Voter fraud ahoy!
But also, the system doesn't actually use the postal service exclusively to deliver the ballots. There are dedicated ballot boxes all over the county/state to collect completed ballots.
Also, when you vote you get a code that you can put into the Secretary of State's website which will tell you when your ballot was revived and counted. So you can bet that if the results aren't close to the polling, the Democrats will ask everyone to check their code and make sure their ballot was received.
What exactly are you saying here? You are implying that Republicans could or will commit election fraud to win California, and it would be wrong or ironic to claim that happened?
And i am saying that as someone who is opposed to electronic voting.
I don't think you're fully considering the implications of what the outcome would look like if voter fraud was used effectively. The world wouldn't "end" because nobody would be the wiser. The whole point of cheating is to do so undetectably, so nobody realizes it and everyone agrees that the outcome is fair.
So it's our moral obligation to ensure that undetectable cheating is as difficult as humanly possible to ensure the integrity of elections. Not just say "oh, well nobody has detected anything bad so far, so it must be fine" because things would also appear fine in a severely compromised voting system.
Personally, I would rather vote the traditional way. But that's more because I enjoy the collective civic duty feeling, and not because I think it's actually better at getting a more accurate representation of the will of the people.
Better or worse depends on what your goals are. It's "better" if your goal is making it easier to vote. It's "worse" if your goal is making it harder to cheat. My point is that it is easier to cheat undetectably the more indirection you introduce into the process.
Anybody who wants to argue against vote-by-mail needs to make the case that the overall outcome is worse, not just that vote-by-mail has some flaws that are different that the ones in-person voting has.
The majority of Americans still trust in-person voting over vote-by-mail. Perhaps you can share the safeguards that will assuage their concerns.
>Within the coronavirus context and questions of safety with in-person voting in November, voters are not very comfortable changing their method of voting. Voters across the country generally trust their current voting process, with 55% trusting primarily in-person voting, compared with 20% who do not trust the current process. When asked about mail balloting, 47% said they would trust a national vote-by-mail process in November, while 31% lack trust in this system. When voters were asked about online balloting, only 33% said they would trust an online system, with 45% not trusting online voting in November’s election.
http://emersonpolling.com/2020/04/28/april-national-poll-tru...
> My point is that it is easier to cheat undetectably the more indirection you introduce into the process.
It's not just "any" safeguards. It's existing safeguards that work well at the level of indirection that "vote by mail" represents. Even with ballot pickup.
Voting isn't about simply voting, it's about faith in the system itself. You could have a perfect voting system, but if nobody trusts it, it is as bad as a corrupted system because nobody will agree on the outcome. And currently, whatever safeguards you claim are "good enough" clearly are not good enough to convince the general public to trust them, so they aren't good enough.
It is true that pure vote-by-mail is the thing that that people are most skeptical of. But almost nobody is 100% opposed to mailed votes; people are fine with absentee voters, military voters, etc. And California's experience shows that people get more comfortable with mail voting as they have more experience with it. Since 2012, the majority of votes have been cast absentee (which is a mix of mail and drop-off): https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/historical-absentee/
So if you'd like to convince the general public, the thing to do is to allow both approaches and let people pick. Especially during a global pandemic, I think we'll see a lot more people liking the idea of mail-in voting than they did in past surveys.
>So if you'd like to convince the general public, the thing to do is to allow both approaches and let people pick.
That's exactly what the majority of states do, but CA is forcing vote-by-mail only. Also, I was courteous enough to post my sources when talking about public opinion, I would appreciate the same courtesy.
You have also worked yourself into a tizzy over nothing. CA is not forcing vote-by-mail only. Newsom's order is only about requiring everybody to receive a ballot. Rules for in-person voting will be determined county by county, and those rules are still being developed.
If you aren't opposed to vote by mail, you did a poor job of making that clear. This chunk of the discussion started out with "Voter fraud ahoy!" You jumped in to fret about "undetectable cheating". If you don't think that vote by mail is any less secure, I have no idea what your goal is, and rereading your posts doesn't help.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/30/trump-vot...
“The things they had in there were crazy,” Trump said. “They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
The DA dropped the case, but they also know where their bread is buttered.
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Allegations-of-voter...
Some mail in ballots have party identification on them, so you can ignore envelopes from the opposing party.
Identification is based on signature matching (that your signature matches the one when you registered). According to the ACLU thousands of mail-in ballots get thrown out in California just because of a perceived signature mismatch.
https://www.courthousenews.com/california-trashes-thousands-...
You can mail in a ballot and then go vote in person on Election Day, or have another ballot "harvested" from you by a canvaser.
Anyone (spouse, significant other, parent) could take your ballot, fill it out, sign it, and mail it in.
Human beings are terrible, and the idea that somehow that a partisan board of elections would be above this stuff is laughable. Everything in politics is corrupt, the corruption isn't suspended on Election Day.
People should only be allowed to vote in-person with an ID, unless they have a disability that otherwise prevents them from doing so.
Many of these are a problem with in-person voting as well. None of us actually see our ballots getting added to the global total, so in theory somebody could just throw out the votes they don't like. Somebody could easily impersonate voters. Somebody could go vote in multiple places. Somebody could just threaten people with a gun and say they'll shoot them if they don't vote the right way.
But in practice these are not a big problem. That's partly because election officials and election nerds are not dummies. And it's partly because that all is illegal, and shifting vote totals enough to win an election with the safeguards in place is at best very difficult.
If you mail people blank ballots, on the day the ballots go out someone could follow the mail truck around the neighborhood stealing them all out of the mailboxes, both disenfranchising everyone in that neighborhood and providing the theives with blank ballots they could fill out and submit.
It opens you up to fresh chicanery like giving people "updates" on where to mail their ballots and having voters send them to the perpetrators who then either modify the ballots before submitting them or only submit the favorable ones.
It creates the possibility that somebody figures out how to forge ballots and then prints off as many as they like and mails them in, because there are no poll workers there to observe anything.
And then what do you do? Hold another election? What happens if they just do it again and hope nobody notices this time? Or do it again just to cause grief and delay the election results?