Vote by mail

We overlook one of the ways in-person voting gives integrity to the results.

We think of ID – is the person handling the ballot who they claim to be, and is this person eligible to vote in the first place.

Can you extend this to mail-in ballots? We've various proposals for managing this, which you may trust or not, depending on your experience with software. The USPS just came out with some guidelines.

But there's another feature to in-person that's almost impossible to extend to the mail-in voting. Independent observers verify that the voters have gone into the booths alone. Nobody looks over the voters' shoulders, and ballots all go into an anonymous box (no box A for our Beneficent Incumbent and box B for the Evil Challenger).

When our youngest daughter voted by mail, the envelope needed a witness, which I was. For the actual "filling out of the ballot" phase, I left the kitchen. Of course. Anybody who knows me knows I wouldn't lean over her shoulder and make suggestions. But there's no way to prove that.

Perhaps a mail-in ballot was in fact filled in by the person who claimed to fill it in, and perhaps that person is a legitimate voter. That doesn't rule out inappropriate influence.

Our town allowed early voting. Mail-in was one way, but another was to show up at City Hall and vote there. That latter seems reasonable enough. It doesn't have the election monitors present, but you can never tell who else is going to show up and ask why two people are involved with one ballot.

Suppose we deprecate vote-by-mail. With exceptions, of course. For most of us, being out of town on election day is a choice. Not all – my parents were posted overseas for years, though with access to the US embassy, which could have coordinated a voting system. And, of course, those in the armed forces don't always know where they will be next week.

So we need to make some provision to cover at minimum as many of our overseas armed forces as are eligible to vote but are posted away from their voting district. I'd think that at bases this wouldn't be hard – finding observers, setting up a temporary dedicated room and a time for voting, having a single place to receive, collect, and mail back ballots… A ship with a long deployment is slightly more complicated – when do you mail things back?

Men in combat are probably out of luck as far as voting goes, though it might be possible sometimes.

But with the understanding that there are some exceptions which we could account for, what do we lose if mail-in-voting is hard? On the plus side, we lose ballot harvesting. On the minus side, some people get posted to a new location for a long time, from well before the candidates have declared to well after the election, and they won't get a chance to vote. In larger cities in the US one might have reciprocal agreements for receiving/sending ballots at the local city hall, but that doesn't help the oil platform guys much.

A system with integrity will have friction. How much of each are we willing to trade off?