Rep Gabbard & Davis introduce bill to eliminate ballot harvesting

[Darthpi - Crush the Oligarchy]

A parting shot before she takes her rightful place as Fox News token Democrat.

[SInNYC]

It depends on the exact phrasing of the bill, but its probably a good thing. But I do wonder how many of the red avatars criticizing it would be that way if it were some mainstream D introducing it. As it is, Gabbard could introduce a bill raising the minimum wage and Ds would criticize it.

[Storr]

Ballot harvesting should be for individual states to decide if it is allowed.

[Anni di ghiaccio]

I am still trying to understand what the hell "ballot harvesting" means, you know.

 Ballot harvesting is when you hand somebody your ballot to turn it in. Republicans used it to cheat in elections in North Carolina by tampering with people's ballots. Democrats mostly use it to get older Latino voters to give their ballots to young people who they trust in their community who then turn it in. Republcians really want to get rid of it because the idea of a community getting together to leverage their vote terrifies them. Instead of going after people who cheat the process the want to get rid of an option people use for voting.

Ballot harvesting seem like a horrible idea to me? How would you verify a voter's real identity? How would you make sure that the vote inserted is really waht the person wanted?

There seem to be tons of problems with that model.

Unless I am misunderstanding something, having some person run around a neighbourhood collecting votes, trusting them to "keep them safe" and correctly delivering them to a polling station sounds like an easy way to have problems.

Then again I do believe that the only "safe" way to vote is with paper ballots, in person, counted manually. (like UK elections for example). But that has to be one of the worst systems to vote designed, almost on par with online voting.

Once the ballot is sealed and signed the poll workers should be able to match the signature to the one associated with the voter, that's not a big problem. It's really no different than sending it through the mail, and it's also not an especially common practice. See my post above, I got crickets as a response.

This bill is designed for one purpose only: to help sow distrust in the entire VBM process and delegitimize a Trump loss.

Oh I actually do think vote by mail is fine for the most part. You should go to an actual post office to send the ballot instead of just dropping it off at a mailbox but vote by mail is perfectly ok in my opinion.

My issue with ballot harvesting would be an scenario where, for example someone goes through an old people's retirment home, with old people who let's say, are no longer in a sharp state of mind to put it some way, and votes on their behalf with the old people not really knowing what is happening. These old people would have their vote taken away from them with them not really knowing what is happening.

(Ironically such an scenario would probably benefit Republicans and not Democrats)

Glad to see it is an uncommon practice, though it's still one I think is bad.

As an aside question, wouldn't this be a state by state issue and not a federal one? If this (presumably) is a Republican initiative, why haven't republican controlled states banned ballot harvesting? (or have they already done it?)

You're missing one of the main points of my comment, which is that all ballots have to be signed and sealed. If somebody steals ballots before they get to the recipient and fakes the signatures, then the signatures wouldn't match the signatures on record where the voter is registered.

To answer your question about the states, several have banned it. No fraud has really been found except for a case in North Carolina where local Republican activists were charged and this led to the results being thrown out and a special election in the 9th Congressional District, won by homophobic scumbag Dan Bishop. So the fraud was caught due to the signatures not matching up, and therefore the safeguards that were in place did their job.

[Del Tachi]

Gabbard is totally correct here