28M Mail-In Ballots Went Missing in Last Four Elections

28M Mail-In Ballots Went Missing in Last Four Elections
realclearpolitics.com

USPS's UAA (undelivered as addressed) rate for first class mail is ~1%. Both ways. Something for postal ballot advocates to consider. Make sure your jurisdictions have online ballot trackers.

These "improvements" are anything but.

If we value the integrity of our elections, we need to minimize the amount of metadata generated.

You need:

- a small pollbook of legal voters

- a location for those voters to obtain and secretly mark a paper ballot

- a means to cast that ballot and tally that polling place's numbers

- a chain of custody for all ballots that protects the election's legitimacy

Elections, and the political power that they grant, demand that we curb our natural tendency to over-engineer systems.

The more shiny, spiffy gadgets and doo-dads we apply to this process, the greater the harm its legitimacy.

If you want, I can flog this dead horse all the way down to glue.

The 28 million ballots in question aren't "missing"; they're ballots that were mailed to voters and weren't used.

In some cases the voters in question likely didn't bother voting (common in local elections) or simply forgot (I've done this when I accidentally stacked other mail on top of a ballot and then didn't find it again until too late). In other cases, voters may have moved and failed to update their voter registration. This situation isn't unusual or alarming, and the opportunities for fraud aren't nearly as plentiful as the article tries to imply.

The article cites a 2008 report by the CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project as recommending that states abolish absentee voting due to fraud concerns, but that report contains only a single paragraph proposing a theoretical _potential_ for fraud due to "unsecured" mail channels. It provides no evidence that this is common or has even occurred, and in fact devotes significantly more space to discussing the inconvenience of mail-in punch-card ballots with Styrofoam backings — something I had never heard of despite having voted by mail for almost two decades.

The article also cites a 2008 Reed College study, which again raises theoretical concerns about fraud but offers no substantive evidence that it's an issue, and in fact states that "A report commissioned by the federal Election Assistance Commission, authored by Tova Wang and Jed Seberov, concluded, on the basis of interviews with experts in the area, that there was little evidence of voter fraud."

How's that an argument against ballot harvesting? That's exactly how political campaigning and elections work. Spread over several weeks or moths, of course. In fact official campaigns are much worse because when this door-to-door salesman talks to a voter he's not in a position to make promises that must be funded by money taken from other people.

That's an argument against democracy and centralization and the way to fix that problem is to decentralize and eliminate multiple layers of government.