• @[email protected]English
    18•10 hours ago

    You sign the envelope that contains the ballot. That way, an election worker can compare the signature on the envelope to your signature on file.

    This is how they make sure that someone didn’t steal the ballot from your mailbox and fill it out for you.

    Once the signature is verified, the envelope is opened and the anonymous ballot inside is removed and stored with all the others. When they are counted, there will be no way to tell who filled out each ballot.

    • @[email protected]
      6•9 hours ago

      When I did absentee voting, the voter signature and voter id information were on a perforated slip attached to the outside of the envelope.

      That way, the process is something like:

      1. Look at the slip. Verify voter signature, eligibility to vote, and mark as having voted in the voter rolls.
      2. Detach perforated slip from sealed envelope. Sealed envelope now contains no identifying information. (This envelope was mailed inside an outer mailing envelope.)
      3. Entire sealed envelope and contents thereof goes into big bin of accepted ballots.
      4. Later, election workers open the sealed envelopes from the bin and run the actual ballot papers through the scantron machine.
    • Tarquinn2049
      3•9 hours ago

      And yet the “scary machines” are too easy to tamper with… they are scared of them because of how hard it would be to get away with tampering with them. And they know their supporters and others in government don’t know any better and will jump on the bandwagon of the machines being vaguely scary.

      • @[email protected]English
        1•7 hours ago

        As I understand it, a fairly bulletproof method is to vote using a machine that prints out a human readable card with a punch through the candidates you voted for. So you can confirm the machine understood the options you tapped and then drop the paper ballot into a secure box, which can be used as a backup for manual recounts.

        Anybody know if this is what the experts [still] want?

        • Tarquinn2049
          1•4 hours ago

          Honestly, while it would certainly help sell it to less technical people. There is no need for a paper copy to make it impossible to get away with tampering with digital voting, building in safeguards entirely digitally is actually enough.

          But yes, most commonly recommended option is to have the machines do a quick result, and then paper to verify.