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Comment by philjohn | Hacker News Reader

Need a citation on that.

UK has universal mail-in-voting for any reason.

Some US states also have universal mail-in-voting, and have done for some time.

The counterpoint to "make sure elections don't have sources of fraud" is that you need to strike a balance - the right to vote is sacrosanct (and in some cases was hard won) so any laws that pretend to be about election integrity, but are in fact a way to suppress voting in certain demographics are arguably more dangerous than the exceedingly low levels of fraud that elections have.

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My state in the US (Oregon) has had universal mail-in voting for two decades and we don't have any voter fraud to speak of.

There isn't really a debate here. Anyone complaining about voter fraud is uninformed or purposefully making a bad faith argument in order to justify voter disenfranchisement.

> we don't have any voter fraud to speak of

You probably mean you're not aware of any voter fraud.

The whole objective of fraud is to have it not be discovered, so it's possible fraud has in fact been occurring and it has not yet been discovered (and/or nobody in a position to do so is interested in discovering it).

In a 2016 audit by the then-Republican Secretary of State Dennis Richardson, 54 potential cases of voter fraud were found, out of more than 2 million votes cast.

> Richardson said the suspicious ballots broke down into several categories: 46 voters appeared to vote in Oregon and another state; six individuals listed as deceased voted; and two voters registered in Oregon voted twice.

From: https://www.opb.org/news/article/voter-fraud-oregon-secretar...

If you have better evidence, not conjecture, please say so.

> The whole objective of fraud is to have it not be discovered,

I don't think so. The objective of fraud is to misrepresent. Finding out about it is incidental to that objective. Although not all fraud relates to identity, it's obvious that fraud is used to leverage all sorts of slippery side effects that often benefit an individual - eg https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-essex-59069662

No, I mean our Secretary of State audits the election every time we have one and rarely to never finds fraudulent votes.

Voter fraud is high-risk, low-reward behavior in a developed nation-state.

I'm curious, what does mail-in voter fraud look like? When I voted by mail in 2020, I had to register to vote just like in person, then they mailed a gigantic ballot to my address (which again validated that I actually lived in the state). I signed a scary thing on the ballot saying it was me. I put it in a mail box. It was then processed by a vote counting center. It's not like there are easy ways to game this system, you'd need to produce fake ballots, fake people with real addresses, or cheat the vote counts when the tallies are reported (which can be done through non mail in ballots as well).

I hear this "mail in vote fraud" line all the time but I think what it really is, is that making it more convenient to securely vote means that people who might not have been able to vote before get to, and that scares people who like that it's hard to vote.

To sway an election, even a close one (e.g. PA or GA in 2020) you'd still need tens of thousands of votes.

The sheer scale of an operation to cast that many fraudulent ballots has such an infantessimally small chance of not being discovered (e.g. "Sir/Madam our records show you've already cast a ballot. You'll have to fill in this provisional one and come in with ID to verify")

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