[xzlzx]

Among other reasons, this is in big part happening due to a large push toward mail-in voting come the next Presidential election. It seems that certain political entities think they will suffer at the poles due to the fact that it’ll be easier to vote.

easier voting -> more votes -> undesirable outcomes

[ethanbond]

Republicans. It is Republicans who think more people voting means they will lose.

Now is a time to be absolutely frank and direct with our words and our actions. Our democracy is not invincible. It is not inevitable. It is teetering on the brink and if it falls, there is absolutely no guarantee that it will recover.

There is exactly one party who is trying to undermine the most basic principle of our democracy, and that is the Republican Party.

Every fallen democracy had an election that was unexpectedly their last.

Vote, donate, discuss accordingly.

[refurb]

Hate to break it to you, but it’s more complicated than that. You may want to do some reading from the other side, you sound like you’re parroting Democratic talking points.

NYTimes disagrees with you that higher turnout always helps the Democrats.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/upshot/2020-election-turn...

Typically increased turnout helps the Democrats, but that’s not necessarily true now.

[ethanbond]

Edited to remove the 3 words, “because it’s true,” that projected from past elections into this election.

You’re right that the Republicans may very well be hurting themselves by disrupting Americans’ right to vote. They might be hurting themselves. They are definitely hurting our democracy.

[evan_]

Then why are republicans fighting so hard to keep people who should legally be allowed to vote from voting? They can’t be doing it because they think it will hurt their chances.

[happytoexplain]

Being able to produce a counterargument does not qualify the original argument as "parroting talking points".

[dane-pgp]

> NYTimes disagrees with you that higher turnout always helps the Democrats.

Well maybe Trump doesn't read the NYTimes:

"Trump says Republicans would ‘never’ be elected again if it was easier to vote"

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/30/trump-republ...

[eclipxe]

You’re wrong.

[zanny]

Note that just because Republicans are wrong (and boy are they) does not make Democrats right. Democratic administrations, even with majorities to pass legislation, have done nothing to correct much of the anti-democratic processes in the US including elections being on a non-holiday Tuesday, absentee ballots being limited / restricted and operating state-by-state, the persistence of first past the post voting being the least representative form of election, the continued existence of the electoral college and senate, nothing to correct the loss of voting rights for felons, and more.

The Republicans are the wrong answer, but by and large and consistently for the last 80+ years the Democrats have not been the right answer. The US has a void (many voids, but this one in particular is most problematic) of a labor / workers party. Democrats are liberals and republicans are conservatives, both of which represent capital interests. This lack of representation is structurally foundational to US government and has been intentional since the founding over 2 centuries ago, and its also intentional that the only path to correcting it without violent revolution is a supermajority of states to compel an amendment to fix it. Which is in and of itself a nondemocratic process because a supermajority of states have a minority of the population.

[ethanbond]

I am no fan of the Democratic Party and strongly feel we need to overhaul our systems in a big, big way. Part of that overhaul cannot be, however, a period without democracy. It is much easier to maintain, modify, or destroy a democracy than it is to create one.

Here you have the Republican establishment, not insurgents, actively trying to disrupt Americans’ right to vote for their leadership.

[zanny]

This is presuming you have democracy now, when studies that show that congressional policy has no correlation to the interests of the people at large but a meaningful correlation to lobbyist money.

In a republic, representatives are meant to be selected as being a stand in for the majority of their electorates will and interests. In aggregate, such authentic representatives would then be proposing policy and instituting an agenda corresponding to the desires of a majority of the public at large.

Studies show a supermajority support in the US now for drug war deescalation, universal health care, military disarmament and an end to the Middle Eastern occupations, more equitable tax code, and more. Policies a substantial minority in congress are even remotely interested in considering let alone passing.

Its not much of a democracy if the people you elect, in aggregate, are not actually acting in the interests of their electorate. At all. Its a democracy in name, but a plutocracy in practice, and to be fair this was the structural intent of the founding documents. Having a senate is undemocratic. Having an electoral college is undemocratic. First past the post voting is undemocratic. Historically, huge restrictions on suffrage, the barriers put in place for newly suffraged peoples to actually vote, general disenfranchisement / difficulties in voting, the lack of regulation on campaigning, etc are in place to perpetuate and empower the plutocratic power duopoly regime incumbent political institutions exist to protect.

But thats where conservative mindsets come from in the first place. Content with the status quo and in fear of things going wrong that they don't want to try to do right. And its not an unfounded fear - centuries of evidence shows regime change never works, especially when its against the interests of a societies incumbent ruling class. But I just don't like maintaining the veneer delusion that America is anything close to truly democratic, or has ever really been.

[dane-pgp]

> Democratic administrations, even with majorities to pass legislation, have done nothing to correct much of the anti-democratic processes in the US including elections being on a non-holiday Tuesday, absentee ballots being limited / restricted and operating state-by-state, the persistence of first past the post voting being the least representative form of election, the continued existence of the electoral college and senate, nothing to correct the loss of voting rights for felons, and more.

How many of those issues could the Democrats have fixed without passing a constitutional amendment? Such a change requires more than a Democratic administration with a legislative majority.

[zanny]

Just from the list in my post:

> elections being on a non-holiday Tuesday

Simple majority legislation

> absentee ballots being limited / restricted and operating state-by-state

Really easy to correct with conditional budget funding on the basis of providing / enabling absentee / mail in voting, again a simple legislative majority on a budget bill

> the persistence of first past the post voting being the least representative form of election

First past the post isn't codified into the constitution. The only part that requires constitutional amendment is the electoral college but that can already be overriden with a combination of popular vote interstate compact and said statewide elections being held in an approval or score voting way.

This one requires policy change that is federal law currently mandating first past the post, but its not constitutional. Additionally this could be done in a way that removes federal simple majority requirements in federal elections and instead uses federal funding incentives to pressure states to adopt more democratic election systems because that would face a lot less blowback from anti-democracy interests.

> the continued existence of the electoral college and senate

This is the one that absolutely requires amendment. The electoral college can largely be made obsolete with the interstate compact but little can be done about how undemocratic the senate is. That is wholly intentional though - the senate was introduced to give less populated states more influence in government and to largely provide capital a numerically small wing of congress to control more easily monetarily.

> nothing to correct the loss of voting rights for felons

Felony voting rights are currently state by state, and again federal law or financial incentives could be used to pressure states to not deprive felons of their voting rights, or it could be codified as law with simple majority.

So of my stated points 4/5 can be done with just regular law, much of it done with just budgetary law requirements.

[nxc18]

The craziest thing about the whole situations is there actually isn’t much evidence that vote by mail favors republicans; and yet they’re willing to degrade postal service to a country more reliant on it than ever, just for a small hope of electoral advantage.

Edit: article in case anyone isn’t convinced (I was skeptical at first, given the tone of the discussion): https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/us/politics/vote-by-mail....

[olliej]

The concern for the GOP isn’t that democrats favor voting by mail, it’s that the GOP has worked hard to make it as hard as possible to vote in person in targeted (eg non Republican) communities.

Widespread vote from mail defeats that as it means that their selective polling closures, and arbitrary barriers to voting in person, go away

[xzlzx]

This is a great point. That makes a lot of sense.

[bobsoap]

Out of curiosity, what are those barriers?

[jeffbee]

The simplest one is just selectively closing polling places, or the related practice of requiring local jurisdictions to fund their own elections, which selectively impacts poorer cities or counties. Next comes voter identification laws which selectively target people who are less likely to have government identification cards (black voters are four times more likely to lack both a drivers license and a US passport compared to white voters). Finally you simply throw ballots from the disfavored precincts directly in the trash. County officials can do this in several ways, by not delivering working machines or official ballots to certain precincts, by forcing precincts to vote on provisional ballots that officials have the authority to ignore, and by subjectively discarding mailed ballots because the signature "doesn't match" according to a non-reproducible process.

[ethanbond]

Photo ID laws is a big one.

Closing polling stations in minority communities.

[_-david-_]

Can you name a first world county that doesn't have voter id laws?

[ethanbond]

How about this: if Republicans were pushing voter ID laws plus a comprehensive plan to get IDs to every American who wishes to vote, I suspect no one would have any problem with such a proposal.

As it stands now, there are large groups of Americans for whom getting a photo ID is a non-trivial task. People without birth records, people who can’t take time off work to go to the DMV, people who don’t know that they go to the DMV to get an ID, people who live hours from the nearest DMV, so on and so forth.

Let’s make sure they all get a chance to vote. Any proposal that aims to do that, I believe, would not have the support of the Republican Party, because the Republican Party is uninterested in increasing voter turnout.

[dane-pgp]

Australia and (most of) the UK:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_Identification_laws#Exam...

[AndrewBissell]

There are other reasons they want to disband the post office beyond just its impact on voting. If they replace it with private entities it becomes easier to surveil and censor the mail, for instance.

[leesalminen]

The USPS takes an image of the front of the envelope for every first class letter sent in the USA. It's a safe bet that they're doing OCR of the recipient/sender addresses and store it in a database. USPS Informed Delivery is just a customer-facing result of that long standing program.

[mindslight]

The USPS includes legal protections against your mail being opened, and a mandate to serve everyone. Whereas private companies can be fully employed for government surveillance (third party doctrine), sell bulk records to commercial surveillance companies (equifax, google, etc), as well as refusing service to whomever they like (ala MC/Visa).

I agree this isn't the overriding concern of those trying to destroy the USPS, but it's surely a nice bonus.

[AndrewBissell]

Yes, the goal of surveillance is already being advanced in many ways under the existing structure of the USPS.

[AnimalMuppet]

There was this incident a while back. Some psychopath sent letters threatening to kidnap young females, rape them, and kill them. He talked about how he had rigged out a van to facilitate this.

His letters got turned over to the FBI, since they would up in different states. Turns out that each stamp has microprinting on it that identifies it. Given the stamp, they were able to identify which post office it was sold at. They guessed at approximately when it was sold, and then from the security cameras they identified the letter writer.

So... explain how private entities are going to do more surveillance?

[AndrewBissell]

Private entities will just have terms of service which say they're entitled to open and inspect your mail for any reason they see fit. mindslight's comment above does a good job of touching on some other ways it will enable more surveillance.

But yes, the postal service has already been turned to this purpose in many ways and the days of "gentlemen don't read each other's mail" are largely over.

[chapium]

its really bizarre that we allow this while in other countries you get fines for not voting

[cure]

There's actually only a small minority of countries where voting is a duty, not a right. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_voting. Still, it's interesting to think about how that would change the dynamics in the US. I think there is a lot to be said for making voting compulsory.

[cozzyd]

What if everybody got $20 for voting? It would be mostly equivalent to a $20 fine for not voting, but different psychologically.