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Being fair to the argument though, we’ve never ever come close to this scale of mail-in ballots, many of them actually turned in by third parties, many of them from people who had just signed up to vote that year. There was little if any vetting of who was voting, whether they’d already voted in person, whether this person lived at the address in question (some states simply mass sent ballots to addresses of known voters and there are numerous reports of people receiving an official ballot for people who no longer lived at that address) whether this person was legally able to vote, was of sound mind, and so on. Even if those ballots happened to just go to eligible voters, there was little done in most areas to confirm that the person who filled out the ballot was actually the person it was sent to.
With that level of not caring, the optimal move is to collect the ballots sent to hospitals and nursing homes where you can get hundreds of “valid” ballots sent to people who are incapable of voting. Nobody will check to see if the person should be voting, nor that the signature matches the handwriting of a 90 year old woman. Or you could offer to send on missent ballots to the right addresses (and then simply vote yourself.
In most other elections, the process for mail in voting was extremely limited. You had to apply at least 90 days before the election, you had to provide a reason why you can’t vote in person, and provide proof that you are who you say you are. And once the ballot was sent in, it was matched to your signature. If it didn’t match, the vote didn’t count.
I think the issue needs to be addressed simply because it’s a way to game the system. It can be used but it needs to be secure enough that both the government and the public can be sure that those votes came from the people who’s name is on the ballot, that the person is actually eligible to vote, and those people only voted one time.
Moving forward, yes I think it’s great to make some adjustments.
But looking backward, it is grossly insufficient to just point out theoretical or principle based concerns. You need at least some actual evidence. To my knowledge, very little if any evidence suggests that the theoretical vulnerabilities you list actually were abused.
Plus let’s assume maybe not a worst case but a bad case: that a lot of old people had people vote for them because of mail ballots. Of course that’s bad in general terms and in principle. Statistically, talking about the effect, that’s still not much of an issue though because non-coordinated fraud tends to average out, quite frankly, and it’s hard to conceive of reasonable mathematical margins that would plausibly have swung the national vote using that kind of casual fraud alone.
The issue is that once you remove the security around the process, catching a cheat becomes very difficult. If I’m not allowed to insist that the signature on the ballot match the one on file, proving that this ballot isn’t cast by the person in question is very difficult. The only evidence available is the signature on the ballot and maybe the return address (which is stupidly easy to fake since it’s public record). Unless this person happens to turn up at a polling station unaware that there’s been a ballot cast in his name, what kind of evidence is there? To my mind this is like having a store that doesn’t track inventory, have cameras, or lock doors — then insisting that I provide proof of theft. But all the things that could be used to prove theft don’t exist. The doors are unlocked, so there won’t be evidence of a break-in. There are no cameras or staff to see someone taking things. And because there’s no inventory record, we can’t check to see whether anything is missing. Once you remove all the security, proving fraud is impossible.
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How does it make you feel that, on election night 2020, several swing states simultaneously stopped counting ballots? How does it make you feel that Stacey Abrams and Georgia Relublicans signed a "consent decree" so that they literally would not collect the kind of evidence we might consider? How do you feel about ballot chain of custody?
Election night is long and pauses in the pace of reporting those results isn't that odd. AFAIK, pretty much all the states counted continuously after starting the process, and did not takes breaks (example). In other words, that's a false claim.
The consent decree didn't lead to any substantive change in policies other than notification about signature matching, and I'm not concerned overmuch about chain of custody in the sense that people can often look and see if their ballot was accepted, plus any deliberate vote-changing associated with those concerns sound wildly implausible. In terms of ballot harvesting, etc. I definitely think there's some good room for stricter laws, though I don't necessarily think for example we need to be too worried about family or close friends agreeing to physically drop off sealed ballots at drop spots as a convenience thing. Campaign affiliated people doing it as some sort of service? Bad. Generic GOTV for example making it easier for seniors to vote? I think that's fine but could use a bit of supervision or auditing or something to avoid abuse, but possibly fine.
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