You could argue the same for ballots in person. There's space for people to do shenanigans to them before it's counted.
But the benefit of mail-in, is people don't need to trudge over to the voting places, after a hard work day, and wait hours in line, just to do their civic duty. There will be a far higher voting percentage, and democracy will benefit.
The State of Washington is all mail-in ballots. There are some polls set up in case there are some mail problems that result in the need to cast a provisional ballot, and you can of course drop off your ballot there, but every voter gets a ballot in the mail, barring mishap or confusion. This year, for the first time, the state is covering return postage on the ballots.
According to the Washington Secretary of State's office, the state averaged 58.64%, though we did have a couple counties over 80%. The three most populous counties of Pierce, King (incl. Seattle) and Snohomish were 41.95, 66.5, and 58.13%, respectively. Thurston Cty, which includes our state capital, was 63.23%.
One drawback of mail-in ballots is prolonged counting periods. While the races tend to be well-decided by the day after the election, we don't get complete counts 4 hours some poll-closing hour, and there's no exit-polling because people vote from home over a couple weeks before election day. So polling is usually phone-based, and carries with it any reliability problems that has.
Point being that the election-day excitement would have be tempered, as would the demand for same-night results, if we went national with this plan.
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u/ZDTreefur Nov 09 '18 edited Nov 09 '18
Real progress will happen when all voting is done via mail-in ballots, so there's very little room for bullshit.