You have to have a id to drive a car. You have to have an id to buy alcohol. Is it such a crime to ask for id when you vote?
Voter fraud is a serious crime, and unlike other similar crimes (like a fake credit application), the perpetrator doesn’t stand to make $$$$ for each act. They need to commit the crime at scale to change the result.
If this form of fraud were happening en masse, surely there’d be tons of evidence of it?
If campaign workers were going around trying to bribe people to vote, some of the people they are trying to bribe might unexpectedly be supporters of the other candidate, and would have a strong incentive to collect evidence of the bribery attempt and report it. It would make for some very interesting hidden camera videos and would be explosive news in the modern political environment.
It's not a crime, but the US government has proven that it can't be trusted not to be virulently racist when the opportunity to disenfranchise minority voters presents itself, particularly at the state level. ID requirements for voting are the equivalent of tempting a drunk with a shot of whiskey.
In 2016, several states, including the largest, had either universal mail-in-voting or on-demand permanent-without-special-excuse absentee status, and that number had gone up for 2020 even before the response to COVID prompted some temporary and other permanent changes.
So, what exactly do you mean by “restrict non-in-person voting back to how it was in 2016”?
The phrase "is possible" is so wishy-washy. It allows all sorts of movie plot scenarios which might have only 1-in-a-trillon odds.
We've long experience with vote-by-mail. Including 20+ years of all-postal voting in Oregon.
It's clear there is a very low incidence of fraud. We know this because there's a handful of cases where, say, one spouse filled out the ballot for a dead spouse. These can be detected by, for example, checking signatures.
There is also a very low incident of fraud in in-person voting, as when someone own two homes and votes in two districts. So it's not like in-person-only voting is free of fraud.
In neither case is the fraud significant - far less than Bush's FL lead of 537 votes over Gore in the 2000 election.
Can we make up examples of how fraud might occur? Yes! The sergeant of overseas-deployed National Guard troops may require the soldiers to vote a certain way, and be able to verify the ballots before mailing them in.
Now that you know fraud is possible that way, do you want to prevent overseas soldiers from voting?
> any fraud would be immediately and obviously apparent.
Open voting leads to a different type of fraud. "I don't rent to people who voted for X". "Anyone who doesn't vote for Y is fired."
Just look at the history of the open ballot in American history to see how easy it is to corrupt. From A History of the Australian Ballot System in the United States at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_Australian_B...
] The failure of the law to secure secrecy opened the door to bribery, intimidation, and corruption.
] Money, or “soap,” as it was called, with increasing frequency was used to carry elections after the Civil War.
] It was charged that the bribery of voters in Indiana in 1880 and 1888 was sufficient to determine the result of the election.
] Intimidation was just as rife as bribery
] According to a report of a committee of the Forty-sixth Congress,[94] men were frequently marched or carried to the polls in their employers’ carriages. They were then supplied with ballots, and frequently compelled to hold their hands up with their ballots in them so they could easily be watched until the ballots were dropped into the box. Many labor men were afraid to vote and remained away from the polls. Others who voted against their employers’ wishes frequently lost their jobs. If the employee lived in a factory town, he probably lived in a tenement owned by the company, and possibly his wife and children worked in the mill. If he voted against the wishes of the mill-owners, he and his family were thrown out of the mill, out of the tenement, and out of the means of earning a livelihood
The fraud was indeed so 'obviously apparent' that it "fill[ed] thoughtful citizens with disgust and anxiety. Many electors, aware that the corrupt element was large enough to be able to turn the election, held aloof altogether."
Surely that's far worse than even nation-wide all-postal voting.
No, because we don't know how much fraud people got away with.
Actually there's editor's note in the end linking to the original RealClearPolitics article. Also the article I submitted says that it was first there, but less visibly and without link.
There seems to be no way to change the url in retrospect.
So, no, this should not have been flagged!
There's always a bureaucratic apparatus involved in processing an election and mail voting doesn't strike me as particularly exceptional. Why does the author trust that the French civil service is non-partisan enough?
Here in Germany mail voting works exactly like described, outer ballot verifies identity, inner ballot contains the vote. There are always, I believe nine people required to be present when the envelops are separated to check on each other. To believe there is a systemic, effort across countless of voting regions with different demographics seems kind of conspiratorial.
