Where I live we vote by mail by filling in little bubbles with a pen. the counting is done by simple photoelectronic tabulators and there is a built-in, human readable record that can be checked by hand. It is very economical and hard to compromise at a scale that has any effect. i hate the idea of using internet voting. I also don’t trust the electronic voting booths where the whole action is virtual or the older mechanical systems with the chads. Just a pen and paper is sufficient.
>Where I live we vote by mail by filling in little bubbles with a pen.
>It is very economical and hard to compromise at a scale that has any effect.
Vote-by-mail creates unnecessary opportunities for cheating, irregularities, and all sorts of foolishness. If you can fill in the bubbles, you could theoretically fill them in for other people. People living with parents suffering from dementia could fill out their ballots without them knowing and vote multiple times. You don't even need a valid signature; states allow witnesses to vouch. Ballot boxes get vandalized. Ballot harvesting is rampant. There's so many problems. It's for the same reason universities don't allow take-home exams.
Vote-by-mail states are open targets for mockery (and rightfully so) as it routinely takes days or weeks to count all the ballots and declare a winner. Third-world backwaters can do it in the same night. This is a solved problem.
Whenever vote-by-mail is criticized, people get really upset. How do you think the other states do it? The argument about not being able to take off on election day doesn't hold water. Most states allow early voting for weeks. If you can find time to visit a post office or ballot box, you can certainly go to the library or a church basement for the 5 minutes it takes to fill in the bubbles, stick it in the machine and you absolutely know it's counted. And results will be available election night.
These problems are all theoretical. If you actually tried to implement them at the scale you'd typically need to sway a federal election you'd find it pretty unworkable. And in close elections, the recount process is pretty intense, so it's even less likely that you'll be successful.
You'll probably want more detail. Ballot harvesting can't work because data analysis shows weird patterns like this ("huh this nursing home went 95% Biden whereas every other nursing home in the county went 55%"). Recounts do signature validation and lawyers from either party can challenge any ballot they want. Voters are contacted to cure their ballots. I've worked on the Democratic side and been heavily involved in doing all of this. We had armies of lawyers, software and data engineers, and organizers.
Most of the pointing out opportunities for fraud comes from a place of like, reasoning from first principles. But elections are huge undertakings involving tons of people. It's hard to successfully commit election fraud at a large enough scale to sway a federal election. It's why foreign adversaries prefer to swarm social media with bots: it has a chance of working.
The thing is, right now we have very little evidence that there is any significant mail-in voting fraud.
But we do have a fair amount of evidence that there is suppression of in-person voting.
So neither of these systems is perfect, but we should go with the one that gives us the most accurate legitimate vote.
Someone else posted a list of ways that in-person voting would be more acceptable, e.g. having a large window to cast ballots. But instead, we see move the other way, trying to restrict the window in which we can cast ballots.
You put a free ID in the hands of every legitimate voter and give them enough time and opportunity to vote, and then I will consider in-person to be on par with mail-in.
> People living with parents suffering from dementia could fill out their ballots without them knowing and vote multiple times.
Or more subtle: watching them vote, with the implicit threat of violence if they vote the "wrong" way.
> The argument about not being able to take off on election day doesn't hold water.
In my country it is mandatory to give time off to vote if necessary. But the booths are open from 07:30 to 21:00, are located in a bunch of convenient locations (schools, libraries, train stations, shopping malls), and have basically zero waiting time, so in practice rarely anyone needs to make use of it.
Because they operate in a non good faith model where discouraging voting and gerrymander is normalised. The electoral commission is politicised, not neutral and independent. Because voting is held at times and dates which disadvantage working poor, because voter ID rules are capricious and partisan.
When looking at supporters of voter ID laws, look at whether they support free IDs, expansion of DMVs/issuers of IDs, etc.
Similarly, opposition of mail-in-voting typically ignores or supports closing down polling places (in strategically partisan areas), making it difficult for groups of people to vote.
These issues are always (by design) discussed in isolation, while ignoring the intrinsically related issues.
TL;DR: Voter ID laws are fine, only if, coupled with universal free IDs for citizens. And no mail-in-voting would be fine, if voting occured on a national holiday, and polling places were reachable by all eligible voters. This is not supported by any (elected) proponent of voter ID laws or opponent of mail-in-voting.
- Free FEC federal voter ID (requires proof of citizenship) to be used ONLY for voting
- Voter ID can be obtained early (age 16?) but DOB is connected to ID and you can’t vote before the legal age
- Funded FEC program to register students for voter IDs at schools and colleges and teach them about voting
- FEC to work with agencies like social security and IRS to determine if a voter is deceased (messy process). Likely deceased voters are communicated to the states ASAP. States must report confirmed deceased voters to FEC ASAP for recording.
- Federal 2 week minimum early voting period
- Federal funding and monitoring of elections requiring adequate polling site coverage of geographic areas, notification of residents, etc
- Federal program to provide free shuttle to and from nearest polling station for residents without transit. Operated federally, states have no involvement. Contract with private transit as FEMA does.
- Mail in ballots heavily restricted, must provide proof of absence or be military
- Voting day is a national holiday
- Federal ballots are separate and simplified to speed up counting/recounting (ballot complexity is often cited as a reason for slow counting)
It will never happen but this would solve so many issues.
Yes, which is why no politician who supports stricter voter ID laws or limiting mail-in-voting would support those proposals, because those issues aren't about strengthening democracy/participation but about voter suppression.
The problem with this, like internet voting, is that you can be coerced.
e.g. a family member or your boss can tell you who to vote for and force you to submit that vote.
Whereas a polling both is utterly private; you are alone and free from coercion. Nobody else knows who you voted for and they have no way of telling.
In the UK, our voting is also done by paper and pencil. The votes are counted overnight by humans (with plenty of checks, independent oversight and rights of recounting) with the result typically declared the next day.
If you limit your perspective to the people who can do it, yes. If you feel it’s important to enable everyone to participate, it doesn’t “just work”
Given the ample attention recently, with no evidence of impactful fraud, it sounds like disenfranchising citizens for no reason other than unrealistic fears.
But now that one party sees their voters increasingly use mailin, I expect to see a shift in opinions quickly. (Recent evidence suggests democrats benefit from low turnout more)
You can be coerced with paper and pencil too.
In Sicily mafia gives you a voting paper with a predrawn X on the candidate they want, and you must come out with a clean voting paper so they are sure you did leave the pre-voted one.
In the UK, you are handed a ballot paper in the voting room by an official immediately before you go to the polling booth; the ballot paper has an official mark on it, meaning no pre-printed or duplicate ballot papers are possible.
This makes the attack you described impossible (short of having every official in the voting room being corrupt).
Isn’t it still possible for the voter to not cast this ballot paper and bring it to the coercer who waits outside? Then the coercer fill this ballot and ask the next voter to cast it and bring back a blank ballot paper?
>The problem with this, like internet voting, is that you can be coerced.
As an example against coercion, on belenios faq they say that they let voter vote several times (and they count just the last vote).
