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Comment by badestrand | Hacker News Reader

By that logic we have to get rid of mail-in voting as well because there could always be a sledgehammer guy standing next to someone in their own home.

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Yes. Here's a 2014 BBC article about that:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-26487418

The article quotes one Mr Richard Mawrey QC:

> "Postal voting on demand, however many safeguards you build into it, is wide open to fraud… on a scale that will make election rigging a possibility and indeed in some areas a probability."

> "Now I know that there is a very strong political desire to keep the present system. What I'm saying is that if you keep the present system, then however many safeguards you create, fraud and serious fraud is inevitably going to continue because that is built into the system."

In reality sledgehammer guy is never the threat, it's somebody fabricating votes. This can be done in a completely illegal fashion as in complete identity fraud, legally grey areas like ballot harvesting, or more socially palatable forms of identity fraud like somebody voting on behalf of family members who would not otherwise be voting.

And the biggest problem of this all is that it's basically impossible to prove because there's no meaningful identifier at any given point in the process. The only real evidence you'd have is a bad signature, yet in 2020 some states ceased comparing signatures and signature comparison was, in general, bizarrely under attack by certain interest groups.

This is 100%, completely absolutely untrue. Stop repeating this propaganda. The system is actually really well designed and safe, I was a poll observer.

You cannot "fabricate" votes, because all mail-in ballots are associated with a voter. Or rather, you put your ballot in an envelope and the envelope is associated with you. When your ballot is received, you are marked as voted and other ballots are invalid. The envelope is stored as proof of who voted and the ballot is kept separately to be tallied.

Ballot counting is done in public (you can go watch!) and there are a lot of safeguards and crosschecks. It's intended to make any fraud very obvious and incredibly difficult to scale.

Claims of voter fraud have shifted to mass voter registration occuring for people that are not eligible to vote, then ballots being sent out without being requested. How is this concern addressed?

Yeah, and those claims are made up to scare people who don't know how it works.

The government knows who is a citizen and who isn't lol, they literally have the records.

Voter rolls are very closely scrutinized. Dead people are, in fact, taken off the rolls. There is essentially ~no voter fraud and ~no instance of non-citizens voting in this country. Yes, it's audited and studied. Yes, they keep the data and you can audit it.

You're literally complaining about it being easier for people to participate in democracy, and you should stop.

Everything's a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works.

From the mail-in ballots from 2024 alone, tens of thousands were returned because somebody had already voted. If you're generous that is 'accidental attempts at voter fraud'. If you're realistic those are going to largely compose a small percent of all successful efforts at voting on behalf of other individuals.

And this for elections which are increasingly decided (in terms of flipping the electoral college one way or the other) by votes in the tens of thousands to low hundreds of thousands. So the scale of fraud in US elections is likely greater than the minimum margin of electoral college victory in them.

You also are substantially overstating the degree of organization of voter rolls. Voting in the US is heavily decentralized by design, which is what enables various states to have completely different electoral systems. But more specifically voter rolls are maintained by the states themselves and that, in turn, is typically further decentralized down to counties themselves.

This leaves a significant degree of inconsistency. In general I do not think that double voting or completely ineligible voting is a significant factor - nowhere near as much as voting on the behalf of others, but it certainly happens. For instance thousands of mail in votes were rejected because they came from dead people, and it is highly unlikely that 100% of these attempts were caught.

Some do think so, but there is also a material difference in needing to be intimidated at the time of the vote being cast vs any point in the future as well.

I think the bigger concern is that mail in ballots lead to fake ballots being submitted. Though I've seen no convincing evidence of this happening at any meaningful scale and the arguments seem unconvincing since you don't get a ballot unless verified with a state ID and your ballot has a unique ID associated with your name, preventing a double spend.

Personally, my concern is that with mail in ballots some nutjob that believes there's ballot stuffing can set fire to the ballotbox and even though they're caught it's a major inconvenience to get a replacement ballot and the websites that show your ballot is received take days to update.

But I still love mail in voting. My state sends a candidate brochure with it and I can take my time to actually look up all those random candidates' policies. It takes me hours to actually fill out my ballot but that's a feature, not a bug (there's nothing preventing you from along party lines but frankly I'd be happier without parties)

> I can take my time to actually look up all those random candidates' policies

But you can already do that, regardless of mail in voting or not?

In the booth I've never had a voter guide and you're definitely discouraged from pulling out your phone.

Not to mention the peer pressure. What asshole is going to stand in the booth for hours voting? I got to get to work!

Sure, you can do all this at home but there's a clear convenience when having both in hand

In 2020 a number of states were sending out mail-in ballots to every single registered voter, even if they didn't request it. Those states were CA, CO, DC, HI, NJ, NV, OR, UT, VT, and WA. [1]

[1] - https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voti...

And that's completely fine, because each mail-in ballot is associated with one voter, and the system is designed to make fraud very obvious and difficult to scale.

If thousands of people were told "you already voted" when they showed up, then that would be very very obvious.

They also really do look at signatures and contact voters to cure ballots if they're unsure.

Not to mention that you can catch double voting across state lines. It's not common that people do this but it does happen and people are really looking for it.

Hell, the fact that so many people have been looking for massive voter fraud for about a decade now and haven't is pretty telling. People aren't good at keeping secrets and if it's being done at scale it would be uncovered or leaked. Accidents and stupid people happen, but that works both ways

Mail-in ballots tend to be counted (and received) after in person ballots, so you don't need to worry about in-person conflict. If we go the other direction (mail-in ballot rejected because the person had already voted), it was indeed in the tens of thousands. In 2024 about 584k ballots were rejected. [1] 11% of those, more than 64k, were because the person had already voted.

[1] - https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2024:_Analysis_of_...

What's wrong with that?

People were being unknowingly registered to vote, even if they weren't eligible to vote when they would get IDs. People move. They get sent ballots. Now you have tons of ballots that aren't really valid, but they're out there and usable. It makes illegal ballot harvesting a lot easier as well if there's no active step where the ballot must be requested. I have to request my ballot every election. it takes 5 minutes, I can do it online and I assert that I'm a citizen and am eligible to vote. I can also do that by mail and I get a mailer to do so. There's no reason to not implement that safeguard.

Why couldn't a ballot harvester send a ballot request on your behalf?

it depends on the state and how thorough their verification system is. I can only speak for IL, but in order to request a mail in ballot, you must be registered to vote first. Even if you register online, you must at minimum provide a DL number or SSN, and the state will associate a signature with your registration. Which is then cross referenced to the signature on your ballot envelope. If you don't have a signature and you try to vote by mail, and in the slim chance your registration is actually approved, you are now a first time non signatures voter, and your mail in ballot will be provisional at best.

This is why many of the election fraud claims focused on lax signature verification of ballots as well as the lax mail in ballot address locations. I feel that IL elections are probably more secure, but only because the state is solidly one party and comically gerrymandered anyways.

But technically, yes, a ballot harvester could send ballots on your behalf if they have enough information about you.

For me the problem with mail-in votes is that they are (in many jurisdictions) allowed to come in long after the in-person voting is closed, and the preliminary results are annouced. So it creates the space for manipulations, where you count the in-person votes first, and, if the score is close, then a week after the election day half a million of mail-in votes mysteriously comes in and swings the vote one way or another.

The postmark must be on or before voting day. I cannot fathom how people have bought into this idea that they can be sent after the preliminary voting has happened.

If you however can go to a polling place afterwards and cast a new vote, that solves that issue, right? And then your mail-in just doesn't count.

Yeah, and you should get rid of that

By that logic we should require DNA testing because, you never know, someone might go to a polling place and lie about their name and have a fake ID too.

You never can be too careful!

Also, maybe someone inside will take their ballot from them.

IMHO this voting thing is too risky. We should just go back to having a ruling family /s

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