I live in Colorado.

A couple of weeks before the midterms I'm going to get a packet in the mail containing my ballot, instructions for filling it out, a pamphlet where every candidate on the ballot gets a paragraph or two to make their case, and a prepaid return envelope. I fill out my ballot at my leisure, stuff it in the envelope, sign the envelope underneath the flap, and drop it in a mailbox. There's a receipt with an anonymous serial number in the packet that I can go online and use to verify my ballot has been received. If I'm worried about missing the deadline there are also dropboxes in most government buildings I can drop my ballot in up through the day of the election, along with a few traditional polling places open on election day.

Voter turnout here is about twelve points above the national average.

And in some states, like Florida, if you vote by mail it is 10x less likely to be counted.[1]

Our democracy is broken, and the people capable of fixing it are actively incentivized to keep it broken.

[1] https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-p...

> And in some states, like Florida, if you vote by mail it is 10x less likely to be counted

The headline of that article is "If you vote by mail in Florida, it’s 10 times more likely that ballot won’t count". That's not equivalent to what you said.

If there's a 99% chance your vote will count and 1% chance it won't, a 10 times more likely to not count changes that to a 90% will count/10% won't count chance. Using your wording, it would change it to a 9% will count/91% won't count chance. Those are vastly different things.

The reason the majority of those ballots were rejected is because they didn't sign them.

We do that in Switzerlamd as well. I have never voted by going to some place.

Voter turnout is still not very high.

Hmm. I wonder why? Any ideas?

There's 4 voting sessions per year and, in my own opinion, about half of the topics being voted on are quite silly. This might induce some voting fatigue.

Makes some sense.

How do you know your ballot has not been changed ?

There's a line for a signature that the flap of the envelope ends up glued over the top of. There is no identifying information visible on the outside of a properly sealed envelope.

The envelopes have to remain sealed until they're brought into the room with the election monitors to be counted. If the seal isn't intact or the envelope isn't signed underneath or the bar code under the flap doesn't match the one on the ballot then the ballot is considered spoiled. The actual ballots are wrapped in a "secrecy sleeve" so that the votes can't be seen without unfolding them, and the election monitors separate the envelopes with the signatures from the ballots before they begin counting, so the secret ballot is preserved.

From that point forward they're processed just like any other paper ballots.

But you’re still not there and cannot be there when they actually read the ballot...

The state of Oregon has vote by mail. Its awesome. My ballot gets mailed to me a few weeks before the election. I fill it out, and can either mail it back (I have to pay for a postage stamp) or drop it off at a ballot drop box all over town.

there are all sorts of safeguards for things like not getting your ballot in the mail, etc. I was also automatically register to vote as an independent when I got my drivers license. (they mailed me a form I could return/mail to change party, if I wanted to).

My last state, my town was small, had a single polling place, and trying to vote before work meant getting there before they opened at 7am, or else wait 60-90 min to vote, and be late to work. (or come in after work, and wait 60-90 minutes).

This actually a bad idea: The reason for in person voting is poll monitors there are watching to make sure nobody knows how you voted.

There are have been cases of "vote for me or I'll break your legs". When you vote from home someone can come by and watch you mail your vote the "correct" way in.

In theory. Has this actually happened, since the introduction of postal voting, in the United States?

To be useful it would be necessary to visit 10,000’s - 100,000 houses and threaten violence.

The voting system does not need to resolve this issue. Threats of violence are already illegal, and any group conducting such acts at that volume would be quickly apprehended. Call the police.

Can you imagine how quickly twitter / the internet would blow up if stand over men were going door to door threatening voters?

Not quite people going door to door threatening people. but with Absentee Voting by mail, there have been plenty of cases of a Candidate's family member or a party operative making the rounds of the nursing homes and special needs homes and "assisting" residents in filling out absentee ballots. Alot of these people you could make a very good argument that the voter lacks sufficient mental capacity to cast a ballot. This happens in plenty of local elections around here. Most of the cases are not really covered by the media either.

The risk has typically been more been cohabiting family (partners and parents, especially).

It has happened in history.

How often is this an issue? Sounds like a made up scenario for the US.

It's better to worry about these things before they are problems. I don't know if it's happened in the US but it is absolutely a very common attack against voting systems, and any voting system not resistant to it should be considered suspect.

Voter suppression is an actual real world problem that happens today, not a hypothetical problem like the one you are worried about. Allowing voting by mail is an improvement to that real world problem as it reduces the barriers to voting for those that are employed in jobs that don't give time off for voting or who don't have transportation to their voting location.

Voter intimidation is already illegal and there is no indication that it is a legitimate problem in the states that have postal voting.

Vote buying is also illegal and vote-by-mail makes it easy to document your ballot to get the promised kickback. This is logistically difficult for national elections but for local office it is much more likely to succeed.

Is there any evidence at all that vote buying is a problem in US elections?

No, but why worry about actual problems when you can make up excuses to disenfranchise people!

Switzerland, one of the most democratic places in the world has done this for a very lomg time.

While im theory its relevant a practical issue has never happened once as far as I can remember.

Going to hugly distributed areas to beat all voters up seems like a terrible attack vector.

So maybe in some places it could be a problem but I dont see it as much of a problem in a modern First World Democracy.

There are definitely smaller countries in Europe where parties have purchased the election by giving money door to door. I know it happened in Albania, along with threats of family members losing their jobs, etc. And they did lose their jobs once the election was over. There were threats to private sector employers if they didn't cooperate, etc.

You think people didn't worry about it before we implemented vote-by-mail? This is a solved problem, and it turns out that there isn't much of an attack vector here after all.

I'm confused. Are you talking about family members forcing others to vote a certain way? Wouldnt that family member be just as coercive at a polling station? I guess in theory one could lie to the family member if they vote in person but is this a sizable and real concern about at home voting?

Genuinely curious because I've never heard of anyone expressing this concern before.

In-person voting has its own issues.

Polling locations can be (and allegedly are) reduced in number and/or moved farther away from specific groups in order to influence who votes.

At least in Sweden you can still go to vote on vote day even if you mailed in your vote earlier. The physical vote will override the mail vote (if both exist).

Can't you do that in the US via a provisional ballot on the day-of?

If you mail it do you get a confirmation that it was received and processed? How does one know that it wasn't destroyed while en route? Does the ballot come with a tracking number that you can punch in on website to see if your vote was processed correctly?

In Oregon you can check the web site to see if your vote was received. Not sure if they send an email, because my registration did not include my email address until just a few minutes ago ;-).

Aside from that you can't find out much more, of course, because as soon as your ballot is received and the outer envelope is scanned, it is discarded and your ballot (which is inside an inner secrecy envelope) is put in a box with the rest.

I get an email ack that it was received. Was it scanned and correctly tabulated? Unlikely given the history in my county (Sarasota)

Why are elections not held on Sundays ? I assume that on average there are less people working that day that Monday - Friday, so less people would have to take time off from their job.

Edit: Found this

> In 1845, the United States Congress chose a single date for all national elections in all states. The first Tuesday after the first Monday in November was chosen so that there would never be more than 34 days between Election Day and the first Wednesday in December. Election Day is held on a Tuesday so that voters will not have to vote or travel on Sunday. This was an important consideration at the time when the laws were written and is still so in some Christian communities in the United States.

This seems a pretty dated reason. Why no one is proposing to change it ?

Elections are held on Tuesday as a way of restricting who can vote PERIOD. Poorer voters have a harder time getting off work, and getting transportation to voting site, which is usually close to their home, but not their work.

The law required you be given enough time off to vote, or you be given advance notice to get an absentee ballot if they won't be close to home.

This isn't followed well enough to make it practical, though. If you aren't scheduled to begin work until 2 hours after the polls open, they say you have time. It doesn't matter if you cannot physically get to the voting booth, vote, and travel to work in the time given.

As far as absentee ballots are concerned, sometimes they are difficult to get. My mother had trouble getting one when she was pregnant - my sister was due around election day. She finally got it, luckily - because my sister was, indeed, born on election day.

These tactics are often combined with restricting voting locations in urban areas to force people to travel farther in an effort to maximize disenfranchisement.

An hourly worker can vote, the just have to forgo several hours of income to do so. This is particularly true in several Southern states, where polling places are few and far between in poor districts. It also doesn’t help that you have to vote in your home district, when you may work a long commute away, increasing the amount of time away from work even more.

Seems simple enough to just make it a national holiday.

People work on national holidays, though.

I assume there is some correlation between people who are unlikely to receive paid time off for voting and people that have to work on unusual days, so I'm not sure changing what day Election Day falls on will fix anything.

The solution is to mandate that employers give you a couple of paid hours off on Election Day. I would be surprised if this was not already the case in several states.

States can also help out by keeping the polls open for longer hours, so that someone who has to work an 8 hour shift has plenty of time on either side of their workday to go vote. (Last primary, I forgot in the morning, then worked late... and still had plenty of time to vote after work. The same is not true in every state.)

Not really.

Do you need to get to the polling place? I guess all gas station workers are exempt. As is everybody working for the various transit systems.

Can you ensure nobody has a medical issue on a national holiday? Doctors, nurses, and hospital support staff are all working. This also brings on either the entire power grid, or someone in maintenance to watch the generators.

Do you eat? All restaurants are exempt. So are grocery stores. So are all the utilities related to energy needed for cooking. (though here Israel with their nobody working on the sabbath has an interesting take - in part that works there because non-jews are willing to work but it need not)

Are you going arrest foreigners the night before (which is to say no passports are valid, go home before voting day and come back afterwards - bad weather is not an excuse to plan ahead)? I guess hotels get to remain open.

You can go on. It turns out to run civilization we need a lot of people working even on holidays. Interestingly, it turns out a lot of these workers are the poorer people who you were trying to help.

Yes I'm sure I could come up with an unlimited amount of scenarios to make every system imperfect.

There's no reason we can't take the positive step forward of making it a holiday now which would improve it for a huge amount of people and then improve it further.

It seems people want 100% solutions. If it's not perfect we might as well stay stuck where we are. This is essentially what you are saying. This is why no progress is ever made, because improvements are ignored because they are "not perfect." The world isn't perfect, but we can do better and making it a holiday will help significantly.

Keep searching for Utopia, while the pragmatists get things done.

This is already a solved problem. Wage workers can get paid for a multiple of their actual hours as a holiday differential. But in order to invoke that system, you do need to declare the holiday.

You didn't solve the problem, in fact you made it worse. For people who already have a problem getting to the polls you have just given them extra money to not make that effort - going to work instead.

The holiday differential is likely enough that the employer will not allow the employee to work any longer than is strictly necessary, and only if the workplace absolutely must stay open during a holiday. Most people will not even have the option to work. For those that do, the shifts will be offered to the most senior workers first.

Some states might even allow absentee ballots for those who will be present in the state, but are essential personnel who have been scheduled to work on election day. That's not something that can be established federally, though.

This!

And it has to be on-par with things like memorial day, labor day, thanksgiving and christmas... plus include primaries as well.

If it is similar to President's day or Veterens day, not only will folks still work, but they will usually get paid normal wages that day as well.

"Seems simple enough" is to politics what "this should be a quick fix" is to engineering.

So we should do nothing, give up. The world is absurd. Oh well.

As something that helps the problem, it is simple enough. It's not an abstract idea. Our particular vessel at implementing such a change is where the complexity lies and the problem is with that, not the idea.

Often times quick fixes solve major issues for enough time for more permanent solutions to be put in place. Patching a pothole does the job. It's not perfect, but your car won't get damaged anymore in the pothole.

I can't believe it's not either a national holiday or an accepted thing for all employers to give the day off. I know legally they have to give you an hour to vote, but the entire day sends a message that this is an important thing for you to do.

> I know legally they have to give you an hour to vote

Are you certain about this?

It's a state-by-state thing. CA requires employers give two hours off: https://www.sos.ca.gov/administration/news-releases-and-advi...

A nearby post repeats the claim as if it were true nationwide, claiming that those who weren't given time off had to be supplied an absentee ballot. On its face it doesn't make sense unless we're talking about state employees, and we're not talking about state employees. EDIT copyedit

That doesn't help low income folks who work service jobs that don't get the same holidays. I feel like that would just make the middle-upper income vote that much more loud.

What about the middle class that would benefit from a holiday? Should we just ignore them because we don't have a perfect solution yet?

Making it a holiday is a huge step forward. Taking other steps (like mandated hours off for all jobs) can also be done. Why can't we have a small step forward? Is there a problem with progress if it doesn't fully solve the problem?

We don't have enough mandated holidays.

1.) There should be at least one federal holiday that constructs a three-day weekend each month. I think ideally, any new such holidays should grant the Friday, rather than Monday, as the holiday day - Friday is traditionally the day of dumping problems on someone else, and ruining their weekend. Ruining a three-day weekend in this fashion is especially egregious, and, at least temporarily, the Friday switchup should help to confuse the problem-dumpers.

2.) The informal Thanksgiving and Christmas-New Years week holidays should be formalized - these are already de facto periods of minimal productivity, they might as well be de jure, and we can just focus on being happy/miserable with our families during this period.

3.) In similar fashion, the entire 4th of July week should be declared a holiday, if for no other reason than to resolve issues of confusion on proper conduct when the 4th falls upon inconvenient days like Wednesday, as occurred this year. A week of vacation during the period when there is actually the potential of usable daylight and pleasant weather would have significant mental health implications.

4.) How the freak is voting day not a national holiday already?!?

That's fair, but my genuine concern is we stop at the voting holiday. As people who have more income are more able to vote, the views of those who aren't able to vote become suppressed that much more.

But you're right - don't do nothing just because to do something isn't perfect.

The system is designed to prevent (certain) people from voting. So while a national holiday would make sense in the abstract, it goes contrary to the goals of those who make the laws.

To those downvoting: voter suppression in the us isn't exactly a secret: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Uni...

In that line, a national holiday for voting would encourage voting. As such, all the groups pushing voter suppression would be against a holiday.

If this had an actual impact on the election you would see one side push for changing the day as a strategy if they are more popular in the poorer populations than their opponent. Republicans would definitely want this more now considering Donald Trump's voter base was mostly lower income people. Same could be said for Barack Obama during 2014.

The GOP is run by the 1% but they need a larger base to win elections. This is why they crafted a platform catering to the pet issues of low-income conservatives. They never actually deliver on their rhetoric because it's all just an act (Still waiting on the executive branch to institute H1B reform). They don't want policies that allow masses of poorer people to influence the results for the periods they are out of power.

FYI. Trump won every income bracket above $50k, while Hillary only won those below

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/e...

That's not what the graph shows at all. The graph shows that there is no statistical correlation between income and votes, except that lower incomes slightly preferred Clinton. The problem with this data is that it doesn't appear to be weighted by electoral college result, so we don't get to actually see what the impact on the election result is. And, even worse, the survey appears to include the question "Did you vote for Clinton or Trump" yet doesn't include that answer in the graph, so we don't get to compare the relative results. I tried to extract that result by using the male/female data assuming 50/50 representation, but ended up in a tie, and we don't get to know the bias of participants vs non-participants.

Lol come on now, no need to be facetious. There are six income brackets broke down with the vote tallies for the respective candidates. The exit polling is not done for the Electoral College, and does not change the fact that every income bracket greater than 50k voted for Trump more than they did Hillary

By a single point! You're really stretching the meaning of the numbers. Compare to "Residence"; now there's a meaningful difference (Cities/Suburbs/Country.)

Per that chart, Republicans in general tend to win every income bracket above $50k. Look at the gains and losses from 2012: Trump made massive gains with lower income brackets, and lost the Republican grip on the middle and upper middle classes.

So yes, it's reasonable to say that the cohort that Trump made the largest gains with (i.e., lower income brackets) is his "voter base."

One oddity of the American system I’ve noticed is that most polls seem to close REALLY early. It’s usually 7am-10pm here, so unless you’re working a 15 hour day (which is illegal in most circumstances) you should be able to vote.

American polling centres also often seem to have massive queues and long waiting periods to vote, I assume due to understaffing and insufficient numbers of centres.

> American polling centres also often seem to have massive queues and long waiting periods to vote, I assume due to understaffing and insufficient numbers of centres.

Yep, due to a well-documented campaign by republicans to restrict access to voting that has been ongoing since the civil rights era.

Yup. And that lack of polling places and understaffing is usually an effort by the party in power to suppress the vote in key (opposing) districts.

Elections were originally on Tuesdays because "Tuesday was established as election day because it did not interfere with the Biblical Sabbath or with market day, which was on Wednesday in many towns."

Why hasn't it changed? Because to change it the party in power would have to vote to massively change voting block, almost certainly swinging several elections. Since the party is in power, they have no interest in this.

Additionally, the people who want it changed are probably the people who can't easily vote on Tuesday. These people already don't vote, so they can't influence their politicians to support changing the day.

> Additionally, the people who want it changed are probably the people who can't easily vote on Tuesday. These people already don't vote

I'm sorry but there is a non sequitur here. If someone is inconvenienced by voting on Tuesday, it doesn't really mean they don't vote on Tuesday.

I don't know how it really is (non-US citizen and not in the US) but I strongly suspect there must a lot of people who don't fancy the extra hassle but still vote.

In the Netherlands you can vote for a large part of the day, about from 7:00 in the morning to 20:00 or 21:00 hours in the evening.

How is the timing in the U.S. then?

It varies by state, but they're typically open for 12 hours starting from 6 or 7AM. Some states are open longer.

https://ballotpedia.org/State_Poll_Opening_and_Closing_Times...

Or you can just do mail in ballots. Washington state, for instance, sends out ballots to all registered voters twoish weeks in advance of each race, and achieved almost 80% turnout for the 2016 election[1], for instance, which we'll probably top this year with the inclusion of pre-paid postage.

https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/research/voter-turnout-by-e...

I mean, it would help if voting didn't take literally several hours of waiting in line in the sun around here. You can (and some do) get heat-stroke from that kind of thing. It's utterly ridiculous, beyond "chore" and into "this might cause you to lose your job".

Silicon Valley is surprisingly terrible at most things governmental.

Silicon Valley is part of California, which has permanent absentee voting available everywhere; voting is only a chore if you choose for it to be a chore.

Can’t you vote by mail in month leading up to the election?

We can, that’s what I do since I’m working on election days.

Depends on what state you live in. I know in my state (GA) you have to be military or demonstrably out of town during the period to qualify for an absentee ballot.