Please recommend this diary.
Please bookmark this diary.
Please send this diary to everyone you know.
Personally, I have voted absentee here in Vermont for the last 22 years.
For those with less time for details, voting by mail is broken down very nicely here:
For more detail on voting by Mail in each of the 50 states:
While it is important to keep track of Trump’s lies and attacks, we really need to be thinking more about November, and how we can best get out the vote.
And here is a good Atlantic story on on voting by mail during the pandemic:
Voting should not be a matter of life and death.
APRIL 14, 2020
Political scientist at the University of Oregon
Last week, Wisconsin voters faced a dismaying choice: Exercise their right to vote or protect their health and safety. As the coronavirus spread, so many voters applied for absentee ballots before the April 7 primary that election officials couldn’t send them out in time. The legislature had refused to postpone the election; the courts turned down Governor Tony Evers’s attempt to change the rules by executive order. So voters who hadn’t received their absentee ballot had to go to the polls despite the pandemic; the plight of poll workers went unaddressed. Wisconsin’s case was described as “a narrow technical question about an absentee ballot,” according to the 5–4 majority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court. It was not. It was a matter of life and death.
The outcome—voters in masks standing in long lines at the polls—was all the more tragic and senseless because states have the option of conducting elections entirely by mail. Five states already do: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington. Critics of voting by mail, most notably President Donald Trump, have portrayed the system as insecure and skewed. “Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans,” Trump recently wrote on Twitter. I am a political scientist who has studied Oregon’s pioneering system in great detail, and my research suggests that these complaints are baseless.
States with upcoming primaries this year should convert them into vote-by-mail elections. Even with Bernie Sanders’s withdrawal from the Democratic presidential race, many important state and local primary contests are yet to be decided. Every state should adopt the system before the November general election. Wisconsin’s experience should not be repeated.
Also, states are starting to waive excuse requirements for absentee ballots!
EXPANDING ABSENTEE VOTING — Northam, Virginia’s Democratic governor, signed a series of bills that make sweeping changes to expand voter access in the state. Virginia is now a no-excuse state for absentee voting, striking a requirement that voters who want to vote absentee have a valid excuse. Other changes made in the bills are making Election Day a state holiday, striking the state’s photo ID law (voters can now show student IDs, utility bills and more) as well as implementing automatic voter registration for DMV customers. The governor’s office has a summary of the bills here.
The state's new election laws means that 34 states and the District of Columbia now allow for at least no-excuse absentee voting in all circumstances, according to a tally from the National Conference of State Legislatures. Most of the remaining states that don't allow for no-excuse absentee voting, which some election officials and advocates say is absolutely necessary for people to vote safely during the times of the pandemic, are in the Northeast or South. Most of the traditional swing states already have some level of absentee, mail-in voting — but the number of people taking advantage of that option will almost assuredly grow across the board.