General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I think it's time to severely limit absentee ballot voting [View all]Retrograde
(10,133 posts)Going by your id, you should be familiar with California's election process. We went to vote-by-mail on request early this century (prior to that anyone could request a mail-in ballot on a per-election basis). We seem to accomplish this without a lot of the problems that come up elsewhere, even though we have the largest voting population. Maybe it has something to do with having Democrats in charge.
We've had early voting as far back as the late 1970s when I moved here - but you had to go down to the county building during business hours. That's fine if you live nearby and can get the time off to do it. It's only recently that we've had limited early voting hours in other places in my county - and then only the weekend or two before the election. Extending early voting sounds good in theory, but in practice there are a load of logistical issues to solve.
Santa Clara county seems to have vote by mail under control. The ballots are sent out when they're supposed to go out, there's a way of tracking whether they've been returned and have been accepted, the county registrar's office responds promptly when problems do come up (I once did not receive my ballot in the mail. After a few weeks, I emailed them, explained the problem, and got a substitute along with instructions on what to do if the original ever showed up). The last two election cycles the county even paid the postage! And this is a county with close to a million registered voters.
No, it's not the idea of mail-in voting that's bad - it's the way it's being implemented in certain GOP-run areas. The only drawback I see is that it does take more time to verify and count all the ballots - but isn't counting every valid vote what we want?