I am an Independent. I don’t like mail-in voting, at least as it exists today, because it opens up extraordinarily easy avenues for voting fraud. In the run up to the 2020 election, Democrats at the state level (where most election regulations are actually decided) opened the mail-in voting laws so far and wide that anyone with a pen could send in as many votes as they wanted in different names and nobody would have any proof of which were valid and which weren’t.
Note that I am not saying that widespread fraud actually occurred in this election...there was no evidence of it, in large part because the laws were setup so that there wouldn’t be. But that isn’t really the point. It could have occurred and nobody could ever prove it, short of the perpetrators themselves coming forward to admit what they did.
Unless something changes before 2024, there is no longer any point in bothering to cast your vote. When anyone can vote without having to prove that they are eligible, and can do it remotely, it renders all votes meaningless.
I generally agree with you, and would prefer we move toward in person voting on paper ballots in as many jurisdictions as possible. With easy exemptions for people with mobility impairments, etc.
However I think any pressure towards in-person voting MUST be accompanied by an expansion of rights in terms of how far polling places are from you, a national holiday where everyone gets the day off work, sizeable transportation stipends, etc. Without all of that, requiring people to vote in person is de facto disenfranchisment.
And furthermore, with regards to 2020, I disagree with you wholeheartedly. I think everyone had a right to no-contact voting this year due to COVID. It was a special set of circumstances.
I agree with you that voting needs to be as accessible as possible, as long as we have steps in place to ensure that only eligible voters are voting, and that they are only able to do so once. I don’t know how you do that with the hard push against voter ID laws, however.
With regard to 2020, the changes to the laws that occurred could have been entirely well-intentioned. They probably were. But those changes have led to the current crisis of confidence in the election results, and rightly so.
> anyone with a pen could send in as many votes as they wanted in different names and nobody would have any proof of which were valid and which weren’t.
I can't find any evidence for this. Further, at least where I live, ballots are mailed to voters and include a control number that ensures only one vote is counted for that person.
Well that’s the issue. There is a patchwork of state and local laws that determine who can vote, what (if any) requirements there are for voter registration, how deaths of registered voters are handled, etc. Even where you live, you might be surprised by how easy it might be to register to vote, and that process might be open for large amounts of fraud. It becomes a very murky issue when you allow each state to set their own rules, and then each state can allow each county flexibility within state law.
Then there is the issue of dead people that have not been removed from the voter rolls. We know for a fact that in 2020, many of these were returned, filled out, likely by family members. That alone is an issue (example: https://youtu.be/CINHx-z9cbk ).
Here is an article with an overview of some of the laws that were changed/relaxed in 2020. Generally speaking, each relaxed restriction opens up more and more avenues for fraud:
The video said that votes from dead people were counted in violation of state law. Call it fraud, call it a mistake. Invalid votes were counted. I am not sure how that contradicts me. The point of this conversation is, quite simply, that the rules were changed in a way dramatically increased the possibility of fraudulent/invalid votes being counted. That makes voting pointless unless and until the rules are changed.
Further, at least in this election, voting and registering to vote were one in the same in many jurisdictions. Many states automatically sent out mail-in ballots to everyone that was registered. All that had to be done from there was to fill it out and send it in. Families of dead people sent in those ballots in many cases.
Registering to vote as someone else, or as an entirely fictional person, is absurdly easy in many jurisdictions. In California, for instance, one can skip any identity checks by simply marking two checkboxes: one indicating they have no ID, and one indicating they have no social security number [1]. Voila, you are now a registered voter. Combine this absurdity with automatically sent out mail-in ballots in many states, and you have a disaster waiting to happen.
A couple of states have had vote-by-mail for years, and Oregon at least has had it exclusively for decades.
The Republican Secretary of State ran an election audit in 2016 and found that, over 2+ million votes cast, around 50 or so were "fraudulent," most of those being cast by people who voted in Oregon and elsewhere.
Vote-by-mail is not problematic, if you consider the historical evidence provided by places that have been doing it for a while.
That is the party line, but you have no way of actually knowing that. The election audit to which you refer has no way of knowing how many votes were cast by identities that were simply invented because of the ease of registration in many states (which has now been combined with proactive sending of mail-in ballots, thanks to COVID). Sure, they can tie together people who voted in more than one state, but that isn’t the attack vector that anyone with any sense would use. Show me a good way of identifying brand new identities used to vote in states where there are easy ways to bypass ID requirements (such as California). There isn’t.
Vote-by-mail allows pressure tactics and potentially removes the privacy of voting. For example, abusive spouses can control the ballot of their victim. It also allows payments for votes, because the ballot can be checked by the payer.
Mail in voting is fine, no one has -ever- been able to prove it widespread enough to change an election (unless you live in a town of like 50 people). This has been studied over and over. Every time they check out the supposed fraudulent votes nothing pans out. It is an empty and flawed argument. The ones saying that it lends itself to being fraudulent need to prove it.
Of course nobody can prove it. The rules are setup to be so loose that there is no way to prove any fraud. As I said below, registering to vote as an entirely fictional person is absurdly easy in many jurisdictions. In California, for instance, one can skip any identity checks by simply marking two checkboxes: one indicating they have no ID, and one indicating they have no social security number [1]. Voila - in under 2 minutes, you have invented a brand new, registered California voter. Combine this absurdity with automatically sent out mail-in ballots in many states, and you have a disaster waiting to happen.
You're forgetting something. If someone were to check the existence of the identities, they would eventually show up as fraudulent. Here, the "proof" works by absence (which is admittedly not logically correct according to the strict classical rules).¹
Consider that an investigation (that includes said identity check), concluding with a recount happens
• mandatory by design to a random small subset of voting districts
• everytime someone reports to the voting commission an indication or outright evidence of irregularities or fraud
• everytime there is a difference between head-to-head candidates smaller than a certain percentage
If GP is right and "nothing pans out", then that means that the CA Secretary of State web site is not an effective tool to commit voting fraud.
¹ A common analogue is: "I do not believe in gods. Theists can change my mind when they bring forth evidence that measures up to the extraordinary claim. In the last couple of thousands of years, this did not happen. Thus, I will live my life as if gods do not exist."
Absence from where? It is perfectly legal to not have an ID or social security number. Not having those things proves nothing. And nobody is going to track down everyone in the country with the same name and DOB that you selected and ask them if they are the Fred Wilson (example) that voted in California. People move all the time, so it wouldn’t be unusual if they went by the house and that person doesn’t live there.
The way that system is setup to accept voters without ID verification, there is not a way to legally disprove that the person with whatever name and DOB chosen does not exist (assuming more than 1 other person in the country shares those characteristics). Hence it would be impossible to legally prove that this invented person isn’t real.
Exceptional claims require exceptional proof. Being able to file one fake account vs 10,000 (and not get caught) to throw an election is about the level of proof you'll need and no one has ever come up with that level of proof. Until then people claiming mail fraud are just shouting into the hurricane of the rights of individuals to not be disenfranchised.
I literally just showed how shockingly easy it is for anyone to invent California voters in a matter of seconds. That’s exceptional in my opinion. I could write a script that would register 10k of those in several minutes. But the more likely scenario is that I can’t be the only one that has realized this...nobody knows how many people are doing this once or a few times.
That is the whole point of this conversation - the possibility of incredibly easy, undetectable fraud renders all votes meaningless because we simply don’t know how much occurred and there is no way to find out because the rules are so loose. Until they are changed, it completely negates any point in voting.
Note that I am not saying that widespread fraud actually occurred in this election...there was no evidence of it, in large part because the laws were setup so that there wouldn’t be. But that isn’t really the point. It could have occurred and nobody could ever prove it, short of the perpetrators themselves coming forward to admit what they did.
Unless something changes before 2024, there is no longer any point in bothering to cast your vote. When anyone can vote without having to prove that they are eligible, and can do it remotely, it renders all votes meaningless.