Comment by gknoy
5 years ago
> If I say mail-in votes will cause election fraud, you cannot prove or disprove that statement
I'm not sure I believe that claim. I think that looking at past history of voting fraud shows pretty conclusively that _vote by mail_ fraud has always been a very low percentage.
Sure, it's possible that _some_ fraud might happen, but looking at data from Oregon, it's happened two times in twenty years (_from my reading of the conservative database that was linked somewhere yesterday -- sorry :) -- I might be off by an order of magnitude, but it's still small_). That seems like an _extremely_ low incidence rate, and seems a small price to may for the idea that maybe more people will be likely to vote, due to not having to stand in line at polling places, deal with vote suppression efforts, or even just because it's more convenient to fill it out on your own schedule ahead of time.
Now, many will say that states like CA and other large states, who haven't had a large-scale rollout of vote-by-mail with the history and planning that Oregon had, will face more fraud than Oregon did. I think that's actually a very believable point -- we are not going to have a perfect rollout. However, I'd also like to point out that we've had two decades of electronic voting machines that have been proven to be absolutely insecure, as well as numerous cases in other states of voters who have been unable to vote because their polling places were under-staffed or closed too early.
Voting by mail is a proven method that scales well to ensure that larger portions of the populace have the opportunity to vote. It's being considered in light of wanting to limit in-person gatherings. It very unlikely that it's some conspiracy to promote fraud.
> I think that looking at past history of voting fraud shows pretty conclusively that _vote by mail_ fraud has always been a very low percentage.
If fraud was committed successfully, it's not going to show up in the data. You won't know at all. It's like saying "there's no evidence of a cover-up". Well of course there isn't, that's the point.
I've heard plausible methodologies for carrying out mail-in vote fraud that would be undetectable. E.g. mail containing ballots being diverted/"lost". I can neither prove nor disprove this is happening though.
I agree that electronic voting is an even worse idea than mail-in voting.