[nradov]

Yes I read the article. There's nothing pragmatic about it. There are no major flaws in the mail voting system, at least not in CA. Registration takes only a few minutes and then they mail you a ballot every election. If voters can't be bothered to do that then it seems unlikely they would actually show up and wait in line at a polling place.

If companies want to give employees an extra holiday then sure, go ahead. But that won't increase voter participation.

[dingaling]

> There are no major flaws in the mail voting system

In general terms postal voting, and any method for voter-not-present polling, is open to coercion and intimidation.

That's why voting-in-person in booths remains the primary method, even in countries such as the UK where voting papers are logged against the identity of the voter ( it takes a court order to de-seal that information ).

[donutz]

It's definitely open to coercion and intimidation, so in some respects I'd consider that a "major" flaw. But is it a widespread enough problem to rule out the paper ballot? Is there a systemic problem of spouses voting for differently-minded spouses, or employers requiring their employees to turn in their blank ballots, or things like that?

[jcranmer]

The rate of voting fraud for in-person voting in the US seems to be around 1 per 10 million votes cast or so. The rate for voting fraud for vote-by-mail seems to be around 1 per 100,000 or so.

In terms of invalidated votes, in-person seems to have about 1% of ballot rejections, whereas vote-by-mail has about 2% rejections. (No data on how many of those rejections were inappropriate and how many were appropriate that I could find). Citation: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-b...

[wutbrodo]

I don't see how this is relevant to the context of the conversation: the perspective of the individual nonvoter being incentivized to vote.