by Dr. Anne Mulhern
Do you remember how we all, or almost all of us, used to vote before 2020?
You would walk up to a table, and identify yourself to the poll-worker by name and residence. The poll-worker would hand you your ballot and simultaneously cross you off the voter rolls for that election. You would take your ballot to the booth and select your candidates with the provided writing instrument. Then you would walk over to the ballot reader and insert your ballot. And then you would depart, your civic duty done.
The polling place procedures were designed to ensure the security of the election and the secrecy of every voter’s choices. These two are essential components of election integrity, and they really matter.
There have always been some voters in any election who have voted by mail, because their exceptional circumstances prevented them from showing up at their designated polling place. But those who had to cast absentee ballots were proportionately few, compared to those who voted in person, and only in exceptional cases could mail-in votes decide an election. Because of this, the security and secrecy of the mail-in procedure was not generally of very much concern.
In 2020, however, the law was changed in Massachusetts in a way designed to make mail-in voting normal and customary.
I looked at the state-wide statistics (https://www.sec.state.ma.us/divisions/elections/research-and-statistics/early-voting-statistics.htm) for mail-in voting; 43% of all votes cast in March’s presidential primary were mail-in ballots. Because of that statistic, the security and the secrecy of the mail-in procedures should be a concern for every citizen.
Compared to the polling place procedures, the mail-in procedures are not secret and are not secure.
The secrecy of every voter’s ballot is ensured by severing the connection between the voter and the ballot as soon as is practically possible.
In the polling place, this connection is severed rapidly. The voter fills out the ballot; the connection is made. The voter picks up the ballot walks over to the ballot reading machine and inserts the ballot into the scanner. The scanner reads the ballot and if there is no problem with the reading the voter departs. Unless someone physically assaults the voter and takes their ballot at the polling place, or the voter illegally takes a selfie at the scanner, or an unauthorized person enters the booth with the voter, the problem of secrecy is solved by the polling place procedures. And the poll-workers and the police officer who is on duty at the polls are on-hand to prevent such secrecy violations.
What sort of secrecy does mail-in voting ensure?
Relatively speaking, much less. The ballot is sent to an address. It is received by someone at that address. It is filled out by someone not necessarily in a secure location. At some point the ballot is placed in a special envelope with a voter’s identification information on the outside. This envelope is then placed in a mailing envelope and sent to the local elections office.
In the polling place, a voter’s identity is connected with their ballot for a few seconds and their voting choices are rarely visible. With a mail-in ballot, the time when a voter and their vote are connected can be a few weeks. There is no one on hand to prevent secrecy violations at every step of the process.
Why is secrecy so important? It prevents overt bribery, it prevents overt coercion and intimidation, and it prevents retaliation.
A voter can not sell their vote if they can not prove how they voted. A voter can not be coerced to vote in the way that someone else wants if there is no way to find out how the voter actually voted. And a voter can not be punished for their vote if no one knows what it was. The secrecy which protects the voter also protects the integrity of the entire election.
In principle, every mail-in vote is for sale, and that is a tremendous threat to election integrity now that mail-in votes account for about half all the votes cast. It is also a threat to the safety of eligible voters. Coercion, intimidation, and retaliation are not good things to experience.
How do the mail-in procedures compare to the polling procedures on security? Not well at all as far as I can tell.
Remember that step where the poll-worker handed you the ballot after you had identified yourself as an eligible voter? At the very same time, you were removed from the voter rolls for that election. At that point, you could vote exactly once at that polling place and nowhere else.
With mail-in voting that instant becomes a weeks long and imprecise process. The ballot is released from the elections office when it is mailed and it goes to an address, not an individual. Indeed, the ballot request form allows for the ballot to be sent anywhere, not just to the registered voter’s address. And the voter is not taken off the rolls until a ballot is returned in the envelope and processed.
We can’t put our heads in the sand and pretend that election fraud does not occur. I did a web search and picked up a recent court cases.
There are multiple examples across the country; New Jersey, Connecticut, New York City, Alabama and Texas, to name a few.
Closer to home, along the banks of the Merrimack River, a Lawrence City-Councilor elect has been charged in connection with possible fraud (https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/2-lawrence-women-including-elected-official-charged-with-voter-fraud/3225350/, https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/video-allegedly-shows-woman-stealing-ballots-from-lawrence-mailbox/3190864/). In this case, it seems the fraud came to light only by good luck; a man went to the polls and was surprised to find out that he was supposed to have already voted. Likely this is just the tip of the iceberg, not the whole cube.
What extra work is the state of Massachusetts and the Lowell elections board and staff doing to ensure election integrity, given that the mail-in procedures are less secret and less secure than polling place procedures?
Well, there is little that can be done about coercion, bribery, and retaliation. With the loss of ballot secrecy, all that naturally follows. So it is necessary to focus on security.
I was assured by the Chelmsford Town Clerk that it is a full time job just to keep the voter rolls up-to-date and I’m sure it is just the same in Lowell, only more so. That’s probably the most that the elections staff in Lowell can manage. That leaves the state of Massachusetts to pick up the rest.
We all know that credit cards aren’t all that secure either and that credit card companies, not wanting to lose money to fraud, monitor credit card usage in order to detect fraudulent activity.
Is the state of Massachusetts doing something similar for the mail-in ballots in order to minimize election fraud? Are there any circumstances that it would identify as likely signs of fraud? If it is monitoring, what actions is it prepared to take?
I would dearly love to know.
6 responses to “The Silent Death of the Secret Ballot”
“And the voter is not taken off the rolls until a ballot is returned in the envelope and processed.”
The implication here is that because the voter is not marked as having voted until the vote is processed, the voter could then go vote again, and cheat by casting more than one vote.
But if someone who received a mail-in ballot goes out and votes, their name is then taken off the rolls when they do it. Mail-in ballots are checked against the voter list, and if the list shows that the person has cast a vote, the mail-in ballot is spoiled and not counted.
It’s actually really easy to catch that; the system in place is set up with that in mind. Some people who sent in mail-in ballots show up to make sure their votes were counted, and to vote in person if they weren’t. Maybe some of them think they’re sneaking in a second vote, but they aren’t.
So there’s an election boogie man out there. Or better yet; an entire organization of them. They secretly pay people to vote for certain candidates. Unfortunately for them, there’s 330 million people in America so they can only offer about ¢5 per vote. But the bigger problem is – what if people just take the ¢5 and vote for who they want. There’s no way to police this conspiracy.
Enter the mail in ballot. This allows the boogie man to drive around to 5k or 10k households during election season and physically watch people check the box. And deliver their nickel in person. Still there’s concerns though; what if they used fake ink and changed the vote after he left? What if they only pretended to seal the envelope? It’s not perfect but it’s better than the honor system.
This is where we’re at now people. Bigfoot ate my ballot. Absolute nonsense
Where did you find this one?
Joseph Boyle, the sentence before is actually more important: “Indeed, the ballot request form allows for the ballot to be sent anywhere, not just to the registered voter’s address.” The poll books and so forth are set up pretty well to eliminate double voting by one person. But they do nothing to prevent some person casting a single ballot in the place of the registered voter.
Jason Do you really believe that there is 100% turnout in US elections? Have you heard of the concept of the “swing state”?
I’ll actually try to summarize Jason’s invalid assumptions:
1. To win an election you have to fraudulently cast as many ballots as there are eligible voters. False: All you need is enough to bring your candidate ahead of the others. Many elections are quite close, so that only a few votes are needed. The elections that are predicted to be close are those where the fraudsters will gather. Take for example, the Minnesota race of 2008. Franken won by a margin of 1/100th of 1% or roughly 1 in 10,000 voters, about 300 to win a Senate seat for all of Minnesota.
2. Bribery of individuals is the only way to have election fraud. False: Most of the occurrences linked to in the article are accounts of ballot harvesting. In the old days, with only in person voting at polls, when the votes were not secret, bribery or intimidation was the best way to go, Tammany Hall is the most famous name associated with this. But since the way people vote has been changed, so has the best way to commit fraud.
3. Since people only vote at the polling places, there is no opportunity for coercion or intimidation; your vote is secret and even if you are bribed, you don’t have to do what you promised. False: One of the points I made very specifically in the article is with mail-in voting, all the benefits of secrecy, but not, I admit, the drawbacks, go away.
4. Ballot harvesting requires getting eligible voters to vote and then taking their ballots and changing their vote and then delivering their ballot. False: There are so many more effective ways to ballot harvest that I would have to write another whole article just about how to do it. In an interview, Greg Pappas talked about an incident, not in Lowell, where someone got a burning rag into a ballot drop box and a few hundred ballots were irretrievably burned. That’s efficient ballot harvesting! So long as the rag deployer could be reasonably certain that the majority of the votes in the drop box were for the “wrong” candidate, then that’s a few 100 votes gained for the price of a splash of gasoline. Or perhaps the rag deployer was trying to reduce election fraud, and figured most of the drop box votes were fraudulent. Or maybe, the rag deployer was just a pyromaniac.
Continued:
5. The only elections are US-wide elections. False: Even ignoring so-called primaries, elections occur at every granularity. The smallest is, I believe District City Councillor. The largest is, indeed, President of the United States. In between there are US Senator, which is state-wide, representative to the US House, which is more local. Massachusetts Senator and Massachusetts representative, which are more local, At-large City Councillor. The only elections which are not vulnerable to fraud are those in which the seat is not contested, i.e only one candidate runs.