California voters to get mail-in ballots for 2020 election | Hacker News Reader

California voters to get mail-in ballots for 2020 election

reuters.com

63 pointshhs90 comments

This is important not only for the Presidential election (which is mostly a foregone thing anyway), but is a big boon to all the down-ballot races. Folks will have time to research other choices at home.

More than that, main-in ballots go a long way towards reducing voter disenfranchisement. No need to wait in long lines (way easier if you've got a job that allows that!) or take time off work on a Tuesday.

Honestly, there's no good excuse for all states not following suit.

> Folks will have time to research other choices at home.

How does this have any relationship whatsoever to the way in which the vote is cast?

People can already research to their hearts content without mail-in-voting.

Assuming you're asking in good faith it's a lot easier with mail in voting because when you get the ballot you can see all the names and search each category before choosing.

It's easier than also having to find out what is on the ballot, searching, and then remembering each person when you go.

I usually spend a couple hours at home voting and searching before sending the mail in, something that would be a lot harder to do effectively if I had to go in person.

I don't understand - is it a secret who's on the ballot before you get to the polling station?

It's not a secret, but it's not obvious and there are a lot of things on the ballot every time.

It's a lot easier when you have the ballot in front of you as a reference.

What do you think people were doing previously then, just voting blindly?!

Yes - if they voted at all.

I suspect they either left options blank, voted by party, voted the name they heard somewhere, or voted randomly.

At least for the positions they didn’t know.

I understand what you're saying, but why not just mail people the ballot information ahead of time without actually casting votes? Let them pencil it in and bring it with them?

They do that too, it's just a hassle.

It's easier to do it when you can also vote at the same time at home.

If you're already mailing people the ballot information, what do you gain by asking them to then come in person to the polling station? It's an objectively simpler user experience. You're asking a lot of people to research ahead of time, make their decision, save that decision for election day, and then make time in their busy workday to go wait in line to vote.

I like to compare it to taking a test based off of memory vs an open book test. And since this 'test' is something we want everyone to participate in (and give them the best possibility to make an informed choice), I believe mail-in ballot voting might be the best possible solution for voting.

If they know the race even exists… Even politically-interested friends often have no idea there are judges on the ballot, or if they do, which one they should vote for. And they can't fall back on party, since many of these races are officially non-partisan. I can go find a sample ballot at the MN Secretary of State website, but it's an extra step. I've chosen the "no excuse absentee ballot" a few times since Minnesota started offering, and this way I just have the ballot to look at, research and fill in.

It is also extremely difficult to research the records of judges, particularly those on lower courts.

If interested, there was a John Oliver episode on the process of how judges are elected: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poL7l-Uk3I8

I am a permanent vote by mail voter in CA - I love it! I get to sit down, research the candidates, and make an informed decision.

I remember there was a judge on the ballot, and he had been on the record for some very divisive political takes that I didn't think belonged in our court system. If it had just been me in the voter booth, there would have been a 1/n (cannot remember the number of judges) chance I voted for him at random. And if I can't make a snap decision, I can always think on it for some time. Best way to run a representative democracy IMHO.

Just yesterday a plan for a mail-in election was scrapped in Poland. It was an extremely rushed thing (the voting was to happen this Sunday), but from what I understand, the plan was to at least have designated mailboxes. This would allow to somewhat track what happens with the ballots. A giant post service's delivery operation was stopped at the last moment. I haven't seen the concerns about secrecy of voting, and voting for other people in your house, properly addressed. Now the ruling party promises work on "better regulations" before the actual presidential election.

I'm really curious how Americans will handle all this.

Generally, I'm very skeptical about all cute ideas that complicate voting and may introduce doubts about its legitimacy. The whole point of a vote is that the elected people have a strong title to whatever prerogatives they have.

California has had mail in voting for years.

This is just extending it to everyone by default.

This (partial mail-in voting) also has been available in many European countries, but you had to qualify e.g. with a physical disability. I think when there is fewer of such votes, it can be easier to ensure that they are legitimate and pay attention to the procedures. You know to expect only a few of them, for example.

I've also heard about postal voting in Britain producing many problems when there were wider experiments with it[1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/apr/05/politics.localgov...

Well, California had 8.5 million mail-in ballots in the last national election, 65% of the total. Mail-in voting in California was available to everyone even before this, not just to people meeting special criteria.

This just makes it the default.

I was interested about the source, and apparently you can check these numbers here[1]. I don't say that this solves the problems for me, but an interesting statistic nonetheless. Seems like another example of American politics being very different.

[1] https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/historical-absentee/

It's California in this case but not every state allows this. Some states, for example, will make you wait in long lines in the middle of a global pandemic just to vote.

This is a important step, assuming if the US Postal Service doesn't get gutted before it happens.

A major RNC donor is poised to become the next Postmaster General of the USPS and it's part of the current administration's plan to surely gut/privatize the USPS and suppress mail-in votes. http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/top-republican-fundra...

HN is about one step away from becoming reddit with this type of baseless speculation. There is no indication this administration wants to suppress votes, the president has explicitly said he wants to institute voter ID's to protect the security of our elections, but you're going to take the word of a WP reporter who've perverted every statement he has ever made? The opposition is suspiciously against voter ID by the way.

Donald Trump is a pathological liar; I am skeptical of every word that comes out of his mouth.

He has also come out against mail-in voting since he feels it will destroy GOP chances at the ballot box. So yes, I do believe Trump is more concerned about voter suppression then election security.

https://lawandcrime.com/2020-election/trump-says-gop-would-n...

California already has mail-in ballots, FYI. All this order does is send them to all registered voters instead of just those who requested a mail-in ballot.

This thread has two or three very vocal, antagonistic and ignorant actors using lazy rhetorical tactics to agitate, deflect and confuse what is a very straightforward topic: mail in voter fraud doesn’t exist and aggressive attempts to say it does are a part of a large, discriminatory and frankly old set of tactics of voter intimidation. These posters offer no evidence of the fraud they are FUDing up because there is none.

We can just pencil in a California Biden win now.

Perhaps, but we already could.

Until Team Trump starts recruiting 'thousands of volunteers' to assist voters.

Yikes. How are they determining if a resident moved away from CA? What about if they're dead? What about if they're voting for another relative, friend, or neighbor that isn't paying attention?

It seems that without voter ID, this is destined for fraud.

When you mail in your ballot you sign it, and the signature is checked to verify it is yours. If you vote for your friend or neighbor, then you need to steal their ballot and forge their signature. You also need them to not notice that they didn't get a ballot and not report it missing/stolen. The rest of the questions apply equally to in-person voting, which are all figured out.

Voter fraud also almost never happens because the person committing the fraud is taking enormous risk for literally zero gain. People aren't stupid. Most people don't even vote anyways, why are they going to go to all this effort to commit fraud.

> signature is checked to verify it is yours

Are you sure? That doesn’t seem right. How are they verifying it?

With voter ID, how do poll workers verify the person on the ID is you?

The answer is the same. They look at it. This isn't rocket science.

A government issued ID complete with matching home address and picture is a LOT more difficult to fake than just some scribbling on a piece of paper. Even better - swiping the card and running the data on the magstrip on the back and comparing to what the government has on that ID is almost impossible to forge.

Who didn't forge their parent's signature in grade school once in a while? It's trivial to fake signatures - particularly since most people aren't trained Graphologists.

Heck, my local grocery store requires me to swipe my government issued ID just to prove my age to buy some beer... they scan your government issued ID to get into some bars and clubs even... but we won't allow that at the voting booth?

Not only that, but aren't they volunteers who tend to be elderly? I can't imagine they have any training to remotely compare signatures.

So the same volunteers who aren't able to compare 2 signatures are also your impenetrable line of defense looking at the tiny picture and tiny writing on a photo ID and verifying the ID is valid and it is the same person.

They can scan the ID like they do at grocery stores, bars, gun stores and more.

Pretty darn close to impossible to fake that.

> Who didn't forge their parent's signature in grade school once in a while?

True. But a malicious actor would need to forge hundreds or thousands of signatures convincingly. And firstly get their hands on the signature database.

Or just make up signatures that have the person's name in them.

I highly, highly doubt and am very skeptical of this supposed signature database and how well it can verify a person's signature. It just sounds like hocus pocus to me.

> I highly, highly doubt and am very skeptical of this supposed signature database

Why? California DMV has your signature on file when you get a driver's license.

> how well it can verify a person's signature.

I think people do that, not software.

> California DMV has your signature on file when you get a driver's license.

They make you sign on a small digital screen that barely registers your pen movements. The one on my license looks like a 3 year old drew some scribbles on it. It definitely doesn't resemble my pen-and-paper signature and I can't be alone in that.

> I think people do that, not software.

How can they get through 15-30 million ballots in anything resembling a timely manner? This entire thing sounds made up it's so absurd.

They get your signature when you register. States that don't use ID at polling stations have big books with everyone's signature in them so the worker can compare against one you write on site.

Those big books are your name and home address which were used to make sure you were in the correct voting location.

Then you signed the book in front of the ballot person as a sort of "proof" the information was correct and you were voting.

So basically, it's just an honor system.

One could theoretically vote in the morning under your real name, then come back in the afternoon and vote again as your neighbor - so long as you beat them there.

NJ and NY have a copy of the actual signature.

They compare it to the signature on your registration form.

Senior homes And retirement respite centers are a ripe target for doing proxy voting in a fraudulent manner.

> When you mail in your ballot you sign it, and the signature is checked to verify it is yours. If you vote for your friend or neighbor, then you need to steal their ballot and forge their signature.

Is this done manually or automated? This is the first time I've heard about it and the mechanics - and scale - are interesting.

In addition, how is the database of signatures secured? Who has access to it now? What other things is a signature and basic information (address, phone, dob) sufficient for?

States like Washington do mail-in voting quite successfully.

Vote-by-mail is cheaper (no polling places to run), increases voter turnout (which is why it’s universally opposed by the Republican party), and actually reduces fraud risk because it leaves a paper trail and removes the opportunity for voter intimidation at polling places.

Sorry, but the very last point is nonsense on balance. Far, far more voters will be intimidated by threat of domestic violence or family pressure to vote the "right way", because the spouse or family member can literally watch them fill out the ballot and mail it in. Voting booths provide privacy in the act of voting, mailed ballots do not.

It's perfectly fine to believe that this is a reasonable tradeoff for increased turnout and general enfranchisement, but it's not going to reduce voter intimidation.

You can have the exact same threat of violence or family pressure for voting booths. "Show me a cellphone picture of the ballot you voted with"

I think making a claim either way about voter intimidation is silly. The most important points are to increase voter turnout and to reduce large-scale fraud.

That's just not true, many jurisdictions don't allow electronic devices, for exactly this reason: https://www.bustle.com/p/can-i-use-my-phone-while-voting-all...

I'm sure it's illegal to pressure someone to vote a certain way as well. Do you really think someone is monitoring someone's voting booth to see if they're using their phone? Wouldn't that be in exact violation of the problem you're talking about?

How would this be enforced?

Very silly.

> Far, far more voters will be intimidated by threat of domestic violence or family pressure to vote the "right way",

Citation needed. And also, is that number more than the number of people who don't vote at all because voting in person is too much of a hassle?

Voter fraud is pretty rare. Voter disenfranchisement is not. Accepting a small increase in fraud (which isn't proven, by the way) would be worth allowing more of the population to vote.

It's a bit late to be concerned: CA has already had opt-in mail-in voting for a while!

Ballots are mailed to the address on file, you can't just ask for a friend's. Voting fraud just doesn't scale either: A couple fraudulent votes per fraudster? No, election fraud is way more dangerous.

Anti-fraud efforts are proportional to fraud prevalence, which is very low. For voter verification, the rate of false negatives (you're not registered to vote, when you are) wildly dwarfs the false positive (fraud) rate.

I'm happy to be concerned if presented evidence of a problem, but absent evidence to counter real, concrete evidence of "voting security"->false-negatives, they don't seem worth spending time, money, and effort on. (After all, government bureaucracy and waste are famously unpopular)

What about vote harvesting? Mail-in Ballots open the door for this abuse a lot more than before.

Just drive around and offer to return Ballots or "help" people fill them in.

Stuff like that tends to get out. For example: https://www.npr.org/2019/07/30/746800630/north-carolina-gop-...

Ya, well in SF they've more-or-less made this very thing legal. Read into that what you want.

it kills me how whenever one raises a question or criticism about the potential for voter fraud in mail-in voting a huge cloud of vitriol descends upon them. It shouldn't be necessary to prove that voter fraud exists in order to wonder about the propensity for fraud.

I lived at the same address in San Mateo for 18 years and every time I voted at the polls I would check the book and see there were 3-4 folks registered to my house that I did not know. I complained to the county multiple times and they informed me it didn't matter, those folks were not voting. Then in 2008 I started walking neighborhoods for the local Republican Party. They gave me a list of registered voters and the most recent elections they voted. I checked my address and sure enough all of those extra voters had been voting. Also one additional person was listed. I went back and complained to the party HQ and at the county assessor's office. Those folks stayed on the list until 2013.

I moved in 2017 and submitted the form to cancel my registration. Guess what? I checked just now and I'm still registered to vote in San Mateo! Wonder if I voted in the last election there?

> voter fraud doesn't scale.

That's the most rational argument I've heard and one that is easy to parse even for someone skeptical of Government doing anything competently.

> Yikes. How are they determining if a resident moved away from CA? What about if they're dead? What about if they're voting for another relative, friend, or neighbor that isn't paying attention?

I think it's strange you seem to believe the people responsible for implementing this did not think of the few complications you were able to rattle off the top of your head.

As it happens, they send the ballot to your California address, and mail-in ballots are not forwarded by the postal service.

The Secretary of State updates the voter rolls annually, and removes people who have died.

People voting must sign the ballot and mail it. The fact that they voted is recorded, and they can check on the status. If someone voted for a dead person, that would be a crime punishable by five years in prison. It might happen, but would you file a single false ballot in a state of 40 million people under the threat of a five year prison sentence?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com