| Each California county maintains a list of registered voters. Every voter gets sent a ballot in the mail, but is also allowed to vote in person. The consequences of this are that every single ballot and voter are tracked carefully. Additionally, a person can vote anywhere in a county, so all in-person voting sites maintain connectivity to that somebody doesn't go to multiple voting sites and vote multiple times, in addition to tracking the mail-in ballots. When voting in person, you provide your name, address, and sometimes age, etc. in order to disambiguate you as the particular person. Mail-in vote counting happens with outside observers watching, with verified signatures. So the system protects against each registered voter only voting once. Registration of voters is usually tied to driver's licenses, when you file a change of address you can check a box to have your registration updated. If you're a new voter, you can provide or drivers license, or if not, the county will follow up with you to obtain other information to ensure that you're not registered by other means and are in fact a real person with that name and address. > anyone simply vote by claiming they are who they say they are? Of course they can! That's only just and fair. If you tried to steal somebody else's identity and vote as them, that would get flagged for multiple voting. Additionally, local political campaigns get lists of every registered voter, as well as which elections they voted in and party affiliation (if they chose one), which they use to campaign and knock on doors. Campaigns have sophisticated information systems to ensure that they don't bother the same voter multiple times, to indicate likelihood of voting and whether the canvasser thought the voter was going to vote for their candidate, etc. If there were a batch of fake voters somewhere, that would show up pretty quickly in these campaigning efforts. |