Questions:
"Peter, what stops someone from voting multiple times?"
"Peter, after college my daughter moved to San Francisco, but she still got an Oregon ballot mailed here to our home. What keeps me from voting both her ballot and mine?"
No system is perfect. Not vote-by-mail, not in-person voting. People sometimes impersonate another. Sometimes ineligible people attempt to vote. This past November the 17-year-old son of the candidate for Virginia governor, Glenn Youngkin, twice approached his local polling place attempting to vote. He was stopped. He wasn't on their list of eligible voters. Election systems have safeguards.
The conservative Heritage Foundation has a searchable data base of election fraud cases and their disposition. There aren't many cases of fraud.
Better than punishing fraud is stopping it before it happens. Jackson County, Oregon has systems in place to make fraud difficult and high risk. What I am describing is how election security is handled here.
One point of presumed vulnerability is a person voting multiple times with counterfeit ballots. The election department does not accept "homemade" ballots. Ballots have a distinctive look and feel. The tabulation machines described in yesterday's blog post require precision uniformity. The election department tracks individual ballots. There are no "surprise" ballots. Ballots are mailed in bar coded envelopes tied to a specific voter and they are returned inside a smaller envelope with the same barcode. A counterfeiter would need to do more than create false ballots. He would need to create false people, with false addresses and false photo IDs at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Return envelope containing my ballot, bar coded to me
A potential vulnerability would be a voter who made a change in registration just prior to an election, with an outgoing ballot already prepared. If the timing were perfect the voter could be sent two ballots in error. However, since ballots are tied to the individual voter, the superseded ballot, if received at the election department, would be immediately flagged and removed. One registration and one legal per person at one time.
The county gets a monthly feed from the Department of Vital Statistics which it uses to delete registrations for deceased voters. Sometimes a death is too close to an election to be flagged and a ballot is mailed to a deceased person. If that person legally voted, then died before election day, the vote is legal. Family members of the deceased who might think to vote that ballot on behalf of the deceased, before or after death, do so at their peril. Upon notice that the person is on the deceased list, dates of death and signatures are readily checked.
Voters sometimes think that ballots sent to an address of someone who has moved out of the house is a ballot sent in error. Not necessarily. Adult children sometimes move out but their move does not necessarily mean they are not eligible to continue to vote at their former home. A person can have a "voter residence" even though they are away in college, the military, or in a new job elsewhere which they consider temporary, even if for an indefinite period. Of course, if they vote somewhere else, they will have changed their voting residence, and that ballot cannot be legally voted.
Oregon participates in a data-sharing arrangement that alerts election officials that people have moved. The system--the Electronic Registration Information System (ERIC)--gathers and shares information with member states. Not every state participates; 31 states do. The system shares driver's license and vehicle registrations, voter registrations, residence addresses, dates of birth, and the last four digits of Social Security numbers. County clerks use this to update and purge files and to investigate if people claim multiple voter registrations.
What should the parents do with a ballot sent to someone who has moved out? So long as that person hasn't registered to vote elsewhere, and the person still considers that address their permanent voter residence, it can be sent to them and be legally voted. The blank ballot might tempt some partisans. What if they fill it out and vote it, an extra "free" vote? It is a felony with a high risk of getting caught. Even if the person is a superb forger of signatures, the person who moved out may vote elsewhere, change a driver's license or otherwise be flagged so that improper vote comes back to the election department as a discrepancy.
Ballot example. Here, signature altered.
Ballots have a signature which appears on the archived and digitalized ballot envelope. Election officials can readily compare the ballot signature with others on file. The bar code system puts the ballot signature right below the signature, both in large format for easy comparison. An investigator also has instant access to the handwriting of others in the household if an anomaly appears. There is an excellent paper trail, all tracking back to specific names and addresses.
Voter fraud in Oregon. In July of last year I asked the Oregon Secretary of State how many examples of voter fraud she investigated in the 2020 election. Her office was oddly reluctant or unable to answer, which I wrote about here. Now they report the information on their own. In 2020 there were 140 cases of reported fraud; four were referred to the Oregon Department of Justice. From 2000-2019 there were 61 million ballots returned and 38 criminal convictions, a .00006% fraud rate.
I suppose people could try to game the system and cast extra ballots or the ballot of another person, but the systems in place make it hard to do and very risky.
Thank you
Very responsive and informative Blog today Peter. Good job !