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Comment by _red | Hacker News Reader

I know, lets pretend like we know nothing about fraud / security and say "vote by mail" is a solution...

We do something about absentee voting, which is that it’s been done since World War 2, has been predominant in some states for decades, and has not once been the source of any notable irregularities.

The chances of a system as decentralized as this, with 50 states and thousands of cities, with dozens of federal and tens of thousands of lower-level elections, each involving constantly changing volunteers, many examined microscopically by vast armadas of campaign lawyers, to be the subject of significant, regular fraud without it becoming public just once, is nil.

By undermining the legitimacy of elections in such a conspicuously partisan way, you’re putting the ax on the fundamentals of the country you claim to be a patriot of.

Absentee is very different. It's opt in, and those votes are counted separately. I got a mail in registration form for someone who doesn't live in my flat today.

I do think it's unlikely as a whole it will effect anything due to the electoral system. As bad as the electoral system is, it actually forces votes into discrete blocks, so slight irregularities in say Arkansans wouldn't really mean anything because the state will undoubtedly go Republican.

Ok? And if you tried to vote for them, it would likely be detected and you would go to jail. Not an argument against mail voting. which is literally the same process as absentee voting.

Let's say you sign your vote by mail, acknowledge all the legal stuff in there. Say you also live in a suburb with no locks on mailboxes. Say someone steals your actual ballot out of your mailbox, or before it gets to your mailbox, and you never get it. You contact the election board.

Say someone sends in that ballot.

What is the process for getting another ballot? Are they coded so they can tell which ballot belonged to who, and how do you deal with the stolen ballot and possible invalid vote?

Would it though? Consider the term ballot harvesting[0]: "

"Ballot collecting, also called ballot harvesting, is characterized by the gathering and submitting of absentee or mail-in voter ballots by third-party individuals, volunteers or workers, rather than submission by the voters themselves directly to ballot collection sites"

How would someone get caught? If you went around a nursing home collecting ballots and then dumped them in the trash on your way home, unless there was some really strong accounting system, you may never get caught. Ballot harvesting is a tried and true method for the democrats, and frankly I trust no one to cast my vote but myself.

[]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_collection

Even if you accept the proposed statement that mail-in-voting is insecure, despite evidence to the contrary, it is still far more secure than making use of a voting machine that is known to be vulnerable... Like half of those in use across the US.

Which have had questions raised over whether they've made mistakes or been tampered with, and before evidence reached court it was accidentally destroyed. [0]

[0] https://apnews.com/877ee1015f1c43f1965f63538b035d3f/APNewsBr...

Oregon does vote-by-mail and it's been very successful.

Colorado, too.

Arizona does it, and it’s turned into a total shit show in Maricopa County full of missed ballots, delays, uncounted votes, and generally an air of malfeasance around the whole process.

It was so bad in our 2018 elections, I’m voting in person this election just to remove one variable.

65% of ballots cast in California recently were mail-in. https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/historical-absentee/ That's 26 million votes or nearly 10% of the country.

What is it that we know about fraud/security of voting by mail? The rates of fraud seem pretty low from the sources I can find.

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