vote harvesting is only an issue with mail-in or absentee ballots.
in-person paper voting doesn't suffer from that problem, because you walk into the voting area, write your vote on a piece of paper, then you yourself place it into the box, and you can then stand there and watch the ballot box with your own eyes until they are counted, at which point you can count along.
>People can take a picture of their ballot in the booth.
This is insufficient. In-person paper voting allows the voter to toss out their marked ballot and get a fresh one. You can take a photo of your ballot, but it's hard to prove that's what you actually casted. Poll workers will tell you to put your camera away near the ballot box, to protect other voters' privacy as they submit their completed ballots.
This completely misses the point. In a well-designed paper ballot election the ballot never leaves the polling station which can be monitored by anyone during the entire process. This is simply not possible if you vote by mail. In the end you have to trust that the person who picks up the letters doesn't mess with them.
Mail-in voting is substantially different to voting in person at a voting station, and has a much larger attack surface. It should be absolutely minimized or potentially even eliminated or replaced with something more secure.
Also, some states use electronic voting/counting machines, which should be looked at with suspicion. How can you, as somebody who wants to verify the integrity of an election, observe that they are not subject to vote manipulation?
Paper voting has the same central point of failure as the above proposal, they effectively have a voting pool manager, which is the State itself (though different in each State). These are notoriously bad at managing the voter pool, and issue ballots for the dead and people who have long emigrated. There are issues with people who have moves states and are issued ballots in multiple states - under mail-in voting they can trivially vote twice. If they were forced to vote in person they would have to make the trip between states on voting day.
Some people might interpret this as gatekeeping, but it really is true. If you're serious about election security, you'll learn a lot very quickly by immersing yourself in the process and the people who do it.
For example, one often-overlooked advantage of traditional in-person paper voting is that you're entitled to spoil your ballot and request a fresh one. This protects voters from being coerced into voting a certain way and taking a photo of their ballot as proof, as there's no guarantee that the ballot in the photo is the same as what was submitted.
If we're just thinking of ways voting can be corrupted, in-person voting can be coerced too. Boss forces you to take a photo of your ballot as you vote in the booth, etc.
In reality, several states have had mail voting for years- Oregon for decades- without coercion being a problem. Millions of votes cast without the problem you suggest. It's not a problem, despite using our imaginations to come up with ways it can be.
Paper ballots are handled by multiple people, not just the voter. Even if you manage to filter out all the volunteers, getting access to the actual ballots might prove difficult, as they're handled quite publicly.
The beauty of paper ballots is you can spoil them and get a new blank sheet. Sure, livestream yourself filling out your ballot. That doesn't mean you actually cast that ballot. The poll workers will tell you to put your camera away when you're outside the booth on the way to the ballot box.
Where I live we use paper ballots that are both scanned and tallied on sight by a machine when submitted, then hand counted by volunteers at a central location that anyone can observe.
That's why you have paper ballots with dumb electronic counters, as Ontario (Canada) did in its last provincial election. The ballot is a full letter size piece of paper that is fed through the counting machine while the voter watches, into a standard ballot box that can easily be recounted.
Plenty of places let you vote by post, which has this problem. And with people taking their camera phones into voting booths, arguably manual voting does too.
Signatures are, frankly, a bad way to determine if a ballot is valid or not. People's signatures change all the time and there's not exactly a science in determining whether or not two are the same. It's ultimately up to the counter to make that determination.
Otherwise, I agree with your point. The reason ballot harvesting is much less of an issue than made out is because there's a vast paper trail with each mail in ballot cast.
in-person paper voting doesn't suffer from that problem, because you walk into the voting area, write your vote on a piece of paper, then you yourself place it into the box, and you can then stand there and watch the ballot box with your own eyes until they are counted, at which point you can count along.
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