Open the ballot envelope and the secrecy envelope
Note who you voted for
Pack the secrecy envelope and the ballot envelope
Use the vote information in whatever way they see fit
Variation:
Hey grandpa Joe, I'm here to help you vote
Note who you voted for
Help you pack the secrecy envelope and the ballot envelope
Use the vote information in whatever way they see fitAlso, what stops someone from doing that with the current voting system? We have computers do the counting with little to no oversight; They could easily be programmed to report people who “voted the wrong way.”
With regards to your variation, that’s an inherent weakness of vote-by-mail, yes. There’s not much that can be done about that other than outlawing vote-by-mail.[^a]
[^a]: Due to the way the Constitution is written, the power to decide the method of voting is not with the federal government. As such, the Tenth Amendment delegates that power to the states. Meaning, the power to require “secret ballots” rests with the states, and many do not have such requirements in their Constitutions. It also means that the federal government can’t outlaw vote-by-mail without a Constitutional amendment.
On voting machines, good point. We should not use voting machines either.
It seems to me your criticisms very much fall into "letting the perfect be the enemy of the good" territory. States have conducted some version of vote-by-mail or absentee balloting for decades, and there's no evidence I'm aware of that either of these have, in practice, materially increased voter fraud. Furthermore, studies on existing voter fraud conducted by groups like the Brennan Center for Justice and the Heritage Foundation have concluded the incident rates are around 0.0025% -- and that's the high end of the estimates. Even if your concern that a push to move most states to vote-by-mail in the 2020 election causes that number to go up substantially proves valid, how likely is it, truly, that it increases by the two orders of magnitude it would take to bring it up to a quarter of a percent -- and that such an incredible increase goes essentially unnoticed and unchallenged?
This is a cost benefit analysis, there are known upsides with no proven downsides and the only downsides seem to be unproven.
* Trust but verify. I'm not aware of a cost-effective way to monitor mail-in voting. Suppose I want to observe the process. Do I need to sleep in the voting collection room for 18 days in a row to monitor that no one is messing with the ballots? What about the post office? What about the post truck?
The argument 'is the proven voter fraud higher when using voting process X vs process Y' cuts both ways. I haven't seen evidence to conclusively prove that proprietary voter machines with no paper trail tamper vote counts. And yet most people agree that paper trail voting is a much more trustworthy approach.
In King County, Washington where I live they record and livestream all ballot handling during elections [1] and the drop boxes themselves are designed with security in mind [2]
1. https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/elections/about-us/security... 2. https://crosscut.com/2019/10/these-ballot-boxes-keep-your-vo...