Commentary By Ron Beasley
I live in Oregon. I have not been in a voting both since 1996 but I have voted in every election because we have vote by mail. I will receive my ballot tomorrow or Monday. That's right, election day is three weeks long. Both political parties initially opposed vote by mail because it makes last minute campaigning difficult. But more people vote and so the Republicans still oppose it because those additional voters are primarily the poor and middle class who vote for Democrats more often than Republicans. Via Daniel Larrison we have this typical attack on mail in voting from the right.
There are (at least) two basic threats to a voting system. One is that people will be allowed to vote when they�re not entitled to. This might be because they�re non-citizens, convicted felons, residents of another jurisdiction, have already voted, etc. Another threat is that a voter will be enticed or coerced into casting a vote that�s different from his or her true preference.
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Rather, my point was about the effect of vote-by-mail schemes on voter secrecy. Imagine if an employer, who everyone knew to be a Republican, required his employees to request absentee ballots and show them to him before they were submitted. Think of an abusive husband who insists that he and his wife fill out their ballots together. Or imagine a political operative going around a low-income neighborhood paying people $50 if they let him fill out their ballots for them. This kind of corruption is very hard for voting officials to detect. And more insidious, voters themselves may not even realize that it�s unethical.
Now Mr Lee obviously doesn't know what he's talking about or he's just making stuff up because being from CATO he can. In Oregon you place your ballot is an inner envelope that has no markings. You place that envelope in the outer envelope which you sign. That signature is checked against registration records and if it is OK the inner ballot is processed. That takes care of the first paragraph but the second paragraph is really absurd. Every scenario Mr Lee comes up with is a crime and employers and political operatives are rarely if ever going to get away with. The reality is here in Oregon there has not been a single case of voter fraud since Oregon became exclusively vote by mail.
Of course the real issue is the folks at the Koch brothers financed CATO institute realize that the less people who vote the more likely it is that a conservative will be elected.
We have the option of voting by mail, but I rather value the experience of walking into the polling place, greeting the poll workers, and marking my ballot. I'm an old guy and I just sort of like the old traditions.
ReplyDeleteI know that people are busy and that mail balloting permits people to vote and encourages higher voting turnout, so I'm glad we have it. Anything that enhances participation is a good thing. I just hope we don't take the polling places away from those who still want to treasure that experience.
It's interesting how ballot secrecy is held to be virtually sacred. Aside from the fact that suffrage was historically limited to men until 1920, the Australian (secret) ballot was not popularized until the nineteenth century. In the early days of the Republic, as in most of the world, literacy was not widespread and voting was a more open process. Factoids such as these are lost on the Tea Party crowd.
ReplyDeleteMy mother told about voting for the first time. She was never interested in politics and her father-in-law, my paternal grandfather, told her it was easy: just vote for everyone who was a Democrat and she would get it right. It is easy to forget that her mother, a very proper minister's wife, probably never voted at all. It was not an issue until after her children were born.
Limitations on voting were widespread here in the South to limit Black voting, so much so that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was necessary even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was already a matter of law. Plenty of old-timers regarded that as having something "crammed down their throat" but sometimes it takes the force of law to make changes in wrong behavior.
I fully expect a continuing fight over health care reform to echo the same kind of political opposition. Republicans, insurance interests and a significant number of medical professionals have said as much. But access to modern medical care, like the right to vote, is one of the benefits of progress reflected even in developing parts of the world. de Tocqueville was correct to be worried about a tyranny of the majority.
Hi Ron,
ReplyDeleteI just came across your post and to be honest I'm a bit at a loss for words. My opinions on e-voting come primarily from conversations my colleagues at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, where i'm in grad school. Most of my CITP colleagues keep their partisan leanings private, but of the ones I know there seem to be more Ds than Rs.
As far as I can recall, I've never discussed the subject of absentee ballots with anyone at Cato, and certainly I didn't get an email from the Koch brothers ordering me to write about this subject. And if you knew anything about me or my work it would be obvious to you that I'm not a Republican partisan. For example, here is Speaker Pelosi citing my work during the FISA debate.
So, consider this a friendly plea to be a little bit more thoughtful about reflexively imputing bad motivations to other people. There are shills out there, to be sure, and it's worth calling them out in egregious cases. But not everyone who disagrees with you is a shill, and it would be helpful to make at least a little bit of effort to understand where people are coming from before you start calling them names.