71–80 of 311 posts
I have never seen a compelling argument for why this should not be allowed.
Security, fraud, and lack of a physical paper trail.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The federal government does not have the jurisdiction to change how people vote in elections. That is determined by the states.
This is true but only half the story. The federal government is able to incentivize vote-by-mail through federal funds. This has been the center of much debate. Speaker Pelosi says she will push for these funds in any next round of stimulus.
Oh, I thought the headline meant remote voting for, you know, voters, not Senators, and was very surprised to see an R next to one of the sponsor's names. The bill's just to let the Senate vote remotely. I'd imagine most of the interesting nuance is about "presence" and quorum-making. This is not about expanding remote/by-mail voting in elections, which Republicans have generally been strongly against, including and…
I used to be wowed by this kind of hypocrisy, but lately I've concluded that these things are happening so frequently because the voters have proved to them sufficiently that they will take no heed provided it "hurts the other team." Everything on the news looks ironic now because the political class has realized there's almost no limit to what they can get away with.
The Senate is a deliberative body, and its primary work requires debate . Already too much gets done behind closed doors and outside the public eye. Dispensing with even the pretense of open debate is somewhat concerning.
Can someone point to any concrete results of debate on the Senate floor from anytime in the last 20 years or so? I am genuinely asking, because it seems to me that the value of debate on the floor is like you said only pretense at this point. Mandating that pretense and in turn making the Senate slower to react in an emergency seems like an actively harmful requirement.
Yes, is this basically what C-SPAN serves as? The hours of Senators reading speeches, is that the "deliberation"? Serious question. I never thought of the Senate as a "deliberative body", not that it shouldn't be.
I'm against this resolution, because it opens up the possibility of senate voter fraud. What's to stop dead senators from voting? Or senators from voting twice? This may even make it possible for former felons in the senate to vote!
The Senate is a deliberative body, and its primary work requires debate . Already too much gets done behind closed doors and outside the public eye. Dispensing with even the pretense of open debate is somewhat concerning.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably not, but mainly due to scale. The number of people who vote remotely is so few that the amount of fraud you can get through without being detected makes it not worth the effort.
Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and Utah conduct their elections entirely by mail. This covers perhaps 10+ million registered voters. At what level would you consider the scale sufficient for these effects to appear?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, but it could have been an amendment, or (more likely) some incentive-based "we're not making you, you'll just get less money if you don't" thing.
Plenty of precedent for that sort of thing, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law > States had to agree to the limit if they desired to receive federal funding for highway repair.
Those hours spent on the road are hours that people could be spending with their family, at work, or doing whatever else they like.
According to the Census Bureau, 128 million today commute daily in the US. Let's say they spend an average of 30 minutes on the highway at a top speed of 65 mph. If we raised the speed limit by 50% (to 97.5 mph), then the average commute would become: 30 / 1.5 = 20 minutes.
Each individual would save 10 minutes a day. With 252 working days a year, that's 2520 minutes saved a year -- which is a total of 42 hours saved per year. That's a lot of time. Across 128 million commuters, we'd save 5.376 billion hours per year. If people earned an average of $20/hour, that would be $107 billion of added economic activity per year. Whereas even 1% of gas savings would not be more than $2 billion saved per year.
They're making sure they can vote... but yet no one has worked to make sure all of the American people can vote safely (Read also: mail in ballots for everyone).
The constitution leaves a lot of details about voting to the states. This would probably require an amendment. A power grab like that from the federal government would probably be turned down by even blue states, especially considering the current president.
Oh, I thought the headline meant remote voting for, you know, voters, not Senators, and was very surprised to see an R next to one of the sponsor's names. The bill's just to let the Senate vote remotely. I'd imagine most of the interesting nuance is about "presence" and quorum-making. This is not about expanding remote/by-mail voting in elections, which Republicans have generally been strongly against, including and…
Imagine a DDoS attempting to prevent quorum or affect vote outcomes! Lots of edge cases to iron out.
Additionally the Senate does recognize vote assignment as legitimate so it'd be reasonable to support pre-registration of voting or the allowance of a voting window.