How are mail-in ballots protected from fraud? I keep hearing that fraud is not a problem, but I'm wondering (a) how do we know there is little fraud; and (b) what mechanisms make it safe from fraud?
Mail-in ballots are linked to a voter permit (outer envelope) which serves the purpose of maintaining the pollbook, that is, ensuring that each voter casts only one vote. This prevents ballot stuffing.
Mail-in ballots are sealed in a tamper evident fashion inside of the permit, to prevent modification. Because opening the envelope would probably damage it, a duplicate enveloped (forged permit) would need to be produced to modify the ballot. In most cases a duplicate ballot would also be needed, which presents its own obstacle, although ballots are not generally intended to be protected against forgery.
The postal service is backed by a particularly strong set of criminal laws which generally make a felony to interfere with the mail. This is of course on top of laws protecting the voting system from tampering.
The outer envelope (permit) is a sworn statement and signing for someone else's ballot would be perjury, a felony, in addition to other laws around voting that likely exist in the state.
None of these measure are perfect, but combined they make vote-by-mail fraud difficult to achieve on a meaningful scale. Remember that, to be effective, voter fraud needs to be successfully committed not once, but many times. The difficulty of each case and general history of harsh prosecution of small-time fraud creates a significant disincentive to try.
Fraud isn't impossible, just difficult to do on a scale that would matter in most elections. In NC, an election had to be redone because someone working for the GOP candidate had fraudulently collected absentee ballots (from registered Democrats I think), preventing those ballots from being counted or possibly tampered with them, and it was a close race.
So obviously the voter needs to be careful to place the mail-in ballot correctly into the USPS and then the USPS has to be trusted to deliver the ballots correctly.
Beyond that, the mail-in ballots are checked against the registered voter rolls. So the state has to maintain clean voter rolls.
But this is not much different really from in-person voting. In theory, I could go to my local polling location and claim to be one of my neighbors, sign their name, and take their vote. They'd only notice if they showed up to vote later. But I'd likely get caught if they'd already voted. Or maybe the poll worker would recognize me. There are lots of scenarios you could imaging getting away with a handful of fraudulent votes. But it would hard to be able to do anything significant enough to affect the outcome of most elections.
One thing I really don't get is the voter registration thing in the US. All European countries I know of simply require residents to register their primary and secondary residencies. You get voting papers to your primary residency. That's it. No registration as a voter, no party affiliation. You can be a party memebyer, but that information isn't public.
Same in Europe. With the notable exception of local elections, like mayors and so on. Thing is, you cannot purge a voter role, as the voter role is the residents role. But then we have ID requirements.
"Bored mailman convicted for altering 8 ballot request forms" suggests that they are secure. Even if he wasn't caught, there should have been time for the ballots to be replaced.
Those claims have been shown to be largely incorrect, with even the foundation retracting the article. An unreturned ballot does not mean fraud, the registered voter may have chosen to vote in person or not vote in that election. Several states send ballots to every registered voter, and that's how the number reached 28 million.
Mail-in ballots are sealed in a tamper evident fashion inside of the permit, to prevent modification. Because opening the envelope would probably damage it, a duplicate enveloped (forged permit) would need to be produced to modify the ballot. In most cases a duplicate ballot would also be needed, which presents its own obstacle, although ballots are not generally intended to be protected against forgery.
The postal service is backed by a particularly strong set of criminal laws which generally make a felony to interfere with the mail. This is of course on top of laws protecting the voting system from tampering.
The outer envelope (permit) is a sworn statement and signing for someone else's ballot would be perjury, a felony, in addition to other laws around voting that likely exist in the state.
None of these measure are perfect, but combined they make vote-by-mail fraud difficult to achieve on a meaningful scale. Remember that, to be effective, voter fraud needs to be successfully committed not once, but many times. The difficulty of each case and general history of harsh prosecution of small-time fraud creates a significant disincentive to try.