Thread by @bansisharma

1. How To Fix Mail-In Vote Fraud

The topic evokes raw emotions. Suspend them for a moment. This is a serious thread on the simplest way to fix most of the potential election fraud that is currently possible in our vote-counting processes. State legislatures should pay attention.

2. The U.S. today has a system in almost all the States (with rare but relatively small exceptions) that rigorously defies fraud detection and correction for mail-in ballots. This has happened because of the noble objective of making the mail-in ballot rigorously 'secret.'

3. 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 to forestall attempts at voter intimidation, blackmailing, and vote buying. All really good. But it also causes an intractable problem.

4. Key tenet of the 'secret ballot' that is preserved even for mail-in 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.

5. 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).

6. 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.

7. The barcode on the ballot must be required by law 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.

8. That simple change in State laws will fix almost all the voter fraud problems that can potentially arise in the vote-counting processes for mail-in votes by making such fraud detectable and correctable if and when it ever happens.

9. The mere existence of this detection and correction mechanism will stop most insider voter fraud dead in its tracks, because it will no longer be possible to commit such a crime with impunity as is the case today.

10. 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 personal information from being disclosed is simply the fact that it is unlawful to do so.

11. 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.

12. Is there any reason to accord a ballot a higher confidentiality 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.

13. 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.

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

15. 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 committed. No way to detect it later, let alone correct it.

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. While a uniform and rigorous Voter ID implementation would be ideal and perhaps will be the long-term solution inevitably, it will take a long time before a political consensus can hammered out to implement it.

19. 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 mail-in ballots are a part of our election system, which I believe will still be the case for a long time to come.

20. A note to Republicans: Stop butting your heads against the wall on mail-in ballots. There is nothing you can do to stop mail-in ballots from being a regular feature of all future elections. Nor should you. Mail-in ballot is not the problem. Fraud is. Fix the latter.

21. Accept and welcome mail-in ballots. Until Republicans realize that, they will have a self-imposed disadvantage against the Democrats that is mindless and hurtful without any redeeming qualities whatsoever. Don't penalize voters for systemic process problems that need fixing.

22. Fix the potential 'vote-counting fraud' as I suggested above, and you will never have to worry about mail-in voting again. Welcome and encourage mail-in voting just as much as Democrats do, thereby neutralizing the Democratic advantage that has been created out of thin air.

23. Republicans will never be able to neutralize Democratic mail-in voting advantage by discouraging mail-in voting and trying to improve in-person voter turn-out on election day. Mathematically impossible to do and a losing battle.

24. No surge of in-person votes on one single day can make up for the shortfall created over a month or more of protracted mail-in voting. Welcome mail-in voting. Plug the vote-counting fraud loophole. And let the voters have the final say, with high process integrity.

The End