I would like to ask that we keep (D)/® politics out of this and just focus on the technical aspects of ballot harvesting:
Ballot harvesting - whereby someone collects your ballot from your home from you and then takes it to a place for ballots to be counted - seems to present an opportunity for tampering - namely, the time when your ballot is in the hands of just one lone person and before it is dropped in the box (or wherever it is that it is being counted.) What prevents your ballot envelope from being tampered with and that person who collected your ballot then secretly amending your vote from (D) to ®, or vice versa, especially since someone who would be spending their time collecting ballots, is someone who is likely to be highly politically motivated for one particular campaign/party?
The whole point of voting being done at a poll station is so that there are many eyeballs watching the machines, ballot boxes, etc. to prevent boxes from being stuffed and to deter someone from trying shenanigans. But here with the harvested ballot, the ballot temporarily lies in 1 person’s hands for a long time - without any witnesses to prevent tampering.
For starters in my state if you are delivering the absentee Ballot for someone you must be identified on the ballot and your identity is checked by the clerk. Ballots are to be filled out in ink, and if you cross out an answer that spoils the ballot.
Also it’s impossible for someone to stuff the ballot box in my state as each voter is assigned a number and their ballot number is also recorded. There is no way someone could arrive at the polls with a stack of ballots thinking they were going to feed them into the ballot box. Where do you vote with such lax oversight?
So say the clerk gets a bunch of absentee ballots delivered by one “authorized person” and that all the Sealed envelopes have been opened and the ballots inside are filled out incorrectly thereby spoiling their vote. That is not gonna fly in any precinct
It wouldn’t really work in Washington State, at least. To quote my own post:
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You put your ballot itself inside a security sleeve. Then you take that whole sleeve, and place it inside the envelope. You sign and date the envelope (for all elections), plus for this one, indicate a party. When it’s received, they verify the signature and the date (and postmark). If everything checks out, your ballot is removed, in its security sleeve, and thrown in with everyone else’s ballots from your precinct. Then, separately, all the ballots are removed from their sleeves, so the ballot can no longer be matched to the voter.
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By the time you see that the ballot itself is spoiled, you can no longer match it to the voter or the harvester. You might be able to see that certain precincts have a statistically unusually high percentage of spoiled ballots, and investigate from there (actually interview voters, see if they had their ballots harvested, by whom, etc.) But the direct evidence chain is destroyed, by design.
The best protection we have here is that we can drop our ballots in any mailbox, without even a stamp, so there’s less need for harvesting.
Ballot harvesting isn’t legal in every state. It is extremely subject to fraud, as well as similar practices such as sending political operatives to assist people in filling out absentee ballots, and convincing people to file early absentee ballots and fraudulently claiming they would not be available on voting day (although that early and online balloting are pushing out the old rules). These practices have rarely been examined, only recently was a massive ballot harvesting fraud uncovered in North Carolina to put a spotlight on the issue. Note that ballot harvesting was illegal in North Carolina. In addition, changes to California voting law created some chaos that delayed election result totals. This caused people to cry foul after they went to bed seeing their candidates in the lead and woke up the next morning to see that they had lost.