4 ms·

I've always considered it ridiculous that so many states only allow voting on a single day. What's worse is then people argue that we should make Election Day

I've always considered it ridiculous that so many states only allow voting on a single day. What's worse is then people argue that we should make Election Day a national holiday, as if that would actually improve turnout (HINT: Ask your local retail, food, or other service worker how easy it is for them to get other holidays like Labor Day or Memorial Day off) Mail-in voting is great, but I acknowledge that a lot of people don't trust it. So why don't we do the actual best thing? Make voting open for multiple days. If you need to vote in person, then it only makes sense to keep polls open long enough so that no matter what job you do, no matter what shift you work, you should be able to find the time to vote. IMO, making the polls open 24 hours for 3 days, or maybe 9 AM to 9 PM for a week, should cover basically everyone except those that travel a lot for their jobs (ie, long haul truckers), but they'd be voting absentee anyways.

soco 2y ago
Switzerland has mail-in voting since forever and it's trusted. Was the mail-in voting an issue in the US before Trump?
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  Mail-in voting is not uniformly allowed in all states in the US, because US elections are a primarily state responsibility (with oversight and constraint placed by the federal government). So the short answer is "yes; states disagreed on whether it was secure." The longer answer is that states that were doing it didn't have any mathematically-detectable fraud patterns distinguishing them from states that didn't, and states that just started in 2016 didn't seem to have any major systemic execution issues that would suggest fraud occurred.
shadowgovt 2y ago
We haven't done it in the US, but technically there isn't much stopping Congress (especially after the New Deal) from passing a law banning various forms of commerce on election day. We even have a category for it now: essential workers would be the only ones who aren't banned.

soco 2y ago

Switzerland has mail-in voting since forever and it's trusted. Was the mail-in voting an issue in the US before Trump?

shadowgovt 2y ago
Mail-in voting is not uniformly allowed in all states in the US, because US elections are a primarily state responsibility (with oversight and constraint placed by the federal government). So the short answer is "yes; states disagreed on whether it was secure." The longer answer is that states that were doing it didn't have any mathematically-detectable fraud patterns distinguishing them from states that didn't, and states that just started in 2016 didn't seem to have any major systemic execution issues that would suggest fraud occurred.

shadowgovt 2y ago

We haven't done it in the US, but technically there isn't much stopping Congress (especially after the New Deal) from passing a law banning various forms of commerce on election day. We even have a category for it now: essential workers would be the only ones who aren't banned.