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First of all, I didn't say that you should, I just pointed out that your argument didn't make a whole lot of sense. But also, the reason why voting by mail is problematic is, as has been mentioned, the potential for pressuring people into voting a certain way, including buying of votes. Now, you said that this had been studied and it had been found that it's not really been a problem. But that's completely missing the point. You cannot judge the security of a system against attacks simply by looking at how many attacks were successful in the past. A voting system being reliable is most important when shit hits the fan. That it works fine when stakes aren't (perceived to be) all that high isn't really all that surprising, the most easily corrupted voting systems would probably work fine, and it tells you absolutely nothing about how it would hold up under different circumstances. Also, mind you, objectively giving an accurate result is not the only function that a voting system has in a democracy, equally important is that the public trusts the system and thus the result, and trust erodes really fast under the wrong circumstances, which is when you can consider yourself lucky if you have a voting system where fraud is not just not happening, but where you can demonstrate that it's not happening. To maybe get an idea of how stuff that's not actually secured is going to be exploited once the incentives are there: In the US, the relevant laws generally don't specify how to divide the country into voting districts. Because nobody thought of that as a problem when writing the law. Nowadays, gerrymandering is a reality. It's obviously undemocratic (I suppose you would agree?), but it's not illegal, and the incentives are there, and so it happens. There is almost nothing that people don't do for power. Trusting that people will be responsible when there is an opportunity to gain power is essentially the recipe for every major disaster humanity has ever created. |
At the end of the day, I'd much rather have the increased participation in the democratic process than cater to the unfounded/theoretical fears of a few folks.