North Koreans stole American identities and took remote tech jobs at Fortune 500

It’s the same trade off in all secure systems. Reducing false positives in exchange for false negatives. Implementing new secure standards would have disproportionate effect on preventing legitimate voters from voting, for very small gain in preventing bad actors. Research from some years ago had the ratio being a few orders of magnitude difference. Stopping 300 legitimate votes from being cast to prevent 1 fraudulent vote makes no sense. In any case, these shenanigans can get you a felony and we’ve repeatedly seen very low rates of this kind of fraud.

That is to say, you can swing more votes in more effective and legal ways than flubbing mail in ballots.

On the other hand, being able to land such a job with no substantial checks who you are is pretty crazy. You would think a six figure employee would warrant at least that amount of attention!

One problem with mail in ballot discussions is it varies so much by state but much discussion is around particular things certain states do combined in a single scenario. E.g. "to flub a mail in ballot that gets delivered to your door regardless if you want it and doesn’t require any form of proof of person to submit" makes 3 of these assumptions in the discussion:

- It is one of the ~20% of states that sent an automatic ballot.

- But not one of the states that requires voter registration containing a comparison signature on file to receive a mail in ballot with a matching signature (which is actually none of the above states).

- And also not one of the states to use barcodes to uniquely identify the ballots related to the voter or have flagging policies when multiple ballots for the same barcode arrive (including poll site voting). Alternatively: the fraudulent ballots only ever come in for people that don't vote with an extremely high accuracy.

With the final argument that an ID would be the be all end all to the original concern (faked overseas civilian ballots). That's not to say I'm necessarily against IDs for voting and that we have to wait for things to actually be a problem to do something but it does muddy the waters a bit on what to do. I'd honestly like to see something like SSN/state ID/passport/voter id functions all collapsed into one which would make registration more or less mandatory and not a separate step. A lot of things could be done with that to both tighten up things while simultaneously making things less hassle. Realistically we've got this weird political and administrative history of separating national/voting/state/private identities as a fundamental concept against big central government combined with the previous election year issue polarizing things and it's not any simpler to solve by saying it's simply about upholding national security and nothing else.

Why not conduct an on-site interview for remote workers instead? If a person interviewed over zoom and never physically visited office it makes fraud easier but I don’t see a big difference between bringing in the office 5 days a week and a few times (including interviews and ID check).