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Unofficial ballot drop boxes worry California elections officials
- bigdict 6y agoChange title to mention it's California?
- dang 6y agoDone.
- Johnny555 6y agoI usually mail my ballot, but this year I'll drop it off at the official ballot box at city hall. And I'll confirm online that they received my ballot.
- cactus2093 6y agoWhy? Also, reminder that you can track your ballot online and make sure that it is received and counted, whether you mail it or drop it off.
- foogazi 6y agoWhy not?
- Johnny555 6y agoBecause even if the post office wasn't deliberately crippled by management (in my area, 40% of sorting machines were disabled in August, I don't know how many were able to be put back into service), this election will likely have much higher than normal mail-in ballet counts, so by delivering mine by hand, that's one less piece of election mail the USPS needs to handle. Oh, and though this is probably obvious, I'm dropping at the box at City Hall, because I know that one's legit.
- iJohnDoe 6y agoYou’re assuming that your city hall is even remotely competent. Most city halls are no better than the Parks and Recreations TV show. Don’t believe me? Go to your next city hall meeting.
- Johnny555 6y agoCity Hall has the only official ballot box for my community (of around 25,000 people).
- kingnight 6y agoAs with all kinds of vote manipulation/fraud, how do those who execute these tasks rationalize their actions and sleep at night.
- jedberg 6y ago"The ends justify the means".
- davesque 6y ago"Unofficial" is a rather innocuous sounding term. How about changing the title to use "fraudulent"?
- me_me_me 6y agoExactly! Try selling unofficial nikes or use unofficial dollars and see how that gets reported.
- heavyset_go 6y agoThis is how you get the FBI to raid your home and business. I'd hope that parties that interfere with our elections would be held to the same level of scrutiny as counterfeiters.
- PragmaticPulp 6y agoReminder for non-American readers that all of these voting stories are newsworthy because they’re so strange and bizarre, not because it’s the norm here. The vast majority of Americans are going to vote completely normally. Many of us are going to simply drop our ballots off in the mail. The mail is still running fine in the vast majority of locations. Don’t get me wrong, these weird stories and edge cases are concerning and must be addressed, but it’s hardly the normal state of affairs for the vast majority of Americans. In this case, the ballot harvesting efforts, however ill-advised, are likely not created with ill intent. Given the way ballots are sealed, it’s unlikely that these operators are somehow going to open the ballots, check votes, selectively discard them, reseal selected votes, and not invalidate all of them in the process. Note that many of these drop boxes are popping at at weird places like gun shops, candidate headquarters, churches, and other locations that are likely to have voters skewed in a specific direction. However, it doesn’t make any sense that a political candidate or a gun shop would go out of their way to discard ballots collected at a location that skews toward their own constituency. Instead, it’s more likely that these people have consumed too much fear-mongering media about election tampering and believe that they are helping the situation by collecting and protecting the votes from like-minded people.
- NationalPark 6y agoMessing with the mail in votes is perhaps new, but suppression of progressive voters - especially minorities - has long been the norm in the U.S. This is actually worse than it sounds because of our electoral college system. Only a relatively small absolute number of votes need to be suppressed to change the outcome of the election.
- InitialLastName 6y agoThis is an important point, and there are plenty of recent elections that affirm it. If the Florida panhandle were part of Alabama, and Michigan's upper peninsula were part of Wisconsin, the result of the 2016 election would have been reversed. The 2000 election was decided by ~500 voters in Florida.
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
- jedberg 6y agoFor those of you in California, be aware that there is a QR code at the top of your ballot, which you can tear off, which takes you to a website where you can track your ballot and make sure it was counted. If it wasn't counted you can use that receipt to file a complaint, and possibly get a chance to submit your votes again.
- kian 6y agoWouldn't this imply that they can track who voted for whom by seeing which IPs are visiting to check on which ballots?
- ForHackernews 6y agoNo. Verifying that your ballot was counted doesn't say anything about which boxes were marked on that ballot.
- jedberg 6y agoThe tracking is separate from the ballot. When the ballot arrives they mark that they got a ballot from voter Alex who lives at 123 Main St, and then separate the ballot from the tracking info.
- pstrateman 6y agoYou're assuming that they separate the tracking information. Nothing ensures that they do.
- jedberg 6y agoIt's a very well defined, legally biding process that is monitored by members of both parties. So basically yes, you have to trust that the law will be upheld and that the Democrats and Republicans who monitor the process together won't be corrupted at the same time.
- tialaramex 6y agoGenuinely Secret ballots aren't actually that common in elections. For example Britain doesn't use them. Periodically the Parliament gets people to come in and talk about this, basically the discussion always goes like this: Expert: We should probably use a secret ballot Politician: Do you have any evidence we've used the fact that ballots aren't secret in the modern period? Expert: No, but that's sort of the point. Courts are allowed to use this but they never do, so, just use secret ballots. Politician: There are rumours that Military Intelligence uses it to find out who votes Communist and so on right? Expert: Yes, there are rumours but we aren't able to substantiate them. Politician: How about you, ex-spy, can you do better? Ex-spy: I have heard these rumours too. Politician: So they're true? Ex-spy: Well like I said, they are rumours. I've never seen it personally. And then the politicians decide actually maybe we'll think about this some more before making a decision and another decade passes with the ballots still not actually secret. [In England you will notice that the ballots are identical on a big pile when you arrive, but then when you show them or tell them who you are, they read out a number (a locally unique voter registration number), that number is written on a serial paper counterfoil, and the current number from the counterfoil is written to the ballot paper. This means that in principle it is possible (but laborious) to unwind parts or the entire election if you wanted to until the counterfoils are destroyed, a year later typically.]
- kjaftaedi 6y agoOne wonders why the local GOP was/is telling everyone to take their ballots to places that can't take them?
- jedberg 6y agoThey're collecting them to turn in en mass. They're putting them in places Republican voters are more likely to already be going to make it easier for Republicans to vote. This is arguably legal under California's ballot harvesting law.
- cosmiccatnap 6y agoThe problem though is that they are claiming it as official which it is not. It's also easy to see how a few ethic names might get lost in this process...
- Spivak 6y agoI really don't see why this kind of thing should be illegal. Aren't we supposed to be happy when people make it easier to vote?
- gremlinsinc 6y agoCouldn't someone gain access to a registry of voters for the dem party, cross reference w/ ballots, and purge non-GOP votes?
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Couldn't someone gain access to a registry of voters for the dem party, cross reference w/ ballots, and purge non-GOP votes? If one was a little more motivated, one could also get FEC donation records and also purge GOP voters whose donation history in the current cycle indicate that they were likely to vote out of line with the party endorsements.
- kjaftaedi 6y ago
- modeless 6y agoI don't understand why we even have ballot drop boxes. The ballots are all sealed in postage paid envelopes already and surely the majority are placed in regular mailboxes which are everywhere. So what's the point in having special drop boxes at all? I don't see a security argument since centralizing the collection of ballots would seem to me to make it easier, not harder, to attack. Fake boxes are one attack discussed in the article, but even straightforward stealing of ballots from boxes would be much easier when you only have to attack one collection box containing thousands of ballots instead of thousands of individual mailboxes distributed all over.
- mplewis 6y agoYou need a stamp to mail most ballots. You do not need a stamp to put ballots in a dropbox.
- jedberg 6y agoIn California all ballots are postage paid.
- modeless 6y agoIn California all ballots do not require a stamp AFAIK. Mine didn't. Even if you do drop it in a drop box, you still have to seal it in the provided postage paid envelope.
- Cerium 6y agoYou do not need a stamp in California. https://www.sos.ca.gov/administration/news-releases-and-advisories/2019-news-releases-and-advisories/no-stamp-no-problem-all-vote-mail-ballots-now-come-prepaid-postage-return-envelopes?fbclid=IwAR2sEPUpSZblc4n1WK06kECqYtkbyn-yuGwrbMvysWcN4wfz6B4qomf7Bho https://www.sos.ca.gov/administration/news-releases-and-advi...
- PragmaticPulp 6y agoThis isn’t true in California and I don’t know of any other state that requires stamps to mail in ballots. Driving any distance to drop off a ballot is more expensive than mailing it from home. It’s more likely that these people have consumed a lot of exaggerated news stories about the mail system and therefore think that dropping it off is safer. Meanwhile, we’re all getting the rest of our mail on time without exceptional delays.
- jedberg 6y agoThis article has more info: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/10/12/california-illegal-ballot-boxes/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/10/12/california-... Apparently the state GOP set them up and has admitted as much on Twitter. They say they are justified under California's law that allows ballot harvesting. They're putting them outside places usually frequented by GOP voters (gun stores, churches, etc) to help make it easier for them to vote. They may have a pretty solid argument. But more importantly, like most of these types of shenanigans, it probably won't be resolved until after the election.
- pstrateman 6y agoI have no idea why state election officials would say that these are illegal when they allow people to in person collect other peoples ballots. Edit: That it says "official" but is not official government is questionable.
- jedberg 6y agoIt's unclear whether the law only applies to collecting them in person or if these unofficial boxes are ok too.
- threatofrain 6y ago> unofficial boxes are ok too. These boxes are labeled as Official and fashioned as if from government. Nobody should be allowed to pose as government.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- weaksauce 6y agoThere's a difference in someone giving their ballot to a trusted person that will drop it off (and having signed the ballot over to that person to execute it) and having unofficial ballot boxes that the persons running can wholesale tamper with by say cross referencing the names with some other demographic information to disenfranchise some parts of society. these particular boxes might be operated without ill intent but that's not to say this practice should be allowed... especially since you can just put it in the mail now.
- svrb 6y agoWelcome to social media, where the facts don't matter. Ballot harvesting is not only legal but standard procedure... for the Democratic Party. The only difference wish these boxes is social distancing. But because ballot harvesting mostly happened in... different neighborhoods than the typical HN reader live in, therefore it's strange and unfamiliar and this didn't really happen, apparently. So naturally when the wrong team does the same thing (but with social distancing) it's the end of the world. And you can bet your last dollar that if the wrong team had collected the ballots in person, that would have been evidence that they're endangering peoples' lives with COVID. This sickens me.
- cosmiccatnap 6y agoIt should sicken you that you can't see the clear difference here. It's not a team issue it's clearly attempting to filter out the ethic ones.
- erichocean 6y ago> This sickens me. "Market-liberal party legally jostles for votes with welfare-liberal party in strongly welfare-liberal state, news at 11."
- Scoundreller 6y agoI could believe it. I ran a very poorly designed online telephone number directory for some years. The number of people that thought I was their bank or phone provider and gladly typed in their details into the Comments box... Then there's the (smaller group of) people that dug down enough to find my phone number that I put on a page when I first set it up. Took me a while to figure out how they got that.
- xtiansimon 6y agoTh O.C. Register has featured, now, two of the most bananas news stories I’ve heard this year—and that’s saying a lot! “Grand jury transcripts give peek into minds of OC deputies who lied about booking evidence” (10-3-2020) https://www.ocregister.com/grand-jury-transcripts-give-peek-into-minds-of-oc-deputies-who-lied-about-booking-evidence https://www.ocregister.com/grand-jury-transcripts-give-peek-...
- gridlockd 6y agoDon't worry guys, there's no evidence of widespread voter fraud.