[einpoklum]

This was not done after the 2016 elections. Why should such a procedure be adopted now? Are there any indications of widespread fraud / miscounting / etc. ?

[anonymouse008]

There was never any “cover” to hide behind — we never really did much mail in voting as a people (absentee mostly).

Now the pandemic is cover enough to hide a few thousand with ease.

[einpoklum]

> we never really did much mail in voting as a people (absentee mostly).

That is false. An official report of the US Elections Assistance Commission:

https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/eac_assets/1/6/2016_...

says that, in 2016, 23.7% of ballots were mailed in.

[charliemil4]

Good fellow, are you really going to say the mail in ballot ratio is the same in a pandemic and not in a pandemic?

That fact is selective on a national scale — if you looked at states, the mail in vs in person ratio is standard deviations away from the norm.

[einpoklum]

> Good fellow, are you really going to say the mail in ballot ratio is the same in a pandemic and not in a pandemic?

I didn't say that.

[joshuamorton]

A few states have been all mail-in for years. 10s of millions of votes were cast by mail in 2016 and 2018. There were certainly more this year, but only like 4-5x.

(It helps that the most populous state is mostly mail-in).

HN is throttling me, so here's some more info:

https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/absent... and https://electproject.github.io/Early-Vote-2020G/index.html have most of the info you want.

CO, DC, HI, OR, UT, and WA are vote by mail for all elections. CA was sort of doing VBM in 2016, but it's more committed to it now. This year, NJ, VT, and NV were also vote by mail as one time things. So in prior years there were more than 30 million mail ballots, and AZ, CA, CO, FL, MI, OH, OR, and WA had more than a million mail votes cast (though some of those were likely classified as absentee in MI and OH).

[charliemil4]

Can you please cite the states that are all-mail in please? I've been checking SOS websites and have not run across this in the states I've checked...

Edit:

Thank you both (below, too) for the info. Yeah, so for the states that default mail ballots (WA, OR, CO), I don't see an issue as these states have used this method previously.

What I'm focusing on are states that moved from 'vote by mail optional' -- to 'vote by mail, nearly default because of a recent pandemic.' Which changes the nature and security of the Ballot Request System in each of these states.

Normal implicit controls around ballot requests are out of the window in this new 'mail-in majority' culture. Refer to my 'bussing' example above.

[theplague42]

Washington, Oregon, Colorado all have universal mail-in where every registered voter automatically gets a ballot in the mail (though you can still drop off your ballot, or vote in person). California is _largely_ mail-in but I don't think it's universal...

[willis936]

I’m confused. People who count ballots only count ballots they issue. Sending in 50k ballots they didn’t issue would result in 50k ballots they didn’t issue getting thrown out. Where is there room for concern for fraud?