Surely sending half a dozen ballots to the same address, for all the previous tenants from the last half decade, "enables fraud" if the person living there is so inclined.
We also don't need to sit around speculating about this because the data we have on voter fraud already tells us that it's incredibly rare.
What we should focus on is the 1 in 10 voters here who had a ballot rejected for primarily UX reasons that could be fixed. That's a problem which is supported by facts and could be fixed. Instead the current administration is gutting the USPS and making voting even more difficult in the middle of a pandemic. My ballot application is already taking twice as long to get in as it did last year. How is that OK?
This would create a record that could then be used to examine the signature on the ballot and charge the person with voter fraud.
Note: not many states have changed their laws on vote by mail this year, so theoretical VBM fraud could have been done by submitting fraudulent ballot applications in most past elections too. The main difference this year is more voters are expected to use the no-excuse absentee ballot that was already available to them in other years.
A few hindered ballots from a [left/right] leaning district going missing can be enough.
Don’t even need to have individual fraud, just some stats on how likely one area is to vote then “wrong” way.
Hell nursing homes or others could easily swing lots of votes by a single staff.
I’ve dealt with plenty of high officials that have negative documents go missing. It’s just routine for many.
No, they would not be considered acceptable in a computing application. But in computing, it’s considered acceptable to discriminate against users for the sake of security.
I’m unaware of any major democracy that uses computerized voting with a username, password, and 2FA to replace the traditional ballot box, for obvious UX reasons. (Never mind that computerized results might actually be easier to forge than paper ballots).
Regardless of what is “acceptable” it is a fact that widespread voter fraud using the mechanisms proposed would be detectable.
We’ve had voting for centuries, and done it without ID requirements.
Not sure how ID requirements would work in the several states that have done all-mail-in ballots for decades successfully.
At least in WA state, a signature is required on the exterior of the envelope, and it is validated against the signature on the voter registration form.
I'm a Washington state resident and because I sign a lot of checks I have two forms of my signature: My 'fancy' signature that has every letter of my name and my check signing signature that is a scrawl of simple squiggles.
I used my fancy signature for voter registration and accidentally used my squiggle signature for my fist mail in ballot and did't get any kickback. I've used it for six years and King County elections still has never questioned it.
About five years ago I decided to change my signature. The first ballot I mailed in after changing my signature was rejected for having a non-matching signature, and I had to prove my identity and update my signature on file with the King County elections in order for my ballot to be counted.
For example, in an election with 100 votes cast. If 10 signatures are suspicious, you only do extended validation and open them if the election was won by a margin smaller than 10.
I was offered a tablet to sign on when I offered up my card. So I took back my card and signed it on the back and then loosely repeated that same signature on the tablet thing.
I'd had that card for around two years. I never sign them these days because it doesn't really mean anything around here any more in the UK. Bear in mind I am old enough to remember signing cheques for "To cash".
Let's keep in mind, depending on where power lies post-election, that doing something illegal, even if caught, doesn't necessarily means one would be punished for it.
So ballots go to the wrong place, fine. The probability of random person there being interested and then finding any of this information is low.
If a close match were demanded, people would complain of disenfranchisement. People don't sign the exact same way every time.
Realistically, the workers are tired and they don't care. If they do reject anybody, it's probably because the vote comes from an area that tends to vote in the undesired way. In other words, this human element is a problem. It would be especially easy to bias the election by rejecting based on name.
An imperfect signature of the desired ethnicity (more likely to be a "correct" vote) gets a pass. An imperfect signature of the undesired ethnicity is a fail. That's all it takes to quietly flip an election, with no evidence trail at all.
For vote-by-mail though, how could anybody go to jail? The ballot shows up. It is accepted or rejected. If rejected, then what? Are we going to pick fingerprint DNA out of the paper fibers for this? There is no reasonable way to ever determine who attempted to cast the vote.
It'll be fraud, but never part of the official statistics. It can't be proven without using the level of resources normally reserved for famous murder cases.
There just isn't a deterrent. Severe punishment means nothing if the criminal thinks he has no chance of being caught. The fraud can be done in bulk, and it is, via ballot harvesting.
Also, what about the corrupt verifiers? Being prone to rejecting some names more than others can change an election, and there would be no way to prove it. If the signature verifier has a preference between Cohen and Abdul, or between Garcia and Washington, what can anybody do?
With the mail-in voting, the person isn't present. You can't possibly find the person. No matter how obvious the fraud, there is nothing to be done about it. The person is certain to avoid arrest. No charges will ever be filed, and some people will then conclude that fraud doesn't happen.
In the one case, the criminal faces a small risk that is easy to dismiss. In the other case, there is no risk at all.