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Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

Mail-in ballots are worst of all, and the people who advocate for their expansion will regret it when they see entire church memberships filling out their ballots together, checking each other to make sure they voted correctly, and shunning, expelling, or firing people who don't participate.

There are currently many heads of household voting for their entire families, and even aside from mail-in ballots, there are people watching and photographing other family members voting within polling places, and uploading the photographs to social media with parental pride. In many places, this is not even criminal anymore.

Paper ballots, with voters having no method to prove who they voted for (no-receipt), in a private booth.

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It's been the method of voting in Oregon for 25 years and Colorado for 10 years, when does the regret start? The current states that have all mail voting are also some of the least religious states in the country, you'd think the religious states would be pushing for it given the scenario you laid out. Colorado also had the second highest voter turn out nationwide in 2020 which supports the claim that all mail voting is good for increasing access to voting.

Of course mailing ballots increases turnout. That wasn’t the question. The question was how do we determine if the votes are fraudulent, for example someone filling out a ballot for their elderly parents against their will.

Colorado does signature matching and ballot tracking. My signature has changed since I registered to vote here and I was notified in one election about it not matching and had to cure my ballot. If someone voted under my name, I would be notified of the processing of my ballot and could object to it. Ease of voting/security is still an important balance. I could easily create a 100% secure election and it would disenfranchise a lot of voters.

Signature matching is a notoriously weak verification, especially when the risk is within-family disenfranchisement. You almost certainly know your spouse's and parents' and children's signatures, you likely have signed in their name in various occasions before, so signing with their signature in a convincing enough way to fool a ballot counter who gets to spend probably ~10s at most on every mail-in ballot is extremely easy.

Not to mention, you can do the opposite: you can destroy your "wrong-minded" family member's ballots to prevent them from voting.

Destroying a ballot accomplishes nothing.

You can always still go vote in person at a polling center, even with all-mail voting they always keep a few open just in case someone loses or spoils their ballot.

They'll record the vote provisionally just to make sure you're not trying to vote twice, and once it's clear no mailed-in ballot arrived it gets counted.

I know my spouses signature and I definitely could not copy it for the life of me. I'm sure we could put it different safeguards and they would almost certainly disenfranchise orders of magnitude more legal votes than fraudulent ones given the scale on which we've proven voting fraud to happen.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-widespread-is-electio...

> Colorado does signature matching and ballot tracking.

Don't know about Colorado but many other states have been sending ballots to dead people as well as people who are not resident anymore. The potential for fraud is huge

The signature matching would be the first line of defense against that. They would also be notified of deaths by the department of health and the social security administration. Broadly speaking though, whenever potential cases of fraud of investigated, very few end up being substantiated and the fraud that is committed is caught up front.

https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-voting-gov...

https://www.rmpbs.org/blogs/news/colorado-noncitizens-deceas...

> They would also be notified of deaths by the department of health and the social security administration.

Is your claim that the social security administration sends a death notification to the deceased person's voter registrar?

https://www.ssa.gov/dataexchange/stateagreements.html

That is what is stated by the Secretary of State in the PBS link above.

“we get information when Coloradans pass away from two spots… the Department of Public Health and Environment and also the Social Security Administration.”

That kind of argument is open to criticism of survivorship bias.

Sure maybe and it still never seems to be proven on a substantial level. The Heritage foundation has an agenda to prove voter fraud and even going by thei number, it appears to be a 1 in every million vote level event. Far more legal votes are stopped by existing laws than illegal votes.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-widespread-is-electio...

Oregon should never be the gold standard for how to do anything, ever. Can they even pump their own gas yet?

Recently, yes :)

https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/06/us/oregon-drivers-pump-own-fu...

Before that changed I LOVED turning the attendants away as I grabbed my Diesel hose and started pumping. I loved telling them when they didn't know.

Ron Wyden seems cool.

This is addressed in serious voting systems.

In Sweden you can vote by mail, but it has to be done in a private booth on a post office. You have to show ID, of course.

That means everybody votes secretly, even when voting by mail.

Sweden doesn’t have the same racist history as the United States. In the US there’s a long history of making it very hard to get adequate photo ID or moving or closing polling locations in minority districts.

> Mail-in ballots are worst of all, and the people who advocate for their expansion will regret it when they see entire church memberships filling out their ballots together, checking each other to make sure they voted correctly, and shunning, expelling, or firing people who don’t participate.

Firing people for not cooperating with something that is a crime under both federal and state law is a strategy that…doesn’t work very long for the criminals.

(Giving a large group of people who you don’t trust to vote your way that kind of criminal leverage over you in general is a pretty self-defeating strategy even without the intense incentives produced when you pile termination of employment on top of it.)

Also, near-universal mail-in voting isn’t some novel untested practice. Oregon has been doing it for more than two decades, Washington and Colorado for a decade, and even more states have adopted it between 2019 and 2022.

And what a diversity of election results those states have had since then!

Why would mail in voting create more diverse results? States that don’t mail ballots also haven’t had diverse results. These concepts are orthogonal. Mail in voting is intended to improve turnout, not diversify results.

You can vote by mail in all 50 states, and both red and swing states have no-excuse absentee. Your point doesn't stand up to the reality of these systems.

> [...] when they see entire church memberships filling out their ballots together, checking each other to make sure they voted correctly, and shunning, expelling, or firing people who don't participate.

That's a felony isn't it?

And tax fraud too?

> ... when they see entire church memberships filling out their ballots together ...

Are you able to cite any evidence for this sort of conspiracy, or is this mainly conjecture? My search came up short. While one can certainly imagine it taking place, particularly in smaller groups, I expect there are both federal and likely also state laws that would make such activities illegal. At the very least, it would seem hard to hide at scale.

That doesn't seem like the kind of thing that ends up in news. Are members of the congregation going to snitch on their "family"? If it happens it is something you would only know from experience.

Couldn't a church just require congregants to send a picture of their ballot from inside a voting booth?

Is there any basis in reality for this?

> Couldn’t a church just require congregants to send a picture of their ballot from inside a voting booth?

They could, though there are some problems with that:

(1) It is generally illegal to ask people to do that,

(2) Voters could “comply” with such a demand and simply mark a ballot the way the church wanted, take a picture, tell poll workers they had made an error marking their ballot and needed a replacement, have the ballot they photographed discarded, mark the replacement with their honest preferences, and cast that ballot.

Of course, (1) applies to the proposed scenario with mail-in ballots, and why large groups that aren’t already tightly-knit cults where they wouldn’t need to worry about defectors with secret ballots anyway would do it – it only takes on defector to get the whole group busted.

It's already illegal to do voter fraud!

I'm not sure how the laws are in all states, but where I am it's illegal to use a camera or cell phone within 100 feet of a voting booth so if you tried to take a picture of your ballot, you'd likely get asked to put the camera away by a poll worker. This was done with the specific intent of protecting the privacy of people's votes.

And now the abuser can just say "show me a picture of your ballot" since we all take our phones into the booth. And the abuser might stand in line and watch to see if you get a second ballot. And you could quickly use photo editing software to fake it, but the abuser might run analysis...

Where is the line of accepted risk?

Photos of ballots are a criminal offence in the UK, which obviously is imperfect in an abusive relationship, but does help set a general norm that the vote is secret.

Abusive relationships are typically criminal in of themselves so not sure laws will help here.

I agree. All those Kamala ads about wives in the polling place defying their misogynistic husbands miss the fact that those controlling husbands would demand that their wives receive mail-in ballots, and then use intimidation and pressure to ensure the vote.

The fact that this is rarely discussed probably means that it rarely actually happens. Political beliefs between husbands and wives are usually quite correlated, I'd imagine.

The issue of maliciously voting for you elderly grandparent may happen, but is probably very very rare.

It's nice to hear how effective that ad was at getting under people's skin.

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