The difference between in-person vote and mail vote is chain of custody. Basically, when voting by mail you can never prove that your vote has not been tampered with in transit. With in-person vote there usually are procedures in place to ensure that no one messes with the ballot box.
Maybe mail in voting wasn't such a great idea, when so many people don't trust the results. In person voting, paper ballot, simplest and most transparent.
I don't know about the US, but mail-in voting should be no different from voting in person (in person verification being the only difference). It must highly traceable in that a registered, actual person can cast only a single vote. Unless tampering happens during vote counting, there is the same keeping of records / audit possibilities.
Generally, by sealed envelopes, and by having groups of people inspect mail votes at counting time to ensure the envelopes haven't been tampered with. There's also usually a paper trail from the post office that receives the votes so you can't just show up with a couple of thousand "mail votes" and send them in.
It is obviously less secure than voting in person, but it's good enough, and your in-person vote supersedes your mail-in vote.
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.
In the two states with vote-by-mail I've lived in, you can always hand-submit a paper ballot that takes precedence over your mailed one. The only way someone could be sure you voted one particular way is to monitor your actions for 100% of the time after you mailed the ballot.
This is less ideal than voting in person for everyone, as it still has failure cases like sufficiently abusive relationships. But it's an overall improvement over the previous system. Significantly more of the population votes in practice, making the vote a better measure of the ever-nebulous "will of the people".
Voting in person the old fashioned way for all but those with a good physical excuse seems to be the best way to maintain the integrity of our voting process. Yes, in-person voting has the potential for fraud, but mail-in voting has all of the same problems and more. It's hard to find a mechanism for fraud that applies to in-person but not mail in.
Furthermore, the issues with COVID seem overblown. I've waited in line to vote, but the lines were never longer than the lines at my local supermarket on Saturday morning. If we can shop for food in person, we can vote.
If you want to understand the fears over mail-in voting, just imagine what you could do if you control the mail sorting for a large apartment building or nursing home. It is just much harder to cheat when you require a physical body to be present at the polls. Not impossible but harder.
the paper ballots via mail handle infrastructure and are counted by machine with spot checking. Also, you can go to the vote counting floor at any time and be part of the process.
However you don't have to setup/store machines, and people can vote over a few days which means better access to everyone.
Vote by mail also easily allows selling votes. You can sell your ballot and signed envelope to somebody. The best way to avoid this is only having in person voting.
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