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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2026
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Do you go to the polls with a big set of notes on who all the major and minor candidates you want to vote for are? In Texas they explicitly ban phones in the voting booths. Nominally this is so you don't take pictures of your completed ballot. In reality it's so you can't research candidates while in the voting booth.
I, personally, don't live in the US and am not a citizen there. Elections in my country are usually just elections to one single office (or assembly), not several at a time.
But yes, I generally walk into the voting booth knowing how I'm going to vote. If I had trouble remembering this, then yes, I would write it down and take those notes with me. If you think that Texas law you describe is especially bad, then I wonder how you think people voted before smartphones…
Well in the US, we hold our election in bulk. You'll have dozens of federal, state, even city and county races on the same election day. This is the context of the discussion here. We're talking American politics, not German politics.
Yes, I know that. Still, if there were more than one election on the ballot, I would do the necessary research before and walk into the voting booth already knowing what I'm going to tick. I wouldn't know why anyone would do it differently.
(My country is Austria, not Germany, but the same would apply if it were Germany.)
I mean, the reason is as given. Many people have difficulty keeping track of the several dozen names/initiatives they want to vote for, in addition to the (purposely, these days) onerous process of voting in person at polling places.
If we can remove barriers to voting, we absolutely should. If it is a struggle for voters to keep track of everyone and everything on the ballot, and voting by mail helps solve that, then that is a fantastic solution.