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> Oregon has been voting by mail for almost 20 years. But here is what people seem to gloss over -- Yes, Oregon has been voting by mail for almost 40 years in
by taborj 6y ago
> Oregon has been voting by mail for almost 20 years.
But here is what people seem to gloss over -- Yes, Oregon has been voting by mail for almost 40 years in fact. But it wasn't just done overnight. In fact, the process started before most here were born; in 1981 mail-in voting was allowed at the local level[0], and it wasn't until 6 years later that it was determined to be something Oregon would do every year. And it wasn't until 2000, nearly 20 years later, that presidential elections were included.
What we're talking about for this election cycle is drastically and suddenly switching the method of voting, not phasing it in over 40 years like Oregon did. When you make a drastic change like that, the situation is ripe for failure and abuse, because the people and systems in place are not equipped to handle the situation. Frankly, they don't even know what they're getting into until they're into it, and a major election is not the time to find out that the whole system is messed up.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote-by-mail_in_Oregon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote-by-mail_in_Oregon
- plorkyeran 6y agoFortunately California isn't going from zero to 100% vote-by-mail in one shot either. I've been voting by mail in California - including for presidential elections - for 15 years now, and it wasn't a new thing when I started.
- bruceb 6y agoTechnology has also grown leaps and bounds since 1981. Oregon may have taken a long time as it was a leader. Charting the unknown. States enabling more mail in voting now have well established examples to follow. Its hardly "drastically" changing anything.
- taborj 6y agoMy day job is building healthcare interfaces. I've done more than my share of immunization registry interfaces, where we connect a clinic up to the state registry. If I've learned anything working with state governments, it's that they all think they know better than the other states. They'll all set off on their own paths, rather than duplicating the successes from other states. Only after a few annoying failures will they come to something akin to parity (in the case of immunization registries, it's the CDC's specification guidelines, which were there all along).