Interesting information, Crowe, but it really doesn't negate any of my points.

First off, you're talking about Boston. There is no uniform standard of care for universal mail-in ballots around the country. It's up to the state and local governments, some of which will be undermanned or will mishandle it badly.

However, your "secure voting" scenarios are unrealistic, and it is very unlikely things would happen this way, unless there was an organized attempt by one person to submit hundreds or thousands of votes.

I'll answer various claims of yours one by one.

Every ballot envelope is gone thru by 2 people working in tandem, and sorted by address. Someone is looking at every ballot, signature, envelope, to make sure everything is all checked out and proper, so if you are using the same handwriting, you;re pretty much gonna get caught before any votes even get opened, never mind scanned. Lets give you some credit and say you did 15 ballots, with 15 different pens and handwriting, so as to get around the human picking up on the problem. If so, we move on.
lolwut?

Let's say John Smith finds 15 ballots in his apartment building, fills them all out (in the same handwriting and blue pen), and mails them. If those were the only 15 ballots to show up, or if they all showed up together with no other ballots in between, it's likely that these "two people" would catch on.

However, John's ballots will be among thousands received that day, and those 15 won't be ordered together.

I do not believe for a second that two people going through tons of ballots would recognize the same handwriting for 15 of them. That's extremely far fetched. Plus, as you said, someone more cautious could modify his handwriting for all 15 anyway.


Next, you have to hope nobody in that building decides to vote that day, because if they try to, it will become immediately obvious that a vote has already been cast in their name. At this point, the Warden of the precinct immediately calls this in to the election department, and the investigation begins immediately. Since all ballots and the envelopes they came in are saved, the person's mail-in vote immediately is challenged, and will not be counted. At this point, it is potentially evidence, and is treated as such, in a special box inside the voting machine.
The same level of "investigation" would take place if I went into my local post office and reported my mail stolen. Technically it's a federal crime. But in reality, they do zero investigation, unless there's a recurring or large-scale problem (such as mail stolen from 50 mailboxes on the same day, or regular mail theft aimed at certain individuals).

It is highly unlikely that there would be any kind of investigation like this for low-level election fraud.

Also, it's safe to say that people who throw away their universal mail-in ballots in a public trashcan probably aren't planning to go vote in person. It can happen, but it probably won't.


But that's just one vote caught, right? Well, not so fast. Every mail in ballot gets scanned, not just for the votes, but for the signatures. The election department has every voter's signature in a database, and any vote that has a signature that the machine claims is not a match gets flagged, challenged, and is analysed by 2 poll workers, likely the clerk and the warden of the precinct. If there's any question at all at this point whether a ballot is legit or not, the election department actively starts contacting voters, on the phone or in person depending on location, to question them about their vote, and the vote goes into the "challenge" box, until its veracity is affirmed or not. If 2 or more ballots were found to be fraudulent coming from the same building, the election department, the boston police, and the FBI would be on it very, very quickly.
There isn't time for this. There are going to be a ton of signatures which don't match. Hell, my signature today doesn't match my voter registration at age 18. I don't even know if they're going to count my vote (dead serious). If we had until the end of 2020 to verify questionable signatures, this might work. In a few days, or even in 2 weeks, there's zero point zero chance you can contact everyone with questionable signatures and verify their authenticity. Also, what about voters without phones? They just lose their votes? C'mon, man.



Also, you aren't accounting for what would be the most common two versions of voter fraud:

1) Voting for relatives who are either dead, apathetic, or incapacitated. If 98-year-old grandma barely knows her name, you can easily cast a vote for her without anyone ever finding out. If grandma died last year, you can also do it (and then feign ignorance if caught, claiming you threw it away, and someone must have fished it out). If your 18-year-old son says, "Voting is a fucking waste of time" and tosses it in the trash in front of you, then you can retrieve it and cast votes for him.

2) Voting for people who moved, but their ballots show up at your house anyway. In this case, none of the security checks there work aside from the aforementioned signature thing (which I already explained is very flawed). Someone who moved likely isn't in the precinct anymore, so there won't be a duplicate voting scenario. Again, you could submit their vote while knowing you could feign ignorance by saying you threw it away, and someone must have fished it out of the trash. But nobody is going to investigate you aggressively for throwing in 1 or 2 extra votes.


Again, you are also talking about Boston, which appears to be putting some effort into a more secure system (which is good). Many areas do not have this. There will be more fraud in this election than the last several elections combined. Some will be for Trump, some will be for Biden. I don't even know which one will have more of it, but I assume probably more for Biden, because some people believe Trump is so evil that it's imperative to knock him out of office, even if some criminal activity is necessary. The riots we've seen this year prove that.

There will also be brute force forms of fraud -- such as vandalism of voter drop boxes. Some areas even allow vote harvesting, where people are allowed to go around collecting votes for the neighborhood, and then drop them all off at once. Obviously you can see how that can be abused.

This is going to be a mess.