Yikes. How are they determining if a resident moved away from CA? What about if they're dead? What about if they're voting for another relative, friend, or neighbor that isn't paying attention?
It seems that without voter ID, this is destined for fraud.
When you mail in your ballot you sign it, and the signature is checked to verify it is yours. If you vote for your friend or neighbor, then you need to steal their ballot and forge their signature. You also need them to not notice that they didn't get a ballot and not report it missing/stolen. The rest of the questions apply equally to in-person voting, which are all figured out.
Voter fraud also almost never happens because the person committing the fraud is taking enormous risk for literally zero gain. People aren't stupid. Most people don't even vote anyways, why are they going to go to all this effort to commit fraud.
Yes, CA has a database of signatures. In order to register to vote, you need to have a signature. For most people the signature is already on file with the DMV. If you were a resident of CA you can verify this easily, just look at your picture ID... it has your signature on it.
I don't know how other states do it, this post is about California.
'a signature is required when you return your ballot, which is checked against a copy of your signature that's kept on file. Wyman calls it security "at the back end."'
This is scary if true. It's a blanket excuse to toss ballots - just claim the signature didn't look quite the same and nobody is there to challenge that assertion or request follow-up evidence?
Because I can't imagine getting through roughly 30 million (adults over 18) ballots in anything resembling a timely manner if we're looking at matching signatures.
What more, we're then going to mail, call, visit people who's signatures didn't look like a match? How many of those people will respond?
San Francisco has about 600 polling places, which each are required to have 4 people. That is 2400 polling workers.
In the 2016 election, SF dealt with 400k ballots. Assuming all 400k ballots needed a signature match, and it took a trained worker 20 seconds to match a signature, and they worked 8 hours a day, then it would take:
400k ballots / (3 ballots/minute * 60 minutes/hour * 8 hours/day) = 277 worker-days to match all those signatures.
If you can get 2400 people to work the polling places you'd probably have no trouble getting 277 people to match signatures, and would get them all matched within a single 8 hour workday. In practice it takes several days, so you'd need far less.
It doesn't seem hard to imagine how this could be done. Running elections is one of the most important things that a government does, so they've put some thought into figuring out how to do it.
Even if your SF scale numbers worked everywhere, and even if signatures were a reliable form of identity verification (which I assert they are not), what do you do when you think there's not a match? Throw away the ballot? Call the person up? Mail their house? Require them to come in and verify their identity?
Why not just scan their government issued ID from the start and be done? Why make it harder than it needs to be?
If you spent 20 seconds looking at the CA secretary of state page, you'd see what they do. Yes, they have a process for it. Yes, they've thought about it. Yes it is clunky but no solution is perfect and the system is fine.
Why not scan a government issued ID? Because that would require me to wait in line and go to a polling place, and I don't want to. I'm a busy guy. I like getting my ballot and slowly filling it out as I research the issues. I like being able to drop it in the mailbox when I'm done.
You have no actual evidence of widespread voter fraud, yet because you are worried about a potential threat which we do not see in the real world, you want my voting experience to be significantly more inconvenient. If the convenient system works fine for all its intended goals, why should we replace it with an inconvenient system? Don't we want people to vote?
Why not make it online then? What could be more convenient than that?
Why not type in your SSN or Government Issued ID Number as proof of identity and vote online, while relaxing on your couch?
Why force everyone to vote with mail-in just because you find it convenient? Perhaps I enjoy the ballot box experience - feel like I've actually participated in our democracy? Perhaps it's convenient for me to do it on my way home from work. Perhaps it being on one day actually motivates people to do it, instead of procrastinating until it's too late? Maybe I don't like the chance USPS will lose my ballot?
Just because there's no evidence either direction to support or contradict claims of voter fraud - we should just adopt systems that make it trivially more simple to pull off? When do we implement a system that lets us actually measure the amount of voter fraud... or make it impossible completely so we don't have to think about it anymore?
> If you spent 20 seconds looking at the CA secretary of state page, you'd see what they do. Yes, they have a process for it. Yes, they've thought about it.
Really? I just spent 10 minutes looking and couldn't find one thing. I had to google it![1] Only to turn up a buried page about checking your Ballot status, and a bunch of phone numbers to call. Nowhere obvious does it tell you your ballot will be disposed of without notification if they can't match your signature... or feel like counting your vote.
Look at these articles[1][2] stating tens of thousands of ballots were thrown out because of a signature mismatch. Is this rampant attempted voter fraud? Or just a failing identity verification system?
What about the courts ruling it unconstitutional to just dispose of ballots[3]? So they give you an obscure way to see if your ballot was counted? Good enough? No way.
The primary driving argument against VoterID laws is economically challenged people will have a difficult time obtaining and paying for a government ID. These same people though, will have easy access to hidden websites and ample time to call obscure phone numbers to follow-up on their ballot status? Just make a basic Government Issued ID free of charge, and problem solved - everyone can get one.
Voting is supposed to be private as well. They claim they dispose of your envelope with your name on it before counting the ballot - but can you prove it? Maybe your ballot has a signature mismatch suddenly because you voted for the wrong guy?
I believe states put them into a provisional ballot pile, and voters can go and check if their ballots ended up there. And follow-up with picture ID in person if required.
In Washington state where I live, voter registration includes soliciting a signature, which can also often be checked with drivers license signature on file.
You have to be ignorant or deliberately acting in bad faith to say that signatures are an issue, because about 10 minutes of research will show you that states which do vote by mail get around these issues pretty easily.
A government issued ID complete with matching home address and picture is a LOT more difficult to fake than just some scribbling on a piece of paper. Even better - swiping the card and running the data on the magstrip on the back and comparing to what the government has on that ID is almost impossible to forge.
Who didn't forge their parent's signature in grade school once in a while? It's trivial to fake signatures - particularly since most people aren't trained Graphologists.
Heck, my local grocery store requires me to swipe my government issued ID just to prove my age to buy some beer... they scan your government issued ID to get into some bars and clubs even... but we won't allow that at the voting booth?
So the same volunteers who aren't able to compare 2 signatures are also your impenetrable line of defense looking at the tiny picture and tiny writing on a photo ID and verifying the ID is valid and it is the same person.
> Who didn't forge their parent's signature in grade school once in a while?
True. But a malicious actor would need to forge hundreds or thousands of signatures convincingly. And firstly get their hands on the signature database.
Or just make up signatures that have the person's name in them.
I highly, highly doubt and am very skeptical of this supposed signature database and how well it can verify a person's signature. It just sounds like hocus pocus to me.
> California DMV has your signature on file when you get a driver's license.
They make you sign on a small digital screen that barely registers your pen movements. The one on my license looks like a 3 year old drew some scribbles on it. It definitely doesn't resemble my pen-and-paper signature and I can't be alone in that.
> I think people do that, not software.
How can they get through 15-30 million ballots in anything resembling a timely manner? This entire thing sounds made up it's so absurd.
They get your signature when you register. States that don't use ID at polling stations have big books with everyone's signature in them so the worker can compare against one you write on site.
Those big books are your name and home address which were used to make sure you were in the correct voting location.
Then you signed the book in front of the ballot person as a sort of "proof" the information was correct and you were voting.
So basically, it's just an honor system.
One could theoretically vote in the morning under your real name, then come back in the afternoon and vote again as your neighbor - so long as you beat them there.
> When you mail in your ballot you sign it, and the signature is checked to verify it is yours. If you vote for your friend or neighbor, then you need to steal their ballot and forge their signature.
Is this done manually or automated? This is the first time I've heard about it and the mechanics - and scale - are interesting.
In addition, how is the database of signatures secured? Who has access to it now? What other things is a signature and basic information (address, phone, dob) sufficient for?
States like Washington do mail-in voting quite successfully.
Vote-by-mail is cheaper (no polling places to run), increases voter turnout (which is why it’s universally opposed by the Republican party), and actually reduces fraud risk because it leaves a paper trail and removes the opportunity for voter intimidation at polling places.
Sorry, but the very last point is nonsense on balance. Far, far more voters will be intimidated by threat of domestic violence or family pressure to vote the "right way", because the spouse or family member can literally watch them fill out the ballot and mail it in. Voting booths provide privacy in the act of voting, mailed ballots do not.
It's perfectly fine to believe that this is a reasonable tradeoff for increased turnout and general enfranchisement, but it's not going to reduce voter intimidation.
You can have the exact same threat of violence or family pressure for voting booths. "Show me a cellphone picture of the ballot you voted with"
I think making a claim either way about voter intimidation is silly. The most important points are to increase voter turnout and to reduce large-scale fraud.
I'm sure it's illegal to pressure someone to vote a certain way as well. Do you really think someone is monitoring someone's voting booth to see if they're using their phone? Wouldn't that be in exact violation of the problem you're talking about?
Voter fraud is pretty rare. Voter disenfranchisement is not. Accepting a small increase in fraud (which isn't proven, by the way) would be worth allowing more of the population to vote.
It's a bit late to be concerned: CA has already had opt-in mail-in voting for a while!
Ballots are mailed to the address on file, you can't just ask for a friend's. Voting fraud just doesn't scale either: A couple fraudulent votes per fraudster? No, election fraud is way more dangerous.
Anti-fraud efforts are proportional to fraud prevalence, which is very low. For voter verification, the rate of false negatives (you're not registered to vote, when you are) wildly dwarfs the false positive (fraud) rate.
I'm happy to be concerned if presented evidence of a problem, but absent evidence to counter real, concrete evidence of "voting security"->false-negatives, they don't seem worth spending time, money, and effort on. (After all, government bureaucracy and waste are famously unpopular)
it kills me how whenever one raises a question or criticism about the potential for voter fraud in mail-in voting a huge cloud of vitriol descends upon them. It shouldn't be necessary to prove that voter fraud exists in order to wonder about the propensity for fraud.
I lived at the same address in San Mateo for 18 years and every time I voted at the polls I would check the book and see there were 3-4 folks registered to my house that I did not know. I complained to the county multiple times and they informed me it didn't matter, those folks were not voting. Then in 2008 I started walking neighborhoods for the local Republican Party. They gave me a list of registered voters and the most recent elections they voted. I checked my address and sure enough all of those extra voters had been voting. Also one additional person was listed. I went back and complained to the party HQ and at the county assessor's office. Those folks stayed on the list until 2013.
I moved in 2017 and submitted the form to cancel my registration. Guess what? I checked just now and I'm still registered to vote in San Mateo! Wonder if I voted in the last election there?
> Yikes. How are they determining if a resident moved away from CA? What about if they're dead? What about if they're voting for another relative, friend, or neighbor that isn't paying attention?
I think it's strange you seem to believe the people responsible for implementing this did not think of the few complications you were able to rattle off the top of your head.
As it happens, they send the ballot to your California address, and mail-in ballots are not forwarded by the postal service.
The Secretary of State updates the voter rolls annually, and removes people who have died.
People voting must sign the ballot and mail it. The fact that they voted is recorded, and they can check on the status. If someone voted for a dead person, that would be a crime punishable by five years in prison. It might happen, but would you file a single false ballot in a state of 40 million people under the threat of a five year prison sentence?
This is important not only for the Presidential election (which is mostly a foregone thing anyway), but is a big boon to all the down-ballot races. Folks will have time to research other choices at home.
More than that, main-in ballots go a long way towards reducing voter disenfranchisement. No need to wait in long lines (way easier if you've got a job that allows that!) or take time off work on a Tuesday.
Honestly, there's no good excuse for all states not following suit.
Assuming you're asking in good faith it's a lot easier with mail in voting because when you get the ballot you can see all the names and search each category before choosing.
It's easier than also having to find out what is on the ballot, searching, and then remembering each person when you go.
I usually spend a couple hours at home voting and searching before sending the mail in, something that would be a lot harder to do effectively if I had to go in person.
I understand what you're saying, but why not just mail people the ballot information ahead of time without actually casting votes? Let them pencil it in and bring it with them?
If you're already mailing people the ballot information, what do you gain by asking them to then come in person to the polling station? It's an objectively simpler user experience. You're asking a lot of people to research ahead of time, make their decision, save that decision for election day, and then make time in their busy workday to go wait in line to vote.
I like to compare it to taking a test based off of memory vs an open book test. And since this 'test' is something we want everyone to participate in (and give them the best possibility to make an informed choice), I believe mail-in ballot voting might be the best possible solution for voting.
If they know the race even exists… Even politically-interested friends often have no idea there are judges on the ballot, or if they do, which one they should vote for. And they can't fall back on party, since many of these races are officially non-partisan. I can go find a sample ballot at the MN Secretary of State website, but it's an extra step. I've chosen the "no excuse absentee ballot" a few times since Minnesota started offering, and this way I just have the ballot to look at, research and fill in.
I would only support mail in voting with voter id. The fact that you're so happy about this decision, regardless of the rampant voter fraud that will take place with no voter id is insane to me
Voter fraud has never been seen in any meaningful level in the US. Worries about it are a fiction concocted by those who would really rather as few people vote as possible.
> Voter fraud has never been seen in any meaningful level in the US
It's also a very difficult thing to track if there's almost no verification happening at the ballot box.
It often gets tossed around that there's this very low level of fraud right now. The truth is we just don't actually know and have no meaningful way of finding out.
So, we don’t know for sure if there is a problem at all. But we absolutely should stop people from voting safely in a pandemic in case there is a problem?
What about every other method of voting? Do we know voting machines used across the country are safe? Why the sudden concern now?
You still haven’t answered how government IDs would be checked as part of mail in voting. If they can’t be then you’re forcing people to risk their health in order to vote in person.
> This has been a debate for at least a decade if not more
And in that time there has been zero evidence of voter fraud at any kind of scale that would effect the outcome of an election.
Do you risk your health going to the grocery store? How is it any different?
These measures will far outlast the coronavirus.
Why check signatures even? If there's no level of voter fraud to be concerned with, why throw out tens of thousands of ballots because the signature didn't match? Was that all voter fraud, or just an incompetent system?
First off, mail-in ballots have their signatures compared to those on record with the state.
Stealing ballots from people's mailboxes is a federal crime and doesn't scale well.
Ditto for stealing it from their homes, or forcing them to vote a certain way.
There's no way you could keep quiet people selling off their mail-in ballots, or handing them to a third-party voluntarily - once it gets beyond more than a dozen people, the secret's going to be out. For example, as occurred in this NC Congressional election: https://www.npr.org/2019/07/30/746800630/north-carolina-gop-...
I accept that you could tamper with a few votes here and there. Doing it systematically, at a scale large enough to tip the scales in an election, and keeping it quiet, seems nigh impossible.
It's not like this is some new method of voting. We already have mail-in voting in California. This just expands it. Oregon has been entirely vote-by-mail since the 1980s.
There is no fraud. You know why there's no fraud? Because it's a crime, and unless you attempted an absolutely massive fraud, which would be just extraordinarily easy to detect, there would be scant little point in taking the risk. Who would risk five years in prison for something that has very little expected impact?
There have been plenty of investigations into vote-by-mail in Oregon, and no fraud has been found.
This is all just a false narrative to suppress voting among people less disposed to stand in line and do it - the poor.
>You know why there's no fraud? Because it's a crime
When has the law ever stopped bad actors? It's naive to think fraud doesn't exist when at least a dozen times each election there are some kinds of issues getting votes counted.
I am a permanent vote by mail voter in CA - I love it! I get to sit down, research the candidates, and make an informed decision.
I remember there was a judge on the ballot, and he had been on the record for some very divisive political takes that I didn't think belonged in our court system. If it had just been me in the voter booth, there would have been a 1/n (cannot remember the number of judges) chance I voted for him at random. And if I can't make a snap decision, I can always think on it for some time. Best way to run a representative democracy IMHO.
Just yesterday a plan for a mail-in election was scrapped in Poland. It was an extremely rushed thing (the voting was to happen this Sunday), but from what I understand, the plan was to at least have designated mailboxes. This would allow to somewhat track what happens with the ballots. A giant post service's delivery operation was stopped at the last moment. I haven't seen the concerns about secrecy of voting, and voting for other people in your house, properly addressed. Now the ruling party promises work on "better regulations" before the actual presidential election.
I'm really curious how Americans will handle all this.
Generally, I'm very skeptical about all cute ideas that complicate voting and may introduce doubts about its legitimacy. The whole point of a vote is that the elected people have a strong title to whatever prerogatives they have.
This (partial mail-in voting) also has been available in many European countries, but you had to qualify e.g. with a physical disability. I think when there is fewer of such votes, it can be easier to ensure that they are legitimate and pay attention to the procedures. You know to expect only a few of them, for example.
I've also heard about postal voting in Britain producing many problems when there were wider experiments with it[1].
Well, California had 8.5 million mail-in ballots in the last national election, 65% of the total. Mail-in voting in California was available to everyone even before this, not just to people meeting special criteria.
I was interested about the source, and apparently you can check these numbers here[1]. I don't say that this solves the problems for me, but an interesting statistic nonetheless. Seems like another example of American politics being very different.
It's California in this case but not every state allows this. Some states, for example, will make you wait in long lines in the middle of a global pandemic just to vote.
This thread has two or three very vocal, antagonistic and ignorant actors using lazy rhetorical tactics to agitate, deflect and confuse what is a very straightforward topic: mail in voter fraud doesn’t exist and aggressive attempts to say it does are a part of a large, discriminatory and frankly old set of tactics of voter intimidation. These posters offer no evidence of the fraud they are FUDing up because there is none.
This is a important step, assuming if the US Postal Service doesn't get gutted before it happens.
A major RNC donor is poised to become the next Postmaster General of the USPS and it's part of the current administration's plan to surely gut/privatize the USPS and suppress mail-in votes. http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/top-republican-fundra...
HN is about one step away from becoming reddit with this type of baseless speculation. There is no indication this administration wants to suppress votes, the president has explicitly said he wants to institute voter ID's to protect the security of our elections, but you're going to take the word of a WP reporter who've perverted every statement he has ever made? The opposition is suspiciously against voter ID by the way.
Donald Trump is a pathological liar; I am skeptical of every word that comes out of his mouth.
He has also come out against mail-in voting since he feels it will destroy GOP chances at the ballot box. So yes, I do believe Trump is more concerned about voter suppression then election security.
California already has mail-in ballots, FYI. All this order does is send them to all registered voters instead of just those who requested a mail-in ballot.
95 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadIt seems that without voter ID, this is destined for fraud.
Voter fraud also almost never happens because the person committing the fraud is taking enormous risk for literally zero gain. People aren't stupid. Most people don't even vote anyways, why are they going to go to all this effort to commit fraud.
Yes, CA has a database of signatures. In order to register to vote, you need to have a signature. For most people the signature is already on file with the DMV. If you were a resident of CA you can verify this easily, just look at your picture ID... it has your signature on it.
I don't know how other states do it, this post is about California.
I flagged this article anyway, this isn't really a topic for HN (and the quality of comments shows why).
'a signature is required when you return your ballot, which is checked against a copy of your signature that's kept on file. Wyman calls it security "at the back end."'
So basically like checking voter ID at the polls.
What more, we're then going to mail, call, visit people who's signatures didn't look like a match? How many of those people will respond?
In the 2016 election, SF dealt with 400k ballots. Assuming all 400k ballots needed a signature match, and it took a trained worker 20 seconds to match a signature, and they worked 8 hours a day, then it would take:
400k ballots / (3 ballots/minute * 60 minutes/hour * 8 hours/day) = 277 worker-days to match all those signatures.
If you can get 2400 people to work the polling places you'd probably have no trouble getting 277 people to match signatures, and would get them all matched within a single 8 hour workday. In practice it takes several days, so you'd need far less.
It doesn't seem hard to imagine how this could be done. Running elections is one of the most important things that a government does, so they've put some thought into figuring out how to do it.
Why not just scan their government issued ID from the start and be done? Why make it harder than it needs to be?
Why not scan a government issued ID? Because that would require me to wait in line and go to a polling place, and I don't want to. I'm a busy guy. I like getting my ballot and slowly filling it out as I research the issues. I like being able to drop it in the mailbox when I'm done.
You have no actual evidence of widespread voter fraud, yet because you are worried about a potential threat which we do not see in the real world, you want my voting experience to be significantly more inconvenient. If the convenient system works fine for all its intended goals, why should we replace it with an inconvenient system? Don't we want people to vote?
Why not make it online then? What could be more convenient than that?
Why not type in your SSN or Government Issued ID Number as proof of identity and vote online, while relaxing on your couch?
Why force everyone to vote with mail-in just because you find it convenient? Perhaps I enjoy the ballot box experience - feel like I've actually participated in our democracy? Perhaps it's convenient for me to do it on my way home from work. Perhaps it being on one day actually motivates people to do it, instead of procrastinating until it's too late? Maybe I don't like the chance USPS will lose my ballot?
Just because there's no evidence either direction to support or contradict claims of voter fraud - we should just adopt systems that make it trivially more simple to pull off? When do we implement a system that lets us actually measure the amount of voter fraud... or make it impossible completely so we don't have to think about it anymore?
> If you spent 20 seconds looking at the CA secretary of state page, you'd see what they do. Yes, they have a process for it. Yes, they've thought about it.
Really? I just spent 10 minutes looking and couldn't find one thing. I had to google it![1] Only to turn up a buried page about checking your Ballot status, and a bunch of phone numbers to call. Nowhere obvious does it tell you your ballot will be disposed of without notification if they can't match your signature... or feel like counting your vote.
Look at these articles[1][2] stating tens of thousands of ballots were thrown out because of a signature mismatch. Is this rampant attempted voter fraud? Or just a failing identity verification system?
What about the courts ruling it unconstitutional to just dispose of ballots[3]? So they give you an obscure way to see if your ballot was counted? Good enough? No way.
The primary driving argument against VoterID laws is economically challenged people will have a difficult time obtaining and paying for a government ID. These same people though, will have easy access to hidden websites and ample time to call obscure phone numbers to follow-up on their ballot status? Just make a basic Government Issued ID free of charge, and problem solved - everyone can get one.
Voting is supposed to be private as well. They claim they dispose of your envelope with your name on it before counting the ballot - but can you prove it? Maybe your ballot has a signature mismatch suddenly because you voted for the wrong guy?
The opportunity for abuse here is extreme.
[1] https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/ballot-status/
[2] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/tens-of-thousands-...
[3] https://calmatters.org/blogs/2018/11/did-you-vote-by-mail-if...
[4] https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-aler...
Does this even remotely sound like a good workflow?
How many people even know to do this? This is the first I'm hearing of it - I can't possibly be alone.
Sounds like a way to throw out a ton of ballots.
The signature at DMV on the electronic pad is hardly a representation of my real pen-and-paper signature.
I suspect you're assuming there's some sort of verification going on - but have no evidence of this.
You have to be ignorant or deliberately acting in bad faith to say that signatures are an issue, because about 10 minutes of research will show you that states which do vote by mail get around these issues pretty easily.
Are you sure? That doesn’t seem right. How are they verifying it?
The answer is the same. They look at it. This isn't rocket science.
Who didn't forge their parent's signature in grade school once in a while? It's trivial to fake signatures - particularly since most people aren't trained Graphologists.
Heck, my local grocery store requires me to swipe my government issued ID just to prove my age to buy some beer... they scan your government issued ID to get into some bars and clubs even... but we won't allow that at the voting booth?
Pretty darn close to impossible to fake that.
True. But a malicious actor would need to forge hundreds or thousands of signatures convincingly. And firstly get their hands on the signature database.
I highly, highly doubt and am very skeptical of this supposed signature database and how well it can verify a person's signature. It just sounds like hocus pocus to me.
Why? California DMV has your signature on file when you get a driver's license.
> how well it can verify a person's signature.
I think people do that, not software.
They make you sign on a small digital screen that barely registers your pen movements. The one on my license looks like a 3 year old drew some scribbles on it. It definitely doesn't resemble my pen-and-paper signature and I can't be alone in that.
> I think people do that, not software.
How can they get through 15-30 million ballots in anything resembling a timely manner? This entire thing sounds made up it's so absurd.
Then you signed the book in front of the ballot person as a sort of "proof" the information was correct and you were voting.
So basically, it's just an honor system.
One could theoretically vote in the morning under your real name, then come back in the afternoon and vote again as your neighbor - so long as you beat them there.
Is this done manually or automated? This is the first time I've heard about it and the mechanics - and scale - are interesting.
In addition, how is the database of signatures secured? Who has access to it now? What other things is a signature and basic information (address, phone, dob) sufficient for?
Vote-by-mail is cheaper (no polling places to run), increases voter turnout (which is why it’s universally opposed by the Republican party), and actually reduces fraud risk because it leaves a paper trail and removes the opportunity for voter intimidation at polling places.
It's perfectly fine to believe that this is a reasonable tradeoff for increased turnout and general enfranchisement, but it's not going to reduce voter intimidation.
I think making a claim either way about voter intimidation is silly. The most important points are to increase voter turnout and to reduce large-scale fraud.
How would this be enforced?
Very silly.
Citation needed. And also, is that number more than the number of people who don't vote at all because voting in person is too much of a hassle?
Ballots are mailed to the address on file, you can't just ask for a friend's. Voting fraud just doesn't scale either: A couple fraudulent votes per fraudster? No, election fraud is way more dangerous.
Anti-fraud efforts are proportional to fraud prevalence, which is very low. For voter verification, the rate of false negatives (you're not registered to vote, when you are) wildly dwarfs the false positive (fraud) rate.
I'm happy to be concerned if presented evidence of a problem, but absent evidence to counter real, concrete evidence of "voting security"->false-negatives, they don't seem worth spending time, money, and effort on. (After all, government bureaucracy and waste are famously unpopular)
Just drive around and offer to return Ballots or "help" people fill them in.
I lived at the same address in San Mateo for 18 years and every time I voted at the polls I would check the book and see there were 3-4 folks registered to my house that I did not know. I complained to the county multiple times and they informed me it didn't matter, those folks were not voting. Then in 2008 I started walking neighborhoods for the local Republican Party. They gave me a list of registered voters and the most recent elections they voted. I checked my address and sure enough all of those extra voters had been voting. Also one additional person was listed. I went back and complained to the party HQ and at the county assessor's office. Those folks stayed on the list until 2013.
I moved in 2017 and submitted the form to cancel my registration. Guess what? I checked just now and I'm still registered to vote in San Mateo! Wonder if I voted in the last election there?
That's the most rational argument I've heard and one that is easy to parse even for someone skeptical of Government doing anything competently.
I think it's strange you seem to believe the people responsible for implementing this did not think of the few complications you were able to rattle off the top of your head.
As it happens, they send the ballot to your California address, and mail-in ballots are not forwarded by the postal service.
The Secretary of State updates the voter rolls annually, and removes people who have died.
People voting must sign the ballot and mail it. The fact that they voted is recorded, and they can check on the status. If someone voted for a dead person, that would be a crime punishable by five years in prison. It might happen, but would you file a single false ballot in a state of 40 million people under the threat of a five year prison sentence?
More than that, main-in ballots go a long way towards reducing voter disenfranchisement. No need to wait in long lines (way easier if you've got a job that allows that!) or take time off work on a Tuesday.
Honestly, there's no good excuse for all states not following suit.
How does this have any relationship whatsoever to the way in which the vote is cast?
People can already research to their hearts content without mail-in-voting.
It's easier than also having to find out what is on the ballot, searching, and then remembering each person when you go.
I usually spend a couple hours at home voting and searching before sending the mail in, something that would be a lot harder to do effectively if I had to go in person.
It's a lot easier when you have the ballot in front of you as a reference.
I suspect they either left options blank, voted by party, voted the name they heard somewhere, or voted randomly.
At least for the positions they didn’t know.
It's easier to do it when you can also vote at the same time at home.
Voter fraud has never been seen in any meaningful level in the US. Worries about it are a fiction concocted by those who would really rather as few people vote as possible.
It's also a very difficult thing to track if there's almost no verification happening at the ballot box.
It often gets tossed around that there's this very low level of fraud right now. The truth is we just don't actually know and have no meaningful way of finding out.
What about every other method of voting? Do we know voting machines used across the country are safe? Why the sudden concern now?
We can be arguing two different things:
1) Signatures are not a good proof of identity
2) We should require government ID for proof of identity
> Why the sudden concern now?
It's not. This has been a debate for at least a decade if not more.
> This has been a debate for at least a decade if not more
And in that time there has been zero evidence of voter fraud at any kind of scale that would effect the outcome of an election.
These measures will far outlast the coronavirus.
Why check signatures even? If there's no level of voter fraud to be concerned with, why throw out tens of thousands of ballots because the signature didn't match? Was that all voter fraud, or just an incompetent system?
How?
First off, mail-in ballots have their signatures compared to those on record with the state.
Stealing ballots from people's mailboxes is a federal crime and doesn't scale well.
Ditto for stealing it from their homes, or forcing them to vote a certain way.
There's no way you could keep quiet people selling off their mail-in ballots, or handing them to a third-party voluntarily - once it gets beyond more than a dozen people, the secret's going to be out. For example, as occurred in this NC Congressional election: https://www.npr.org/2019/07/30/746800630/north-carolina-gop-...
I accept that you could tamper with a few votes here and there. Doing it systematically, at a scale large enough to tip the scales in an election, and keeping it quiet, seems nigh impossible.
This is sadly a partisan issue, and it begs the question: why is that so?
There is no fraud. You know why there's no fraud? Because it's a crime, and unless you attempted an absolutely massive fraud, which would be just extraordinarily easy to detect, there would be scant little point in taking the risk. Who would risk five years in prison for something that has very little expected impact?
There have been plenty of investigations into vote-by-mail in Oregon, and no fraud has been found.
This is all just a false narrative to suppress voting among people less disposed to stand in line and do it - the poor.
When has the law ever stopped bad actors? It's naive to think fraud doesn't exist when at least a dozen times each election there are some kinds of issues getting votes counted.
I remember there was a judge on the ballot, and he had been on the record for some very divisive political takes that I didn't think belonged in our court system. If it had just been me in the voter booth, there would have been a 1/n (cannot remember the number of judges) chance I voted for him at random. And if I can't make a snap decision, I can always think on it for some time. Best way to run a representative democracy IMHO.
I'm really curious how Americans will handle all this.
Generally, I'm very skeptical about all cute ideas that complicate voting and may introduce doubts about its legitimacy. The whole point of a vote is that the elected people have a strong title to whatever prerogatives they have.
This is just extending it to everyone by default.
I've also heard about postal voting in Britain producing many problems when there were wider experiments with it[1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/apr/05/politics.localgov...
This just makes it the default.
[1] https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/historical-absentee/
A major RNC donor is poised to become the next Postmaster General of the USPS and it's part of the current administration's plan to surely gut/privatize the USPS and suppress mail-in votes. http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/top-republican-fundra...
He has also come out against mail-in voting since he feels it will destroy GOP chances at the ballot box. So yes, I do believe Trump is more concerned about voter suppression then election security.
https://lawandcrime.com/2020-election/trump-says-gop-would-n...