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What risks to mail-in voting aren't already covered by mail fraud laws? AFAIK those laws are sufficient for normal crimes that one can easily commit by mail, so

• lordvon 6y ago
  Well, take a look at the following examples of convictions made for ‘fraudulent use of absentee ballots’ (and other forms of voter fraud): https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/pacei-voterfraudcases.pdf https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p... I suppose the pandemic is a valid point for wanting to vote by mail, but concerns for voting integrity are still there. I think there should be an easy-to-implement contactless yet in-person way to vote (maybe similar to how you get a coronavirus test), which would avoid the rather drastic action of allowing universal mail-in voting. Know that there are many states who ban / regulate it for good reason.
  • magicalist 6y ago
    > Well, take a look at the following examples of convictions made for ‘fraudulent use of absentee ballots’ (and other forms of voter fraud) 163 cases of "fraudulent use of absentee ballots" over 1988-2017. Probably a lot more useful to worry about the scantron machine accuracy.
    • lordvon 6y ago
      Those are the ones that just got caught. (And first page says it is a sampling not a comprehensive list...) It shouldn’t happen at all. And it will get worse with less stringent forms of mail-in voting, wouldn’t you agree?
      • LordDragonfang 6y ago
        A quick Google shows that paper ballots have a 1-4% inaccuracy rate in correctly recording voter intent. That's about 5 orders of magnitude higher, so we should stop using paper ballots entirely, since any amount of inaccuracy is unacceptible.
        • lordvon 6y ago
          Fraud should be prevented. Inaccuracies should be improved.
          • bavell 6y ago
            It seems the best way to do this is to move away from in-person voting. As has been demonstrated at DEFCON for years now, voting machines used in dozens of states are laughably insecure and easily tampered with. Mail-in ballots would be much more difficult to pull off large scale voting fraud with due to their distributed nature.
            • AnthonyMouse 6y ago
              Don't they still use the same voting machines for the mail in ballots? And the distributed nature is the problem. At the polls you have representatives of both major parties there to make sure nothing untoward is happening. How are you supposed to secure something that happens literally anywhere?
              • jimsug 6y ago
                I don't know whether the distributed nature is a problem, though. Voter intimidation is a lot easier, for example, if you know where and when to turn up. You would probably find it easier to tamper with a voting machine if you know where they're going to be, and if more people have access to them, too.
                • AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    • AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      > 163 cases of "fraudulent use of absentee ballots" over 1988-2017. That's more than five cases a year, of those that have been caught. Five stolen elections a year seems like a lot. > Probably a lot more useful to worry about the scantron machine accuracy. The scantron machine isn't purposely trying to alter the election results so the errors it makes aren't all in the same direction.
• AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > What risks to mail-in voting aren't already covered by mail fraud laws? With ordinary mail fraud, the victim tends to notice. You have a bill for something but the something never arrives. With mail in ballots, if someone registers people who didn't register themselves and then takes their ballots, the real constituents weren't expecting to get a ballot and then don't notice when none shows up. There are also a lot of problems that have really nothing to do with mail fraud. When people fill out their ballots outside the context of a polling place with election monitors, anybody could be intimidating them or paying them to vote in a particular way and then verifying that they do.