I’m hoping @Sam_Stone comes back to this thread and either addresses the comments showing that, whatever his concerns are, they don’t seem to be a problem in the real world, or provides cites that there actually are significant problems with mail-in voting.
He’s too busy digging up the goalposts right now.
Yes, you can fill out the ballot for another person in your household and have them sign it. So? To me, not a big deal.
No, you can’t. They cross check, and one ballot would be invalidated.
They cross check and they would invalidate the ballot. You could do the same in person of course, mail in just makes it a little easier.
You don’t know their signature, not even enough to fake it, and if that person also notices they didn’t get a ballot in the mail, and asks for another or votes in person, they will invalidate the fake one. In CA, you can track your ballot. Not to mention, you just committed mail fraud and mail theft, two rather serious felonies, just to get a couple extra votes. Also mass stealing mail is not as easy as you may think. In any case, there are no instances of this happening.
True, but you also don’t have the major disadvantage of the GOP controlled local government making it so Democratic areas have to stand in lines for hours and hours, while GOP districts just walk up and vote.
Committing felonies, losing their career and retirement just to maybe cost one party some votes?
We have already said this can’t happen, and digging through everyones garbage in the hope of finding a ballot which is pristine? Sure- pull the other one, it’s got bells on it. Hasn’t happened.
The real opposition to mail in voting is that it is harder for Republican Jim Crow laws to suppress the vote. Fix the districts so that Dems have to wait for hours? Won’t work if they can mail in. Have armed Poll watchers staring at minorities voters as they come in? Won’t work. Make it really hard to get ID and then have GOP poll workers reject the Dem voters? Won’t work.
CA has had VBM for decades, through Republican Governors etc, and until trump with his bogus “voter fraud” fantasies they has never been an issue, even from the GOP.
Yep. Been there done that.
Voting in person was fine, but a lot more of a hassle, IMHO. I voted in person for years until part of my job as a court employee in California required me to work elections.
During my vote-in-person years, I was fortunate that my precinct was housed in a school close to my home, so I could just walk over and cast my vote. The election worker would locate my name on their register and I was required to sign the book. They would then compare my signature to the one on file. If it passed muster, I was permitted to go into a voting booth and cast my vote. I had to trust that the machine recorded my vote properly. It was uncomfortable trying to work quickly in a tiny space.
I learned a lot of things behind the scenes when I worked elections.
First, nothing is done without at least 2 people together to witness the process. The job I was most regularly assigned to was to go with a deputy sheriff to outlying precincts to pick up boxes of ballots and return them to the main elections office to be counted. I never knew which deputy I would be paired with ahead of time, although because we had often worked together in courtrooms, we had some latitude to choose one another. (Hard to form a plot to sabotage an election if you don’t know ahead of time who you’re plotting with, or which deputies are going to work the election.)
Second, every stage of the process is formally witnessed. I had to sign for each box of ballots I picked up, witnessed both by the deputy and the precinct workers turning them over to me. Every box is sealed and placed in a transport bag. This process is witnessed, too. When I turned my ballot boxes over to the main Elections office, each box was inspected for tampering and then witness-signed that the boxes were received in a proper manner. Each precinct box was expected by the Elections office and ticked off a list once it was received.
Third, every single election worker, paid or unpaid, took their work very seriously. Partisanship was non-existent. This has obviously changed over time, but I don’t think people who are baldly partisan would be election workers for very long. It’s mostly retired folks who are civic-minded.
Collectively, we didn’t just somehow forget to run safe, secure elections in 2020 after more than 240 years. I really don’t get people who suddenly distrust the process – except for knowing the extent of propaganda surrounding the issue since Trump came on the scene.
I often remind people that Trump spoke openly about contesting the election in 2016 on the issue of vote fraud even before the election was held – and he would have, too, if he hadn’t prevailed. Clearly, only elections where Democrats win are fraudulent, according to Trump Republicans.
Keep in mind my experiences are for Washington State…
Yeah, voting in-person wasn’t too bad. It was usually at a church or school. I’d walk in, go to a table, and give my name. They’d find my name on a list then have me put my signature next to my name and then hand me a ballot.
I’d go to a little desk thing with partitions so that I could have privacy, and fill out a ballot by filling in circles. From what I recall the ballot was completely identical to what now goes in an envelope to be mailed, all the way down to the security sleeve. I’d then drop it in a box and leave.
The actual process is almost identical to what I do now by voting by mail. The difference is that the ballot comes to me instead of me going to it. I fill out the same thing the same way, and the confirmation that I am the person the ballot is assigned to is my signature, the only difference is that my signature is on the envelope being mailed rather than a ledger a poll volunteer hands me. And of course, another huge difference is that I have days to vote rather than minutes.
I was pretty good about voting regularly when it was in-person, so I don’t think going to mail-in ballots changed that. But voting day used to be a bit stressful because I had to make sure to clear my afternoon to vote (after I was done with work), and I had to schedule my evening around it. There is absolutely no stress at all with the mail-in system. You have all the time in the world to do it.
Bolding mine. That’s it, really – it’s been a non-stop attack on the voting process by the Republicans, and it’s working – they are using it as an excuse to disenfranchise people, but that’s harder to do with vote-by-mail. It’s working so well that even a Canadian like Sam_Stone distrusts VBM. That’s probably because he has shitty right-wing news sources.
We have always been at war with Eastasia mail-in ballots.
I remember some Republican politician recently saying that mail-in ballots were, essentially evil and subject to voter fraud, while absentee ballots (as used by overseas military) were not. As if there’s a difference.
Much the same in Washington. I actually get two “Voter Information” mailings: one from the Secretary of State covering statewide races and ballot measures, and one from the County Auditor covering the local versions. For offices, they include candidate information and statements; for ballot measures, they include both a summary and full text, as well as arguments for and against (plus rebuttals). Both include general information about the process, and the county publication has a list of ballot dropboxes. I won’t say they cover everything one would want to know, but they come pretty damn close.
The ballots are managed by the local county election commission, comprised of members for whom we either vote directly, such as the County Clerk, or appointed members, who are appointed by the County Board. We vote for County Clerk/Board every 4 years, and as such, they answer to the local voters.
Under the proposed plan, who is going to determine the new guidelines? Some agency in Washington? Serious question, I don’t know the answer.
I’ve been voting by mail (actually, always been “vote by dropping ballot off at the big box at the library down the street” for me) for all but my first election in Oregon and I suspect if any stupid butthole ever tried to change us back to the regular method there’d be some full scale riots that would put all previous protests to shame.
I was kind of shocked to find out that voter information pamphlets are not by any means universal, but they should be. Another thing that should be universal is Oregon’s universal voter registration–you actually have to fill out an “opt out” form to take yourself off the voter registration rolls and if you change your address, say at the DMV, your voter registration is also updated automatically. I see footage of people standing in miles long lines to vote in a pandemic and I suspect that if a national referendum were held to force every state to adopt the Oregon/Washington vote by mail model the response would be an overwhelming “YES PLEASE.” Voter disenfranchisement is orders of magnitude more prevalent than voter fraud and needs to be addressed bigtime–and vote by mail does that handily.
Here’s an example, which was already posted by Gyrate.:
Four charged with vote harvesting in Texas:
Woman accused of tampering with 400 absentee ballots:
You wouldn’t have these cites if the preps weren’t detected, right?
So these cases are either the tip of the iceberg or examples proving that it’s really really tough to commit voter fraud.
I suspect the latter. YMMV.
I’m actually not disagreeing with you, but where I live in Colorado, pretty much Every measure must be on the ballot, which means on many ballots, I have had over 60 individuals and initiatives to consider. Yes, I could focus on the ones that I found more important and left the rest blank, but I’d rather check on all of them.
That’s not absolutely unique, but definitely makes the comfort level (both physical and research) of VBM much more endearing, especially as my memory isn’t quite as good as I might wish. 
No one, afaik has been convicted, and all were Dems arrested by Republicans. In one case, it was not vote fraud, but applications where the party was marked in advance. That would have no effect on how they voted in the General election, and these were absentee, not VbM.
Yeah, so they arrest a few Democrats to make their claims look good. Plenty of GOP voter fraud cases too.
This Republican was actually convicted: Appeals court upholds former GOP chair's felony conviction for voter fraud
More: https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud-print/search
Note that Ronald Reagan, while he was governor of CA liked voting by mail. It has only became an issue because the orange con man wanted to run two more cons:
- Make his faithful think the election was rigged
- Get donations to Fight The Steal, spend about 10% on suits and such thrown out of courts as groundless- often by GOP Judge- and then pocket the other 90%.
It was and is a Con.
These have always been voter fraud and irregularities, but they don’t change the outcome of any national elections.
I seem to remember reading, likely on this board, that someone ran the math. All the detected fraud of any sort from 2000 - 2021 as a percentage of the total number of votes cast at all levels of public election during that timeframe.
It was a very small number. Like 0.0000001%.
Just another point about a huge advantage to VBM that no one I saw mentioned - costs.
For a lot of people, their employer doesn’t offer any/sufficient time off to go vote (a previous employer offered up to 2 hours on election day and you had to use PTO). Or it’s offered unpaid, so you can easily be throwing out a half-days pay or more in order to vote. Yes, in some areas you have enough flex to maybe work around it, but again, it’s a work around.
VBM - you make some time anytime in the roughly 10 days prior to the election and drop it in the mail/secured lockbox on the way to work. Zero wages lost. Much more attractive. And yeah, I do find it telling that ‘absentee’ voting for seniors and military was always fine (conservative groups) but making it easy for lower income groups to vote (mandatory pay like jury duty maybe on election days) is a never-starter.
Good points.
We know massive undetected voter fraud is happening because we’re not detecting it!