It is never that simple. Voting by mail only works for people with reliable mailing addresses, mooting the homeless vote. At best, the US needs a combined system that will allow everyone the chance.
Address verification is likely only to verify that you're at the correct precinct that you were registered for. You don't have to have a permanent address to vote.
That could be. But, they demand my DL before reciting my name and full address. So...? I have no idea.
All these GOP schemes to prevent voting fraud or reduce costs all seem tailor made to reduce turnout of groups that are presumed to be largely non-GOP.
There is a segment of both parties that feel that people who disagree with them shouldn't have a voice - unfortunately it seems this segment managed to get a lot of control in the GOP while on the left side they mostly get relegated to the loony bin.
Both parties are super guilty of gerrymandering, but "voter fraud" isn't a proportionally important issue and it's been abused by some strategists to implement wide spread voter discrimination.
Sure, and motor-voter (which automatically registers people to vote when they get driver's licenses)[1] doesn't help people who don't drive. But both do enable a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise vote to do so. I would like to see the homeless be able to vote, but we're talking about 500K people in a country of 330M, so we shouldn't overstate the impact that would have.
A vote by mail loses the guarantee of secrecy (someone could check your mail and ensure 'consequences' for your vote, or even for voting in general), safety (someone could have coerced your vote, and because it was by mail they could verify 'your' vote was what they decided it to be), intelligent decision making (a mailed vote is mailed in advance, something could have changed by election day. This actually happens quite often, especially in primaries) and election integrity (someone in the mail could have messed with your vote).
Mailed votes are just a bad idea. The simpler and better solution is to have the US federal elections run by a federal non-political commission + a federal voting holiday. Disabled people could use mobile election vans and/or a proxy-vote system like in the UK but limited to them (very imperfect; but safer than a mailed vote, since the proxy's vote is still secret).
This state's rights issue was, thankfully, already lost when laws were passed to combat widespread racial discrimination[1] in voting. Those laws have been repealed but the federal government has a good historical justification for enforcing more laws around voter accessibility.
1. Among other requirements, the ADA likely requires that polling places and some proportion of booths be wheelchair accessible and mandates the accessibility of braille ballots.
Isn't it at least a little scary to you to nationalize the voting process? Would you want a Voting Administration with presidential appointees deciding how to register voters, collect votes, and count them?
I guess other countries do things that way with lots of observers, etc. to try to avoid the worst problems. But I'm not excited about my state/county giving up its role (which it seems to do just fine) under the theory that the federal government will do better in some other state and county that doesn't currently do a good job.
If you want to elect folks to federal offices directly, then you need a federal vote. The current system requires an awful lot of trust to be invested into states that have consistently shown themselves unable to justify being trusted.
That's correct. "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators."
Technically all elections are state/local elections. We don't directly vote for anything at the federal level. Each state has full control over who which presidential candidate it sends its electoral college votes to. That's why states like Virginia can decide to send all of theirs to the winner of the national popular vote.
yes, conservatives also believe that slavery was a states rights issue, the civil war was "the war of northern aggression", women's health care is a federal issue, and lgbt people don't have any rights.
We need to stop acting like this hypocrisy and bigotry is a reasonable PoV, and stop bargaining with them. Conservatives and the GOP have a proven track record of bad faith, and any claims they make should be presumed false or misleading until proven otherwise.
"Conservatives" are not a single monolithic block of people, and labeling them as such doesn't help in any way.
Both sides regularly use "States' Rights" if and when convenient. When your side has a majority in Congress, go for a national bill; when your side has a majority in a state, go for a state bill. So it's easy to point to hypocrisy, but I tired long ago of "hypocrisy" as an argument. It's not convincing anyone, it's just a way to score points.
But States' Rights are a legitimate principle, too. The EU member states have rights (including the right to leave, apparently). I think retaining some autonomy is a good hedge against the risk of bad things happening at a higher level of government.