[slg]

The issue is that mail in voter fraud doesn't scale and you need scale to turn a national election. So you can argue this is a concern in general, but someone arguing this is a real problem for the integrity of the 2020 presidential election is being disingenuous at best.

[cgy1]

Elections are run by the states, not by the Federal government. If Washington, the 13th most populous state can conduct elections purely via mail-in ballots, why not any other state?

[slg]

>Elections are run by the states, not by the Federal government.

Sorry, I was talking about national scope and not the federal government actually running the election. The larger the electorate, the more votes cast, the more votes needed to change the results, and the more important scaling becomes in your plan to rig the election.

> If Washington, the 13th most populous state can conduct elections purely via mail-in ballots, why not any other state?

I agree.

[blhack]

Is this true? I don't think it is, and I think that has been borne out in several of our most recent presidential elections. In the last election alone, Clinton won NH by a mere 2700 votes, for instance.

[slg]

OP edited their post, but they were talking about methods to change maybe one or two dozen votes at a time. The minimum number of votes that you would need to reverse the 2016 presidential election was 107k. That was if you had perfect polling going in and knew exactly what votes to change. In practice you would likely need to change several hundred thousand votes if not over a million. This process would need to be done in multiple states all over the country. You would need a large distributed team of people all committed to defrauding an election. That isn't a smart plan for a conspiracy.

[Fjolsvith]

No one here is even considering a nation state working to change the outcome of an election. A spy network might get away with it.

[Tagbert]

Online voting could be vulnerable to such an attack but paper-based voting such as is used by mail in voting is very low tech and distributed. hacking and fraud are hard to scale in that case.

[Fjolsvith]

So, every mailbox in a post office gets one or two voter applications or ballots. A bunch of them get sorted out and thrown in the lobby trash can as people pick up their mail.

Some unscrupulous person grabs a bunch, forges signatures on them and mails them back in.