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billfriedman9987 t1_iujqstj wrote

I actually just posted this in another reply so here it is.

With an absentee ballot, you provide information, you sign a form, and they mail one to you to fill out. It is uniquely tied to you and your name and signature is associated with the vote. You requested the ballot and turned it in. This is fine and has been a common practice for years for those who are out of state or medically unable to vote. There is also the no-excuse category, which again, I'm fine with, but it follows the same process but there is no actual reason other than convenience for this service. This is ok.

What is not ok is universal mail in ballots, where they are sent to every single voter. This sounds good on paper, right? But it has a lot of issues associated with it.

Because of widespread inaccuracies in a state’s voter registration records, a state that sends ballots to all registered voters will inadvertently send ballots to persons ineligible to vote or others with fake registrations, invalid registrations, outdated registrations, and to the deceased.

Furthermore, with this type of carpet-bomb approach, it lends to ballot harvesting which if you are unfamiliar is the practice of collecting ballots from large groups of people and submitting them en-masse, often times empowered by political candidates and in doing so alter the legitimacy of those ballots.

There is a reason that no industrialized nation condones universal mail in ballots. This is not just a democratic or republican issue; this is an issue that impacts all of us.

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Boating_with_Ra t1_iujzucc wrote

But this isn’t what happens in Pennsylvania. Mail-in voting in PA is the exact same process as absentee voting. They don’t mail everyone a ballot. They mail everyone a notice that you can vote by mail and give you instructions to do so, and if you want to apply for a mail-in ballot, you follow all those steps you described for absentee ballots.

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