[PLUG-TALK] Punch Ballots, Mail Ballots, and Fraud
Russell Senior
russell at personaltelco.net
Mon Aug 3 21:30:08 UTC 2020
>>>>> "Paul" == Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com> writes:
Paul> On the public side, vote by mail is subject only to small-scale
Paul> mistakes and fraud. Ballots get mailed to wrong addresses, to
Paul> deceased voters, to people to have moved outside the jurisdiction;
Paul> these ballots are likely subject to some level of recipient-side
Paul> fraud. Further, it's certainly possible (though I have no evidence
Paul> of any sort to back this up) that certain household members may
Paul> intimidate other members to vote a certain way or even
Paul> fraudulently complete others' ballots.
One fun anecdote: One of my kids (>18yo) got two ballots this year. It
might have possibly been because he changed his unaffiliated party
registration to pick a party about a month or two before the primary
this year. He of course didn't vote the second ballot. Not only because
it would be wrong, but because the elections office would immediately
spot the second vote. They are checked off at the signature check. If a
second ballot arrived, they would immediately notice his name was
already checked off.
Paul> While any mistakes and fraud should be rooted out, the risk of
Paul> these public-side issues threatening an election are low. They
Paul> happen in low numbers, are (presumably) spread across partisan
Paul> divides, and are difficult or even impossible to scale.
Yeah. Any kind of scaling would require coordination and that
coordination would inevitably leak, because the conspirators would need
to recruit others to the scheme and that recruitment would pretty soon
encounter a refusal that would unravel the secrecy required to maintain
the conspiracy.
Paul> In other words, the biggest threats to mail-in elections are not
Paul> found in the public, but in officials with evil intent.
Paul> As Keith has mentioned, mail-in ballots are archived for later
Paul> research and fact checking, which in some cases could certainly be
Paul> used as evidence against said officials -- though I'll admit to
Paul> being unschooled in the actual mechanics of archived ballots.
+1
There was talk a few years ago about doing regular post-election audits
of samples of ballots. My understanding is that is not part of the
current process, but was seen as a deterrent to hacking tabulation
machines.
The Techno Activism 3rd Mondays (TA3M) group had a presentation on
Oregon voting security a year or so ago that I attended. At least the
big counties use high-speed scanners to produce an image of the ballot
and do some kind of automated vote extraction from the image. But,
again, the exact technology varies by county, and some of the smaller
counties might use what seems like archaic technology. The upside is
that the small counties have so few voters, their ballots could all be
hand-counted by N people in M hours, where N and M are small integers.
I'm pretty confident in the security of Oregon's system.
--
Russell Senior
russell at personaltelco.net
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