Unless it's right before the election. Or maybe your ballot left your house and didn't make it back to the counting location. These aren't theoretical concerns, they're happening today [1][2][3]. And we see in some cases, there is a political bias pattern involved in election-related mail getting "lost"[4]. People affiliated with both parties have been involved in wrongdoing.

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/three-tubs-of-ballot...

[2] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/24/28_mil...!

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/us/politics/wisconsin-ele...

[4] https://noqreport.com/2020/06/28/caught-on-camera-postal-wor...

In WA ballots are mailed out to voters a month before the election, giving plenty of time to request a new one. If a voter doesn't mail it in time there are in-person drop off spots (basically big dedicated mailboxes) all over town leading up to and on election day.

I was a voter in Washington during the 2004 Gregoire/Rossi gubernatorial election campaign, and what happened during the recounts[1] has proven to me that mail-in balloting is fundamentally flawed and should be banned.

For those unfamiliar with the story, in the 2004 election for governor of Washington, the Republican candidate (Dino Rossi) won the initial count by a very narrow margin (261 votes), triggering a legally-mandated recount. The recount closed the gap to Rossi only winning by 42 votes. A manual recount was performed, and during the manual recount election workers "found" a bunch of ballots; in arguments before the left-leaning state supreme court, the court rejected requests for applying the same recount methodologies in all counties (in opposition to Washington state law) and the "found" votes, mostly from D-leaning counties, put Gregoire into the lead. The Democrats in the state then successfully argued in court against any further recounts, and Rossi conceded without taking his complaint to the state supreme court. Gregoire took office shortly thereafter.

I don't know who should have won that election, but to an outsider it sure LOOKED like some fraud was occurring, especially since the "found" ballots didn't match the statistical distribution of the rest of the votes in the counties, and leaned D significantly more heavily than the counties' original ballots.

So THAT is why I oppose mail in voting. Mail in ballots introduce custody, integrity and identity issues, as well as enable vote-buying and selective vote harvesting, and so are amenable to fraud. We have seen all of these things happen; they aren't theoretical.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Washington_gubernatorial_...

  A manual recount was performed, and during the manual recount election workers "found" a bunch of ballots

This is exactly what happened with the Santa Clara County (CA, USA) transit tax a few years ago. It initially failed by several hundred votes (2/3 majority was needed). Over the next few weeks, they kept "finding" additional ballots, and every batch had disproportionately high Yes vote percentages on the measure (although all other races were unaffected). Then the second they reached the needed threshold, they conveniently stopped finding ballots.

Thanks for sharing this. It was well before my time in WA.

I'm not sure how this relates to mail in voting though? If there was fraud and D ballots were being hidden where was that happening? Wouldn't it be during counting, not transportation? Would voting in person have changed this or made it impossible?

Oh, my bad, I didn't tie things together.

The found ballots were absentee ballots, which were the only form of mail-in balloting available at the time.

Thanks, I'll have to do some more research on how those absentee ballots differ from the current system. Do you recall if there were changes to mail in voting based on this election?

That only stops fraud if everyone knows how to and takes the time to do it. What about the tens of thousands of dead people still registered to vote[0]? How do they request a new envelope?

Do you have any answers for my 3 sourced statements other than naked assertions?

[0] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/more-than-20-000-dea...

California has ~39,500,000 residents. 23,000 is 0.058% of the population.