Claim: Mail-in ballots

[Bootstrap]

Claim: Mail-in and drop-off ballots are not being verified, or are not being verified in a way that effectively establishes identity

What is the evidence for and against that claim? I don't know much about this.

[Bootstrap]

Claim: Mail-in and drop-off ballots are not being verified, or are not being verified in a way that effectively establishes identity

What is the evidence for and against that claim? I don't know much about this.

Nobody has weighed in on this so far, so let me throw out a few things I see ...

1. Mail-in ballots seem to be verified

Table 14: How States Verify Voted Absentee/Mail Ballots (National Conference of State Legislatures)


2. People who claim there is a lot of voter fraud frequently point to this database, but it contains only 37 cases of voter fraud in 2022, and there were criminal convictions for most of these:

https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud/sea ... ar=&page=0

Looking at the details, it's hard to know whether votes were actually counted in these cases. The database does not tell us that. These cases are investigated and prosecuted, so it's possible to look these things up, e.g.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndny/pr/fo ... tity-theft

[Robert]

1. Mail-in ballots seem to be verified

Some are being verified with a 10% accuracy. The computer looks and if it is within 10% of the original signature, it is passing. Some are not being verified at all. This is the case in Arizona right now. They are not verified and there was no chain of custody for a large block that came in.

[Bootstrap]

1. Mail-in ballots seem to be verified

Some are being verified with a 10% accuracy. The computer looks and if it is within 10% of the original signature, it is passing. Some are not being verified at all. This is the case in Arizona right now. They are not verified and there was no chain of custody for a large block that came in.

Can you give me something to help me verify that claim?

Here's the Arizona Signature Verification Guide. It looks like human beings are verifying the signatures, not computers:

https://azsos.gov/sites/default/files/A ... _Guide.pdf

[Soloist]

I basically stay out of politics but Oregon uses mail in ballots.
The last election I voted for was back when Ron Paul was trying for the Republican nomination. After the rule change and seeing how the Republicans treated him I decided to vote for Gary Johnston.
After the election my ballot got sent back to me saying “we can’t read your signature” far too late to fix or do anything about. My sister had the exact same thing happen.
I was taking a psychology class at the community college several years after and (I had decided to stop voting at that point) I asked the visiting politician (secretary of state) about it. She listened to my question and was about to respond when about 6 other people in my class of 40 chimed in saying the same thing happened to them.

My question for anyone in favor of mail in ballots is how can you avoid this problem which seems to have been selectively eliminating third party votes? I’m sure most of the responses were being done in Oregon at that time, feel free to look.

[Ken]

It seems to me that the more relevant question is whether systematic fraud is happening with mail-in balloting.

Every single voting system in this country, whether it is mail-in or in-person does essentially the same thing.

• 1. They start with a list of actual registered voters
  
  2. They provide individualized serial-numbered trackable ballots to every individual who votes, regardless of method.
  
  3. Data is collected on every registered voter who receives a ballot and every outstanding ballot is associated with a specific voter
  
  4. There is some verification that the person filling out the ballot is the person to whom it was intended.
  
  5. When ballots are collected and counted that are associated back to the specific lists of voters in each precinct and the counts are reconciled. This is the canvassing process. If even one ballot is out of place they continue until it is reconciled. And any stray ballots not associated with a specific voter can be immediately caught and removed

Now it is possible to commit various one-off types of fraud in this system and always has been. For example:

• Registration fraud: People who are not eligible to register in a jurisdiction sometimes do so. Sometimes this is accidental (former Felons who were told they had been cleared to re-register to vote). Sometimes it is intentional fraud such as when Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows fraudulently registered to vote in North Carolina where he did not actually live: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/north- ... 022-12-30/ And sometimes people intentionally register in more than one location. Republican snowbirds with homes in both the Northeast and in Florida have been caught doing this. But either way, we are just talking one vote here or there and nothing systematic. And this type of fraud spans the political spectrum. At least as many GOP voters have been caught doing this as Dem voters. Maybe more.
• Voter impersonation fraud: People sometimes fraudulently submit a ballot for someone else. Again, when people get caught it is just as often GOP voters as Dem voters doing this. In PA there was a Trump supporting dad caught sending in his daughter's mail-in ballot when she was in college. And some guy caught sending in a ballot for his dead mother. That sort of thing. But again, it is always one-off examples. And honestly, requiring in-person voting doesn't completely stop this sort of thing anyway. An abusive husband can fill out his wife's mail-in ballot. Or he can go to the polls with her and fill it out there in person after she swipes her ID. I expect both things happen. The only instance of systematic and organized fraud that was even uncovered of this sort was in North Carolina and it was Republicans doing it for local elections. It was a few hundred votes and swung a local election and they were caught: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/ ... ina-523238

No system is going to completely eliminate the two types of one-off voter fraud identified above. But that is different from claiming that there is systematic fraud. Other than that one Republican case in North Carolina, I am not aware of any other examples in modern history.

It is also exceedingly unlikely that anyone or any party could actually engineer such fraud on a national scale for a long list of reasons. The first and most obvious reason is that no one knows in advance how many votes you need to fraudulently insert or flip and where you need to flip them. Can anyone look forward to 2024 and say that we can steal the 2024 presidential election by fraudulently flipping 25,000 votes in PA, 15,000 in Wisconsin, and 24,000 in GA? No we cannot. We don't even know at this point which states will be the key states much less how large of a margin needs to be stolen in those states. Will it be AZ and GA? Or maybe NC and FL? Or maybe TX which has been trending blue. Who knows? How do you plan here in 2023 to engineer voter fraud in November 2024 when we don't even know which states need to be stolen and how many ballots need to be involved? It is impossible.

And then even if you were to engineer such a system, you still have to get past the canvassing process where every ballot is associated back to an individual voter in an individual precinct? A process that is observed every single step of the way by both political parties. So if you want to steal 120,555 votes in Pennsylvania (the 2020 margin between Biden and Trump) you have to invent 120,555 fake voters in PA, register them to vote in precincts across the state, and then fraudulently get 120,555 votes into the system without being caught by the canvassing process. Trump and his associates claimed that PA was "stolen" because of votes in Philly. But they were unable to show a SINGLE fraudulently cast vote in Philly much less 120,555 of them. And in fact, Trump actually got more votes in Philly in 2020 than he did in 2014. Where he lost ground compared to 2016 was in suburban and rural areas. So the fraud would have had to have been spread across hundreds of suburban and rural precincts that are largely in GOP control and where the entire process is observed by both parties every step of the way.

The final place where elections fraud could happen is in the vote counting process. There were lots of allegations of vote counting fraud with vote counting machines like Dominion that have all proven false. In fact Dominion is currently suing FOX news about such claims and it isn't looking good for FOX news. But the obvious way to prevent such fraud is to require a paper ballot audit trail for every vote so that they can all be hand-counted in any sort of recount. Every recount we ever had that I am aware of has essentially confirmed the original vote counts. Usually there are ballots discovered that were not read correctly in the first machine count due to light ink, creases, ballot damage, two ballots stuck together, etc. So vote counts for BOTH candidates typically creep up slightly during a recount. But I don't know of a single instance where the counting machines and counting software made any sort of deliberate or accidental mistakes that changed elections. I have seen how these machines work. They work just like the standardized testing grade scanning machines that I have used many times. They flag every ballot that is unreadable or vague for a person to examine and hand-tabulate. So it is humans who are intervening and hand-counting any ballots that the machines cannot read. And the number of ballots that are incorrectly read or unread during the first count is always exceedingly low. And hand-counting is not error free either. I would 100% support paper ballots and maintaining an audit trail so that machine counts can be verified by hand. That is just common sense. There was a time when we adopted a lot of electronic voting machines that wouldn't do that but I think the pendulum is swinging back to maintaining a verifiable paper trail and that is a good thing.

[Ken]

I basically stay out of politics but Oregon uses mail in ballots.
The last election I voted for was back when Ron Paul was trying for the Republican nomination. After the rule change and seeing how the Republicans treated him I decided to vote for Gary Johnston.
After the election my ballot got sent back to me saying “we can’t read your signature” far too late to fix or do anything about. My sister had the exact same thing happen.
I was taking a psychology class at the community college several years after and (I had decided to stop voting at that point) I asked the visiting politician (secretary of state) about it. She listened to my question and was about to respond when about 6 other people in my class of 40 chimed in saying the same thing happened to them.

My question for anyone in favor of mail in ballots is how can you avoid this problem which seems to have been selectively eliminating third party votes? I’m sure most of the responses were being done in Oregon at that time, feel free to look.

I don't know how it works in OR, but here in WA with mail-in ballots, if your ballot signature cannot be read or there is some other problem with the ballot they contact you immediately using the form of communication that you registered with (phone, email, etc.) and you can go into the elections office and "cure" your ballot by signing it again. This process lasts for up to a week after the end of the election. You also don't need to wait for them to contact you. You can go online after you vote and check that your ballot was received and accepted. And if it wasn't you can request a new ballot and vote again.

And if they see that your signature didn't quite match but that it was still close enough, they send you another letter saying that your ballot still counted but that you need to update your signature and you can sign the form three different times and send it back so that they have 3 new signatures against which to match future ballots.

Here in this state I have never heard of someone getting a ballot mailed back to them. They notify you that your ballot signature needs to be "cured" but they keep the ballot and await you showing up in person to "cure" it.

[Josh]

Ken,

Your post above seems to imply you believe individual mail in ballots are tracked and associated with a specific voter?

Are these ballots still secret?

[Ken]

Ken,

Your post above seems to imply you believe individual mail in ballots are tracked and associated with a specific voter?

Are these ballots still secret?

Yes they are still secret. There are separate secure datasets that track voting and ballots. But if there is fraud a specific ballot can be invalidated, even after it has been counted.

I wrote about that previously here:

Claim: Mail-in and drop-off ballots are not being verified, or are not being verified in a way that effectively establishes identity

What is the evidence for and against that claim? I don't know much about this.

That isn’t really the most relevant question. The more relevant question is how voters are tracked across the system regardless of which method of voting they use. And how are voters identified and fraudulent or duplicate ballots identified and rejected. Every jurisdiction uses slightly different methods, but they all rhyme and most of them use a system that works like this:

The registrar of voters (ROV) creates a unique ID for you – could be your SS#, but is probably just a randomly assigned number in some database somewhere. That number serves as a proxy for you, the voter. Feed that number into the database, and you can look up your name, address, phone number, etc. It might look like this

12345678;Biden;Joseph;1600 Pennsylvania Ave;Washington;DC;202-456-1111;potus@whitehouse.gov
ID, last name, first name, address, phone, email, etc.

When you go to vote in person, there’s a voter log which records that voter 12345678 cast a ballot. That goes in a database so that we can know that you voted. Not *how* you voted, just that you cast a vote. It might look something like this:

12345678;2022-11-08 16:11:08
ID, date of election and time the ballot was submitted (timestamp) or when the person checked in.

When the ROV mails out a ballot, they attach an ID to the ballot that is bar coded. It’s not your voter ID but a completely different random number which is generated just for that ballot. There is a different system that records the ballot ID and the voter ID it was attached to. It might look like this:

9876543210;12345678
Ballot id, voter id.

Ballot IDs are never reused so we don’t even need to care which election this was for. And the voter log might look different:

12345678;2022-10-03 09:41:56;2022-11-06 11:32:12;2022-11-08 16:11:08

Now the voter log shows the voter ID, the timestamp for when the mail ballot was mailed out to me, the timestamp for when the mail ballot was received by the ROV, and the timestamp when I voted in person. Ha ha! I voted twice! If I didn’t vote in person, that 4th field would be NULL. If I didn’t return the mail ballot, that 3rd field would be NULL. But you note that the voter log doesn’t have the ballot ID. It doesn’t need it. By recording when a ballot was sent out, it tells us there is a ballot ID but requires us to search the other system to find it. One benefit of this is that you can open up the voter log to parties that you wouldn’t want to be able to associate the ballot ID with the voter ID and lock down the ballot/voter ID table to a much smaller number of people. There are techniques for obfuscating this further, but really you just want a system where if given a ballot ID, you can’t deduce the voter ID (like making the ballot ID the voter ID with some digits attached) and vice versa unless you have high level access.

If the ballot gets processed successfully (ID is verified), the system records the vote in the vote counting database and sends a message to the voter logging system to say ballot 9876543210 was processed 2022-11-06 11:32:12. The voter logging system looks up 9876543210 in the ballot lookup, gets the voter ID of 12345678 and then logs the processing timestamp in the voter log for 12345678.

If there’s a problem with the ballot, a worker can do a similar lookup, find that 9876543210 is the ballot for 12345678 and looks up in the voter registration system that 12345678 is Joe Biden’s ballot, and how to reach him. You can then call him, cure the ballot, and then process it and it’ll go through the step in the preceding paragraph.

The vote recording system needs an ID for the ballot. It could be the same ballot ID or it could be just a randomly generated one – depends on if there’s ever a need to work that vote data back to the voter. There’s even techniques where you can derive an ID from the mail ballot ID that you can easily walk backward but given the mail ballot ID it is near impossible to find the actual recorded ballot data. (This is how encryption systems work to ensure voter privacy).

These kinds of systems are actually more involved and sophisticated than this but it gives you the basic idea. You can lock down the various layers to just the people who need access.

In the case of the double vote above, it can tell the system to zero out the mail ballot because the in-person ballot overrides it and/or to investigate me for trying to vote twice. Here in WA you often cure spoiled ballots by voting in person at the election office and there’s a flag on your record that someone instructed you to do that.

This system also allows the ROV here to send you a text when they mail out your ballot, when they’ve received it, when it’s been processed. It’s kinda nice. I can also go online and see my ballot being processed every step of the way and my entire voting record (not how I voted, but which elections I voted in) which is public record. So long as there is either NO way to resolve the ballot results to the voter ID or a way that is extremely secure and limited, then it preserves voter privacy.

So the notion that boxes of fraudulent ballots are being stuffed into ballot drop boxes or being pulled out from under the table in counting rooms is patently false. They would be immediately identified and rejected because there would a mismatch between the voter ID and ballot ID and only the ROV knows which voter ID is associated with which ballot ID.

In other words, you can’t create fraudulent fake ballots that aren’t assigned valid ballot IDs because those would be flagged and rejected. You can’t create duplicate ballots with the same ballot ID because those would be flagged and rejected. And even if you have correct ballot IDs you can’t fraudulently turn them in because you don’t know which voter ID is associated with that ballot and if there is a mismatch the system will flag it and reject it. The databases that associate ballot IDs with voter IDs are very tightly held and only the highest access voting officials can do that.

Bottom line? The whole signature match issue is a red herring and not the real way that ballot security is maintained. We don’t even need a signature at all to verify that the ballot sent to voter X is the same one that is being returned and processed and that voter X only voted once in a particular election. And signature match or no signature match, there is no way to insert fraudulent ballots into the voting system without them being detected and rejected. This is because it is impossible for anyone outside a very small group of high level elections officials to even know which ballot ID is associated with which voter ID and any mismatch between the two is flagged and rejected.

Furthermore, all the statements here about how vote by mail opens the door to wholesale fraud are also false and misinformed. Given the system I described in detail above, which is how most jurisdictions do it (with minor differences). I invite anyone to explain how systematic and wholesale fraud could be conducted. How exactly would you go about doing it? Say, for example, how would you insert 100,000 or 200,000 fraudulent ballots into the 2020 PA election where Trump claims that Biden’s 80,000 vote margin of victory was the result of fraud. In fact, how would you even know in advance how many fraudulent ballots to insert into the system and, in the case of presidential elections, which states to insert them in.