There is a basic data science question here. What kind of data errors exist in the US system.
Precision error = invalid voter voting
Recall error = valid voter unable to vote
You can look up detailed definitions on wikipedia.
US is plagued by recall errors. Like tptacek pointed out miniscule precision errors identified so far are by Republicans. The errors trade off with each other. Reducing precision errors will increase recall errors and vice versa.
When someone makes a song and dance about virtually non existent precision errors and tries to worsen recall errors - the intent is not to reduce the errors, but increase it to subvert the democratic process.
First, can we agree on a set of premises --- for instance, that "ballot harvesting" is not an idiosyncrasy of the Democratic party? It's an article of faith among conservatives that the Democratic Party is the party of voter fraud, but that's empirically untrue.
When we agree on what the facts are, it should be straightforward for us to work out what good changes would be.
I don’t think democrats are “the party of voter fraud.” I do think they overvalue activist rhetoric about voter access while undervaluing the importance of overt displays of trustworthiness in building trust in elections. The whole point of elections is so people who don’t trust each other can agree on the result, and ballot harvesting pretty much screams untrustworthiness.
Voting isn’t rocket science. Plenty of advanced democracies do it well. My point of reference is basically: is this practice common in the EU, or Japan/Taiwan/Australia/Canada? As far as I can tell, ballot harvesting isn’t.
I guess I'd ask why I should care about that particular wrinkle of vote casting. I took the time to go read up on state ballot harvesting laws, and there's essentially no apparent correlation between state parties and ballot collection laws. I learned that ballot collection is kind of a big deal for Native Americans (who rely on collectors for far-flung reservations, where otherwise getting to a sanctioned ballot box might involve a multiple-hour drive) and for elderly voters in assisted living homes. There seems to be no studied connection between lax collection laws and incidence of fraud.
Why do you care about this? I'm asking sincerely; I don't get it. I know about the Bladen County thing in NC (Bladen County was the subject of the last Serial podcast) --- again, that was Republican election fraud. But my reaction to that isn't that we should make it harder for people to cast ballots.
Why is mail-in voting a “disgraceful corruption of the voting process?”. Lots of people can’t vote in person (eg military and others temporarily overseas).
Note: I’m not American and have no stake in this. I’ve just never seen such a strong negative opinion about mail in voting in principle.
I live in WA state. All vote is mail-in. I can't vote in-person even if I want to. This is not democracy. Some further thoughts:
* I was raised in a country with a single party and 99% outcome elections. People, kids my age (at the time), sacrificed their lives for the right to vote. I don't take voting for granted, but I do take voting seriously.
* The mail-in argument is predicated on the postmodern "the exception is the rule". I reject that on principle. A small minority has special needs, we can find many ways to accommodate that without disrupting the vast majority. And if we can't, too bad for the small minority.
* The custody chain is fundamentally broken. The reason I marginally trust election results is because representatives of both parties keep a hawk eye on each other to prevent foul play. This can be done in at in-person polling locations for a day or two, but cannot logistically be done for weeks over the area of an entire state.
* As a corollary, him who delivers the mail has weeks to either make certain votes appear from thin air, or disappear / delay blocks of votes from areas likely to vote against his party. Oops, we just printed 10k ballots too many...
* The vote must be secret. Mail-in vote sits with your signature on it for weeks who knows where. In the era of cancel culture, possibly worse, the doxxing risk is non-negligible. Remember Brendan Eich?
* There is no confirmation that the vote was filled by the person receiving the ballot. Perhaps their spouse / elder guardian / etc. filled it in for them?
* Ballot harvesting, the process of pressuring people into voting by knocking on their door or downright bullying them into collecting the blank ballots. Done selectively in areas leaning towards your party it can easily turn an election. Note how both parties complain about this when they are at the receiving end of it.
Are you equally appalled that so much other government paperwork goes through the mail? If we can't trust voting by mail, then we certainly can't trust mailing passports, visas, IRS forms, car records, etc.
It's weird to me to single out voting as the one thing that can't be trusted to the postal service, especially when there's things like voting lock boxes that are kept under camera you could put your vote in.
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KUOW news editor Gil Aegerter was poking around on the Washington state elections website when he noticed something strange: You can print out a ballot for anyone, as long as you know their birthday.
To demonstrate, he pulls up a ballot for Secretary of State Kim Wyman, who is in charge of elections in Washington.
[...]
That's because a signature is required when you return your ballot, which is checked against a copy of your signature that's kept on file. Wyman calls it security "at the back end."
Aegerter pulls a copy of Wyman's signature online. Wyman's still not worried.
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It also happens that our last local elections swung by 7-13% after the election night counts. Just a coincidence.
Edit: It's worse than I thought. Obviously, once people accept the inacceptable, you push one step further. Before long we'll decide elections by Twitter likes.
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This year, military and overseas voters will be allowed to vote electronically in Washington's presidential primary. Wyman backed a bill this legislative session to try and kill that. It failed.
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This sure sounds like a deflection. The GP raised several points about how mail-in-voting (especially 100% mail-in voting) could reasonably lead to increased rates of voter fraud, and it's not all because it transited the mail.
And that renders your second paragraph moot. GP talked about the sender being either under coercion or not who the ballot said. If that happens, then keeping a camera on the voting lock box once the ballot arrives isn't going to fix the problem.
