Symbols of white supremacy flew proudly at the Capitol riot – 5 essential reads

Rioters carrying white supremacist symbols were inside the Capitol on Jan. 6. AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta

Jeff Inglis, The Conversation

Many Americans are trying to gain a deeper understanding of what was behind the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and, most importantly, why it happened.

At The Conversation, we asked several scholars who study symbols – including ancient Norse images and more recent flags from U.S. history – to explain what they saw during the riot, and what those symbols mean.

Reading their work, it’s inescapable that white supremacy is a common thread connecting many of the different groups who converged on Washington that day. Here are five articles from The Conversation’s recent coverage, explaining what many of the symbols mean.

A man carries the Confederate battle flag in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, between portraits of senators who both opposed and supported slavery. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

1. The Confederate battle flag

Perhaps the most recognized symbol of white supremacy was the Confederate battle flag.

“Since its debut during the Civil War, the Confederate battle flag has been flown regularly by white insurrectionists and reactionaries fighting against rising tides of newly won Black political power,” writes Jordan Brasher at Columbus State University, who has studied how the Confederacy has been memorialized.

He notes that in one photo from inside the Capitol, the flag’s history came into sharp relief, as the man carrying it was standing between “the portraits of two Civil War-era U.S. senators – one an ardent proponent of slavery and the other an abolitionist once beaten unconscious for his views on the Senate floor.”

Gadsden flags fly at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

2. The yellow Gadsden flag

Another flag with a racist history is the “Don’t Tread On Me” flag. It was designed by slave owner and trader Christopher Gadsden when the American Revolution began, as Iowa State University graphic design scholar Paul Bruski writes.

“Because of its creator’s history and because it is commonly flown alongside ‘Trump 2020’ flags, the Confederate battle flag and other white-supremacist flags, some may now see the Gadsden flag as a symbol of intolerance and hate – or even racism,” he explains.

It has been adopted by the tea party movement and other Republican-leaning groups, but the flag still carries the legacy, and the name, of its creator.

A gallows symbolizing the lynching of Jews was among the hate symbols carried as crowds stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in Washington, D.C. Shay Horse/NurPhoto via Getty Images

3. Powerful anti-Semitism

Another arm of white supremacy doesn’t target Blacks. Instead, it demonizes Jewish people. And there were plenty of anti-Semitic symbols on display during the riot, as Jonathan D. Sarna explains.

He is a Brandeis University scholar of American anti-Semitism, and describes the ways that “[c]alls to exterminate Jews are common in far-right and white nationalist circles.” That included a gallows erected outside the Capitol, evoking a disturbing element of a 1978 novel depicting the takeover of Washington, D.C., along with mass lynchings and slaughtering of Jews.

A man known as Jake Angeli, who has been arrested for his role in the Capitol riot, wears a horned hat and tattoos of Norse images. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

4. Co-opted Norse mythology

Among the most striking images of the riot were those of a man wearing a horned hat and no shirt, displaying several large tattoos. He is known as Jake Angeli, but his full name is Jacob Chansley, and he has been arrested for his role in the riot.

Tom Birkett, a lecturer in Old English at University College Cork in Ireland, explains that many of the symbols Chansley wears are from Norse mythology. However, he explains, “these symbols have also been co-opted by a growing far-right movement,” and Chansley appears – from other tattoos he wears – to be among them.

Birkett traces the use of Norse symbols back to the Nazis, and points out that they are a form of code hidden in plain sight: “if certain symbols are hard for the general public to spot, they are certainly dog whistles to members of an increasingly global white supremacist movement who know exactly what they mean.”

The yellow-and-red striped flag of the defeated American-backed Republic of Vietnam flies at the U.S. Capitol insurrection Jan. 6. Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

5. An outlier, of sorts

Another flag was prominent at the Capitol riot, one that doesn’t strictly represent white supremacy: the flag of the former independent country of South Vietnam.

But Long T. Bui, a global studies scholar at the University of California, Irvine, explains that when flown by Vietnamese Americans, many of whom support Trump, the flag symbolizes militant nationalism:

“[S]ome Vietnamese Americans view their fallen homeland as an extension of the American push for freedom and democracy worldwide. I have interviewed Vietnamese American soldiers who fear American freedom is failing,” he explains.

Editor’s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives

Jeff Inglis, Politics + Society Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

What is the 'boogaloo' and who are the rioters who stormed the Capitol? 5 essential reads

Rioters mass on the U.S. Capitol steps on Jan. 6. Samuel Corum/Getty Images

Jeff Inglis, The Conversation

In the wake of the insurrection on Jan. 6, the U.S. is bracing for the possibility of additional violent demonstrations and potential riots at the U.S. Capitol and state capitol buildings around the nation. While many were in Washington, D.C., ostensibly to protest what they wrongly saw as a stolen election, their presence – and their actions – reflect a larger set of goals that American militants are hoping to seize upon to take more extreme action.

Several articles by scholars of violent extremism, white supremacy and militias explain the path down which these rioters and insurrectionists seek to take America. The Conversation U.S. has compiled excerpts of five of those articles, seeking to explain the rift that has torn wide open in American society.

A gallows, in part symbolizing the lynching of Jews as part of a massive race war, was among the hate symbols was erected as crowds stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in Washington, D.C. Shay Horse/NurPhoto via Getty Images

1. What is the ‘boogaloo’?

“QAnon followers, the Proud Boys and the other far-right and alt-right groups that converged on Washington imagined that they were living out the great fantasy that underlies what many consider to be the bible of the white nationalism movement, a 1978 dystopian novel, ‘The Turner Diaries,’ by William Luther Pierce,” writes Jonathan D. Sarna, a scholar of anti-Semitism at Brandeis University.

“The novel depicts the violent overthrow of the government of the United States, nuclear conflagration, race war and the ultimate extermination of nonwhites and ‘undesirable racial elements among the remaining White population,’” he explains.

This widespread and extremely violent conflagration is often called the “boogaloo” by its adherents.

2. Militants seek to accelerate conflict

Amy Cooter, a sociologist at Vanderbilt University who has extensively studied the American militia movement, reports that some far-right groups have adopted what is called “accelerationism,” which she explains as “the idea that inducing chaos, provoking law enforcement, and promoting political tension will hasten the collapse of Western government … making room for them to establish a whites-only country.”

Rioters occupy the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

3. They aren’t alone

It might be tempting to think that these violent radicals are just individual malcontents, but Alexander Hinton, an anthropologist at Rutgers University – Newark, explains that “these people are not alone,” as the Capitol mob makes clear.

“Most far-right extremists are part of larger extremist communities, communicating by social media and distributing posts and manifestos,” he writes. “Their messages speak of fear that one day, whites may be outnumbered by nonwhites in the U.S., and the idea that there is a Jewish-led plot to destroy the white race. In response, they prepare for a war between whites and nonwhites.”

4. They have supporters in the military

White nationalists – people who believe whites are under attack in America and therefore seek to establish a whites-only nation where nonwhites do not have civil rights protections – “find new members and support in the U.S. military.”

That’s one conclusion of political scientists Jennifer Spindel at the University of New Hampshire, Matt Motta at Oklahoma State and Robert Ralston at the University of Minnesota, who note that “Since 2018, white supremacists have conducted more lethal attacks in the United States than any other domestic extremist movement.”

The connections are deep, the scholars explain: “The links between the U.S. military and white nationalists date back to the 1990s, with many believers seeing military service as an opportunity to hone their fighting skills and recruit others.”

Two members of the Proud Boys wear military-like gear at a rally in Oregon in September 2020. John Rudoff/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

5. And there are supporters in the police

White supremacist groups also seek to recruit police officers, writes Vida Johnson, a law professor at Georgetown University: “With their enormous power, department-issued weapons and access to sensitive information, … police departments have become attractive recruiting grounds for white supremacist groups.”

As far back as 2006, the FBI warned about this problem, she explains. But even 15 years later, Johnson says it is hard to find out how many officers are involved.

However, she notes that “since 2009, police officers in Florida, Alabama and Louisiana have been identified as members of white supremacist groups. Meanwhile, more than 100 police departments in 49 different states have had to deal with scandals involving racist emails, texts or online comments sent or made by department staff,” including one this month involving a high-ranking officer in the New York Police Department.

Editor’s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives

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Jeff Inglis, Politics + Society Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Why does the Electoral College exist, and how does it work? 5 essential reads

Missouri Republican Sen. Roy Blunt signs an official tally of the Electoral College votes from the 2016 presidential election, in January 2017. AP Photo/Zach Gibson

Jeff Inglis, The Conversation

On Dec. 14, the members of the Electoral College will meet in state capitols across the country and cast their ballots for president and vice president. The expected vote total: 306 for Democrat Joe Biden and 232 for Republican Donald Trump. It will be their votes – not the votes of the nearly 160 million Americans who cast ballots on or before Nov. 3 – that will determine whose presidential term will begin on Jan. 20, 2021.

Over the past several months, The Conversation has asked scholars of the Electoral College to explain how this system was developed and how it works and to describe whether – and how – it gives advantages to certain people based on where they live. We’ve collected highlights from several of those articles here.

These 11 men agreed on a compromise that created the Electoral College. The Conversation, from Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-ND

1. Where did it come from?

Delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 debated three potential ways to pick a president, explains Purdue University civics educator Philip J. VanFossen: “election by Congress, selection by state legislatures and a popular election – though the right to vote was generally restricted to white, landowning men.”

The idea of a popular election – where the candidate who got the most votes won – was attractive. But the 11 committee members realized the Southern states would not agree, because they wanted to wield more political power based on their ownership of enslaved people.

They ultimately settled, VanFossen writes, on “a system of electors, through which both the people and the states would help choose the president. [It] was a partly national and partly federal solution, and … mirrored other structures in the Constitution.”

That system assigned two U.S. senators to each state, and a number of U.S. representatives based on states’ relative populations – and a number of electors equal to the sum of the senators and representatives. No state would have fewer than three electors, no matter how few people lived there.

2. Benefiting less populous states

That system means voters in different states are treated differently, writes LaGrange College political scientist John Tures.

As he explains, “some critics have complained that the Electoral College system encourages candidates to ignore voters in smaller states like Oklahoma and Mississippi, instead focusing on campaigning in big states like California and New York, which have lots of electoral votes.”

But in reality, the Electoral College gives an advantage to voters in less populous states, Tures finds: “[V]oters in small states have more Electoral College votes per capita than larger, more diverse states, using several different measures – and therefore more power to choose a president than they would have in a national popular election.”

He notes that a similar system for electing Georgia’s governor was overturned in 1963 in a U.S. Supreme Court “ruling that it violated the fundamental principle of ‘one person, one vote.’”

3. A matter of race

Ignoring that principle has repercussions today, reports political scientist William Blake of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County: “The system continues to give more power to states whose populations are whiter and more racially resentful.”

His analysis of states’ racial breakdowns and electoral votes finds that “states whose people exhibit more intense anti-Black attitudes, based on their answers to a series of survey questions, tend to have more electoral votes per person.” That’s a measure of how many electoral votes a state has in proportion to the number of people who live there.

Statistically, he found that “if two states’ population numbers indicate each would have 10 electoral votes, but one had substantially more racial resentment, the more intolerant state would likely have 11.”

4. Vulnerable to interference

The Electoral College makes American democracy more vulnerable to hackers, fraudsters and others who might seek to alter the results, explains mathematician Steven Heilman at USC Dornsife.

Noting that “changing just 269 votes in Florida from George W. Bush to Al Gore would have changed the outcome of the entire [2000] national election,” Heilman highlights just how close so many national elections have been over the course of the country’s history.

As he details, “The Electoral College divides one big election into 51 smaller ones – one for each state, plus the District of Columbia. Mathematically speaking, this system is built to virtually ensure narrow victories, making it very susceptible to efforts to change either voters’ minds or the records of their choices.”

Maine’s electors take their oaths before casting their ballots in December 2016. Derek Davis/Portland Portland Press Herald via Getty Images

5. Is there a better way?

Westminster College political scientist Joshua Holzer describes the various ways that different countries pick their presidents, and “found better human rights protections in countries that elect presidents who are supported by a majority of voters – which is something U.S. Electoral College does not guarantee.”

He explains plurality voting – a method widely used across the U.S., in which the person who gets the most votes wins. He also looks at runoff voting, with “potentially two rounds of voting. If someone wins more than half the votes in the first round, that candidate is declared the winner. If not, the two candidates with the most first-round votes face off in a second round of voting.”

After laying out other variations, including contingent voting and ranked-choice voting, that let voters express more nuanced preferences, Holzer concludes with a description of an effort that is underway right now, to effectively convert the Electoral College system into a nationwide popular vote.

But, as he observes, that would come with its own problems – just different ones.

Editor’s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives.

Jeff Inglis, Politics + Society Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Election 2020: 89 articles to teach you about how American elections really work

How did the U.S. political system get the way it did? jsmith/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Catesby Holmes, The Conversation; Jeff Inglis, The Conversation, and Naomi Schalit, The Conversation

Editors’ note: In a world transformed by a pandemic, few of the fundamentals in Americans’ lives – schools, jobs, even how to shop for groceries – have remained the same. The same is true with the election, where the most basic of the institution’s elements – how, where and when to vote, among them – have changed.

When The Conversation US’s politics editors met to figure out how to provide readers with coverage that would be useful and informative, the approach was clear: a civics lesson. Over the course of roughly 100 articles, our scholars have explained how the U.S. election system works, retold the history of how it got that way and examined what effects and significance those mechanisms have for the nation today.

Here, our team has collected all of these articles, divided thematically, from the very beginning of campaigning through what happens after Election Day itself.

Eugene DePasquale, left, Democratic candidate in Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District, in Harrisburg, Penn., Sept. 19, shows that even the traditional handshake with voters has changed in pandemic-era campaigns. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Campaigning

Basic elements of political campaigning

• The two-party system is here to stay
• Civility in politics is harder than you think
• George Washington was silent, but Trump tweets regularly – running for president has changed over the years
• The clothes make the candidate: The sartorial politics of this year’s key Senate races
• Why do people believe con artists?
• Angry Americans: How political rage helps campaigns but hurts democracy

Campaigning in a pandemic

• Presidential campaigns take flight in the age of the coronavirus
• Amid pandemic, campaigning turns to the internet
• From recording videos in a closet to Zoom meditating, 2020’s political campaigns adjust to the pandemic

Campaign tactics

Campaigns send lots of texts. Jake Olimb/DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Images

• Why you’re getting so many political text messages right now
• What’s the best way to get out the vote in a pandemic?
• Trump’s law-and-order campaign relies on a historic American tradition of racist and anti-immigrant politics
• Trump and Biden ads on Facebook and Instagram focus on rallying the base

Political conventions

• Democratic, Republican parties both play favorites when allotting convention delegates to states
• Political conventions today are for partying and pageantry, not picking nominees
• Pandemic alters political conventions – which have always changed with the times
• What are political parties’ platforms – and do they matter?

Money in politics

Cory Booker can use money left over from his presidential campaign to run for reelection to the Senate. AP Photo/Patrick Semansky

• Election 2020 sees record $11 billion in campaign spending, mostly from a handful of super-rich donors
• Money talks: Big business, political strategy and corporate involvement in US state politics
• When presidential campaigns end, what happens to the leftover money?

Candidates’ debates

• Think presidential debates are dull? Thank 1950s TV game shows
• How to make presidential debates serve voters, not candidates
• Lessons on wrangling candidates from the masterful moderator of presidential debates, Jim Lehrer
• Don’t underestimate the power of the putdown in a presidential debate
• Dominance or democracy? Authoritarian white masculinity as Trump and Pence’s political debate strategy
• VP debates are often forgettable – but Dan Quayle never recovered from his 1988 debate mistake

Media and public perception

President Elizabeth Keane of ‘Homeland’ is a craven politician who has a ruinous tenure in office. Showtime

• Political bias in media doesn’t threaten democracy – other, less visible biases do
• Watch more TV to understand the backlash against the women in the running for vice president
• The candidate you like is the one you think is most electable
• Why is it so hard for atheists to get voted in to Congress?

Polling

• When noted journalists bashed political polls as nothing more than ‘a fragmentary snapshot’ of a moment in time
• Epic miscalls and landslides unforeseen: The exceptional catalog of polling failure
• Political forecast models aren’t necessarily more accurate than polls – or the weather

Vice presidential and Cabinet picks

Rep. Bella Abzug speaks to a crowd of some 10,000 at ‘The War is Over’ celebration in Central Park on May 11, 1975, where she called for unconditional amnesty for Vietnam War draft dodgers in Sweden and Canada. Bettman/Contributer/Getty

• For Biden, naming Cabinet before election would be a big risk
• Don’t expect Biden’s pick of Kamala Harris for VP to make or break the 2020 election
• VP pick Kamala Harris stands on many women’s shoulders, especially Bella Abzug’s
• Before Kamala Harris became Biden’s running mate, Shirley Chisholm and other Black women aimed for the White House

International perspectives

• Russian media may be joining China and Iran in turning on Trump
• What could replace the Electoral College?
• What US election officials could learn from Australia about boosting voter turnout

A voter casts a ballot at a mobile voting station in California in May 2020. AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez

The process of voting

History of voting

• The right to vote is not in the Constitution
• There’s nothing unusual about early voting – it’s been done since the founding of the republic
• 1864 elections went on during the Civil War – even though Lincoln thought it would be a disaster for himself and the Republican Party
• A summer of protest, unemployment and presidential politics – welcome to 1932

Voter suppression

Milwaukee voters wait in a social-distancing line, some wearing masks, before voting in the state’s spring elections on April 7. AP Photo/Morry Gash

• Closing polling places is the 21st century’s version of a poll tax
• Why the Supreme Court made Wisconsin vote during the coronavirus crisis
• Trump’s encouragement of GOP poll watchers echoes an old tactic of voter intimidation
• Georgia’s election disaster shows how bad voting in 2020 can be
• It takes a long time to vote
• How sexist abuse of women in Congress amounts to political violence – and undermines American democracy

Many voters face obstacles

• Citizenship delays imperil voting for hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the 2020 election
• As few as 1 in 10 homeless people vote in elections – here’s why

Specific voting groups and blocs

Asian American voters leave a Temple City, California, polling place in 2012, in the state’s first legislative district that is majority Asian American. Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

• With Kamala Harris, Americans yet again have trouble understanding what multiracial means
• Kamala Harris represents an opportunity for coalition building between Blacks and Asian Americans
• Asian Americans’ political preferences have flipped from red to blue
• Want the youth vote? Some college students are still up for grabs in November
• How to reach young voters when they’re stuck at home
• Will German Americans again put Donald Trump over the top in the presidential election?
• Indian Americans can be an influential voting bloc – despite their small numbers
• With Harris pick, Biden reaches out to young Black Americans

How to vote

Voting is important. Make sure you know how to do it! Gregory Rec/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images

• Why there is no ethical reason not to vote (unless you come down with COVID-19 on Election Day)
• Iowa caucuses did one thing right: Require paper ballots
• How to make sure your vote counts in November

Voting in person

• Voting while God is watching – does having churches as polling stations sway the ballot?
• Poll workers on Election Day will be younger – and probably more diverse – due to COVID-19
• 19th-century political parties kidnapped reluctant voters and printed their own ballots – and that’s why we’ve got laws regulating behavior at polling places

Voting by mail

In most states, ballots must be mailed in official envelopes. AP Photo/Hans Pennink

• Timing, signatures and huge demand make mail-in voting difficult
• Mail-in voting’s potential problems only begin at the post office – an underfunded, underprepared decentralized system could be trouble
• Some states more ready for mail-in voting than others
• 6 ways mail-in ballots are protected from fraud
• Research on voting by mail says it’s safe – from fraud and disease
• Mail-in voting lessons from Oregon, the state with the longest history of voting by mail
• Mail-in voting does not cause fraud, but judges are buying the GOP’s argument that it does
• Voting by mail is convenient, but not always secret
• How to track your mail-in ballot

Staff of the House of Representatives review Illinois’ Electoral College vote report in January 2017. Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Aftermath

• How might the campaign’s endgame be disrupted? Here are five scenarios, drawn from the history of election polling

Electoral College

• Electoral College benefits whiter states, study shows
• The Electoral College is surprisingly vulnerable to popular vote changes
• Supreme Court reforms, strengthens Electoral College

Election integrity

Every vote counts – but what does it mean when election results go to court? Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images

• ‘Stolen’ elections open wounds that may never heal
• If Trump refuses to accept defeat in November, the republic will survive intact, as it has 5 out of 6 times in the past
• Judges used to stay out of election disputes, but this year lawsuits could well decide the presidency

Potential for violence

• When politicians use hate speech, political violence increases
• Election violence in November? Here’s what the research says

Who decides the outcome?

Under the Electoral Count Act, Congress supervises the counting of the Electoral College ballots in early January after the presidential election happens. Mark Reinstein/Corbis via Getty Images

• How Congress could decide the 2020 election
• The case of Biden versus Trump – or how a judge could decide the presidential election
• Could a few state legislatures choose the next president?
• Who formally declares the winner of the US presidential election?

How it all ends

• The president’s term ends at noon on Jan. 20

Catesby Holmes, International Editor | Politics Editor, The Conversation; Jeff Inglis, Politics + Society Editor, The Conversation, and Naomi Schalit, Senior Editor, Politics + Society, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Mail-in voting is safe and reliable – 5 essential reads

An election worker in Pennsylvania handles mailed ballots during that state’s primary election in May. AP Photo/Matt Rourke

Jeff Inglis, The Conversation

Time is running out for Americans who want to cast their ballots by mail.

If you want to vote this way but haven’t yet requested a ballot, you should know that it takes time for ballot requests to get from voters to their local election officials, for ballots to get mailed to the voters, and for the completed ballots to make it back to election offices.

The U.S. Postal Service recommends that, this close to the election, people who want to vote by mail request their mail-in ballots as soon as they can, and fill them out and send them back in the mail as soon as possible, as well – before Election Day for sure, but perhaps even earlier, depending on state deadlines.

Many scholars have studied various aspects of mail-in voting, looking at how secure it is, how susceptible to fraud it might be, and what voting officials need to do to handle an influx of ballots arriving by mail. Here we spotlight five recent examples from our archives.

1. Mail-in voting is safe and reliable

In 43 states and the District of Columbia, any citizen can vote by mail.

Edie Goldenberg, a University of Michigan political scientist and public policy scholar, studied mail-in balloting as part of a National Academy of Public Administration working group. Her group found that “voting by mail is rarely subject to fraud, does not give an advantage to one political party over another and can in fact inspire public confidence in the voting process.”

2. Election officials and postal workers are key

Many of the protections that keep mail-in voting safe are “built-in safeguards,” according to Charlotte Hill, who is a former elections commissioner now studying voting laws at the University of California, Berkeley, and Jake Grumbach, a political science professor at the University of Washington.

They explain that special paper, printing details, unique bar codes and other anti-counterfeiting methods in election and postal offices combine to “make it hard for one person to vote fraudulently, and even more difficult to commit voter fraud on a scale capable of swinging election outcomes.”

3. It has bipartisan support

Public confidence in voting by mail is extremely high in Oregon, which has been conducting all elections that way since 1998, writes Priscilla Southwell, a professor emerita of political science at the University of Oregon.

She has been studying mail-in voting for almost that entire time, and has been struck by the degree of public support for continuing to conduct elections that way, writing:

“Perhaps the strongest evidence that the system is equitable, fair, reliable and safe is that in two statewide surveys I have conducted over the years, a nearly identical percentage of Oregon Republicans and Democrats strongly support voting by mail, and the same is true of elected officials in the state.”

4. You can keep an eye on things

If you are voting from home, you can make things easier for the people who will be processing and tallying your vote – and those of countless neighbors. Luke Perry, a government professor at Utica College, explains that sending in your ballot early, with a signature that matches the one on your voter-registration card, can ensure your ballot is counted efficiently.

Perry points to an important step voters themselves can take: tracking their ballots. In 44 states and the District of Columbia, people who vote by mail can go online to a statewide site that will display when a ballot has been requested, when it has been mailed to the voter, when it was returned to the election office, and whether it was accepted or rejected. In the remaining six states, some municipalities or counties may provide this option as well – which might allow people whose mail-in ballot was rejected to cast a ballot another way instead.

“This helps people feel confident their vote has been counted and may give them enough notice to vote in person if their mail-in ballot encounters delays or other problems,” Perry writes.

5. Be sure to vote alone

One thing to be aware of, write Susan Orr and James Johnson, is that voting is still supposed to involve a secret ballot.

Orr, who teaches political science at The College at Brockport, a part of the State University of New York system, and Johnson, who teaches political science at the University of Rochester, warn that there are powerful interests seeking to coerce people into voting particular ways.

“In 2018, Los Angeles landlords threatened tenants with rent increases if a particular ballot initiative passed,” they write. “And in the last two presidential elections, as many as 1 in 4 workers were approached with political information by their employer. … [That] included employer endorsements of referenda or candidates – and even notes in employees’ paychecks threatening layoffs or plant closures if one particular candidate were to win.”

They explain that the key element of democracy that prevents these efforts from controlling the results of an election is the principle of a secret ballot. So if you choose to vote by mail at home, make sure you mark and seal your ballot in private.

Editor’s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives.

Jeff Inglis, Politics + Society Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.