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Comment by briffle | Hacker News Reader

The state of Oregon has vote by mail. Its awesome. My ballot gets mailed to me a few weeks before the election. I fill it out, and can either mail it back (I have to pay for a postage stamp) or drop it off at a ballot drop box all over town.

there are all sorts of safeguards for things like not getting your ballot in the mail, etc. I was also automatically register to vote as an independent when I got my drivers license. (they mailed me a form I could return/mail to change party, if I wanted to).

My last state, my town was small, had a single polling place, and trying to vote before work meant getting there before they opened at 7am, or else wait 60-90 min to vote, and be late to work. (or come in after work, and wait 60-90 minutes).

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This actually a bad idea: The reason for in person voting is poll monitors there are watching to make sure nobody knows how you voted.

There are have been cases of "vote for me or I'll break your legs". When you vote from home someone can come by and watch you mail your vote the "correct" way in.

How often is this an issue? Sounds like a made up scenario for the US.

It's better to worry about these things before they are problems. I don't know if it's happened in the US but it is absolutely a very common attack against voting systems, and any voting system not resistant to it should be considered suspect.

Switzerland, one of the most democratic places in the world has done this for a very lomg time.

While im theory its relevant a practical issue has never happened once as far as I can remember.

Going to hugly distributed areas to beat all voters up seems like a terrible attack vector.

So maybe in some places it could be a problem but I dont see it as much of a problem in a modern First World Democracy.

There are definitely smaller countries in Europe where parties have purchased the election by giving money door to door. I know it happened in Albania, along with threats of family members losing their jobs, etc. And they did lose their jobs once the election was over. There were threats to private sector employers if they didn't cooperate, etc.

You think people didn't worry about it before we implemented vote-by-mail? This is a solved problem, and it turns out that there isn't much of an attack vector here after all.

Voter suppression is an actual real world problem that happens today, not a hypothetical problem like the one you are worried about. Allowing voting by mail is an improvement to that real world problem as it reduces the barriers to voting for those that are employed in jobs that don't give time off for voting or who don't have transportation to their voting location.

Voter intimidation is already illegal and there is no indication that it is a legitimate problem in the states that have postal voting.

Vote buying is also illegal and vote-by-mail makes it easy to document your ballot to get the promised kickback. This is logistically difficult for national elections but for local office it is much more likely to succeed.

Is there any evidence at all that vote buying is a problem in US elections?

No, but why worry about actual problems when you can make up excuses to disenfranchise people!

In theory. Has this actually happened, since the introduction of postal voting, in the United States?

To be useful it would be necessary to visit 10,000’s - 100,000 houses and threaten violence.

The voting system does not need to resolve this issue. Threats of violence are already illegal, and any group conducting such acts at that volume would be quickly apprehended. Call the police.

Can you imagine how quickly twitter / the internet would blow up if stand over men were going door to door threatening voters?

It has happened in history.

The risk has typically been more been cohabiting family (partners and parents, especially).

Not quite people going door to door threatening people. but with Absentee Voting by mail, there have been plenty of cases of a Candidate's family member or a party operative making the rounds of the nursing homes and special needs homes and "assisting" residents in filling out absentee ballots. Alot of these people you could make a very good argument that the voter lacks sufficient mental capacity to cast a ballot. This happens in plenty of local elections around here. Most of the cases are not really covered by the media either.

At least in Sweden you can still go to vote on vote day even if you mailed in your vote earlier. The physical vote will override the mail vote (if both exist).

Can't you do that in the US via a provisional ballot on the day-of?

I'm confused. Are you talking about family members forcing others to vote a certain way? Wouldnt that family member be just as coercive at a polling station? I guess in theory one could lie to the family member if they vote in person but is this a sizable and real concern about at home voting?

Genuinely curious because I've never heard of anyone expressing this concern before.

In-person voting has its own issues.

Polling locations can be (and allegedly are) reduced in number and/or moved farther away from specific groups in order to influence who votes.

If you mail it do you get a confirmation that it was received and processed? How does one know that it wasn't destroyed while en route? Does the ballot come with a tracking number that you can punch in on website to see if your vote was processed correctly?

I get an email ack that it was received. Was it scanned and correctly tabulated? Unlikely given the history in my county (Sarasota)

In Oregon you can check the web site to see if your vote was received. Not sure if they send an email, because my registration did not include my email address until just a few minutes ago ;-).

Aside from that you can't find out much more, of course, because as soon as your ballot is received and the outer envelope is scanned, it is discarded and your ballot (which is inside an inner secrecy envelope) is put in a box with the rest.

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