This quickly goes down the rabbit hole of identity and identity theft in the USA in a more broad sense. Our entire system is build on similarly flimsy "identity" from banking, to medical records, and even getting copies of a birth certificate/driver's license.

I would say though that "scale matters." If an electronic voting system is compromised the "scale" could be the entire state, and millions of votes, but each time a mail ballot is stolen via identity theft, you're risking it being detected/getting caught, so it ultimately scales to fewer than thousands of potentially problematic votes (which is bad, but not democracy breakingly so, like electronic/computer voting insecurity).

Right on — the thing that worries me most is that Equifax’s breach didn’t cause much of a stir... someone was/is sitting on that trove of 140m records.

To me it’s wild that anyone would want voting to be anything but universal. Shouldn’t they send ballots to every person legally allowed to vote?

Riiiiight. Just look at how districts are gerrymandered to realize this is not what politicians of either side want.

Isn’t it reasonable to want the people who make a decision to know what they’re making a decision about? I want all the informed voters to vote but, by and large, uninformed voters make the outcome arbitrary.

I forget who said it and I won't even get the quote exactly right, but I'm reminded of something I once heard:

> The greatest thing about a democracy is that every idiot is allowed to vote.

> The worst thing about a democracy is that every idiot is allowed to vote.

If democracies don't allow idiots to vote, that creates a disenfranchised class that does not accept the government as legitimate. An important role of democracy is to stave off class conflict, arguably just as important or moreso than having a government that serves the people efficiently.

A proper long-term solution is to have governments invest in critical thinking skills and education, but of course, it's a catch-22 situation.

Yeah, the problem is coming up with a test that actually identifies who’s “informed” without biasing the electorate unfairly.

Every person legally allowed to vote should be able to vote.

No votes should be cast by people not allowed to vote.

Mail-in ballots are not secret ballots and that's dangerous. There's a reason a workplace cannot be unionized in the US without a true secret ballot.

Mail-in ballots are secret ballots. The way they work is that they have two envelopes: you put your ballot in the inner envelope, which has no indication of who is casting the ballot. All of that information is on the outer envelope. When processing the ballot, the information is checked on the outer envelope; once verified, the inner envelope is then handed to another station to be opened and fed into the counting machine while the outer envelope is discarded.

> Mail-in ballots are secret ballots

I’ve knocked on doors in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Many registered Democrats (usually the wife) denied being Democrats when their partners were around. I thought this was an error in our data until I revisited the neighbourhood. Husband wasn’t home. Wife scolded us. He is an ardent Republican and wouldn’t appreciate how she votes.

Mail-in ballots let voters verify their vote to third parties. That opens them up to external influence, positive (pay for votes) or negative (fired for voting wrong).

We had no choice this year. But there is a real tradeoff in privacy for vulnerable people. We shouldn't lose sight of that trade-off while pushing for turnout.

Isn't the actual problem the abusive relationship and that pressure to vote a certain way a symptom? The solution isn't to ban mail in ballots for those that want to vote that way, but to offer assistance to empower people to get out of that situation. It's already illegal to take a picture of your ballot to address these kinds of abuses.

> Isn't the actual problem the abusive relationship and that pressure to vote a certain way a symptom? The solution isn't to ban no mail in ballots for those that want to vote that way, but to offer assistance to empower people to get out of that situation.

If a voting system requires zero abusive power dynamics to work, it’s a bad system.

Also, banning mail-in ballots isn’t the only solution. Early voting is an alternative to mailed ballots. Letting someone re-vote a mailed-in ballot at a poll site is a fix to the cited problem, though it introduces complexity.

All of the above seems like the best solution

I agree. Was just responding to OP saying “mail-in ballots are secret ballots.” They are not. To return to our status quo of secret ballots, a mail-in ballot system needs additional thought.

How exactly do mail in ballots let voters verify their vote to third parties?

They fill-in the ballot in front of them and seal the envelope.

Or worse the voter gives the other person the empty ballot with a signed envelope.

Mail-in ballots are absolutely not a secret ballot.

A secret ballot is one in which each voters vote is anonymous to EVERYBODY.

Spouse, parent, landlord, employer, union boss, social worker.

Case in point https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/limestone...

This doesn’t work the same way in every state. In my county of CA you only send back a single envelope with the ballots folded over. Instead there is a serial number you can tear off to validate that the ballot was counted.

So it’s not doubly secret in the way you describe: https://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/vote-by-mail/pdf/guidance.p...

They're not secret at all. They can be canvassed and frequently are, by pushers who pressure people to vote a particular way.

Mail in voting is probably secure, but there are enough concerns where many countries with healthy democracies limit who can vote by mail: https://www.newsweek.com/voting-fraud-real-concern-just-look...

> Here is what we found. Besides the United States, there are 36 member states in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Forty-seven percent ban mail-in voting unless the citizen is living abroad, and 30 percent require a photo ID to obtain a mail-in ballot. Fourteen percent of the countries ban mail-in voting even for those living abroad.

But to return the ballot, you need to match the signature with the one on file, which is very difficult to do at scale.

Unless signature matching is deemed unnecessary as in PA