[poorjohnmacafee]

Most countries, including EU nations, ban mail-in voting minus exceptions like living abroad, these laws being passed because of discovered fraud in elections.

Election integrity is the difference between democracy and a one-party state. Every citizen should be bending over backwards to make sure our elections dont have sources of fraud.

[philjohn]

Need a citation on that.

UK has universal mail-in-voting for any reason.

Some US states also have universal mail-in-voting, and have done for some time.

The counterpoint to "make sure elections don't have sources of fraud" is that you need to strike a balance - the right to vote is sacrosanct (and in some cases was hard won) so any laws that pretend to be about election integrity, but are in fact a way to suppress voting in certain demographics are arguably more dangerous than the exceedingly low levels of fraud that elections have.

[cmh89]

My state in the US (Oregon) has had universal mail-in voting for two decades and we don't have any voter fraud to speak of.

There isn't really a debate here. Anyone complaining about voter fraud is uninformed or purposefully making a bad faith argument in order to justify voter disenfranchisement.

[whatthesmack]

> we don't have any voter fraud to speak of

You probably mean you're not aware of any voter fraud.

The whole objective of fraud is to have it not be discovered, so it's possible fraud has in fact been occurring and it has not yet been discovered (and/or nobody in a position to do so is interested in discovering it).

[Frondo]

In a 2016 audit by the then-Republican Secretary of State Dennis Richardson, 54 potential cases of voter fraud were found, out of more than 2 million votes cast.

> Richardson said the suspicious ballots broke down into several categories: 46 voters appeared to vote in Oregon and another state; six individuals listed as deceased voted; and two voters registered in Oregon voted twice.

From: https://www.opb.org/news/article/voter-fraud-oregon-secretar...

If you have better evidence, not conjecture, please say so.

[thehappypm]

I'm curious, what does mail-in voter fraud look like? When I voted by mail in 2020, I had to register to vote just like in person, then they mailed a gigantic ballot to my address (which again validated that I actually lived in the state). I signed a scary thing on the ballot saying it was me. I put it in a mail box. It was then processed by a vote counting center. It's not like there are easy ways to game this system, you'd need to produce fake ballots, fake people with real addresses, or cheat the vote counts when the tallies are reported (which can be done through non mail in ballots as well).

I hear this "mail in vote fraud" line all the time but I think what it really is, is that making it more convenient to securely vote means that people who might not have been able to vote before get to, and that scares people who like that it's hard to vote.

[cmh89]

No, I mean our Secretary of State audits the election every time we have one and rarely to never finds fraudulent votes.

Voter fraud is high-risk, low-reward behavior in a developed nation-state.

[Supermancho]

> The whole objective of fraud is to have it not be discovered,

I don't think so. The objective of fraud is to misrepresent. Finding out about it is incidental to that objective. Although not all fraud relates to identity, it's obvious that fraud is used to leverage all sorts of slippery side effects that often benefit an individual - eg https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-essex-59069662

[philjohn]

To sway an election, even a close one (e.g. PA or GA in 2020) you'd still need tens of thousands of votes.

The sheer scale of an operation to cast that many fraudulent ballots has such an infantessimally small chance of not being discovered (e.g. "Sir/Madam our records show you've already cast a ballot. You'll have to fill in this provisional one and come in with ID to verify")

[freshpots]

Not discovered fraud. Fears of frauds, stoked by some with nefarious intentions. Why are you making factually incorrect claims?

A number of countries, with competent government leaders and institutions, use it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_voting

[productivepizza]

Can you provide links with information on countries that have discovered election fraud and banned mail-in voting? I could not find anything with a quick google search.

[aigo]

In the UK we did discover some postal voting fraud in a 2014 local election in an area of London called Tower Hamlets. We did not ban postal voting as a result.

We have, however, imported a voter ID law from the US which was recently passed by the Johnson government, despite no voter impersonation occurring in Tower Hamlets (or anywhere else really). Previously, no ID was required.

[snovv_crash]

Many other countries have mandatory IDs anyways, so in these cases ID presentation isn't problematic. The issue with ID verification is when only people with eg. a driver's license have IDs.

[denton-scratch]

I think the majority of "postal voting fraud" in the UK consists of very patriarchal families in which the father directs family members as to how to vote, and submits the votes himself. Arguably, this isn't much different from persuading people to change their voting intentions, which is entirely legitimate. Postal voting used to be restricted to people who could show that they were unable to vote in-person, e.g. because they were in the armed services.

I disapprove strongly of that patriarchal practice; but (1) I doubt it has much effect on outcomes, (2) mandatory in-person voting wouldn't prevent it (the patriarch can still instruct his family members).

I also disapprove of early voting. I believe that to cast a vote legitimately, you have to pay some attention to the hustings and the arguments. That is not a barricade I will die defending, though - the tide is against me.

AFAIAA, the UK has not imported a voter ID law from the US. There was a trial at the last election, in a handful of constituencies, and there is mandatory photographic ID for voting in Northern Ireland. A voter ID law was proposed in the Queen's Speech, but no legislation has been tabled or debated.

For the most part, voters receive a poll card in the post, which they don't have to produce at the polling station. You can just turn up, state your name and address, and cast a ballot. Your name is then crossed-out in the voter register, so that the same name-and-address can't vote more than once.

[selimthegrim]

Are they still prosecuting "undue spiritual influence" cases in the UK?

[denton-scratch]

Wut? Wow -

https://lawandreligionuk.com/2016/08/30/undue-spiritual-infl...

I thought you were going on about voting while under the influence of spirits.

[unethical_ban]

Your premise that mail-in ballots were a source of significant fraud has been proven false.

Edit: Election integrity is important. So is access to voting. It seems completely obvious to me (and millions of others, it seems) that the so-called election integrity measures taken by places like Florida and Texas are blatant attempts to restrict access to legitimate voting for the kinds of people that tend to vote Democrat.

[orangepurple]

There is basically zero public evidence of election fraud in the US. It's irrelevant. What matters is the people who are in charge of developing, handling, and operating the voting machines and systems. There is zero public information about the chain of custody and potential vulnerabilities in the chain. This should be vastly more concerning.