In recent times, it has been popular to recount and analyze ballots.
The one, potentially true, risk of mail-in voting is that it means that people who live together are not guaranteed a private space to vote as they see fit. This creates a condition that can be abused for voter fraud. I was always curious, for example, that former President Trump did so well among women despite the plethora of credible accusations against him. (People can be nuts - women included - so I don’t necessarily take that as evidence of voter intimidation by their spouses but it did surprise me that there was so little different in voting behavior between male and female Republicans at the time.)
It should be possible to compare similarity of vote between married couples who went to the poll booth (and had privacy) and those who mailed them in, to see if there is any notable difference between the two groups.
Do you think that a spouse who’s living in a toxic environment and has their vote dictated by the other person is going to be truthful in such an inquiry?
I did not propose a face to face inquiry. Ballots are attached to addresses and, as I understand it, you can tell which ones are mail-in and which come from the voting box.
You separate out the ballots where there you see the same address for more than one entry, and perform mathematical analysis on the voting choices.
Given what has already been done in Arizona, it seems like there’s not much more you could do to pry into everyone’s privacy there. And certainly if that’s the standard, this seems like the least objectionable thing you could do.
The data simply isn’t there to be analyzed. By the time votes are counted, they have already been stripped of all identifying information, including addresses. This is by design, because if you could tell who the person at 123 Elm Street voted for, then you could retaliate against them for voting “wrong”.
It is a good question, and I would like to see some good way of addressing it. But I don’t see how, and it’s certainly not as simple as you propose.
I suppose that you would have to make it part of the process in a coming year, to set up an anonymized database at the same time that you are stripping the addresses.
Having participated on the county’s Absentee Voting Board (i.e. counting mail-in ballots), there are so many reasons why the OP’s proposal is a Very Bad Idea.
As for exit-polling, that’s supposed to be very accurate, but (anecdote) my brother was once exit-polled, and deliberately gave all wrong answers.
Team 1 opens outer envelope with address and generates a non-reversible hash from it (using strict rules on how to enter the address - e.g. using “street” instead of “st”, “#xxx” instead of “unit xxx”, etc.), puts the hash on the inner envelope. Team 2 opens inner envelope and populates ballot results to database, according to hash. After associating the data together, the database drops the hashes and generates a new identifier.
Back 100 years ago, serious concerned people were convinced that women should not be given the right to vote because their husbands would just dictate the results.
There has not been any convincing evidence that this has happened at any time since. I think it’s extremely improbable that mail-in ballots are producing any appreciable amount of spousal abuse.
Everything that can be researched should be, of course, but mail-in as well as electronic ballots are as privileged as voting machine ballots.
Women have voted against Republicans in most recent elections. Pew has breakdowns for 2016 and 2020. In 2016 overall, men voted 11 points more for Trump and women voted 15 points more for Clinton. In 2020 Men voted 2 points more for Trump and women voted 11 points more for Biden. That is a narrowing. The chart only breaks down white voting but white women increased their margin for Trump from 2 points to 7 points, indicating that minority women must have swung the other way.
In fact, according to a Washington Post column, white women have swung Republican in all but 2 elections since 1952!
I’d say that squelches any reasonable suspicion that the voting results are being manipulated. The votes of women conformed almost exactly to the historical pattern.
The historical pattern would only reveal an issue if the entire nation switched voting methodology all at once and take-up was very high, immediately, and stayed that way. You might see a sudden rise or drop in the partisan lean of the nation.
If states slowly migrate from booth voting to mail-in and voters slowly shift their preferred voting method gradually as it becomes more popularized, then you wouldn’t see any marked shift. Everything would look like smooth, predictable change.
Again, you might be able to tease out a result if all states suddenly cancelled mail-in voting, after it had become sufficiently prevalent for there to be a notable shift after the cancellation. But no state has done that.
I opposed mail in voting until i tried it… Damn, that’s convenient. But there’s WAY more room for fraud with mail in voting than any kind of in-person voting.