Typically, absentee ballots are considered suspicious because for a century or so they were used to stuff ballot boxes. They still are.

Why, during the Franken Coleman recount, I met an elected official who told us (bragging) that when he was in the military, his job was to take all the absentee ballots from the ship he was on and fill 90 percent of them out for the Republican candidates (for president, generally) and 5 percent or so for the Dem (to make it look good), and toss the rest. This was standard practice. That is par of the reason that people think military people vote for Republicans all the time. Thank you Richard Nixon.

Therefore, Absentee ballot procedures traditionally have been changed to increase security from this sort of practice.

The ballots Coleman wanted counted were all the suspicious ballots that were put aside because no one could be certain that they were valid. If you vote with absentee ballots in Minnesota or most states, you have to follow certain rules and if you screw the rules up you don’t get counted.

Oregon has done something entirely different. Oregon has decided to make voting something that is not by default a thing that happens in the voting booth. In Oregon, Absentee ballots is not a backup procedure.

Now, in many states, and this is very troubling to me, absentee ballots have become something used by more and more people for whatever lame ass excuse they have for not going out on election day. And in this context, when elections are close, you seriously risk having your vote not matter because if you are lazy enough to not vote on voting day you may also have been lazy enough to not pay attention in school and you are probably a moron who can’t fill out a form. So guess what. You threw away your vote.

(Well, the chances of this conjuncture of moron-osity happening are not great, but it certainly happened to a few thousand Minnesotans this year.)

I assume Oregon has some … system … that makes this all go away. Either that or you are all a bunch of morons. I’ve heard people in Oregon are smart, so I’m betting for the former. But it seems that if your system has distance voting as your default, then you would not have a system with a lot of room for error. Good luck with that.

Meantime, yes, I believe that the US Constitution requires that all the votes be cast on the same day. We happen to interpret “casting” the vote as something that is done for you in the case of an absentee vote, and that is allowed because people have special requirements like they are on some Navy ship somewhere, or at a embassy, or ill, or whatever. But now, the absentee vote is used for people who just don’t feel like going to vote on election day. This could probably be challenged.

I prefer that people vote on the same day. There are good reasons the founding dead white guys specified this. I also think we should be able to do this on the internet.

But it needs to be done with open source software.

Seriously though, don’t all polling places (and our OR county elections offices) have folks on hand to assist the however disabled?

By the way, has anyone read the US constitution lately? None of the absentee votes are valid for President.

This, by the way, is one of the reasons that I never vote absentee. You should not either.

I disagree. I see nothing wrong with absentee voting. I find the whole process of standing in line a pain in the behind. It’s ridiculous.

I had permanent (no fault) absentee status in my last state (for about 20 years). They even published a voter’s guide for every election, something MN should be doing too. I could sit in the comfort of my home and vote deliberately and with data at my fingertips. Oregon even has 100% mail-in voting.

You’re probably just as likely to not have your vote counted either way. As long as you get the absentee ballot in in time (hello? OK, I know this may be an issue for military personnel; but they don’t have achoice anyway — if they are away, they have to vote absentee) and fill in the blanks properly on the absentee ballot cover (nothing more than name, address and signature, plus witness signature) you shoud have no worries. The ballot itself is exactly the same as those used at the “regular” polling places.

Much was made about rejected absentee ballots. This has not been balanced by a discussion of rejected, uncountable, erroneous, etc. regular ballots and the prevention of voting at the regular polls. Some persepctive is needed here.

Bated breath. Not baited.