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Comment by PureParadigm | Hacker News Reader

One criticism I see often of many electronic voting systems also applies to vote by mail: it does not protect against external pressure or buying votes. Someone could easily offer to buy blank ballots (especially from poor voters who may need the money), or otherwise coerce/pressure people to reveal their ballots and break anonymity. I realize actions like these are already a crime, but one of the main reasons for the secret ballot is to protect against situations like these by making it impossible to do.

Perhaps this compromise in the integrity of the voting system is one we want to make in these unusual times, but I think it is important to point out that there is indeed a compromise here. Mail voting doesn't come without its own issues.

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> it does not protect against external pressure or buying votes.

It does though. If your vote was coerced you can always request another ballot, which invalidates the first.

If you're getting paid to vote a certain way, then nothing here really changes. California already had vote by mail as an option.

And most states have the concept of "absentee ballots", as well, which are effectively voting by mail.

Right. I'm not arguing for or against voting by mail or absentee ballots. I'm only pointing out that these voting methods come with risks, and it's better to be aware of the risks when deciding whether we want mail/absentee voting. There very well may be situations where absentee/mail voting is the best option (and possibly during this pandemic), but it would be disingenuous to pretend that they don't carry any risks. Like all public policy decisions, this is a cost-benefit analysis, and an informed decision needs to be aware of both costs and benefits.

My (poorly informed) understanding is that the difference between "absentee ballot" and "vote by mail" is with absentee voting you must first request a ballot, whereas with vote by mail, they send a ballot to every registered voter.

Seems pretty well the same to me, but I guess the having to request the ballot makes some people feel better about it.

> If your vote was coerced you can always request another ballot, which invalidates the first.

And whoever is coercing you could also ask for the info for the My Voter Status website [1] and verify that the ballot that the person coercing used was the one that was counted (maybe based on the date recorded as received by the county). They could definitely make sure you didn't go vote in person.

> If you're getting paid to vote a certain way, then nothing here really changes. California already had vote by mail as an option.

The number of mail in votes increases significantly, so if you believe in potential risk with those, then there is a significant increase in overall risk.

[1] https://voterstatus.sos.ca.gov/

> If your vote was coerced you can always request another ballot, which invalidates the first.

I'm not sure that'd necessarily be effective in cases where somebody is being coerced by their spouse to vote a certain way.

  which invalidates the first

Most USA registrars have no process for invalidating a submitted ballot once it's in the box.

First, all these alleged problems exist for absentee ballots, and yet no one complains about that.

Second, voting fraud is exceptionally rare in the United States. Even if you tried to purchase votes, you can’t purchase enough to shade an election, and stay clandestine. It’s simply too expensive. A much more effective and efficient use of money is to encourage voter suppression — especially legal voter suppression.

> First, all these alleged problems exist for absentee ballots, and yet no one complains about that.

Fair enough.

> Second, voting fraud is exceptionally rare in the United States

This doesn't make sense as a justification for relaxing restrictions. Perhaps it is because of the existing restrictions that fraud is so difficult and low, so then relaxing restrictions en-masse would increase the rate of fraud. I'm not saying this is definitely the case, but citing a low current rate of fraud as justification for making fraud easier doesn't make any sense at all.

> Even if you tried to purchase votes, you can’t purchase enough to shade an election, and stay clandestine

In most cases, this is true. But there are elections that are decided by a few dozen votes (maybe local elections, and more rarely larger elections), so a small amount of fraud could change the result.

The 2000 US Presidential election was decided on a handful of Florida votes, so elections do get decided on a few dozen votes.

Oregon has had exclusively vote-by-mail for over two decades.

One of the two major political parties there has opposed it vigorously for all that time, making these claims among others. In all that time, however, it has never offered any evidence that this happens.

In fact, when the Oregon Secretary of State audited the 2016 election, they found 54 problematic votes out of 2+ million cast; most of those were someone voting in their old district after they'd moved out of state. A handful (maybe 10 or so?) were double votes.

There just isn't any evidence that there are any widespread problems with vote-by-mail, let alone enough problems to affect election outcomes. If there were, I can't believe that the political party in Oregon that opposes it wouldn't have been publicizing such problems over the last 20 years.

Besides, it's certainly possible people could attempt to coerce people voting in booths; "take a photo of your vote and show me or we'll get your family" or whatever.

The much bigger issue is vote tampering by election officials, which does happen though still not at scale to affect election outcomes. I remember in 2016, the big scandal was a republican clerk in Clackamas county threw out a box of democratic-registered ballots. They were caught, the votes were counted, but that sort of thing is a bigger threat to electoral outcomes than vote-by-mail.

It still isn't really a threat; the real threat is voter suppression, which absolutely does happen but which Oregon does a great job at minimizing, with universal vote-by-mail and automatic voter registration at the DMV.

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