5 ms·

Are there concerns of vote selling? Or mechanisms to prevent it?

jdavis703 8y ago
In California (which has a lot of vote by mail), it’s also legal to use a camera in the voting area. In this regards, I don’t think there’s particular weaknesses. In general the voting system can guard against false positives or false negatives. By that it can either bar legitimate voters or allow illegitimate voters. Since the USA has a historic tendency of barring the poor, minorities and women from voting; elections officials should take that into account when considering trade offs.
specialist 8y ago
There continue to be election integrity issues with vote by mail. The benefits may outweigh the risks. From an election integrity standpoint, the modern implementations of vote by mail is little different from electronic voting. -- The jurisdictions that I'm aware of scan AND tabulate ballots as they are received. This permits peeking at early results. Citizens expect that votes are not tabulated until polls close on election day. Administrators argue that the pre-scanning and tabulating isn't really a count and that only the final report is a count. -- Until very recently, vote by mail lead to a novelty participation bump followed by a long decline. Explained by losing the culture of voting. Postage is now prepaid in some jurisdictions, which may have lead to a +4% boost in participation, matching prior poll site participation rates. But it's too early to separate the prepaid postage boost from the overall boost in 2018. Time will time. -- The transition to vote by mail is driven solely by appropriations (pork) and administrator's desire for centralization. With vote by mail comes new business models. Whereas with poll sites we'd only pay per ballot to accommodate projected turnout plus 10%, we now pay for every voter every election. Vote by mail ballot packets are ~$2 whereas poll ballots cost ~10c. Additionally, all new tasks like signature verification and ballot tracking are new opportunities for rent seeking. Again, per voter per election, vs time & materials. There's all new gear to buy, of course. One could argue this is no different than any other IT lifecycle. -- Another way vote by mail is like electronic voting is the complete loss of voter privacy (the secret ballot). Elections are administered per precinct. Received ballots are binned. So very likely that your ballot will be the only one from your precinct in the bin. To protect the secret ballot, ballots must be sorted into precincts before processing (opening). This adds considerable effort and expense to the entire process (logistic nightmare). Last time I checked, my jurisdiction still was not doing the legally required precinct presort. -- Because voters are no longer able to fix their own errors (like with the mark sense poll based systems mentioned elsewhere), administrators have to adjudication voter intent. Now that ballots are optically scanned as they are received, like a fax machine vs the mark sense systems, voter intent is adjudicated electronically, meaning there's no paper trail. Makes the manual recounts and audits kind of tricky, if not completely suspect.
- evrydayhustling 8y ago
  Thanks for the thorough rundown!
- greglindahl 8y ago
  Many large counties in California report mail-in ballot results many days after election day, so they're definitely not scanning ballots as they're received. (I live in Santa Clara, population 1.94 million.) You state many other things in your comment that are incorrect. For example, if I make an error on my mail-in ballot, I get a new one... just like the instructions say. That's never happened to me, because it's pretty straightforward to not spoil my ballot. And if the ballot is marked oddly, there is a paper trail, it's... the original ballot. As you're probably fully aware, some recounts look only at ballots that show overvoting or otherwise are judged less confident by the counting system, and more precise recounts look at all ballots. It's not that tricky, and it's certainly not completely suspect. My county uses the same system for in-person and mail-in votes.
  - specialist 8y ago
    "Many large counties in California report mail-in ballot results many days after election day, so they're definitely not scanning ballots as they're received." I believe ballots in CA must be postmarked by election day to be counted. Whereas OR's rule is received by election day. So the Santa Clara number will be updated as more ballots arrive. But there is a count on election day. FWIW, IIRC, my jurisdiction's elections are certified, the final count with all the bookkeeping, two weeks after election day. Santa Clara will do something similar. "My county uses the same system for in-person and mail-in votes." That can't possibly be true. The ballot may look the same. But the handling, administration, bookkeeping, and tabulation is completely different. For a long while, jurisdictions did try to use the same mark sense devices at both poll sites and central count. But they way too slow to be practical for mail ballot processing. I'd be very surprised indeed if a county your size didn't use the newer high speed imaging scanners. "You state many other things in your comment that are incorrect." Each jurisdiction has it's own chaotic mutant rules. And it keeps changing. So no one person can know everything about all election administration in the USA. But your first "refutation" wasn't. Your last wasn't even wrong. And I don't have the heart to correct the rest. -- Update: I was curious what gear Santa Clara is using, when I spotted this: "Returned Vote by Mail Ballot Processing In accordance with California Elections Code, the ROV will begin to open, process and count returned Vote by Mail Ballot Envelopes approximately 11 days before Election Day. Vote by Mail processing will continue after Election Day until all ballots received prior to 8:00 pm on Election Day are processed." https://www.sccgov.org/sites/rov/Voting/observers/Pages/default.aspx https://www.sccgov.org/sites/rov/Voting/observers/Pages/defa... So I was wrong about the postmarks. I strongly encourage you to observe your elections. And attend the certification (canvas report) meetings. Seeing how the sausage is made will illuminate you. Santa Clara County's publicly available information is actually quite good. I spent years clawing information out of my county and didn't get anything nearly as detailed: https://www.sccgov.org/sites/rov/Voting/VotingNovember2016/Documents/E107%20Canvass%20Procedure%20Manual%20for%20November%208%202016.pdf https://www.sccgov.org/sites/rov/Voting/VotingNovember2016/D... Oops. Santa Clara is still doing "ballot enhancement" and "ballot duplication". So now I believe it's likely they're still using the mark sense (opscan) devices for mail ballots. My county switched to image scanners over a decade ago, so I assumed everyone would have switched by now. My bad. But wait, then why does it take so long to get the final mail ballot tallies? I'd bet it's because "duplication" and "enhancement" are manual tasks, and they're manually feeding the mail ballots into the mark sense devices, which takes days. -- For the record, per your own county's documentation, the only thing I was wrong about is the lack of a paper trail (enhancement, duplication). Because your county hasn't upgraded to the ballot image scanners. Yet.

In California (which has a lot of vote by mail), it’s also legal to use a camera in the voting area. In this regards, I don’t think there’s particular weaknesses. In general the voting system can guard against false positives or false negatives. By that it can either bar legitimate voters or allow illegitimate voters. Since the USA has a historic tendency of barring the poor, minorities and women from voting; elections officials should take that into account when considering trade offs.

specialist 8y ago

There continue to be election integrity issues with vote by mail. The benefits may outweigh the risks. From an election integrity standpoint, the modern implementations of vote by mail is little different from electronic voting. -- The jurisdictions that I'm aware of scan AND tabulate ballots as they are received. This permits peeking at early results. Citizens expect that votes are not tabulated until polls close on election day. Administrators argue that the pre-scanning and tabulating isn't really a count and that only the final report is a count. -- Until very recently, vote by mail lead to a novelty participation bump followed by a long decline. Explained by losing the culture of voting. Postage is now prepaid in some jurisdictions, which may have lead to a +4% boost in participation, matching prior poll site participation rates. But it's too early to separate the prepaid postage boost from the overall boost in 2018. Time will time. -- The transition to vote by mail is driven solely by appropriations (pork) and administrator's desire for centralization. With vote by mail comes new business models. Whereas with poll sites we'd only pay per ballot to accommodate projected turnout plus 10%, we now pay for every voter every election. Vote by mail ballot packets are ~$2 whereas poll ballots cost ~10c. Additionally, all new tasks like signature verification and ballot tracking are new opportunities for rent seeking. Again, per voter per election, vs time & materials. There's all new gear to buy, of course. One could argue this is no different than any other IT lifecycle. -- Another way vote by mail is like electronic voting is the complete loss of voter privacy (the secret ballot). Elections are administered per precinct. Received ballots are binned. So very likely that your ballot will be the only one from your precinct in the bin. To protect the secret ballot, ballots must be sorted into precincts before processing (opening). This adds considerable effort and expense to the entire process (logistic nightmare). Last time I checked, my jurisdiction still was not doing the legally required precinct presort. -- Because voters are no longer able to fix their own errors (like with the mark sense poll based systems mentioned elsewhere), administrators have to adjudication voter intent. Now that ballots are optically scanned as they are received, like a fax machine vs the mark sense systems, voter intent is adjudicated electronically, meaning there's no paper trail. Makes the manual recounts and audits kind of tricky, if not completely suspect.

evrydayhustling 8y ago
Thanks for the thorough rundown!
greglindahl 8y ago
Many large counties in California report mail-in ballot results many days after election day, so they're definitely not scanning ballots as they're received. (I live in Santa Clara, population 1.94 million.) You state many other things in your comment that are incorrect. For example, if I make an error on my mail-in ballot, I get a new one... just like the instructions say. That's never happened to me, because it's pretty straightforward to not spoil my ballot. And if the ballot is marked oddly, there is a paper trail, it's... the original ballot. As you're probably fully aware, some recounts look only at ballots that show overvoting or otherwise are judged less confident by the counting system, and more precise recounts look at all ballots. It's not that tricky, and it's certainly not completely suspect. My county uses the same system for in-person and mail-in votes.
- specialist 8y ago
  "Many large counties in California report mail-in ballot results many days after election day, so they're definitely not scanning ballots as they're received." I believe ballots in CA must be postmarked by election day to be counted. Whereas OR's rule is received by election day. So the Santa Clara number will be updated as more ballots arrive. But there is a count on election day. FWIW, IIRC, my jurisdiction's elections are certified, the final count with all the bookkeeping, two weeks after election day. Santa Clara will do something similar. "My county uses the same system for in-person and mail-in votes." That can't possibly be true. The ballot may look the same. But the handling, administration, bookkeeping, and tabulation is completely different. For a long while, jurisdictions did try to use the same mark sense devices at both poll sites and central count. But they way too slow to be practical for mail ballot processing. I'd be very surprised indeed if a county your size didn't use the newer high speed imaging scanners. "You state many other things in your comment that are incorrect." Each jurisdiction has it's own chaotic mutant rules. And it keeps changing. So no one person can know everything about all election administration in the USA. But your first "refutation" wasn't. Your last wasn't even wrong. And I don't have the heart to correct the rest. -- Update: I was curious what gear Santa Clara is using, when I spotted this: "Returned Vote by Mail Ballot Processing In accordance with California Elections Code, the ROV will begin to open, process and count returned Vote by Mail Ballot Envelopes approximately 11 days before Election Day. Vote by Mail processing will continue after Election Day until all ballots received prior to 8:00 pm on Election Day are processed." https://www.sccgov.org/sites/rov/Voting/observers/Pages/default.aspx https://www.sccgov.org/sites/rov/Voting/observers/Pages/defa... So I was wrong about the postmarks. I strongly encourage you to observe your elections. And attend the certification (canvas report) meetings. Seeing how the sausage is made will illuminate you. Santa Clara County's publicly available information is actually quite good. I spent years clawing information out of my county and didn't get anything nearly as detailed: https://www.sccgov.org/sites/rov/Voting/VotingNovember2016/Documents/E107%20Canvass%20Procedure%20Manual%20for%20November%208%202016.pdf https://www.sccgov.org/sites/rov/Voting/VotingNovember2016/D... Oops. Santa Clara is still doing "ballot enhancement" and "ballot duplication". So now I believe it's likely they're still using the mark sense (opscan) devices for mail ballots. My county switched to image scanners over a decade ago, so I assumed everyone would have switched by now. My bad. But wait, then why does it take so long to get the final mail ballot tallies? I'd bet it's because "duplication" and "enhancement" are manual tasks, and they're manually feeding the mail ballots into the mark sense devices, which takes days. -- For the record, per your own county's documentation, the only thing I was wrong about is the lack of a paper trail (enhancement, duplication). Because your county hasn't upgraded to the ballot image scanners. Yet.