With ordinary mail fraud, the victim tends to notice. You have a bill for something but the something never arrives.
With mail in ballots, if someone registers people who didn't register themselves and then takes their ballots, the real constituents weren't expecting to get a ballot and then don't notice when none shows up.
There are also a lot of problems that have really nothing to do with mail fraud. When people fill out their ballots outside the context of a polling place with election monitors, anybody could be intimidating them or paying them to vote in a particular way and then verifying that they do.
I suppose the pandemic is a valid point for wanting to vote by mail, but concerns for voting integrity are still there. I think there should be an easy-to-implement contactless yet in-person way to vote (maybe similar to how you get a coronavirus test), which would avoid the rather drastic action of allowing universal mail-in voting. Know that there are many states who ban / regulate it for good reason.
163 cases of "fraudulent use of absentee ballots" over 1988-2017. Probably a lot more useful to worry about the scantron machine accuracy.
As has been demonstrated at DEFCON for years now, voting machines used in dozens of states are laughably insecure and easily tampered with. Mail-in ballots would be much more difficult to pull off large scale voting fraud with due to their distributed nature.
And the distributed nature is the problem. At the polls you have representatives of both major parties there to make sure nothing untoward is happening. How are you supposed to secure something that happens literally anywhere?
Voter intimidation is a lot easier, for example, if you know where and when to turn up.
You would probably find it easier to tamper with a voting machine if you know where they're going to be, and if more people have access to them, too.
But for the same reason it's a lot easier to prevent. If you show up at the polls to intimidate voters you get arrested. If you do it to other members of your household, or your employees or union members, nobody there is independent. Anybody who reports it still has to live or work with those people the next day, so people don't report it.
> You would probably find it easier to tamper with a voting machine if you know where they're going to be, and if more people have access to them, too.
Not when there are election monitors there watching you. With paper ballots you fill out your ballot behind a screen, but you drop it into the machine in front of everybody.
Also, many of the voting machine vulnerabilities are as a result of submitting specially crafted ballots. Which is another reason you want to give people their ballot and have them fill it out by hand and submit it immediately, instead of giving them an unlimited amount of time and access to a computer and a printer while "filling out" their ballot.
Of course the better solution in either case is to use voting machines without security vulnerabilities, but there aren't always enough ponies for everybody.
Yes, if this is consistently and fairly enforced, I agree - only doubting that it is because I honestly don't know, and hopefully never have to find out firsthand.
> many of the voting machine vulnerabilities are as a result of submitting specially crafted ballots
Yeah, fair enough. I don't know enough about the vulnerabilities, but if this is the case, I agree.
That's more than five cases a year, of those that have been caught. Five stolen elections a year seems like a lot.
> Probably a lot more useful to worry about the scantron machine accuracy.
The scantron machine isn't purposely trying to alter the election results so the errors it makes aren't all in the same direction.
Personally, I'd like to vote by mail because there's a bit of a global pandemic going on. Preventing me from voting in a safe way (with a simple, well-tested solution, I might add) is an outright assault on my right to vote. So the integrity of your vote is really harmed far more by the willful incompetence of those in power.