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this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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Well, coercive voting is a crime, so there is that. But we've been doing vote by mail for 24 years and haven't really had a problem.
In the early days someone tried a "drop off your ballot here!" scam and tried to throw them away. They got caught.
A few years back (12! 12 years!), an election worker got caught filling in portions of ballots that had been left blank:
https://katu.com/archive/former-elections-worker-pleads-guilty-to-ballot-tampering-gets-90-days
So, first, to be clear: I'm in favor of vote-by-mail. I believe it's more of an enabler than a risk.
That said:
First, so is domestic violence. If a person is willing to break that law, why wouldn't they also be willing to break a law and force their spouse to fill in a ballot their way?
Second, how would we know that is not a problem? Do we have studies that have surveyed survivors of domestic violence to ask whether or not their spouse ever forced them to fill in a mail-in ballot a certain way, which found that it's rare?
Third, imagine a world of Project 2025, where Brown Shirts exist again. Or, just mafia-esque gangsters, if you will. Being illegal is not going to stop organized crime from forcing an entire apartment block from filling in a ballot in front of an enforcer. And I think it's naïve to think it couldn't happen today, anymore that we were naïve to believe defeating the Nazis in 1945 meant we wouldn't see the rise of his kind again being a threat 71 years later.
I do think there are solutions, in rescindable votes and re-voting; there are voting systems (software) designed with these sorts of features built in. With these systems, you can change your vote as many times as you like up until the polls close; this wouldn't prevent abusive-spouse scenarios, but would make mass coercion much harder. But I do think there's opportunity for abuse with mail-in ballots, much more so in a world of Project 2025, where the people braking the law against coercion are also pals with the ones charged with enforcing it.
It's less of a problem with spousal abuse and more of a problem with corporate abuse.
A spouse might impact one vote.
A company could go "Ok, everyone bring in your ballots and lets all fill them out together!"
But, again, that's illegal and hasn't really happened. From a corporate perspective, you'd only need one employee to rat you out and you're done. The risk/reward ratio just isn't there.