The Electoral College
Prompted by my GOTV efforts in this election, I've started to think about the Electoral College and the role it plays in our elections. As we all know, it's possible for someone to become president while losing the popular vote, and this is certainly a bug, not a feature. However, I've been thinking about other consequences of the system, and not
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In any case, I don't think that an election should turn on "something big happen[ing] just before election day". Because what if it happened just after? That's inefficient and unpredictable to my mind. Conversely, I'm pretty sure that by having a ballot sitting in front of you, most Oregon voters just _make up their minds sooner_. I've spent the last two months sitting on my hands waiting for election day to roll around.
Which is all to say that I don't think that any of your criticisms are particularly well focused on vote-by-mail. Most of them apply at least as well to absentee voting --- indeed, because Oregon is entirely mail-in, we do it pretty well, complete with anonymizing tamper-proof envelops (something that wasn't included in my California absentee ballot). Dead people don't vote in Oregon since they don't receive ballots, and every name is checked (if you want to go tampering with ballots in any other state, just submit a bunch of absentee cards for other people). In fact, coersion has not been a problem in Oregon, although a lot of us worried it would be.
Vote-by-mail makes phone-banking easier, since when ObamaOffice calls, I can just say "I've already voted" and never have to hear from them. As for obsessing over exit polls, is your argument that vote-by-mail makes for worse decision making or for worse reality TV?
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I'm not saying that a change in how politicians attract the electorate is inherently bad, I'm saying that *this* change would be bad, and if it were not one in the morning I would attempt to explain myself better. As for something big happening, reporters (and juries, etc) can act if they have a solid deadline, but without knowing when the public is going to vote it is difficult to coordinate their maneuvers. Again, not inherently bad, but can you imagine what would have happened if the Sarah Palin public-vetting process was cut short by a month?
As for vote-by-mail versus absentee, the difference is scale (and, sadly, socioeconomic factors, as those voting absentee are skewed toward highly-educated, less like to be coerced, etc). Oregon also has advantageous demographics that the rest of the country does not share. I'm totally on board that this is a great idea for Oregon, but the rest of the country? *gulp*
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