[EL] Difference between absentee and all mail in balloting

[John Tanner]

Rick, as always, makes an important point  But there’s another angle.  An important feature of no-excuse absentee voting is that under normal circumstances it does not involve use of the mails.  It usually translates into early voting as election officials set up extra early/absentee locations to divert demand from the central election office, where officials have other work to do.   Texas already has - has long had - a vigorous early voting program. 

I think the 2020 primary experience shows that switching the large volume of early voters — if memory serves, 60% of all GA black voters cast early ballots after their voter ID law allowed  no excuse absentee voting, and that caused trouble enough.  Shifting such a volume to mail ballots can create logistical nightmares and overwhelm the voting system.   It certainly did in DC this year, and in CA where 10% of mailed ballots were rejected according to press reports, and I have read of similar debacles elsewhere. Across the country. 

In my long experience, election offices, like other bureaucracies, are ... inelastic.   It usually takes three elections for any new election procedure to be implemented    smoothly — as designed.   

Let’s hope for landslides all around. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jul 15, 2020, at 7:22 PM, Pildes, Rick <rick.pildes at nyu.edu> wrote:
> 
> 
> When I spoke at this conference a month ago, I said that some of the political conflict over “vote by mail” results from terminological confusion between “no-excuse absentee voting” and what might be called true “vote-by-mail,” such as used in WA, OR, and a few other states.  The functional difference is that the former requires the voter to request an absentee ballot while in the latter the state mails out absentee ballots to all eligible voters. 
>  
> It’s easy to find supporters and critics who sound as if they are defending or criticizing one of these options when they are actually addressing the other option.  As an example of someone defending no-excuse absentee voting who sounds as if they are supporting true VBM, look at Jocelyn Benson’s, Michigan’s Secretary of State, recent op-ed entitled “Vote By Mail Worked in Michigan.”  That certainly sounds like she is defending true VBM, but she is not.  She is only defending and explaining no-excuse absentee voting (I don’t know if she chose this title, since many publications do not permit authors to choose their titles, a practice that has resulted in many unfortunate titles that misrepresent the actual piece).
>  
> Similarly, some critics of true VBM may sound as if they are attacking no-excuse absentee voting, or be taken to be doing that, when they are not.  Professor Michael Morley, for example, has written strongly against true VBM for this fall’s election, but supports no-excuse absentee voting. 
>  
> In addition, no-excuse absentee voting is not enormously controversial.  By my count, there are 28 states that now have no-excuse absentee voting (another 5 states use true VBM).  And the list of these no-excuse absentee ballot states includes many that would be considered “red states.” I won’t list them all, but some are KS/ID/WY/SD/ND/NC/NV/NE/MT/GA/AK (a few of these now have divided government).
>  
> To be sure, some states do strongly oppose no-excuse absentee voting, with TX being a current, prominent example. 
>  
> But I do think at least some of the political conflict in recent months results from people thinking defenders of no-excuse absentee are defending true VBM and critics of true VBM being thought of as hostile to no-excuse absentee voting. 
>  
> Best,
> Rick
>  
> Richard H. Pildes
> Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law
> NYU School of Law
> 40 Washington Square So.
> NYC, NY 10014
> 212 998-6377
>  
> From: Law-election [mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Charles H Stewart
> Sent: Wednesday, July 15, 2020 6:22 PM
> To: James Bopp Jr <jboppjr at aol.com>; rhasen at law.uci.edu; law-election at uci.edu
> Subject: Re: [EL] Difference between absentee and all mail in balloting
>  
> At the risk of entering a debate over nomenclature that appears to be at cross purposes, let me provide a perspective, as a social scientist who has been a fly on the wall of election administration for the past twenty years.
>  
> Jim defines absentee balloting below as a situation in which a registered voter must apply for a ballot.  The problem is that once states started abandoning the requirement that you be _absent_ on Election Day, the adjective “absentee” no longer applied.  It was as simple as that.  People who are concerned that incorrect adjectives would convey incorrect information about the nature of the policy started encouraging people in “no-excuse absentee” states to stop using the adjective “absentee.”  It’s inaccurate and a misnomer.  A few states, such as Florida, took the clue and changed its statute so that it no longer refers to “absentee” voting and refers to “mail ballots” instead.  (A similar thing is happening these days in thinking about what to describe what Colorado, Oregon, Washington, etc. do.  Because most people in those states return their ballots in person, “vote by mail” doesn’t seem descriptive.  There’s a push to call it “vote at home” instead.)
>  
> I, for one, find the NCSL classification of mail/absentee systems to be very useful, and is the one I almost always use, with the caveat that there is a lot of variability within each legal regime.  If people are interested in a useful summary categorizations, rather than weaponizing the admittedly inconsistent use of terminology that describes what is happening when the government mails a voter a ballot, I would encourage people to start there.  The NCSL site, in fact, has a helpful discussion of this nomenclature issue on this page:  https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/absentee-and-early-voting.aspx.
>  
> -cs
>  
> From: Law-election <law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu> On Behalf Of James Bopp Jr
> Sent: Wednesday, July 15, 2020 3:45 PM
> To: rhasen at law.uci.edu; law-election at uci.edu
> Subject: [EL] Difference between absentee and all mail in balloting
>  
> I just don't understand why the MSM and the Democrats say " There’s no difference between mail-in voting and absentee ballot voting. "
> 
> The big and obvious difference is that, in absentee balloting, the registered voter must apply for the ballot. This contemporaneous application requirement serves many anti-voter fraud purposes.  By requiring an application, the vote must, usually, swear that they are alive, their current address. and that they are still eligible to vote.  Furthermore, this creates an audit trail that is examined by election officials to compare the applications with the subsequent mail in ballot.  This provides substantial protections.
>  
> All mail in balloting skips the application and just mails ballots to all voters on voter registration rolls, usually those on the "active" registration roll.  Of course there are two big problems here, first, we lose the benefits of the application, and second, ballots are mailed to many voters who are dead, moved or ineligible, flooding the state with ballots for the unscrupulous to scoop up and vote. 
>  
> And the Democrats want to mail ballots to those on the "ineligible" registration list.  These are people who have not voted in the last 2 elections and election officials have mailed them a post card that was returned as undeliverable. So more ballots are flooding the state -- sent to people we already know are not there.
>  
> Now, it may be that one would like to argue over whether an application is helpful to prevent voter fraud or whether it is prudent to send ballots to addresses of voters we already know are not there, but surely it is indefensible, but maybe from the Democrats perspective useful, to say there is not difference between the two.  Jim Bopp
>  
> In a message dated 7/15/2020 11:29:32 AM US Eastern Standard Time, rhasen at law.uci.edu writes:
>  
> “Florida GOP doctors Trump tweet to solve mail-in voting problem”
> Posted on July 15, 2020 8:01 am by Rick Hasen
> 
> Politico:
> President Donald Trump’s harsh rhetoric against mail-in voting is causing a big problem for Florida Republicans, who once dominated the practice here.
> 
> So the state GOP came up with a solution: They doctored one of Trump’s tweets on the issue to remove the stigma.
> 
> In a mass-solicitation designed to boost flagging interest in registering to vote by mail, the Republican Party of Florida featured a Trump tweet from June 28 that praised absentee ballots but that had his opposition to mail-in voting strategically edited out.
> 
> “Absentee Ballots are fine. A person has to go through a process to get and use them,” Trump said in the tweet. The rest of the quote was blurred out: “Mail-In Voting, on the other hand, will lead to the most corrupt Election is USA history. Bad things happen with Mail-Ins. Just look at Special Election in Patterson, N.J. 19% of Ballots a FRAUD.”
> There’s no difference between mail-in voting and absentee ballot voting. Trump is claiming a distinction that does not exist, all the while exaggerating the fraud risks, prevalence and effects of voting by mail.
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