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Comment by TechBro8615 | Hacker News Reader

Lack of voter ID, combined with mail-in voting, can lead to fraudulent “ballot harvesting,” where boxes of votes are “found” at the last minute, for example. Also, many people aren’t aware that ballot harvesting is actually legal in some jurisdictions including California. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_harvesting

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28 Million Mail-In Ballots Went Missing in Last Four Elections

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/24/28_mil...

https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p...

"Went missing" makes this sound way more nefarious than it is. It just means that the ballot wasn't returned (e.g., the person didn't vote. I vote by mail and there are elections where my ballot would have gone missing because I didn't have the time to make myself well informed enough about the candidates to place an informed vote.) I don't exactly see what's so implausible about this.

Hard to do without getting caught, though. Still one ballot per person, so if you submit a ballot on behalf of someone who also tries to vote for themselves, the double vote will get flagged.

It takes years for people who have died or moved out of state to be removed from the voter list, you could use those names without much concern

Even assuming 1 person could make it through 10-20 precincts per day, you're going to need thousands of attackers to change even a close national election.

Coordination on that scale is completely impossible to pull off without detection. This just isn't a feasible attack.

That's a problem for the registration system to handle, it doesn't need to be solved at the ballot box.

Say a lot of flags are raised, now what do you do? Do-over?

If there are enough double votes that throwing them all out changes the election. Then yes, do-over. The possibility of that happening is basically non-existent though because it would require a coordinated attack by thousands of people to change a national election (even assuming they strategically attack swing states).

There's a virtually zero chance that a group effort involving thousands of people isn't uncovered before the attack happens.

You invalidate duplicates and notify the real voter they need to re-cast their ballot. You then hand off the evidence to the police for prosecution.

But that is getting ahead of ourselves. The problem isn't how do you solve duplicate voting, it is how do you detect it. That is a solved problem, already, and the answer is that there are very few attempts at voter fraud in a vote-by-mail system.

Now, the electronic machines are a whole 'nother matter. I would fight hard against my state implementing such a disaster. Vote by mail is great.

If I vote by mail, I darn well expect my vote to be “found”.

Obviously. The issue is when you don’t vote by mail and your vote is still “found.”

Or even proving that has happened on any level.

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