Thread by @bansisharma

1. The Biggest Real Problem with Our Voting System

Whether by design or happenstance, the U.S. has ended up in almost all the States (with rare but relatively small exceptions) with a system that rigorously defies fraud detection and correction for absentee ballots.

2. In this thread I will use the term 'absentee ballot' for all ballots that are not cast in person. It includes all mail-in ballots of course in this usage of the term.

3. By combining absentee ballots with the need to keep the ballots 'secret' has solved one problem by creating another, i.e. secrecy is implemented at the cost of making it harder to detect and almost impossible to correct fraud.

4. First, a little history on how we ended up with a 'secret ballot' in the first place.

Before 1890, partisan newspapers printed filled-out ballots which party workers distributed on election day so voters could drop them directly into the boxes.

5. All of the states replaced these with secret ballots around 1890, popularly called "Australian ballots." They were printed by the local government and listed all the candidates impartially.

6. The "Australian ballot" is defined as having four parts:

a) an official ballot being printed at public expense
b) on which the names of the nominated candidates of all parties and all proposals appear
c) being distributed only at the polling place
d) being marked in secret.

7. In the United States, most states had moved to secret ballots soon after the presidential election of 1884. Kentucky was the last state to do so in 1891, when it quit using an oral ballot. But seven states did not have government-printed ballots until the 20th century.

8. South Carolina created them in 1950 and Georgia in 1922. The first city to start using the Australian ballot in the U.S. was Louisville, Kentucky. But first state to adopt the Australian ballot was Massachusetts in 1888. Hence, it is also known as the "Massachusetts ballot."

9. In the U.S., voting by secret ballot was universal by 1892 but criminal prohibitions against paying people to vote were only instituted in 1925.

10. Elections in the U.S. are mostly held by secret ballot, although some states use mail ballots instead, which violate requirements 3 and 4 of the "Australian ballot", as it is distributed to the home, and potentially marked in the presence of other people.

11. The states of Colorado, Oregon, and Washington conduct all elections by mailed ballots. New Jersey did the same this year. And many states allowed/encouraged mailed ballots this year.

The Constitution for the state of West Virginia still allows voters to cast "open ballots".

12. So as you can see the requirement for a 'secret ballot' is certainly not in the U.S. Constitution. It is just a method broadly adopted by all the States, understandably to forestall attempts to influence the voter by intimidation, blackmailing, and potential vote buying.

13. Key tenet of the 'secret ballot' that is preserved even for mailed ballots is that you cannot trace back from the final ballot that is used to count votes for candidates and State proposals, who cast any given ballot.

14. There is no identification on the ballot tying it back to the voter who mailed it. And therein lies the rub. A fraudulent ballot is 100% indistinguishable from a real ballot just as long as the fraudulent ballot uses the official paper (which has special hidden markings).

15.This is not a Constitutional requirement, but one arising from individual State laws. States can easily change it to facilitate fraud detection, while still preserving the benefits of a secret ballot. Ballots can easily have a barcode, tying them to the ballot envelope.

16. The barcode on the ballot can be legally required to be used only for fraud detection/correction purposes during an election whose results are challenged. It should be made a serious crime to use the code for any other purposes or to disclose it unlawfully. That is it.

17. For anyone who is even the least bit uneasy about this should keep in mind that the only thing that prevents someone's medical information or tax return or any other highly confidential information from being disclosed is simply the fact that it is unlawful to do so.

18. Surely, the information about who/what a voter voted for is not any more precious than all the other personal and confidential information in one's life combined.

19. Is there any reason to accord a ballot a higher confidentiality severity level than to a tax return or medical information, etc. even at the cost of making voter fraud detection/correction impossible in our nation? I don't think so.

20. Currently, the ballot signature verification process separates the outer envelope which has voter identification information from the inner ballot which has none. Once the two are separated, they can never be tied together again.

21. Later on, say during an audit, if an envelope is determined to be fraudulent, we have no way of knowing who got the fraudulent vote from the ballot that was enclosed in that envelope.

22. And say if a 1,000 fraudulent ballots, without any corresponding envelopes are slipped into a ballot pile in a vote-counting center and a 1,000 real ballots at random are removed & destroyed, a perfect crime has been executed. No way to detect it later, let alone correct it.

23. There are those who believe what I described above can never happen, because they assume our system is and will always be run by angels.

I believe it can happen and we should make it detectable and correctable by having a code that ties every ballot to its envelope.

The End

20. Currently, the ballot signature verification process separates the outer envelope which has voter identification information from the inner ballot which has none. Once the two are separated, they can never be tied together again.

21. Later on, say during an audit, if an envelope is determined to be fraudulent, we have no way of knowing who got the fraudulent vote from the ballot that was enclosed in that envelope.

22. And say if a 1,000 fraudulent ballots, without any corresponding envelopes are slipped into a ballot pile in a vote-counting center and a 1,000 real ballots at random are removed & destroyed, a perfect crime has been executed. No way to detect it later, let alone correct it.

23. There are those who believe what I described above can never happen, because they assume our system is and will always be run by angels.

I believe it can happen and we should make it detectable and correctable by having a code that ties every ballot to its envelope.

24. A rigorous Voter ID will stop external fraud by stopping illegal votes even before they are cast. In the above thread, I addressed internal fraud/errors committed in the vote-counting centers after the voting has already been done. We need both to mitigate end-to-end fraud.

25. While a uniform and rigorous Voter ID implementation would be ideal and perhaps be a long-term reality inevitably, it will take a while before the political will meets technical implementation. The latter is easy, the former is nowhere on the horizon yet.

26. What I addressed above, on the other hand, can be implemented easily before the next election. And it will be needed for as long as the paper absentee ballots are a part of our election system, which I believe will still be for a long time to come.

The End