reality is that only around 1:10^6 votes are ever substantiated as fraudulent (e.g., Arizona has proven 36 cases of voter fraud among 42 million votes cast over the last 25 years).
See: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-widespread-is-electio...
Donald Trump and the current Republican Party does not care about anything other than winning at all cost. And if they don’t win, they will cry like Little Lord Fauntleroy.
I just voted early in Ohio a few days ago and that same list is hanging from the wall, no drivers license needed
https://www.savethepostoffice.com/rto-n2024-1/
It's so frustrating. If I want to mail something out, it sits for over a day in the local post office. Even Priority Mail Express can no longer get something out locally overnight. If I need overnight service, I have to drive a significant distance to get to a UPS station to get something into the network.
If something mis-sorts to the wrong post office, it sits for over a day at that remote post office before it can re-enter the stream.
I have had more and more late and missorted packages that compound the late deliveries and all I want to do is cry that I can't get the mail anymore in a reasonable fashion.
Mass social engineering 101
Ditto public schools, roads, phones, and broadband (sorta).
https://www.markpack.org.uk/159114/leaflets/
Either way, it’s not in USPS’ hands since Congress would have to change that requirement.
Local deliveries used to be overnight; now they take up to a week. Transnational deliveries can take months.
I hope the primary effect of this will be that millions of MAGA votes go uncounted this year and in 2028, because they're the ones that voted for this in the first place.
"I hope the primary effect of this will be that millions of MAGA votes go uncounted this year and in 2028, because they're the ones that voted for this in the first place."
With all of the cheating and dirty tricks from the Democrats (picking the same name as your opponent to confuse voters), I hope the Democrats never take power again.
That's false. The USPS has raised postal rates a number of times in the past several years, without requiring Congressional approval. Hell, they literally just increased rates less than a month ago. https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2026/0825-...
With all of the cheating and dirty tricks from the Democrats (picking the same name as your opponent to confuse voters),
LOL the best and only example you can come up with is the one legal "trick" the Democrats did, and they got the idea from the Republicans. In 2024, Republicans encouraged two guys with the same name as the WA state attorney to run against him in the gubernatorial election. The Dem employee behind the Alaska stunt was working for him at the time.
Meanwhile, the GOP DOJ keeps trying to take away the voting rights with knowingly false claims that U.S. citizens are illegal immigrants, even after an analysis showed that more than half of the names on their list were U.S. citizen and the remainder were never registered to vote. https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/doj-california-...
Keep your MAGA propaganda on 8chan where it belongs.
Sure seems like this ranked choice voting solves a lot of problems over the first past the post style we mostly do.
You apparently don't realize that this is not something new, Republicans have done the same thing. So do you hope Republicans also never take power again?
Here's the ballot that some suggest would confuse voters: https://ballotpedia.org/Alaska_official_sample_ballots,_2026
A bold allegation, which, if untrue, renders your question moot
Also, this is nothing new, republicans did it too and non a peep of complaint.
It apparently has one small mistake though, because it says the postal regulatory commission (PRC) sets rates, while the PRC website says they only set rate limits and the USPS sets their own rates [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_posta...
[1] https://prc.gov/who-sets-postal-rates
1: show up at polling location, either on voting day or within the early voting period.
2: show ID to poll worker who verifies it and hands over the ballots for the elections in which you have the right to vote
3: fill in the ballots, put them in the envelope(s) and hand these over to a poll worker
4: poll worker checks again whether you have voting rights for the specific elections and drops the envelopes into the correct voting urns
Done. No postal service involved. You can vote at any (early) voting location for national elections, for local ones you'll need to go to a local voting location where the required ballots are available. Early voting can start a few weeks before election day so nearly everyone should have the possibility to set aside half an hour to an hour to do their civic duty.
That leaves those who really can't make it to the polls. For these people there can be a verified postal ballot system, i.e. they get one sent home on request, fill it out and send it back in the required envelopes. Voting by mail always adds risks but since it would only be needed for a small fraction of the voters that risk is manageable. Mail-in votes need to be counted on election day so they need to be in the mail about a week before election day. Why you ask? Because the fraud risk of mail-in ballots makes it all too easy to use them to add enough votes to push a close race towards a specific candidate. Count them early on election day and publish the results, these need to be final results, before the rest of the votes are counted. There's plenty of countries where votes are counted this way, this is not rocket science. I have voting rights in 2 different countries in northern and western Europe, both use something resembling this scheme. Everyone shows his or her ID either to get the ballots or to have them deposited in the voting urns, this has never been contested and the mere thought of voting without ID is so clearly outrageously silly that nobody brings it up. All the arguments against showing ID have been proven to be specious at best, you need ID to do just about anything related to the government so insisting on voting without it only serves to undermine trust in elections.
it's a constitutional right, not something you should have to jump through hoops
people don't have the time to take off work and not get paid and wait in line for hours which is exactly what many places do now by reducing voting location radically
many people can't even afford a car these days or to fill it with gas
if you insist on in person voting, make it a paid day off
the ID thing is a false narrative, it's not ID that's the problem, it's that it costs money to get the ID and now they want your birth certificate saying the ID doesn't even prove you are a citizen with "realID"
Buying a gun, free speech, right to assembly. Each with caveats.
Appearing in front of your fellow citizens as a breathing person is central to how voting has worked for hundreds of years.
Why change it?
I agree it should be paid day off.
But those same people who don't want their first and second amendment rights to be infringed are okay with voting having high friction so a lot of people can't do it.
There simply is no meaningful intentional voter fraud in the US.
In an even more online and disconnected world, it forces us out of our homes to stand with our neighbors in an exercise of our power.
There's a beauty to this that, when a large amount of voting is done over mail, I feel is lost.
Standing inline with your neighbors to exercise our vote is empowering. It reminds us of our status as voters. As equals. It crosses boundaries. It's beautiful.
Sure there's cases where appearing in person isn't practical and I'm not suggesting we close the door to that. But I think it should be needs based.
To all those who reacted with 'ID required to register to vote': you're missing the part where the postal services need to get involved to deliver ballots which this article is about. You're also missing the part where 'registering to vote' does not mean the ballot is filled in by the person registered to vote, let alone the part where voter rolls are heavily polluted with people who moved or died still registered at an address to which ballots get delivered. You know this to be the case, you've seen the reports on the voter rolls, you may even have received ballots for people who used to live on your addresses. Denying it doesn't make it go away. Maybe that's the point? It is getting harder and harder to take the reasons to refuse voter ID at face value given that, as said, this is the way it works in a large part of the world. Checking ID at the polling location is normal in most countries. It is the sane and smart thing to do, never mind the bollocks excuses The Party makes up against it. Once person, one vote (per election), close to guaranteed.
Signs point to "no".
Somehow folks who call for voter ID laws seem to also be opposed to making getting a photo ID free and easy
-1. Give everyone an ID. Actually give them one and don't just pretend to do it.
You're not even wrong.
I worked as a poll judge for a long time. I know a little bit about election administration.
Most every jurisdiction has required ID for a very long time. And the exceptions prove the rule. (IIRC, North Dakota?)
I also strenuously objected to closing the local polling sites in my county and state. (We activists were only able to delay it 2 years. Mostly by exposing lies of vendors and their lackeys.)
One of the (many) reasons was the long term decline of USPS, mostly caused by the decades long revanchist campaign to dismantle it, to further undermine our democracy.
Sadly, we were proven right.
Those countries have robust and long establish national ID systems, and they do go a good job of making sure citizens easily obtain their ID.
The US has no such system.
There are millions of adult citizens without valid government issues photo ID acceptable and who cannot reasonably afford to get it. Before you say that states offer free ID, it is not the cost of the ID itself that is the issue. It is the cost of getting supporting documents.
Often getting copies of the supporting documents requires showing ID. Oops. There are alternate procedures, which often involve hard to find documents, often not digitized or centralized.
The only way to do a voter ID system in the US without disenfranchising a large number of voters is to establish a system similar to other countries with a national ID that is easy for every citizen to obtain and we grandfather in existing citizens by making the new system only required for people who are born after it is instituted.
1) Driver's license, even expired if expired within the last 2 years
2) State Non-Driver's ID
3) Out of state Driver's License
4) Passport
5) Free Voter ID
6) College / University ID
7) School employee ID
Additionally all the following are valid, without any limitations on expiration as long as they are photo IDs:
1) Military / veterans ID
2) Tribal enrollment ID for Native tribes
3) Any other photo ID issued by any federal or the state's government agencies
In addition to all of that, if you still are unable to produce an ID, you can still vote with a "provisional ballot" and sign an affidavit declaring your inability to obtain an ID. All of the following are valid reasons:
1) Lack of transportation
2) Disability or illness
3) Lack of supporting documentation to obtain an ID (birth certificates etc)
4) Work or school schedule
5) Family responsibilities
6) A lost, stolen or misplaced ID
7) Applied for an ID but haven't received it
8) Other impediment (write in)
9) Religious objection to being photographed
10) Victim of a declared natural disaster within 100 days of the election
All provisional ballots must be counted before the state can certify the vote count and a provisional ballot can only be rejected by unanimous vote of the board of elections commission that the ID exception form was filled out falsely.
That seems a pretty reasonable system to me given how it's pretty much impossible to interact with the state, the federal government, banks or employers without a photo ID these days.
To use Sweden as an example, there is no need for supporting documents. When a person here want a passport or national ID, and they don't already have a valid id, all they need is someone else with an valid ID to sign the paper. It can be a coworker, a teacher, a relative, or basically anyone with some form of relation to the person. The same apply for voting, so someone can go and vote as long they have a second person with an ID willing to sign that they are who they claim to be. Not a single paper required and all they need to do is say their name and date of birth.
No birth recipient, no electrical bill, no tax receipt, no money, nor any other paper which is honestly a less secure system that simply having already identified person signing a legally binding paper.
I’m working as a poll worker for the current US election, and I can’t see how you would do it. We don’t check ID.