There was an audit in GA of ~20,000 mail-in ballots for signature verification. 8 ballots were adjudicated to have mismatched signatures; another 2 were improperly signed. All 10 of them, when followed up with the purported voter, were found to be valid.

This gives you a rough estimate of voter fraud of having an impact of <0.01% of the election results. The tightest race this year was 0.25% margin--that's a full 20× a reasonable upper bound on the incidence of voter fraud. Fraud doesn't change election results.

On the flip side, some of what you claim about--particularly ID rules--has a real disenfranchising effect on people. Having valid ID isn't an issue if you're someone who drives, but if you're someone who is physically incapable of driving and can't get a driver's license, well, obtaining that ID can be quite difficult. (Even getting a driver's license in my state requires going to a particular building in the hours of 9-5 M-F--sucks if you have an hourly job you can't get time off to get an ID!)

A lot of the rest of what you complain about... [citation needed]. The complaints I've seen about signature verification aren't about requiring a signature on the ballot, it's about requiring a second signature (IIRC, unrelated to you!) to "witness" you doing the ballot yourself. In all the states I'm aware of, the voter is still required to sign the ballot themselves.

> On the flip side, some of what you claim about--particularly ID rules--has a real disenfranchising effect on people. Having valid ID isn't an issue if you're someone who drives, but if you're someone who is physically incapable of driving and can't get a driver's license, well, obtaining that ID can be quite difficult. (Even getting a driver's license in my state requires going to a particular building in the hours of 9-5 M-F--sucks if you have an hourly job you can't get time off to get an ID!)

How many people actually exist in this country that have no form of ID? You need it for even getting various utilities in some areas (maybe all?)

Further, why can’t we fix this issue? If it takes 3 hours to get the ID then compensate hourly workers to get it and pass a law requiring jobs to allow time for such a thing. Why because it’s difficult for some we give up on the entire idea of requiring IDs?

> How many people actually exist in this country that have no form of ID? You need it for even getting various utilities in some areas (maybe all?)

I don't have hard statistics, but for the photo ID usually advocated for, that number is going to be something like 5-10%.

> Further, why can’t we fix this issue? If it takes 3 hours to get the ID then compensate hourly workers to get it and pass a law requiring jobs to allow time for such a thing. Why because it’s difficult for some we give up on the entire idea of requiring IDs?

I would have no problem supporting voter ID laws if the issue of the difficulty of obtaining voter ID were addressed. However, my experience is that nearly every politician who advocates for voter ID laws is unwilling to address these measures, because their real goal is usually to disenfranchise voters who will vote for the opponent.

> because their real goal is usually to disenfranchise voters who will vote for the opponent.

This is the crux of the issue. I think there should be a constitutional amendment not only guaranteeing every citizen (felony convinction, in jail, or not!) not only the right to vote, but also requires them to vote. There should be a federal department in charge of finding you and collecting your vote. Too much politics is about getting people alternately mad, apathetic, or lazy, and we need to stop that.

I agree 100%. Voting should be mandatory.

> Further, why can’t we fix this issue? If it takes 3 hours to get the ID then compensate hourly workers to get it and pass a law requiring jobs to allow time for such a thing. Why because it’s difficult for some we give up on the entire idea of requiring IDs?

Don't assume people in power want to fix the issue. After the Voting Rights Act was gutted in 2013, states began shutting down DMV locations where IDs are issued. In Alabama, 31 of 67 locations were shut down, primarily in Black parts of the state. This was done specifically to disenfranchise voters, and was done in conjunction with pushes for Voter ID laws.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/23/us/politics/voting-rights...

https://www.aclu.org/blog/voting-rights/voting-rights-act/al...

(Canadian here) For a year or two, I didn't have a valid† form of photo ID. I don't drive, so I either didn't have a license or didn't have a learner's license that hadn't expired. You'd be surprised how far you can get by day-to-day without a legal photo ID. Utilities don't require photo ID, nor does voting (you're mailed a text-based voter registration piece of paper and just… show up and vote). It's nice.

†I did have a photo provincial health card, but oddly enough, it's legally not considered a valid government ID in many contexts. I also had a passport but I had let it expire and didn't renew it for a while. Even when I did renew it, I would not carry my passport around with me, so it would not count as day-to-day photo ID. I have since acquired a provincial photo ID card, which looks like a license, but is a different colour and doesn't permit you to drive (Duh!) These weren't available til a few years ago.

You can't fix the issues around Id because the people pushing for id rules want to use them to disenfranchise people. They won't go for solutions that make it easier to get the id because they don't want certain people to vote

Signing the ballot defeats the purpose of anonymous voting.

What State has you personally sign your ballot?

My understanding is the process in a lot of these states is that you put the anonymous ballot in an envelope, then put that envelope in an outer envelope and sign the outer envelope. The idea being that the officials check the signature on the outer envelope, if it's valid and non-duplicated they open it and put the now-anonymous envelope with the sealed ballot in the pile of votes to be counted. This is then opened by the vote counter, and this person who has no idea of the origin is the first to see what the contents of it are.

Ooooohhh. That makes sense. I thought they meant actually signing the ballot itself, which is why I was so confused.

You give up an element of this anonymity and repudiablity when using a mail-in ballot system instead of a truly anonymous in-person voting system. The votes are still tallied anonymously, and it's impossible to post-hoc validate who you voted for, so it serves the anonymity purposes since you can't check whether your investment in buying votes was successful.

Every state that does mail-in voting at all requires a signature. Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Missouri also require a witness -- Missisipi requires a notary.

I don't know about the US, but mail-in voting should be no different from voting in person (in person verification being the only difference). It must highly traceable in that a registered, actual person can cast only a single vote. Unless tampering happens during vote counting, there is the same keeping of records / audit possibilities.

There are many states that require for instance including a scan of your license on your first mail in vote. Others that make it almost impossible to get a mail ballot in part because of 'identity' requirements

No, the GOP will continue to push the myth that the democrats didn't win. The democrats will rightfully claim that they won. Despite all talking it is just that easy.

Agreed - One can't look at the system from the outside and honestly say it's perfect and incorruptible. So instead it relies on us having "trust" in the institutions that facilitate them and the "election officials" with potentially ridiculous training, no audit, no recordings and no mandated certification, all topped with the real potential for bias because hey, we're humans. And we know that trust in governmental institutions and politicians is not universal.

I'd go out on a limb and posit that a good chunk of the individuals here would advocate and insist on all sorts of various audit trails, cryptographic hashes, check-digits, security layers and "oversight" with privacy and security guarantees with certification and training and and and... if this were health data. But when it comes to something like the leadership of a nation, we suddenly revert to "it's okay, trust the election officials and pieces of paper with dubious transportation mechanisms and security", don't worry, there were official "processes" to ensure no irregularity.

> You’ve effectively deleted the server logs, claimed your system is perfect and impenetrable, and are now asking anyone with questions to prove otherwise.

I'm all for auditable, verifiable processes, paper trails and all of that. Thankfully election security officials do work on that! But the people standing up to claim massive fraud are not claiming that because they have evidence, it's because they lost and they are pissed off about it. What they are proposing for remedies is to just throw the whole process out and declare Donald Trump won. Interestingly, they are not challenging any Senate results (Georgia TBD), House results, or even local results.

People are claiming massive fraud because of complete lies. They aren't claiming "something might be fishy here, let's check, recount, etc." Because we did that. All of the swing states recounted their votes, some twice, by hand. They went into the signature verification, observation process, the whole show. No, instead, the crazies go right to the rails and the people who yell the loudest are out there right now showing us exactly what they think of the US Constitution, the law, and this whole process.