I am not a fan of voting by mail, and I wholeheartedly agree that ballots cast in the mailstream are significantly less secure from intimidation and tampering than those cast in a polling place and that there is a double standard applied to vote by mail (and paper voting systems generally) as compared to DREs.
I do have to take issue with two of your points, though.
First, with the argument that vote by mail is less secure because "the only authentication of the voter that is done is the signature aspect". We at least mail the ballot to the voter's address after verifying the signature on the application, which is greater authentication than what we require in the polling place. I could, at least in theory, commit fraud by simply mining the voter rolls for perennial non-voters, appearing at the polling place and stating information that is in the public record. If the poll workers don't know the "real" voter and the voter doesn't appear before I do, then no one would be the wiser until my ballot is cast. At least with absentee voting there are opportunities in many jurisdictions to view and contest the voter's absentee ballot application and/or envelope before it is opened and counted, something that is realistically much more difficult to do in the polling place.
Second, vote by mail is not necessarily "drastically cheaper than supervised balloting". Not based on the numbers we're looking at for a special election in the District next spring. We've been running the numbers and it would be far more expensive to run an all vote-by-mail election - once you consider the costs of printing and mailing ballots to every registered voter, rather than simply printing enough for a low-turnout special election, and since we've already made the investment in voting equipment that would just be sitting on blocks in our warehouse - than to staff polling places. We believe that we can save money by making the switch to vote centers, but not by conducting the election by mail.
Alysoun McLaughlin
Public Affairs Manager
District of Columbia Board of Elections and Ethics
441 4th St. NW Suite 250 N
Washington, DC 20001
email: amclaughlin@dcboee.org
Website:www.dcboee.org
Phone: 202-727-2511
Cell: 202-441-1121
________________________________________
From: election-law-bounces@mailman.lls.edu [election-law-bounces@mailman.lls.edu] On Behalf Of Joseph Lorenzo Hall [joehall@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 15, 2010 11:48 AM
To: Jason C. Miller
Cc: Election Law
Subject: Re: [EL] All-mail elections research & analysis?
On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 7:43 PM, Jason C. Miller <jcmiller@gmail.com> wrote:
Also, is anyone aware of any research or publications concerning additional
ballot security concerns of going to an all-mail voting (as opposed to
allowing voting by mail in general). And what about the equal protection
issue if a handful of counties are exempted from the all-mail requirement?
Thanks,
NIST has published a few white papers that look at security issues and
accessibility issues with UOCAVA voting (overseas absentee voting) and
much of that can be translated to domestic vote-by-mail (just leave
out the need to rely on military postal service or foreign postal
services, etc.). Much of this might wax a bit technical:
Accessibility issues:
http://www.nist.gov/itl/vote/upload/AU_for_remote_voting_draft_white_paper_6-28-10_-3.doc
Security considerations:
http://www.nist.gov/itl/vote/draft-wp-securityconsiderations.cfm
Threat Analysis:
http://www.nist.gov/itl/vote/upload/uocava-threatanalysis-final.pdf
A dirty little secret amongst those of us in the technical community
is that VBM has a number of particularly poor security properties
compared to supervised voting models (polling places, early voting,
etc.). First, there is the fact that the only authentication of the
voter that is done is the signature aspect, so signing your blank
ballot and handing it off to a coercer or vote-buyer is very easy.
Second, there is the mechanism for getting the ballot from the voter
to the election official for tabulation. This is usually the postal
service, but can also be a spouse or other individual that drops off
the voted VBM ballot at election HQ or the post office.
Those two aspects -- the threat of coercion/buying and the threat of
manipulation of ballots in-transit -- are substantial risks compared
to in-person supervised voting (where there is a pollworker
(hopefully) enforcing election procedures that work against undue
influences and support chain of custody).
I think the reasons you haven't seen many of the technical folks speak
ill of VBM (yet) are many. E.g., election officials tend to love it
because it's drastically cheaper than supervised balloting. And we
have spent so much time talking about the risks of things like
paperless DREs and internet voting, that it often seems
counterproductive to talk about the risks of VBM.
Anyway, apologies for rambling a bit here. best, Joe
--
Joseph Lorenzo Hall
ACCURATE Postdoctoral Research Associate
UC Berkeley School of Information
Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy
http://josephhall.org/
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