A Drawback to Voting by Mail

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

This past week I happened to catch a special episode (a subscription preview) of the podcast "Pollercoaster" which is hosted by Dan Pfeiffer and is part of the Crooked Media group of shows.  I have recently became a regular and avid listener of "Pod Save America" which is the flagship program of Crooked Media, Inc., and the episode of "Pollercoaster" that I heard this week ran in place of a regular "Pod Save America" presentation so that the "Pod Bros" could have Labor Day off.

The episode of "Pollercoaster" that I heard contained interviews with a couple of well known national pollsters, Celinda Lake and Terrence Woodbury, and was entitled "State of the Race."   Ms. Lake, a longtime pollster and political strategist with the Democratic Party spoke first, and because I had attended a small panel discussion in which she was a participant her many years earlier, I was particularly interested in hearing her views and concerns regarding the Harris-Trump presidential race. She and Woodbury, as well as the moderator, all stressed the likely closeness of the race in November, but it was her thoughts on mail-in voting that really caught my attention.

Celinda Lake noted that as much as Donald Trump has ranted and roared over mail-in voting, that Republicans are nevertheless encouraging their voters to use the process when they can.  Trump may see the concept as somehow unfair to him, but the GOP writ large views it as a way to get more of their people to actually vote.    But, she also noted one big potential drawback.  With mail-in voting husbands and wives will often sit down together to mark their ballots, and the husband could exert undue pressure to force the wife to vote like he does - and Trump has an advantage with male voters.

"Hey, what are you doing?  You can't vote for her.  We're Trump voters!"

I hadn't thought about that before, but voting together at the kitchen table could lead to family discord or blatant coercion.  There is a reason that voting booths are constructed for use by one voter at a time!

(Note:  The panel discussion in which I had heard Celinda Lake talk about polling took place in a small art gallery in Key West, Florida, in February of 2007,  It was held just as the Democratic primary race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton was beginning to take shape.  The event was one of several workshops presented as part of an educational cruise that was jointly sponsored by the National Association of Social Workers and Ms. Magazine.  It was nine months later when I started this blog, and I didn't get around to writing about the cruise until a year after that - in October of 2008.  The panel discussion referred to here today was covered on October 18, 2008, in a posting entitled:  "The Feminist Cruise:  Part Two (Key West)."