Do the rest of us get to find out what that was, or do we have to wait for you and Bricker to play some sort of guessing game first?
I see two obvious vulnerabilities to mail-in voting, one before and one after mailing.
The ‘before’ one is the potential for ‘helping’ seniors with their voting when they’re no longer mentally competent, particularly in a nursing home where one could vote on behalf of dozens of elderly people at a time. I’m not sure what one does about that, but it’s probably not a huge problem. Still, it’s worth keeping in mind that roughly 2 million people reside in nursing homes, a number that’s only going to go up as my g-g-generation ages, and that we might have to think about that down the road.
(Stuff also probably goes on like a church pastor telling his flock to show up on a given evening with their mail-in ballots, so he can tell them all how to vote. But if fully competent adults wish to let their pastor tell them how to vote, that is their choice AFAIAC, and nothing needs to be done about it.)
The ‘after’ part involves the counting of the ballots, in instances where that is done by scanning software. This is important because you’ll get a lot more ballots being counted in one place than you do with precinct voting, and while there are recounts when an election is closer than some predetermined percentage, someone could bug the software so that it tilts the results more than that. But it’s easy enough to deal with, assuming either the Federal government sets standards for vote counting in Federal elections, or states do it themselves.
Suppose a mid-sized state has 2 million ballots, all by mail. Divide them into batches of, say, 200 ballots per batch, with the batches identified and kept separate. Require that the software produce counts for each batch, and total them up.
Then you randomly select a certain percentage of the batches and either hand-count them, or run them through alternate vote-counting machinery provided by each major party, to ascertain whether the official vote-counting machinery is doing its job.
The nice thing about mail-in ballots is that you do have this paper trail that can be checked against the official counts. I feel a lot more secure with something like that than touch-screen voting at my precinct, where I have absolutely no assurance that the votes being transmitted are the ones I indicated on the touch screen.