Title: New York, New Jersey Mail-in Voting Problems May Foreshadow Difficulties in Upcoming Presidential Vote
Headings: New York, New Jersey Mail-in Voting Problems May Foreshadow Difficulties in Upcoming Presidential Vote
Politics
New York, New Jersey Mail-in Voting Problems May Foreshadow Difficulties in Upcoming Presidential Vote
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Unreliable
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States Adopting Mail-in Ballots
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Content: The Unrecognized Unreliability of Voting by Mail.” “While voting fraud is the most commonly cited problem with vote-by-mail, it is only one aspect of the issues plaguing the integrity of elections nationwide,” Alabama Today reported. “Yasinsac’s research breaks down some of the most frequent problems. Among them, common procedural errors such as those that contributed to an estimated 4.2% percent of invalid ballots in the Minnesota 2008 elections. Yasinsac describes these as, ‘Common errors include failure to sign, signing in the wrong place, and improper packaging (e.g., husband and wife bundling two absentee ballots in the same envelope).’” Mail-in voting programs also consistently experience ballots arriving late to elections offices because of postal processing delays, as well as election fraud, lost ballots, and under- or over-counted ballots because of mishandling by election officials, according to the paper. Yasinsac, a computer science professor, writes in his paper that voting-by-mail, or VBM, “is inherently unreliable.” “Worse yet, it disenfranchises discernable constituencies that can influence electoral results, causing other than the voter’s choice to determine winners.” He states it is “fundamentally more difficult to ensure the validity of VBM ballots (one person-one vote) than for those cast in person, both because it is more difficult to strongly authenticate the voter (Voter Authentication) and to bind a ballot to the identified voter (Ballot Attribution).” Voter privacy can also suffer during the VBM process.