That is a good point. I should do some math.
I think if there is any evidence that anyone has been coerced or threatened by anyone else into voting a certain way, that’s a crime and it should be taken seriously - although I’m not sure the “election fraud” aspect of this crime is the most worrying element. I
But people vote the way they vote for lots of different reasons. In an ideal world, every single person would vote based on their considered and informed positions of the candidate’s position and record, but we don’t live in an ideal world.
If a woman votes for a particular candidate because she prioritizes keeping peace in the household over voting for the candidate she really prefers, that’s NOT voter fraud, as long as she’s not in fear of actual abuse.
Encouraging your friends and family to vote for your favorite candidate is not voter fraud, and if a friend of mine votes a certain way because he thinks it will please me, when he might have voted differently if I hadn’t convinced him otherwise, that’s not voter fraud, it’s grassroots campaigning.
Yes, some men have a lot of influence over their wives, and if a wife is hiding her true political positions from her husband, in-person voting makes it easier for her to maintain that deception. I will also mention that she is legally entitled to claim she needs assistance and to take her husband into the voting booth with her, so if she’s in a truly coercive relationship, in-person voting isn’t going to save her.
And I say this even though I know that spouses, usually the male ones, often exert influence over the votes of their spouses and that influence probably typically works against “my side”. But I’m concerned about the way the term “voter fraud” is being bandied about these days and I’m really concerned at the way electioneering is being recast as fraud.
Willingly voting the same way as your husband because it’s easier is not voter fraud, no more than casting your ballot a certain way because you have a crush on Sean Hannity or you’ve been convinced BLM is going to burn down your house if Democrats are re-elected.
These are not good things and it would be better if everyone made an effort to become informed, saw their vote as important, and cast it accordingly, but the fact that many people don’t isn’t fraud. This is at the heart of many of the arguments in favor of voter suppression - the idea that if you make it really hard to vote, you will only get the voters that appreciate the value of their vote and won’t waste it by, for example, voting a certain way to impress a girl or appease a husband.
So, no I’m not in favor of suppressing the vote because of a theory that mail-in ballots are somehow less of a “real” vote than in-person ballots, because the person who legitimately votes and signs them may allow someone to look over their shoulder.
The idea that significant numbers of American women are such helpless Hannahs that they bow to men in their voting choices is repellent and foolish. If they were that downtrodden by abusive spouses they’d likely be obedient in the voting booth too.
By all means, survey mail-in voting choices if you want. It’d be more productive to analyze why so many women were willing to overlook Trump’s history with females and vote for him anyway. Could it have had something to do with Democratic candidates and policies? Nah. 
As for voter fraud, I’m far less concerned with mail-in ballots than with hacking of voting machines.
I can take my senile mother’s ballot out of her mailbox and vote it myself. I can look up a list of voters in the X party primary, and steal their ballots as they arrive. (I know some mailboxes are locked, mine isn’t, nor are most of them around here. And you don’t need to vote those ballots – just making it harder for people to vote is effective.) I can register my politically apathetic live-in daughter and vote her ballot.
These are all illegal. The second involves some risk of being caught. They are all small-scale, retail voting fraud. But they are all easier and safer than driving around and pretending to be other people and hoping none of those other people have already voted and you get caught red-handed.
At a wholesale level, the election officials can scrutinize signatures more strictly in districts they disfavor politically. Of course, those same officials can arrange for in-person voting in disfavored areas to be inaccessible and poorly staffed, leading to long lines that discourage voting. That latter isn’t “fraud”, but it serves the same function, perhaps more effectively.
Although mail in voting is easier for most, it does risk making it harder for those who don’t have a mailing address or who want to vote in person to do so – at least in my town, I know the town clerk is looking into reducing the number of polling places if mail-in voting reduces the number of voters enough, to save the town money. She says that at the peak of the pandemic, one polling place would have had enough capacity for all the in-person voters, but she’s rejected that due to making the polling place inaccessable to some. But other election officials will make other decisions.
All in all, I’ve decided that the greater accessability of mail-in voting is worth the risks and costs. But I see arguments the other way.
Yeah, that’s the wholesale fraud we should all be concerned with. IMHO, voting machines should only be allowed if they produce a human-readable paper ballot, and THAT’s what’s counted. And there should be routine audits of the machines that read paper ballots, as well.
I don’t see it.
Maybe other states are different, but the mail-in voting procedures in my state are very secure. They may not have been so secure in the past, but most of the articles about how mail-in voting is less secure than in-person voting were written 10-20 years ago, and document tracking technology has come a long way since then.
I might get a dozen absentee ballot APPLICATIONS in the mail, in some states I my be able to print off as many as I want, but they will only send me ONE ballot. That ballot does not contain my personal information but it contains a bar code that is directly linked to my personal information.
I have been doing early voting, which is technically in-person absentee voting- so I got the same ballot that would’ve been mailed to me. The ballot application that I filled out when I went to vote had both my personal information and the same bar code that appeared on my ballot. I was asked to double-check everything myself, not just my personal info, but to make sure the bar code numbers matched. That bar code is tied to my name in the voter database. One someone applies for a mail-in ballot, as my niece did, you have a tracking number and you can go online and track your ballot, noting when it’s been received and when it’s been counted.
If someone tries to, deliberately or accidentally, run my ballot through a tabulation machine more than once, the bar code will prevent it from being counted twice. If it presents a bar code that isn’t valid, that isn’t linked to a registered voters, it isn’t counted.
The vulnerability of mail in voting is that it is technically possible to request and receive someone else’s ballot BUT in order to do that the fraudster would have to obtain the personal information of another registered voter, and they would have to be sure that registered voter was not going to try and vote themselves. This is happened, usually by people voting for a sick or recently deceased family member, friend or acquaintance—- but in order to do this, you have to have a sick or recently deceased family member or acquaintance, be able to adequately forge their signature and be willing to risk a felony conviction. Even though people have done this, both in person and by mail, these hurdles are sufficient to keep “voter fraud” from becoming an actual risk in all but the very smallest or closest elections.
The thing that struck me most when I voted was not that the process was anything less than totally secure, but that the veil of secrecy was pretty thin. Sure, my name wasn’t on the ballot, but a bar code that linked directly back to my name was, and that code was on my ballot. If anything, maybe the insistence that the voting process is totally secret has caused officials to downplay the security and that leads people to think the process is less secure than it really is.
True, but most of us don’t have a senile mother that’s a registered voter lying around the house
But most of those people will notice they didn’t get their ballots. I noticed you walked back the idea of voting those ballots, because at least one of those people, and probably more - would certainly notice if you did, especially considering that their ballot requests may be traceable on-line, and then the shit would hit the fan. So all your left with is “I can steal their ballot and throw it away so they have to jump though hoops to cast it again. This is one that might’ve worked better 10 years ago, before a large percentage of homeowners had video surveillance on their front door mailboxes. But you couldn’t get away with it in 2022. This goes to my previous point that out technologies have made mail-in voting way more secure than it was 20 or even 10 years ago.
If you are going to go to the trouble of stealing her ID and identity, you could vote her ballot in person. That’s fraud, but that kind of fraud isn’t specific to mail-in ballots.
If you are going to pressure her to request a ballot, tell her how to fill it out and have her sign it and mail it back, I don’t think that’s fraud. It’s her vote and she’s allowed to use it to please you.
I don’t think there’s a single state that doesn’t provide an alternative to in-person voting if a voter is incapacitated physically to the point that they can’t attend a polling place. What would stop you from using this method in any state that chiefly offers in-person voting? And don’t forget, you still have to forge a signature either way. Worth it?
You can, but I promise you you would likely be found out. Many people are on the lookout for their ballots to show up in their mailboxes at election time. They will inquire at the local election board if a ballot doesn’t arrive. If the local election board received a number of complaints about this, they will take steps with law enforcement to find out what is happening. I realize you indicated this was the most likely way a person committing such fraud would be caught. You’re right about that.
You can. It’s a pretty rare situation, though. And there is that signature match thing again. People think elections officials don’t pay attention to signatures, but they do.
I would argue that voter suppression tactics taken to disenfranchise certain voters is far more egregious than the comparatively rare types of actual voter fraud utilized in mail-in voting. That’s been borne out in many studies.
I live in a vote-by-mail state, have for nearly 2 decades, and worked as an elections official in another state for many years, also utilizing vote-by-mail because we had to work the elections. Most of what is offered as arguments against vote-by-mail is just ginned up hocum. Such fraud occurs on such a vanishingly small scale that its effect on election outcomes is nearly 0%. As opposed to overheated fears about “abused spouses” which, as pointed out most ably by @Ann_Hedonia, is more myth than reality.
Efforts to force in-person voting, together with efforts to make in-person voting as inconvenient as possible, are the true voter fraud, in my view.
Routine audits of the machines checked against paper ballots are already done in most states, I’m happy to say. Just as the hand recount in Georgia demonstrated dispositively that Biden had won the election there, it also verified that the machine count was virtually identical to the hand recount. No fraud there.
That’s an excellent point. I withdraw this one.
That’s good, because i actually do this one. I mean, i don’t actually know how she votes, because i don’t look at her ballot. But i do pressure her to either request a ballot or go in and vote in person (neither of which she’d be likely to do on her own) and i also tell her whom i support.
And i agree both that this (and the similar spousal situation) isn’t fraud, and that it’s just about as easy to do with in-person voting as with mail-in voting.
Also, yes, that was an edit, but i wasn’t walking anything back. I posted and thought, “hmm, someone might take that the wrong way”, so i edited to clarify that i was thinking of voter suppression, not voting other people’s ballots.
But what with all the cameras these days, the only person who could get away with doing that is the letter carrier. I do know a woman online who claims that her letter carrier used to throw away most of the Republican ballots in her area (which is why i thought of it, honestly) but i doubt that’s a significant issue.
If a person doesn’t feel free to vote the way that they think they should then, whether there was any criminal intent on the part of the influencer or not, it’s not a free vote.
If your husband convinced you of his position, Hannity convinced you of his position, the moon fairies convinced you of their position, or whoever convinced you then - when you’re in a free position to vote your conscience - you will vote in accordance with your true beliefs and understanding. But you have to have that freedom. Otherwise, we’re just making the assumption that you were convinced and we’re giving others the freedom to run all over your beliefs.
Mail-in voting is a convenience but not a necessity. It is entirely possible to ensure that everyone has access to the voting booth, if the government is willing to declare time and funding for it. The options are not simply “disenfranchisement” or “unintentional voter fraud”. Any ideal voting condition is simply a matter of wanting it and holding your politicians’ feets to the fire on it.
That convenience may be worth it if there’s really no practical difference between the votes of co-habitants when mailing in and when driving in, but you would need to know those actual numbers first.
That is really my point, that none of these are significant issues. There are plenty of ways someone could rob a bank, but that doesn’t mean that banks are unsafe, and it doesn’t mean that bank security is an issue. It certainly doesn’t mean I shouldn’t use them.
And I wanted to throw in the general comment that tabulation machines are a great tool against fraud, and those that advocate eliminating them as a fraud prevention measure are flat out wrong.
They should be audited by hand, of course, but they can, when tied to a bar coded ballot system, not only keep ballots from being counted more than once but they can keep ballots that aren’t associated with a registered voter (ballot stuffing) from being counted at all.
What’s the baseline? What’s the range of normal?
If you take any medical test, a single set of results by themselves mean nothing. The doctor will need to look at your past results to see whether these new ones are higher or lower, and also use a set of agreed-upon standards to judge whether the results are within the band of normal findings.
What is normal when it comes to spousal voting? Some polling has probably been done over time, but that can’t be accurate enough to call any particular set of results fraudulent. You’d need years, probably decades, to create a baseline to which new results can be compared.
As for methodology, simple comparison of addresses is too noisy. There are dozens of reasons why two ballots from an address might not be spousal. What about addresses with three or more ballots? What if one spouse sends in a fraudulent mail-in ballot and then votes in-person? How much uncertainly can you allow in a system with no presumption that the fraud is any larger than known ballot fraud which is in the tiny fractions of one percent?
The OP assumes that mail-in voting produces a higher amount of spousal influence than in-person voting. An absolute knowledge of fraudulent or abusive spousal influence over in-person voting is therefore another necessary baseline. That can’t be pulled out of Big Data. Knowledge not only of individual votes but of the reasons behind individual votes would be required, undermining all faith in the voting system. As said above, there are reasons to believe both that spouses would vote similarly and that deviations can be explained in dozens of ways.
At best, this is a solution seeking a problem. Though I’m flattering it by calling it a solution. What remedy could be sought if somebody decided that the ratio wasn’t what some government body thought proper? Go into homes and interrogate everyone who lives there? The only solution I can see is to stop all mail-in balloting.
But a Washington Post analysis of data collected by three vote-by-mail states with help from the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) found that officials identified just 372 possible cases of double voting or voting on behalf of deceased people out of about 14.6 million votes cast by mail in the 2016 and 2018 general elections, or 0.0025 percent.
Can anyone think that this one possible additional source is large enough to affect that minuscule number? We already have enormous sets of protections built into the system. What price are we willing to pay to interfere in between spouses?
Thanks for that, by the way. That’s reassuring to know.
And back to mail-in voting, i really appreciated that my state posted on line when it received my ballot, and that it had been accepted. That gave me a great deal of confidence that my vote had been counted, and that everyone’s vote would be counted exactly once, and that it would be fairly easy to correct an error, such as my ballot being lost in the mail or rejected. Because in those cases i would know, and could either cast a new mail in vote, or go to the polls and vote in person.
Certainly two people living together will have an impact on their thinking which is fine and normal. If I do something stupid and my GF calls me on it I listen to her and that modifies how I approach things (and vice versa). A strong personality in a relationship may overwhelm someone and they might defer to that person (we see that in cults…mentioned only to note that this kind of thing happens).
I do not think there is a way around whether or not a spouse influences the other and I would worry about a mail-in ballot if a domineering spouse looked over the shoulder as a ballot was filled out at home (or they filled it out for the other person).
But, 100 years ago, I never understood that complaint. You voted in private so, apart from having your thinking changed, the person can pull whatever lever they want and lie to their spouse about who they voted for.
Absolutely, such noises were just excuses for keeping the vote away from women. People then were no different from today’s online chuckleheads who invent smooth sounding reasons for bias and bigotry that aren’t as bluntly distasteful as outright hatred.
There is some historic context for the opinion. Secret ballots were still new things. I believe some states hadn’t fully enacted them into law until after the passage of the 19th amendment. I also believe that rigid enforcement was laxer than it is today. I wouldn’t be at all surprised that in some places at some times it would be common for spouses to vote together and that generally “assistance” on paper ballots was also common. Not universal, but not as extremely low as voter fraud is today.
Also, the wife could just be lazy and say to her husband: “You fill out my ballot, I’ll just sign it.”
This does actually happen, to my personal knowledge. No, I wont give details.
Do people sign ballots? Aren’t they supposed to be anonymous?
Really asking. I have only ever voted in person and, while I had to sign-in and prove I was me and in the right place, the ballot was anonymous.
They sign the outer envelope, not the ballot itself. I should have been more clear.
The signature on the ballot is checked that it matches the voter record, then it is discarded and the ballot itself is anonymous.