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Comment by Sparkle-san | Hacker News Reader

It's been the method of voting in Oregon for 25 years and Colorado for 10 years, when does the regret start? The current states that have all mail voting are also some of the least religious states in the country, you'd think the religious states would be pushing for it given the scenario you laid out. Colorado also had the second highest voter turn out nationwide in 2020 which supports the claim that all mail voting is good for increasing access to voting.

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Of course mailing ballots increases turnout. That wasn’t the question. The question was how do we determine if the votes are fraudulent, for example someone filling out a ballot for their elderly parents against their will.

Colorado does signature matching and ballot tracking. My signature has changed since I registered to vote here and I was notified in one election about it not matching and had to cure my ballot. If someone voted under my name, I would be notified of the processing of my ballot and could object to it. Ease of voting/security is still an important balance. I could easily create a 100% secure election and it would disenfranchise a lot of voters.

Signature matching is a notoriously weak verification, especially when the risk is within-family disenfranchisement. You almost certainly know your spouse's and parents' and children's signatures, you likely have signed in their name in various occasions before, so signing with their signature in a convincing enough way to fool a ballot counter who gets to spend probably ~10s at most on every mail-in ballot is extremely easy.

Not to mention, you can do the opposite: you can destroy your "wrong-minded" family member's ballots to prevent them from voting.

Destroying a ballot accomplishes nothing.

You can always still go vote in person at a polling center, even with all-mail voting they always keep a few open just in case someone loses or spoils their ballot.

They'll record the vote provisionally just to make sure you're not trying to vote twice, and once it's clear no mailed-in ballot arrived it gets counted.

I know my spouses signature and I definitely could not copy it for the life of me. I'm sure we could put it different safeguards and they would almost certainly disenfranchise orders of magnitude more legal votes than fraudulent ones given the scale on which we've proven voting fraud to happen.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-widespread-is-electio...

> Colorado does signature matching and ballot tracking.

Don't know about Colorado but many other states have been sending ballots to dead people as well as people who are not resident anymore. The potential for fraud is huge

The signature matching would be the first line of defense against that. They would also be notified of deaths by the department of health and the social security administration. Broadly speaking though, whenever potential cases of fraud of investigated, very few end up being substantiated and the fraud that is committed is caught up front.

https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-voting-gov...

https://www.rmpbs.org/blogs/news/colorado-noncitizens-deceas...

> They would also be notified of deaths by the department of health and the social security administration.

Is your claim that the social security administration sends a death notification to the deceased person's voter registrar?

https://www.ssa.gov/dataexchange/stateagreements.html

That is what is stated by the Secretary of State in the PBS link above.

“we get information when Coloradans pass away from two spots… the Department of Public Health and Environment and also the Social Security Administration.”

That kind of argument is open to criticism of survivorship bias.

Sure maybe and it still never seems to be proven on a substantial level. The Heritage foundation has an agenda to prove voter fraud and even going by thei number, it appears to be a 1 in every million vote level event. Far more legal votes are stopped by existing laws than illegal votes.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-widespread-is-electio...

Oregon should never be the gold standard for how to do anything, ever. Can they even pump their own gas yet?

Recently, yes :)

https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/06/us/oregon-drivers-pump-own-fu...

Before that changed I LOVED turning the attendants away as I grabbed my Diesel hose and started pumping. I loved telling them when they didn't know.

Ron Wyden seems cool.

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