
Vote by Mail: Ballot Fraud Risk, State Laws and Trump's Claims - evo_9
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/04/864899178/why-is-voting-by-mail-suddenly-controversial-heres-what-you-need-to-know
======
wry_discontent
People complaining about voter fraud shouldn't be taken seriously. If you
cared about the integrity of US elections, voter fraud isn't where you'd
start. It's a fraction of a percent compared to the election rigging that
happens in the open.

Campaign finance makes a mockery of the campaign process. Voter id laws
disenfranchise more people than fraudulently vote. Gerrymandering creates
unfair advantages with malicious boundaries. Regular closing of the polls
disenfranchises more people than vote fraudulently.

Voter fraud might be a problem, but it's minuscule compared to fraud of the
elections themselves.

~~~
mcculley
I did some analysis of vote data in Florida and found some fraud:
[https://enki.org/2018/12/07/finding-unusual-
voters/](https://enki.org/2018/12/07/finding-unusual-voters/)

I'm not convinced it is large scale enough to sway an election. It's mostly
just a failure of the counties to coordinate with each other to prevent double
votes.

Florida has had unrestricted absentee ballot voting by mail since 2002. Over
2.5 million Florida voters used it in the last two elections, so I think the
recent noise about voting by mail is just a distraction.

I do think we need better coordination across the states. I am convinced that
there are people with residences in multiple states getting more than one
vote. Unfortunately, not all of the states are as transparent as Florida is
with the vote data.

~~~
clairity
at best, you possibly found evidence, not fraud. leave the determination to
judges and juries. intent matters and due process shouldn't be circumvented.

~~~
mcculley
I agree with you that I should not have used the word fraud. I was careful in
writing the original post and careless with this comment on HN.

------
tryptophan
Does anyone understand the security model of mail-in-ballots or have a good
article about it?

This article suggests there is some security-through-obscurity with each
county having its own ballot version, changed each election year.

They also mention matching voter registrations and signatures, but doesn't
this defeat the principle of anonymous voting by putting your signature and
name in the same envelope as your vote?

~~~
fuzzy2
In Germany, you have two envelopes, outer and inner. The inner envelope
contains your anonymous voting slip. I think it’s basically the same one you
get when voting in person. (Haven’t been there for a long time.) It’s what
goes into the voting box.

The outer envelope contains the sealed (invalid otherwise) inner envelope and
an affidavit where you declare that the vote was your own blah blah. This also
doubles as your voting registration (dunno how to precisely translate it, it’s
a paper your receive that allows you to vote wherever or via mail).

So the security is that it’s perjury if you’re not voting properly. The
anonymity is because the inner envelope is only opened when counting. The
outer envelope is gone by then.

~~~
rayiner
This would be fine in America. But that’s not what we’d do. Instead, someone
would file a lawsuit to count the “invalid” envelopes that were discarded
because the outer envelope wasn’t sealed properly. And they’d do it only in
Democratic-leaning counties, where the Democrat could expect to get more votes
from counting the invalid envelopes than the Republican.

(This is, in fact, almost exactly the trick Gore tried to pull in 2000, except
it was counting invalid paper ballots only in counties that had gone in his
favor.)

------
soco
We vote by mail in Switzerland every few months, for decades already. No major
issues... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_Switzerland#Mail-
in_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_Switzerland#Mail-in_ballots)

------
_red
HN is usually pretty good at detecting insecure implementations and obvious
attempts at subversion.

I wonder whats wrong in this case?

~~~
kochb
The crux is whether mail delivery of the ballot can be executed securely and
verifiably, and whether failures can be corrected in a timely manner.

A few examples of where this can go wrong:

* Introducing third party ballot collectors risks bad actors manipulating the ballot pipeline, for example what we saw in 2018 in North Carolina's 9th district.

* The US mail is mostly reliable, but lost mail (in my experience) is still fairly common. While this would be a random occurrence, every election cycle involves several tight races, and a lost ballot can flip the results.

* In the event errors in ballot transmission occur, you need to correct them in a timely manner. This requires someone to put in the effort to proactively watch out for missing ballots. Individuals are lazy, and it might not be in the interests of partisan officials to try.

The severity of these and other issues largely depends on the volume of mail
voting; the more mail voting the more incentive to try to subvert it. As with
any security issue, the defenses against them need to be strong enough to make
the attacks too expensive to execute. Just because we don't see fraud yet
doesn't mean mail voting won't be targeted in the future.

~~~
soco
This underlines how the actual bipartisan system winner-takes-all much too
sensitive to minor (postal or otherwise) hiccups. In a proportional system
wouldn't matter much if the difference between the lead positions was
plusminus 1%... but okay, it is how it is.

------
snarfy
"The things they had in there were crazy. They had levels of voting, that if
you ever agreed to it you'd never have a Republican elected in this country
again." \- trump

~~~
rsynnott
If making it easier to vote hurts the Republican Party, then presumably it's
on the Republican Party to make itself more appealing to people.

Incidentally, this is a VERY common argument against extending the franchise,
and extremely self-serving. And also typically incorrect; the Tory party in
the UK was terrified of letting all men vote, and then of letting all people
vote; a century later, they're still getting elected (though of course they
have a somewhat different character now that they have to appeal to people who
aren't even male landowners...)

~~~
_-david-_
>If making it easier to vote hurts the Republican Party, then presumably it's
on the Republican Party to make itself more appealing to people.

You could turn this around since its possibly that people who wouldn't
normally vote but would vote if they could do a mail in ballot are probably
less informed. The Republican Party is afraid that people who are less
informed are more likely to vote for the Democratic Party.

~~~
lalaland1125
Voter turnout is extremely correlated with income
([https://econofact.org/voting-and-income](https://econofact.org/voting-and-
income)). The more likely explanation is that the Republican party is afraid
that more poor people who currently can't afford to vote will suddenly have
the resources to do so.

~~~
_-david-_
People who are poor are more likely to be working multiple jobs and would have
less time to read / watch the news and as such I would be less informed about
politics.

Because of that I would say my point would still stand.

~~~
ilikehurdles
People who exclusively watch Fox News have been shown to be less informed
about politics than people who watch no news. Guess which party's loyalists
watch exclusively Fox News?

Education correlates with increases in Democratic votes. Christianity with
Republican ones.

It's not about information, it's about income.

~~~
_-david-_
>People who exclusively watch Fox News have been shown to be less informed
about politics than people who watch no news.

There is a few issues.

1\. That study was from 2012. Things have quite possibly changed since then.

2\. The study did not take a look at age. The average Fox News viewer is older
than most news shows. Older people have worse memory. A study should look at
the various age groups to make sure that it is not just old people not knowing
stuff. I am guessing young people who watch Fox are more informed than old
people who watch Fox.

3\. What is the correlation between Fox News viewers and voters? Its possible
that most Fox News people don't actually vote and as such bringing up Fox news
is irrelevant to the conversation.

4\. What is the correlation between poor people and Fox New views? Since we
are talking about poor people it seems like you should have included this.

>Guess which party's loyalists watch exclusively Fox News?

There have been studies that show the majority of Fox News viewers watch news
from multiple news sources.

>Education correlates with increases in Democratic votes.

Being educated does not mean informed about politics. Having a bachelors in
biology doesn't mean somebody knows anything about various policies.

>Christianity with Republican ones.

In 2014 it was estimated that 84% of democrats believed in God to varying
levels. Christianity is common throughout both parties.

>It's not about information, it's about income.

I agree that there is a difference in voting based on income but that does not
mean it is because of income.

------
mnm1
This isn't a debate. Many states have had mail in ballots for decades and some
use them exclusively. This is established practice and we know that suspected
fraud cases occur extremely rarely. Just because our idiot president and his
even dumber followers think something stupid is an issue doesn't make it so.

------
ikeyany
> _The opposition to mail voting is anchored by Republicans in states that don
> 't offer wide access to mail voting already.

The president has made it clear that despite voting by mail himself multiple
times, he does not support wide expansion of the practice._

Occam's Razor apllies here.

~~~
tw000001
>The president has made it clear that despite voting by mail himself multiple
times, he does not support wide expansion of the practice.

If we take off our hate-goggles here, this really isn't the gotchya that
journalists want you to think it is. One can be qualified to legally vote by
mail and do so while also claiming that overall the system is broken.

~~~
ikeyany
Did you read the very next paragraph in the article after what I quoted? The
claims were based on bogus evidence.

Not everyone who disagrees with you has "hate" in them.

------
every
There are over 3000 counties or equivalents in the US and each one has their
own particular take on the mail-in process. This isn't where I would start if
I wanted to influence the tallies beyond a strictly local level...

------
slovette
I've been voting by mail in Colorado for at least three years of memory, and
I've seen zero reports of any systemic issues. Utah and Oregon are the same
from what I know. Both Germany and Switzerland have mail voting, and there
isn't any strong statistical data showing an abundance of voter fraud.

However, this doesn't stop my rural farming parents from screaming about
rampant voter fraud and "The Dumb-o-crats" trying to take advantage of the
system. Yes, they also live in Colorado and vote by mail.

The propaganda works, even on decent people. We have a HUGE misinformation
issue to solve in this country before any complex issue like our voting system
can ever be talked about seriously.

Those of us that put real work effort into being properly informed, know the
real issue is turn-out and how voting by mail enables polling to have MUCH
MUCH higher turn-out. This is a problem for one of those parties that have
been able to hang onto power through less than ethical means of manipulation
and reducing voter turn-out from population bases they look down their nose
at.

This isn't my opinion, its fact. It's strategically brilliant by them and
their playbook is exceptionally effective. And THIS IS WHERE THE PROBLEM IS.

People like my folks are good, decent people. But they're intellectually lazy
and are victims to the propaganda machine that runs across their televisions
every day. If vetted information was presented in an easy-to-relate way, they
would see what I see. But somehow Trump and the right have figured out a
single childish label for complex societal issues chanted over and over again,
mentally over-powers the thousands of hours living a life of the exact
opposite.

It's shocking how well the right has dialed in their messaging. My parents
work in the trees and fields, under the hot sun, nearly every day in the
summer next to the same people they'll later chant are ruining their "American
Prosperity." They nearly bankrupted themselves, keeping these same workers
paid during COVID, because they weren't going to let them go hungry or lose
their homes. But they'll talk about the rampant welfare state and the need to
gut it over dinner.

Somehow, they don't relate what they see in politics with what they're living
every day. It's like it's two different worlds for them, and I'm dumbfounded
by how the propaganda has created that reality within them.

Voting issues, welfare, and/or any single issue directive won't overpower this
reality we live in now. We HAVE to solve this information issue first.

------
aSplash0fDerp
John Oliver summed this up pretty well.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l-nEHkgm_Gk](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l-nEHkgm_Gk)

It looks like the age of Independent candidates is upon US. The existing
burdens/obligations prevent the existing parties from seeing the future.

~~~
aSplash0fDerp
Whoops! Shouldn't have mentioned Independant.

The defenition of puppet is someone else dictating the words and actions, so
if your not amazed currently, you're just not a fan of puppet shows.

