A political machine that can make use of the 'who did Joe voted for' information is likely to have access to the ballot id database and link 'ballot id 43abfd32' to Joe.
On voting machines, good point. We should not use voting machines either.
Then what exactly should we do? Physical ballot boxes? We can imagine all sorts of ways to tamper with votes that way, surely. Even if there's a paper trail, doesn't somebody somewhere have the ability to tamper with it? We can surely propose a flaw in every possible voting system, can't we?
It seems to me your criticisms very much fall into "letting the perfect be the enemy of the good" territory. States have conducted some version of vote-by-mail or absentee balloting for decades, and there's no evidence I'm aware of that either of these have, in practice, materially increased voter fraud. Furthermore, studies on existing voter fraud conducted by groups like the Brennan Center for Justice and the Heritage Foundation have concluded the incident rates are around 0.0025% -- and that's the high end of the estimates. Even if your concern that a push to move most states to vote-by-mail in the 2020 election causes that number to go up substantially proves valid, how likely is it, truly, that it increases by the two orders of magnitude it would take to bring it up to a quarter of a percent -- and that such an incredible increase goes essentially unnoticed and unchallenged?
Exactly. We should not trade off the weakening of the voting process for convenience. The voting process deserves to be as strong as we can possibly make it. In person, on paper, on a weekend day.
* Voting is the cornerstone of democracy. It is the one place where it's not worth cutting costs for convenience.
* Trust but verify. I'm not aware of a cost-effective way to monitor mail-in voting. Suppose I want to observe the process. Do I need to sleep in the voting collection room for 18 days in a row to monitor that no one is messing with the ballots? What about the post office? What about the post truck?
The argument 'is the proven voter fraud higher when using voting process X vs process Y' cuts both ways. I haven't seen evidence to conclusively prove that proprietary voter machines with no paper trail tamper vote counts. And yet most people agree that paper trail voting is a much more trustworthy approach.
>Trust but verify. I'm not aware of a cost-effective way to monitor mail-in voting. Suppose I want to observe the process. Do I need to sleep in the voting collection room for 18 days in a row to monitor that no one is messing with the ballots? What about the post office? What about the post truck?
In King County, Washington where I live they record and livestream all ballot handling during elections [1] and the drop boxes themselves are designed with security in mind [2]
On voting machines, good point. We should not use voting machines either.