On another note, what a low-quality article the original piece is. I'm not sure this belongs even on HN.
It's pretty easy and quick for me to mail stuff. Convenient too, I can use any mailbox at any time of day or night, or go to the post office. Mostly I use my building's outgoing mailbox.
Anyway if I was worried about some sort of anti democratic street toughs or whatever it is you are positing, I'd say decentralized efforts would be way harder to disrupt or influence.
This seems just like a way to delay and disrupt the vote under the guise of election integrity. So basically classic voter suppression.
Does your mail change the result of an election? Because people might care about it more then.
And, of course, it's mostly not the mail, it's the fact of having your ballot outside of a polling place where someone could coerce you to vote a particular way. Or just reward you to hand over your blank ballot, or punish you for not doing so.
Wait, what? What specific scenario are you talking about and who would have the resources, incentive, and immunity from law enforcement to actually pull it off?
If I receive my ballot at home, complete it at home, and then deliver it to mailbox or drop box, at what point can someone intercept me and "force me" to show it to them?
> Then people can be punished or bribed for their vote.
So you think someone could sway an election by intercepting people holding mail-in ballots, "forcing" them to show them the ballot, and then bribing/punishing(?) them as an incentive to change the vote? Like you think someone could do this at a large enough scale to change the outcome of an election?
And if that's true, why aren't there any documented cases of this happening?
As soon as someone forced you to change your vote, you could call your elections board, report it, file a criminal complaint, and submit a new ballot.
> This has obvious significance in a union vote where those things have a greater history of happening, but it's true in general.
It's much easier to change a unionization vote with intimidation tactics than a large-scale political election. If unions were still organized criminal organizations in many places, this would be a legitimate concern. But it's also not 1950 anymore, so it's not a concern.
At the point the next morning when you go into work without your ballot and your boss says "I told you to bring your ballot" and you get punished. Or your spouse/parents/housemates take it and fill it out differently than you would have. Or you're institutionalized and the employees of the institution apply for and take the ballots of all the patients and "help" them by filling them all out for the same candidate and submitting them.
> So you think someone could sway an election by intercepting people holding mail-in ballots, "forcing" them to show them the ballot, and then bribing/punishing(?) them as an incentive to change the vote? Like you think someone could do this at a large enough scale to change the outcome of an election?
One person doing this is unlikely to change the result. 0.1% of people doing this to ten people each when the margin of victory is 1% would change the outcome of an election.
> And if that's true, why aren't there any documented cases of this happening?
There are documented cases of this happening:
https://nypost.com/2020/09/27/project-veritas-uncovers-ballo...
The unknowable question is how many undocumented cases there are because the perpetrators are difficult to catch when the victims fear retaliation for turning them in.
> As soon as someone forced you to change your vote, you could call your elections board, report it, file a criminal complaint, and submit a new ballot.
How does that help if the method of coercion used to make you change your vote is also used to keep you from reporting it?
That coercion is a crime.
Given a time window to vote and mail, and a secrecy process where the validation of the vote is physically separated from the vote to be counted, secrecy is there.
The real question is whether Oregon style processes are available.
If they are, the election will be solid.
On the back end, validation, counting are done in a secure place under camera.
Election fraud is also a crime.
Vote by mail works just fine when well implemented.
So you vote the way they want and don't report it to the cops and without any other mechanism of detecting it they get away with it.
Votes are cast over a period of a couple weeks and are distributed well in both time and space.
It is very difficult to line up the needed criminals and have them lean on many people over a non trivial amount of time and space.
And the criminals cannot really verify the vote cast.
So, let's say they unionize. Break a lot of kneecaps over the next year?
All that will come out and won't look pretty.
By contrast, discouraging votes by forcing everyone to gather in one hard to miss group takes far fewer criminals. It all happens on one day too.
The key thing is that distribution in time and space. The mechanics of coercion are very different.
Nobody knows who has ballots, when and whether they have voted and or any number can report too.
Criminals would be facing a high risk scenario and a high resource requirement.
How does this help you? It makes it easier because you can send one goon to a hundred people over the course of weeks instead of needing a hundred goons. Everybody knows ahead of time that this is going to happen and they'll be punished if they submit their ballot before the goon arrives to watch.
> And the criminals cannot really verify the vote cast.
What do you mean? They watch you put it into a mailbox. Or just take your ballot and mail it themselves.
> So, let's say they unionize. Break a lot of kneecaps over the next year?
That only happens if they fail. If they succeed you don't have to punish anybody.
> All that will come out and won't look pretty.
Assuming people who have just had a violence demonstration will be inclined to invite more for reporting it to the police.
> By contrast, discouraging votes by forcing everyone to gather in one hard to miss group takes far fewer criminals. It all happens on one day too.
Except that all happening in one place on one day is the advantage because it allows that day and that place to be secured by impartial monitors who ensure that nobody there is looking at anybody else's ballot.
Apparently it also saves a bunch of money.
Or, in the less organized crime case, when your spouse refuses to let you vote for who you want to because they want you to vote for somebody else.
That is an awful lot of goons, goon payments, goon logistics, etc...
In ordinary elections you get something different -- decentralized coercion. Your boss says hey, I want everybody to vote, everybody bring your ballots to work on Tuesday and we'll all fill them out together. Now they don't even have to look at them, all they have to do is put a fear in people that they might so that people fill out their ballots the way the boss wants in case that happens. The same thing happens with many bosses in many places, so the total effect is significant even if they're not coordinating. People fear for their jobs if they report it.
Come on, this is silly. Vote by mail works great. Oregon and other states have outperformed for many years now.
Fear a low wage job? Hardly. Trust me, that shit would get out, if on nothing but principle.
This has obvious significance in a union vote where those things have a greater history of happening, but it's true in general.