Posted by The Taint on 8/14/2020 1:43:00 PM (view original):
Posted by all3 on 8/14/2020 10:41:00 AM (view original):
Since I'm only guessing at what exactly you mean by that, I will say these things.
The USPS has been horribly run for decades (I'm friends with 3 people who have each worked there for 20+ years each). It is long overdue for a HUGE overhaul. Had they been doing the job efficiently, at a reasonable price, we wouldn't have seen all these companies like UPS, FED EX, DHL, etc. come to be.
I hate how Trump is mixing their funding with mail-in votes though. That said, there are a ton of people who vote by mail who are perfectly capable of going to the polls, so I do think it should be a bit more difficult to apply to vote by mail, as it certainly is easier to have fraud that way (for either Party). For example, I am collecting my neighbors' mail this week while they are away. The husband works from home, with flexible hours, the wife is back in school and working PT, and the 20 year old daughter does nothing. They got their mail-in ballots delivered yesterday, although all of them could easily go to the polls. What's keeping me from filling-out their ballots and returning them?
Hope that addresses what you were asking. You may begin criticising now.
They would get sent back because the signature doesn't match. Not to mention, they would wonder where their ballots got to..why they didn't get to them and eventually could probably remember that you were checking their mail for them. Ballots are easily tracked.
In most states, at least, vote by mail ballots are centralized. They generally don't even have access to the statewide pool of signatures, and it's a virtual guarantee that nobody is checking them.
I tend to agree with my fellow conservatives on this one. Living in Virginia, for the first time in my life, I've been required to present my ID when I show up to vote, and this feels much more appropriate to me. My primary concerns are not far-fetched things like mail fraud, however. What concerns me the most is the lack of a mechanism in most states to automatically clean up voter rolls. Most voters - myself included - are not rigorously fastidious about cleaning up after ourselves in this particular area. I last lived in Pennsylvania, honestly, in 2006, but I voted in PA until summer 2010 when I moved to California. After the 2018 election my dad happened to mention to my brother - who lives in Arizona since 2013 - and me that we were still on the registration list at my parents' polling place in Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania, you just need to sign the paper to vote. And they provide the reference signature. It's not held by the election officials to cross-reference, it's right on the paper next to where you sign. So all anybody would have needed to vote as me in Pennsylvania in every election from 2010 through 2018 was the knowledge that I wouldn't be there and a willingness to copy my signature. It seems like states could use state and Federal tax databases to notice that I was no longer paying taxes in Pennsylvania and at least send me a letter asking if I still resided and voted at that polling place. Most people are registered to vote by the DMV (EDIT: really
at the DMV, but that's at least where they get the paperwork), but they also don't use DMV records to
remove voters. The PA DMV knew I had cancelled my PA license for a CA license. But nobody took me off the voter roll until I requested paperwork to do so, filled it out by hand, and sent it back to them. Eight years after I left.
At least this experience gave me a heads up to clean up my California registration. I was registered to vote by mail in CA. That means that in the 2018 election, and any intervening local elections from summer 2017 until that point, whoever moved into my former house received a valid ballot with my name on it. All they had to do was fill it in and send it back, and it could be counted. At least California is actually one of the states that does scrupulously check signatures on vote-by-mail ballots.