I question whether the vote coercion/purchase opportunities opened up by mail voting are actually "huge" compared with in-person voting. But even if so, these opportunities don't scale easily and potential damage is limited.

If some malefactor wanted to buy 1 million votes at an average price of $50 each, that's $50 million of somewhat traceable money and 1 million people, some fraction of whom are certain to reveal they were paid. It won't remain a secret, and it will leave numerous evidence trails.

Contrast with fully electronic voting fraud - scalable, hard to detect, and (when well-executed) leaves little evidence to support nullifying an election and forcing a do-over.

There are ways to make it hard to trace. Suppose your boss tells you to vote for his favorite candidate or you're fired.

Instead of money changing hands, there will be a threat of money ceasing to change hands, and that's much harder to prove

IIRC, last I checked something like half the states in the US allow you to get a paper ballot ahead of time for no particular reason so in those states vote by mail wouldn't change anything.

I would say that vote by mail isn't always the best option depending on circumstances but today in the US there is not much vote buying or coersion and it seems like a clearly less bad option than any of the alternatives considering how they are actually implemented. I would not recommend it for Mexico, which already has widespread vote buying even without being able to verify who voters actually vote for.

I don't disagree, but considering that everyone has a camera in their pocket at all times -- including in the votig booth -- these days, I wonder if the opportunity gap for coercion is really all that big.

> On the other hand, voting by mail opens up huge opportunities for coercion or vote buying/selling.

Not any more than any current systems do. You have to sign the ballot, and if the signature does not match what you submitted in your voter registration thing, they kick it back to you.

Unless you are insinuating that the USPS mail folks could collect them all and send in forgeries?

The phrase "opportunities for coercion or vote buying/selling" in the above post refers to opportunities for a malefactor to be physically present while a voter is filling out the ballot and coerce/bribe the voter to fill out the ballot a certain way. Voting at a polling place guards against this by requiring that the voter cast a ballot privately, out of the view of anyone else.

You don't sign the ballot. You sign a paper that gets sent along with the ballot. If things are done properly, the person checking your signature doesn't see your vote and the person counting your vote won't see your signature.

Yea I wasn't totally accurate in my response. The point is, voter fraud by mail requires accurately forging a LOT of signatures.

Alternatively, the state can pay for the return stamp, but will likely have to pass some tax measure to fund it (in Oregon, state budget must be balanced), so in the end voters would still be buying the stamp. This is less efficient since now there would be stamps bought that folks have no intention of using since they drop them off.

No need to forge signatures, you just order all your kids and grandkids to vote like you say, or they will be ostracized by the rest of the family.

Or you order all your employees to vote like you say, or they will be fired. If they don't snap a pic of a ballot filled out to your liking, out the door they go.

Or you just buy the votes of anyone. $50 for a pic of a "correctly" filled out ballot. That scales pretty nicely.

I see your point, but don't agree that it 'scales pretty nicely' since it would rely on all participants keeping quiet about it, which definitely prevents it from scaling at all since you won't be able to openly advertise you are doing this without drawing fire from election officials.