this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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If you have the opportunity, vote-by-mail is genuinely awesome also. I qualify in my state because I'm chronically ill, and it's one of the few silver linings. I get a ballot in the mail every time an election happens like clockwork, I have time to do my research and it's significantly harder to forget.
In California you no longer need to apply for vote-by-mail, they mail a ballot to everyone and you can either mail it back, no stamp needed, or drop it in any ballot box, or take it to any polling place on the day to hand it to a person.
It's so much better to be able to sit there at a computer or on your phone, looking up the candidates for the smaller offices and marking them as you go.
And you can get phone notifications for when your ballot is received and counted.
Oregon too. There's also a service where you just give it your voting registration details and an email address and it emails you:
Same in Michigan. Voters here passed a ballot initiative with a bunch of voting rights protections in 2022, and now you can sign up to be mailed a ballot once, and they keep sending it for every election if that, if you check the box saying you want that. It makes it SO easy to vote, especially for smaller elections that I ordinarily probably wouldn’t pay attention to
Isn't it amazing how much more likely we are to participate in our democracy once the barriers are taken away?
It's almost like the people whose wealth doesn't depend on showing up to a job every day wanted to be the only ones making decisions.
It took a pandemic for the states to even try it, and some states have pulled it back.
Wisconsin's been fun with voting rights restrictions. After the repeal of the repbulican drawn & super-biased districts that jerrymandered the state to shit, republicans have been pushing ballot measure after ballot measure to try to suppress voters, because if they can't win by cheating one way they'll find a different way to cheat
The MAGAs are attacking the election system in my state (Georgia) so hard that, at this point, I'm starting to worry about mail-in ballots being fraudulently thrown out because of false claims of signature mismatch.
Yeah, I plan to do in-person early voting rather than take my chances with mail-in voting.
I voted in Colorado a couple years back. I had moved here several months before. I had all the documents to prove residency. 3 months after the election, I got a letter saying that a (conservative asshole) group had challenged my vote and it was thrown out, and was told I could go to court and prove I was legal to vote but also if I did so it threatened me with jail or fines if it didn’t work. It was 3 months after the election and it had all been counted already, so why tf would I do that?
Yeah I live in a state turned red by gerrymandering and brain drain (Ohio) and I won’t vote by mail because I’m not certain it’ll be counted if the legislature doesn’t like what the mail votes do. Our legislators love ignoring our votes.
This is automatic in WA state, and I absolutely love it. Never missed a local or federal election.
During covid my state allowed anyone to sign up for permanent mail in voting ans I love it. Wish every state had it. It’s so convienent.
people in America forget to vote?
Yes. Often. Our elections are sporadic and weird. And also on a Tuesday
ok ngl that's pretty inconvenient on a Tuesday...
Yeah, major elections are always the Tuesday following the first Monday of November. Every year but most of the time it’s only significant every two years with President every four (it’s easy to remember because it happens to fall on leap years). Minor elections can happen three other times in the year (I think it’s the Tuesday following the first Monday of February, May, and August, but February and August are so rare that it was blatant election fuckery when my state had a ballot initiative vote last august). Oh and primary elections vary by state and party and are basically never on a major or minor Election Day but tend towards Tuesdays.
Oh and we don’t get off work for it. You can also be purged from the voter rolls without notice.
Fellow Ohioan spotted?
Yeppppp, thank fuck that attempt to subvert the will of the people failed. I hate our state government
Fellow Ohioan spotted?
Originally they did that because people would have to travel for so long to vote and it would give the candidates time to travel as needed, but we now can send information effectively instantaneously and traveling across the country can be accomplished in half a day by plane
A huge portion of people don’t think about it at all.
do they watch/read any news?
A large number in fact would rather consume entertainment exclusively than be informed at all.
See also: the American diet
Well, no. They might see 5 minutes of packaged and processed snippets a day and maybe glance at a headline, if they read or watch news it’s stuff like celebrity gossip.