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There's two steps to the process: Step one, check the signature, the voter roles, and remove the envelope. Throw the ballot into the bin to be counted. Step

There's two steps to the process: Step one, check the signature, the voter roles, and remove the envelope. Throw the ballot into the bin to be counted. Step two, count the ballot. This ballot now has no identifiable information on it at all. There's no way to verify that a person's ballot was correctly tallied. So if you wanted to ballot stuff, you could do so prior to step two. Recounts wouldn't identify fraud, you're just counting anonymous ballots again. The NY Times wrote about the possibility for mail-in voter fraud back in 2012: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-by-mail-faulty-ballots-could-impact-elections.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...

the_snooze 4y ago
Stuffing mail ballots makes zero sense if you're actually trying to tilt elections in your favor. It requires too much effort and conspiracy to get past the procedure you describe. Your crime-ing efforts are better off throwing away your opponents' mail ballots.
- xadhominemx 4y ago
  No, because it’s easy to check if your vote has been registered. If someone threw away a ton of ballots, people would notice.
  - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
    They're not thrown away in the dumpster instead of fed to the counting machine. They're discarded as invalid over "signature doesn't match" and legal nit-picking. It's another case of regulatory rules being used to stop competition instead of improving market/election integrity.
    - mulmen 4y ago
      This has the same problem. I can use a webpage to verify my vote has been counted. If there’s something wrong I can see there’s a problem and what to do about it. If this was widespread it would be caught.
    - xadhominemx 4y ago
      Again, many organizations track ballot rejections for exactly the reason you describe. It’s very easy to discover this sort of behavior.
hef19898 4y ago
And still this never happened in any other democratic country doing paper ballots. Simple reason: If there are more votes in the ballot box then registered voters (ideally this means everyone above voting and eligible to vote) you know someone tempered the ballot box. And having more than one (where I live I'm always puzzled how they find the hundreds of people to monitor the dozens of polling places since we have at least four people per polling station) person monitoring the handing out of ballots. having dozens polling stations, with a limited number of voters, means any ballot stuffing has close to no impact on results, doesn't scale and easy to catch. same goes for properly set up mail in ballots and voting, I know for a fact that all that works without any signatures and other things, a central registry of residents goes a looong way in solving this.
- upsidesinclude 4y ago
  You find a bunch of people that can't or wouldn't vote and collect their automatically mailed ballots, fill them out and have them dropped off in boxes. That's one way to illegally harvest votes. One that almost certainly occurred in nursing homes around the country in the last election.
  - thenewwazoo 4y ago
    > almost certainly occurred Citation, please.
    - mmcgaha 4y ago
      Let me google that for you: https://detroit.cbslocal.com/2022/02/24/macomb-county-nursing-home-worker-pleads-guilty-in-attempted-election-fraud-case/ https://detroit.cbslocal.com/2022/02/24/macomb-county-nursin... https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2020/11/12/texas-nursing-home-worker-charged-134-counts-election-fraud-n352006 https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2020/11/12/texas-nursing-home-w... https://www.apr.org/2007-07-13/two-charged-with-voter-fraud-in-south-alabama https://www.apr.org/2007-07-13/two-charged-with-voter-fraud-... https://ktla.com/news/nationworld/4th-resident-of-villages-florida-retirement-community-charged-with-voter-fraud/ https://ktla.com/news/nationworld/4th-resident-of-villages-f... https://www.tmj4.com/news/local-news/wisconsin-sheriff-wants-charges-filed-over-nursing-home-vote https://www.tmj4.com/news/local-news/wisconsin-sheriff-wants... https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/vote-fraud-election-seniors-pennsylvania-20171103.html https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/vote-fraud-election-sen...
klipklop 4y ago
I am glad you pointed this out. Few seem to understand that once the envelope is open and thrown away there is no way to verify the ballot being legitimate in many states. It's sad that people think with such a system there is no chance of voter fraud. They will smugly say that a recount confirmed everything was legitimate, etc. Very frustrating that the nuance is lost on them. Ballots need serial numbers that trace back to a person that we can pick up a phone and confirm their vote when elections are contested. Being unable to do a spot-check audit is just plain stupid. Every person should be able to look up their ballot and see how it was counted at the end of the election. Let's say voter fraud is indeed very low in the US, why not make obvious moves to make it even more accurate and honest?
- chki 4y ago
  > Ballots need serial numbers that trace back to a person that we can pick up a phone and confirm their vote when elections are contested. That would mean that elections are no longer secret. There are many good reasons why elections are secret in most (all?) democracies. It makes it impossible for people to be pressured into voting a certain way or payed to vote a certain way. It also means that you can't be prosecuted for voting a certain way. Giving up all of this would open up so many new avenues for voter fraud. Edit: This is not necessarily an argument but secret ballots are part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  You have to weigh the good with the bad. The secret ballot is essential, as compromise of that secrecy enables vote selling and voter intimidation. One of the reasons New York had tabulating machines and kept them was to limit the ability of political machines to interfere with elections at the local level. Tammany Hall operatives and others would retaliate against voters who didn’t do what the machine wanted. (Later those machines aged and became a liability) There’s no such thing as a perfect process, and while your idea is a worthy way of providing validation, it creates more serious issues that ultimately undermine the democratic process. If you have any kind of audit background they answer to ensuring integrity is always a same: a well defined process where different individuals are responsible for different parts of the process and are audited to achieve best practices. The reality is that measures designed to target individual voter fraud are solving a problem that doesn’t exist and are done to suppress turnout. The actual risk of voting related fraud is pretty obvious - political partisans with the access and ability to intimidate or bypass civil service employees from following the process. As a nation, we should be lauding the courage of the GOP election commissioners in Georgia who risked their careers and perhaps their lives to defy a demented president. Whatever the politics, those are people with integrity.
tptacek 4y ago
This isn't a thread about mail-in voting.
jbritton 4y ago
With respect to the 2020 election, I have wondered about the chain of custody of the ballots once separated from their envelope. In some regions boxes of ballots were transported to counting locations. Could someone swap out the entire contents of a truck. The boxes were then unloaded and brought in through back doors late at night. Could the boxes get swapped out during unload. Some boxes were left sitting under tables for later retrieval and not securely locked up. Some boxes were forgotten about in back rooms. There were reports of mail-in ballots that appeared stamped by machine, but I never saw any finished investigation of the reports.
- dpierce9 4y ago
  Are you saying ballots were separated then transported to be counted? I don’t know of anywhere where that happens. In Detroit there were allegations that ballots were ‘left unattended under a table’ which amounted to actually meaning ‘most of the employees left a secure facility which was videotaped the entire time and live streamed’. Trump actual gained votes in Democratic Wayne County. I read all of the allegations of fraud filed in Michigan and they were, to put it politely, drivel. There were also a number of reports on the integrity of the election, many legitimate audits (including in Antrim county). Did you read them? Did you look for them? Or are you trying to undermine something by feigning concern and sowing doubt? Edit: also it is useful to remember that the 2020 presidential election wasn’t close. Nothing like 2000. Neither in total votes, electoral votes, or the margin in any of the marginal electoral-vote supplying states.
  - jbritton 4y ago
    I don’t claim fraud, but I do have procedural concerns. I’m of the understanding that ballots stripped from their envelopes were transported to counting centers. Perhaps bribing one driver would be sufficient to swap 1000s of ballots and there would be no trail. I find the following from https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/05/gateway-pundit/video-does-not-provide-evidence-election-fraud-det/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/05/gateway-pu... “”” Only after ballots were validated were they delivered to the TCF Center for election workers to process and tabulate them. Shane Trejo, a writer for the right-wing website Big League Politics, told the Gateway Pundit that he was at the TCF Center where he said he witnessed thousands of ballots being unloaded early Wednesday morning. "There were at least 50 boxes that I saw unloaded at 3:30 a.m.“”” It’s my understanding that the validating process results in the naked ballots being placed into boxes for delivery to a counting center. The linked article debunks that the ballots were late, but that is not my concern. I was going to write more about Georgia but then I came across this article which eliminated most of my concerns there. I don’t know why it took a whole year before this was printed though. https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/investigators-locate-no-evidence-of-fulton-county-ballot-fraud-in-2020-election-01634164815 https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/investigators-locate-n... I did see some of the audits, which mostly removed my concerns of cheating. However there were claims in Georgia of mail in ballots that appeared marked by computer and I knew there was going to be a court case on this, but I never saw any reporting on this case. The above article says there were never any such perfect ballots found. I think the perfect ballot is where my fears come from. Where in the chain could you swap out ballots and put in generated ballots.
ricudis 4y ago
Long gone are the good old times where you just had to place some local policemen/military in every voting center "friendly advising" people who should they vote for. "For their own security", of course (reference: Greece 1961)

the_snooze 4y ago

Stuffing mail ballots makes zero sense if you're actually trying to tilt elections in your favor. It requires too much effort and conspiracy to get past the procedure you describe. Your crime-ing efforts are better off throwing away your opponents' mail ballots.

xadhominemx 4y ago
No, because it’s easy to check if your vote has been registered. If someone threw away a ton of ballots, people would notice.
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  They're not thrown away in the dumpster instead of fed to the counting machine. They're discarded as invalid over "signature doesn't match" and legal nit-picking. It's another case of regulatory rules being used to stop competition instead of improving market/election integrity.
  - mulmen 4y ago
    This has the same problem. I can use a webpage to verify my vote has been counted. If there’s something wrong I can see there’s a problem and what to do about it. If this was widespread it would be caught.
  - xadhominemx 4y ago
    Again, many organizations track ballot rejections for exactly the reason you describe. It’s very easy to discover this sort of behavior.

hef19898 4y ago

And still this never happened in any other democratic country doing paper ballots. Simple reason: If there are more votes in the ballot box then registered voters (ideally this means everyone above voting and eligible to vote) you know someone tempered the ballot box. And having more than one (where I live I'm always puzzled how they find the hundreds of people to monitor the dozens of polling places since we have at least four people per polling station) person monitoring the handing out of ballots. having dozens polling stations, with a limited number of voters, means any ballot stuffing has close to no impact on results, doesn't scale and easy to catch. same goes for properly set up mail in ballots and voting, I know for a fact that all that works without any signatures and other things, a central registry of residents goes a looong way in solving this.

upsidesinclude 4y ago
You find a bunch of people that can't or wouldn't vote and collect their automatically mailed ballots, fill them out and have them dropped off in boxes. That's one way to illegally harvest votes. One that almost certainly occurred in nursing homes around the country in the last election.
- thenewwazoo 4y ago
  > almost certainly occurred Citation, please.
  - mmcgaha 4y ago
    Let me google that for you: https://detroit.cbslocal.com/2022/02/24/macomb-county-nursing-home-worker-pleads-guilty-in-attempted-election-fraud-case/ https://detroit.cbslocal.com/2022/02/24/macomb-county-nursin... https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2020/11/12/texas-nursing-home-worker-charged-134-counts-election-fraud-n352006 https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2020/11/12/texas-nursing-home-w... https://www.apr.org/2007-07-13/two-charged-with-voter-fraud-in-south-alabama https://www.apr.org/2007-07-13/two-charged-with-voter-fraud-... https://ktla.com/news/nationworld/4th-resident-of-villages-florida-retirement-community-charged-with-voter-fraud/ https://ktla.com/news/nationworld/4th-resident-of-villages-f... https://www.tmj4.com/news/local-news/wisconsin-sheriff-wants-charges-filed-over-nursing-home-vote https://www.tmj4.com/news/local-news/wisconsin-sheriff-wants... https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/vote-fraud-election-seniors-pennsylvania-20171103.html https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/vote-fraud-election-sen...

klipklop 4y ago

I am glad you pointed this out. Few seem to understand that once the envelope is open and thrown away there is no way to verify the ballot being legitimate in many states. It's sad that people think with such a system there is no chance of voter fraud. They will smugly say that a recount confirmed everything was legitimate, etc. Very frustrating that the nuance is lost on them. Ballots need serial numbers that trace back to a person that we can pick up a phone and confirm their vote when elections are contested. Being unable to do a spot-check audit is just plain stupid. Every person should be able to look up their ballot and see how it was counted at the end of the election. Let's say voter fraud is indeed very low in the US, why not make obvious moves to make it even more accurate and honest?

chki 4y ago
> Ballots need serial numbers that trace back to a person that we can pick up a phone and confirm their vote when elections are contested. That would mean that elections are no longer secret. There are many good reasons why elections are secret in most (all?) democracies. It makes it impossible for people to be pressured into voting a certain way or payed to vote a certain way. It also means that you can't be prosecuted for voting a certain way. Giving up all of this would open up so many new avenues for voter fraud. Edit: This is not necessarily an argument but secret ballots are part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Spooky23 4y ago
You have to weigh the good with the bad. The secret ballot is essential, as compromise of that secrecy enables vote selling and voter intimidation. One of the reasons New York had tabulating machines and kept them was to limit the ability of political machines to interfere with elections at the local level. Tammany Hall operatives and others would retaliate against voters who didn’t do what the machine wanted. (Later those machines aged and became a liability) There’s no such thing as a perfect process, and while your idea is a worthy way of providing validation, it creates more serious issues that ultimately undermine the democratic process. If you have any kind of audit background they answer to ensuring integrity is always a same: a well defined process where different individuals are responsible for different parts of the process and are audited to achieve best practices. The reality is that measures designed to target individual voter fraud are solving a problem that doesn’t exist and are done to suppress turnout. The actual risk of voting related fraud is pretty obvious - political partisans with the access and ability to intimidate or bypass civil service employees from following the process. As a nation, we should be lauding the courage of the GOP election commissioners in Georgia who risked their careers and perhaps their lives to defy a demented president. Whatever the politics, those are people with integrity.

tptacek 4y ago

This isn't a thread about mail-in voting.

jbritton 4y ago

With respect to the 2020 election, I have wondered about the chain of custody of the ballots once separated from their envelope. In some regions boxes of ballots were transported to counting locations. Could someone swap out the entire contents of a truck. The boxes were then unloaded and brought in through back doors late at night. Could the boxes get swapped out during unload. Some boxes were left sitting under tables for later retrieval and not securely locked up. Some boxes were forgotten about in back rooms. There were reports of mail-in ballots that appeared stamped by machine, but I never saw any finished investigation of the reports.

dpierce9 4y ago
Are you saying ballots were separated then transported to be counted? I don’t know of anywhere where that happens. In Detroit there were allegations that ballots were ‘left unattended under a table’ which amounted to actually meaning ‘most of the employees left a secure facility which was videotaped the entire time and live streamed’. Trump actual gained votes in Democratic Wayne County. I read all of the allegations of fraud filed in Michigan and they were, to put it politely, drivel. There were also a number of reports on the integrity of the election, many legitimate audits (including in Antrim county). Did you read them? Did you look for them? Or are you trying to undermine something by feigning concern and sowing doubt? Edit: also it is useful to remember that the 2020 presidential election wasn’t close. Nothing like 2000. Neither in total votes, electoral votes, or the margin in any of the marginal electoral-vote supplying states.
- jbritton 4y ago
  I don’t claim fraud, but I do have procedural concerns. I’m of the understanding that ballots stripped from their envelopes were transported to counting centers. Perhaps bribing one driver would be sufficient to swap 1000s of ballots and there would be no trail. I find the following from https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/05/gateway-pundit/video-does-not-provide-evidence-election-fraud-det/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/05/gateway-pu... “”” Only after ballots were validated were they delivered to the TCF Center for election workers to process and tabulate them. Shane Trejo, a writer for the right-wing website Big League Politics, told the Gateway Pundit that he was at the TCF Center where he said he witnessed thousands of ballots being unloaded early Wednesday morning. "There were at least 50 boxes that I saw unloaded at 3:30 a.m.“”” It’s my understanding that the validating process results in the naked ballots being placed into boxes for delivery to a counting center. The linked article debunks that the ballots were late, but that is not my concern. I was going to write more about Georgia but then I came across this article which eliminated most of my concerns there. I don’t know why it took a whole year before this was printed though. https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/investigators-locate-no-evidence-of-fulton-county-ballot-fraud-in-2020-election-01634164815 https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/investigators-locate-n... I did see some of the audits, which mostly removed my concerns of cheating. However there were claims in Georgia of mail in ballots that appeared marked by computer and I knew there was going to be a court case on this, but I never saw any reporting on this case. The above article says there were never any such perfect ballots found. I think the perfect ballot is where my fears come from. Where in the chain could you swap out ballots and put in generated ballots.

ricudis 4y ago

Long gone are the good old times where you just had to place some local policemen/military in every voting center "friendly advising" people who should they vote for. "For their own security", of course (reference: Greece 1961)