All mail in Voting or In Person?

 

Some folks are wondering why having “all mail in voting” is so contentious?

 

I say it is because the we have two sides that are unable to agree on much of anything. So, on something as grand as the next president why should we be surprised? We hear shrill comments from both for and against the process. Problem is there is some merit to both.

 

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released a report in September that urged all states to adopt paper ballots before 2020. Why is paper best for verifying election outcomes?

 

The idea of a post-election paper audit is a form of quality control. You want to have people inspect enough of the paper records to confirm with high statistical probability that the outcome on the paper and the outcome on the electronic results is the same. You’re basically doing a random sample. How large a sample you need depends on how close the election result was. If it was a landslide, a very small sample—maybe even just a few hundred random ballots selected from across the state—could be enough to confirm with high statistical confidence that it was indeed a landslide. But if the election result was a tie, well, you need to inspect every ballot to confirm that it was a tie.

 

The key insight behind auditing as a cyber defense is that if you have a paper record that the voter got to inspect, then that can’t later be changed by a cyber attack. The cost to do so is relatively low. My estimate is it would cost about $25 million a year to audit to high confidence every federal race nationally.

 

Widespread voting by mail poses risks of disenfranchising voters, delaying election results?

Expanding vote-by-mail systems takes an immense amount of equipment, time, staff and funding, yet some want to impose universal vote-by-mail mandates on every state this fall. It has taken Washington state nearly a decade to navigate the complications of expanding vote by mail to every voter. Waving a wand from D.C. cannot change existing nationwide election infrastructure in a matter of months — nor should it.

Widespread voting by mail also risks severely delayed election results. Processing mail ballots is time consuming, particularly in states that have low levels of voting by mail. Due to the large number of mail ballots, California counted votes for over a month after the Democratic primary this spring. California legislators now want ballots to be counted even if received 17 days after the election!

Finally, mail voting is less secure than in-person voting. Voters, particularly in vulnerable populations such as the poor or the elderly, can be coerced to yield their ballots because there is no ballot secrecy. Voters’ ballots can be lost, delayed or thrown out by election officials without the voter knowing.

All Americans deserve an election system that is easy to access, secure and final. Instead, many states offer bloated rolls that include millions of ineligible voters; tabulation of ballots that takes weeks instead of hours; and with ballot harvesting, substantially increase the risk that ballots are coerced from voters, misdirected or completed fraudulently.

Until states bring their election systems up to date and make them secure, automatic vote by mail will continue to pose significant risks of election fraud, delay and lack of finality.

Simply said, we are suffering from an issue of trust; both people and the system.

Simple Americans simply want their vote to count. The hysteria whipped up by the media has NOT assured anyone their vote will be counted or thwarted in some way. All Americans want to feel secure that winners are truly winners and not the product of a failed process.