For all the concern in recent years that U.S. democracy is on the brink, in danger or under threat, a report out Tuesday offers a glimmer of good news for American voters worried that casting a ballot will be difficult in 2024.
Put simply, the new data shows that voting in America has gotten easier over the past two decades. More voters have the ability to cast a ballot before Election Day, with the majority of U.S. states now offering some form of early in-person voting and mail voting to all voters.
"Although we often talk in a partisan context about voter fraud and voter suppression and whether voters have access to the ballot, the reality is, over the past 25 years, we've greatly increased the convenience of voting for almost all Americans," said David Becker, the founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), which authored the new report...
The data shows that, despite real efforts by some Republican-led legislatures to restrict access at the margins, the trend in the U.S. since 2000 has been toward making it easier to vote: Nearly 97% of voting-age American citizens now live in states that offer the option to vote before Election Day.
"The lies about early voting, the lies about voting machines and efforts in some state legislatures to roll back some of the election integrity and convenience measures that have evolved over the last several decades, those efforts almost all failed," Becker said. "In almost every single state, voters can choose to vote when they want to."
Forty-six states and Washington, D.C., offer some form of early in-person voting, the report tallied, and 37 of those jurisdictions also offer mail voting to all voters without requiring an excuse...
In 2000
In 2024
Infographic via NPR. If you go to the article, you can watch an animation of this map that shows voting availability in every election since 2000.
There are some political trends that show up in the data. Of the 14 states that don't offer mail voting to all voters, for instance, 12 have Republican-led legislatures.
-via NPR, March 19, 2024. Article continues below.
But maybe the more striking trends are geographic. Every single state in the western U.S. has offered some form of early and mail voting to all voters since 2004, according to the data. And those states span the political spectrum, from conservative Idaho to liberal California.
"It's really hard to talk about partisanship around this issue because historically there just hasn't been much," Mann said. "We've seen voting by mail and early in-person voting supported by Republican legislatures, Democratic legislatures, Republican governors, Democratic governors. We see voters in both parties use both methods." ...
In 2020, New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts all made changes to make voting more easily accessible, which have since partially or fully become permanent. Delaware is currently embroiled in a legal fight over whether it can implement early and mail voting changes this election cycle as well.
The South, with its history of slavery and Jim Crow laws, has long lagged behind when it comes to voting access. The CEIR data shows that, although some states have slowly started expanding options for voters, generally it is still the most difficult region for voters to cast a ballot.
As options nationwide have become more widely available, voters have also responded by taking advantage.
In the 2000 election, 86% of voters voted at a polling place on Election Day, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
In 2020, during the pandemic, that number dropped to less than 31% of voters. It went back up in 2022, to roughly half of the electorate, but was still in line with the two-decade trend toward more ballots being cast early.
...in reality, Becker says, more voting options actually make elections more secure and less susceptible to malicious activity or even human error.
"If there were a problem, if there were a cyber event, if there were a malfunction, if there were bad weather, if there were traffic, if there were was a power outage, you could think of all kinds of circumstances. ... The more you spread voting out over a series of days and over multiple modes, the less likely it's going to impact voters," he said...
-via NPR, March 19, 2024
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i keep seeing anti-labour memes about how they're just tory lite and listen. listen i fucking get it ok they suck ass they do. sure kier starmer is flawed as fuck and labour is diluted conservatives sure. but diluted. is still LESS. if this election is gonna be a pick the lesser of two evils situation u gotta nut up and fucking vote for the lesser evil. i don't give a shit. srsly I dont care. I know it sucks I know its bad but u can't. u can't sit it out. u can't protest vote. it won't work. and the tories will stay in power
no matter how much u can hate on starmer (and trust me I hate on him a LOT) he will be better than the tories.
blair was also a labour leader considered tory lite and u kno what? yeah he sucked ass but he got Some shit done. the NHS flourished a lil under his leadership u can hate him all u want for not having been a left enough leader but he was a damn sight better than the tories wudve been
so when the election rolls around u gotta fucking suck it up buttercup. I hate seeing this kind of anti-labour rhetoric even in meme form cus it's just gonna either discourage voting especially among the left, or it will completely split the vote. and then we will b truly fucked.
vote smart. vote labour if u have to. unseat the tories and fucking get them the fuck out of power
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Postal Service considers rural mail slowdown after election
Trump appointee, Louis DeJoy, needs to go. Tell your Congress Critters!
If you can't safely contact them in person, here are some other options:
Call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask to be connected to the representative of your choice.
Here is one that will send your reps a fax: https://resist.bot/
To get your Critters' numbers to call direct: https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member
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The journalists have been a problem since the screened but they’ve just gotten worse by sticking themselves into fandom discourse when they don’t need to be there at all. This is what one of them tweeted and it made me so angry:
https://x.com/kat__writes/status/1796683035514921368?s=46
https://x.com/kat__writes/status/1796683230629757217?s=46
because why are you speaking like this is an objective idea held by the whole fandom? countless fans loved the scene and loved bucktommy. If it didn’t resonate with some that doesn’t mean it’s objectively bad writing. I also cannot for the life of me understand how these scenes are being compared because in one, two of the guys are best friends not a couple and in the other, you have a canon couple and if a canon couple is talking to each other, obviously their flirting will be bold and outright and possibly sexual. The writers want us to know the couple is flirting. They don’t want us to dig deep for it in subtext. These are grown men in a relationship one of whom has been shown to very much enjoy sex and have a kinks already established. God forbid he flirt with his boyfriend and his boyfriend flirts with him beyond a little bat of the eyelashes.
yeah, that's not a journalist, that's a fan who happens to get paid to write about the show. and this is on her professional account? where she posts her actual interviews? babes no, that is literally why you have different personal and professional accounts. it doesn't need to be private/secret, but when you start putting your own biased opinions right next to what is supposed to be unbiased reporting, you lose credibility. if i can't trust you to separate your own feelings on a fucking twitter page then i can't trust you to do so in an interview.
the only people who have expressed an issue with the scene are ones who have found an issue with every aspect of tommy and bucktommy. not sorry, but i'm not listening to the opinions of people who have already decided they aren't going to like the scene before it happens, and can't even admit that.
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i love to see you politics posting cause how else am i gonna find out about hungarian elections? all the news i can see is about. France.
no yeah real noone talks abt hungary online except the impressive amount of mentally ill tumblr users that are on here for some reason. u guys are getting an extremely skewed idea of what the average hungarian's politics are tho most ppl here are insane right wingers it's just that anyone who isn't is 100% on tumblr
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