CO mails paper ballots to everyone* about a month before election day. You can choose to vote in person, or mail in/drop off your paper ballot anytime prior to election night.
My understanding is what while the ballots are paper, many (all?) are tabulated digitally. It certainly appears to be laid out in a way that benefits digital reading, and i believe that is what the machines in question are responsible for.
I’m an overseas Colorado voter. They lump me in with the military voters so my voting process is super easy (I’m sure certain groups would love to make this harder, but not for the troops). I get an email that my ballot is ready, I go to the CO website, authenticate with my SSN (fucking yikes), fill out my ballot online, print a copy to pdf, slap a digital signature on there, and email it back to the SOS who presumably prints it out and throws it in with the rest, and then get an email saying my vote has been counted.
It’s amazing how easy voting can be when we want it to be.
When you disregard basic voting security, everything becomes super easy. Mail-in voting allows for vote buying, the only way to avoid this is by having a private in person voting booth so the person voting cannot prove to the outside world who they voted for.
Even this isn't secure now, because everyone can just photograph their voting card within the booth.
After your very last sentence, I’m not even sure what your point is here. You just listed a bunch of reasons you don’t think mail in ballots are safe, and then ended with saying the alternative also isn’t safe from vote buying.
Vote buying also does not appear to be a problem in the US electoral system, as another commented pointed out: in order to make a difference in the election, you’d have to buy enough votes that someone would be bound to tell on you.
Yea no, I get that, it's just that voting was still secure up until smartphones were ubiquitous. Now it's not.
It's not just about vote stealing per se, it's about any third party infraction of individual voting rights. It may not matter on a large scale, but it matters to individuals.
Not only that, but it matters that bosses can't coerce workers into voting for someone, or an abusive spouse, or any third party who might have an interest in swaying an election. It often doesn't take much to sway an election.
It becomes very problematic when a victim is unable to vote for someone who would stop abuse. For example, Russia decriminalizing spousal physical abuse. That same thing could happen anywhere, and then you'd have every asshole abuser at home forcing their family to vote for their choice.
Not having secure voting is a real problem, and one that is now unsolved thanks to smartphones.
With my remote voting, I can generate as many ballots as I want. If I want to make a dummy ballot that says I voted for any given candidate in order to fool someone it is easier than ever. Now instead of 1 physical ballot, I can generate multiple ballots, and do as I please with them.
That's a different security issue, not related to voter coercion.
There are checks to ensure votes aren't fraudulent, that's actually very easy and already done. You can send as many ballots as you want, but they need to be legitimised against a person. That's not such an easy grift. I believe
Do you have any evidence this is happening? In order to swing an election, you'd have to buy a lot of votes. That's a lot of people to rat you out.
You're proposing that secret vote-buying conspiracy is going on and thousands of people are all keeping their mouth shut in order to keep getting that... $10, $50, $100 bribe?
Hehe you disproved your own claim. Mail-in voting does not “allow” vote buying any more than any other method of voting. It’s simply not possible for the voting system itself to prevent vote buying, if that were actually a serious problem. But where’s the evidence that vote buying is a widespread problem in the US? Imagining that something is possible doesn’t mean it’s happening, nor make it likely, nor make it a serious problem to solve. And on the flip side, the more technology we add in the name of security, the easier it is to influence elections without people knowing and without having to buy votes.
If you don’t want it to be possible for people to buy or sell votes, then you need to make sure every citizen is engaged and cares about casting their own vote, and you need to make sure the government has a stable and trustworthy system of checks and balances. And why not just make it illegal with massive fines to buy votes and post a huge bounty for anyone tattling on a vote buyer that gets prosecuted? It doesn’t seem that complicated to disincentivize vote buying in a way that eliminates any concerns about the method of voting.
> You would think AI/ML could help with fraud detection.
I think that's a very big leap to make, that the ballots are going to where they're going because of fraud. Hanlon's razor applies.
> ballot box stuffing
Ballot-box stuffing happens when more ballots are cast than there are people who voted. This is difficult to do when voting by mail. Indeed, from the article:
> LeVan Hodson told KING 5, "Even if someone gets a second ballot (or more), whether under their name or someone else’s, we’ll only ever count one ballot per registered voter with their matching signature."
When you receive the envelope, you check the signature against what's on file. You also check records to see if the voter had voted elsewhere (such as at an early-voting location). You can check to see if the voter reported not receiving their mail-in ballot. You can do all these checks before opening the envelope. And once you do open the envelope, it's easy to see if multiple ballots had been included in the envelope.
The signature on my voting registration is the one I used when I first registered 40 years ago when I was still in high school. It’s quite different from my signature today, and it’s never been challenged.
> County officials in Pennsylvania confirmed to local news outlets that the man filmed in the video was an acting postmaster, doing his job. After the video went online, he began receiving threats.
Because of how the electoral college works, and because of how tight the margins are, you don't need to have or enable fraud on a massive scale to cheat. All that's needed is putting your thumb on the scale in a few select jurisdictions and that could tip the scales one way or the other. It's within the realm of probability that the presidential election will be decided by < 50k voters nationwide.
But you have to know which 50k voters in which state, and be able to put your thumb on the scales without tipping off the dozens of people who are professionally employed to prevent exactly this scenario.
More than a few people have been caught trying to cast just a single extra vote.
How in the world are you going to pull off a massive conspiracy like in the midst of the most scrutinized election in the world.
Another example of "Everything looks suspicious when you don’t know how anything works."[0]
Mailed ballots are verified against voter registrations and signatures are checked against the signature on file. This woman with a bunch of ballots for former residents of her apartment would gain essentially nothing and open herself to serious criminal penalties if she tried to vote as anyone except herself.
The article you cite says nothing in direct response to the parent comment (ballot harvesting, etc.).
It also includes some misinformation, saying " signature verification is a critical part of ensuring that only valid ballots from eligible voters get counted" ... while many states, including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Georgia, do not verify signatures.
CO mails paper ballots to everyone* about a month before election day. You can choose to vote in person, or mail in/drop off your paper ballot anytime prior to election night.
My understanding is what while the ballots are paper, many (all?) are tabulated digitally. It certainly appears to be laid out in a way that benefits digital reading, and i believe that is what the machines in question are responsible for.
* for some definition of "everyone"