In Oregon, the votes are received by teams of people that are required to have representatives from each of the major parties. They check signatures, then open the outer envelope and take out the secrecy envelope which has the ballot inside and toss that in another box. The person checking the signature does not do anything else with the ballot itself. Then the pile of ballots in their secrecy envelopes is given to another team and they open the envelope and process the ballot.

Yes, the mailman could commit a federal crime and figure out how you voted for. So if you're worried about that, drop the envelope in the actual ballot box.

Your address, or your name, will be enough to determine how you most likely voted.

The mailman sees even more. If you live in a condo and drive a Prius with a "Coexist" sticker, you probably voted one way. If you live in a single-family home with a big yard and you drive a pickup with a "Blue lives matter" license plate holder, you probably voted the other way.

> Your address, or your name, will be enough to determine how you most likely voted.

Your party affiliation is already public record, no need to attempt to infer your preference from your name or address.

The votes are inside another envelope. The complete ballot actually has two envelopes: the outer envelope has the signature and an inner one contains the votes.

For reference, here is how it works in Washington state: https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/faq_vote_by_mail.aspx

The votes are counted in public. The envelope is verified and then put in a pile of verified envelopes. Someone else then removes the ballot from the envelope. In theory they do this face down so they can't see the name, which is verified by the other people watching them.

Then the ballot is placed in the same hoppers that the in person votes are put in and they are commingled.

That prevents you from doing the correlation after the vote has been counted but not before.

To do the correlation in person you would have to do it in the polling place, on election day, in front of election monitors and the voter, during the 30 seconds between when the person fills out their ballot and when they drop it into the box.

If your name is on the envelope, now it can be done anywhere between your mailbox and the polling place during the period of days or weeks between when you put it in your mailbox and when it gets counted. Wouldn't we then need independent election monitors guarding the incoming mailboxes 24/7 for several weeks?

in Oregon the ballot goes in an envelope with no identification, and that envelope goes inside the envelope with identification.

The outermost envelope is verified and opened, and the innermost envelope is collected with all of the others in a different area for counting.

There is an implied identification that is effective. Some neighborhoods vote one way, and other neighborhoods vote the other way. Postal workers can purposely misplace/delay/destroy the votes for a whole neighborhood.

I think the risk/reward would make this not worth it. You can check to see if your ballot was received. If a bunch of ballots are determined to be lost from the same postal route one assumes the postal inspectors would be having a word with that mail carrier. Tampering with the mail is a pretty serious crime, ballot or not, so there's a strong disincentive to try it.

My town has a bunch of dropboxes which are picked up by election volunteers if you still don't trust the mail. An election volunteer could "lose" a box of ballots but that seems like it would be pretty easily detectable as well.

Since mail tampering is a federal crime maybe Trump could pledge to pardon every mail carrier who throws away ballots from likely Biden voters. Seems pretty unlikely, but I don't know how to counter that.

It's possible the counters could be looking at ballots but noting and tracking who voted for who would be difficult to do in your head and you can't track it on paper because there are monitors from both sides watching the count happen.

They could also have any number of ways of secretly associating normal in-person ballots with the voter's identity. Perhaps the most obvious would be hidden cameras in the voting booths. There's no unique threat here.