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Voting by mail is not at all secure. For example, a post-office worker could easily skew the results by throwing away letters from a partisan district.
by fsh 7y ago
Voting by mail is not at all secure. For example, a post-office worker could easily skew the results by throwing away letters from a partisan district.
- asdff 7y agoPost offices are covered in security cameras. My branch has two by the stationary alone, ensuring every angle is monitored lest you steal a $0.10 mailer.
- donarb 7y agoBallots are mailed out 3 weeks before the election. If you didn't receive a ballot, you can ask for another. After you've mailed in your ballot, you can check online if it's been received. Again, if not, you can request another ballot. In addition, most neighborhoods have drop off boxes where you can deposit your ballot, untouched by postal authorities.
- fsh 7y agoThis completely misses the point. In a well-designed paper ballot election the ballot never leaves the polling station which can be monitored by anyone during the entire process. This is simply not possible if you vote by mail. In the end you have to trust that the person who picks up the letters doesn't mess with them.
- donarb 7y agoThe thing is is that ballots aren't permanently stored at the polling location, they eventually need to be transported to a central location for auditing and storage. In the past, polling places with lax security could "lose" an entire box of ballots. Nowadays, if a couple thousand ballots disappear from a certain zip code, the authorities would be on it pretty quickly. In Washington state where I live and has email balloting, the central location is a secure county election facility that invites citizens to visit in person and through the internet to watch the counting process as it happens.
- Frondo 7y agoOregon has had vote by mail for at least 20 years and there is almost no irregularity in the process, either for voters or election officials. In the 2016 election, out of 2 million votes cast, they found something like 54 cases of voter fraud, mostly people voting after they'd moved out of their district. Election fraud in Oregon is equally rare -- the big one in 2016 was a Republican volunteer in Clackamas County attempting to toss out a box of dem voter ballots. I don't remember the specifics but I think they were caught almost immediately. The security thing is absolutely a red herring to discourage more states from adopting vote-by-mail, pushed by anyone who benefits from low turnout, because vote-by-mail significantly improves turnout without threatening election security in any meaningful way.