Yay For Voting By Mail!

(Seeing as I'm apparently on a bit of an election kick today...)

I am currently registered in California as what most people would probably call a "permanent absentee voter", though that term is going out of style apparently and they are now calling it "vote by mail". Essentially it means instead of going to a polling place on Election Day and filling out the ballot in realtime, I get my official ballot in the mail at least a few weeks prior to the actual election.

This enables me to fill out the ballot at any time after I receive it and mail it in, or simply drop off the complete form at the polling place by 8 PM on Election day. My partner Matt is also registered to vote by mail, and in the past few elections, he's just dropped off both our ballots at the polling place (which is usually pretty close to where he works, making that a very convenient option for us).

I don't know if all states, or even most, allow people to register to vote by mail permanently -- but I remember being quite surprised and pleased to find out that in California, anyone who wants to can do this.

For those of us who see voting as useful¹, being able to vote by mail is a tremendously enabling option -- even though I've technically been able to vote since I was eighteen, I very rarely voted until I was in my mid-twenties (when I registered as permanent absentee) because the logistics of getting to polling places were so complicated for me, and because I knew the polling places would likely be crowded and filled with the kind of bustle that often renders me unable to think properly.

At any rate, vote-by-mail ballots are definitely something I would recommend to anyone who has difficulty with crowds or noise, or who doesn't deal well with schedule disruptions. They are a great example of something that feels like a very useful "accommodation" (especially for people with brains and sensory systems like mine) but that has managed to come into being without all kinds of weird stigma attached to it.

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1: I know some reading this may be either (a) anarchists who see voting as a band-aid at best and "buying into the [oppressive and flawed] system" at worst, or (b) people who see it as better that fewer people vote, because so many (in their opinion) are insufficiently educated.

If you fall into either of those categories you are certainly entitled to your opinion, but I am not writing this to initiate an argument over the utility of voting. I'm planning on voting personally, and everything I've written here should be construed as speaking primarily to those who also already plan on voting -- not to those who think voting is pointless. Hence, I am not interested in arguing in the comments about whether people should vote in the first place, and won't take people up on such arguments if they try to initiate them.

This is not because I am somehow unwilling to listen to viewpoints other than my own, but because I think such a discussion would derail attention from the actual issues that prompted me to write this in the first place. And those actual issues (human rights, civil rights, discrimination, power, people having a voice, etc.) would exist regardless of what system, formal or informal, happened to be in place, because they are all very human issues that go right to the core of our evolved brains and social-organizational tendencies.