There's one last aspect related to human factors that I want to talk about today.
And, this encompasses aspects both of, usability and of human factors.
This is the idea that, since voters are, are people, they have to somehow get to the
polling place in order to be involved in the standard kinds of voting processes
we've talked about. And there's an alternative to that though,
the way to make accommodations for voters who can't get there.
And, this is the idea of absentee voting. So why might voters not be able to make it
to the polls? There are a number of things that are
commonly accepted by election jurisdictions as excuses, things like the
voter is sick or hospitalized or immobilized.
Maybe the voter is traveling and, just not in the jurisdiction where the election is
taking place on election day. Or maybe the voter is stationed in the
military and is out of the area, perhaps even abroad.
In 22 states, excuses like these are required.
But 28 states allow absentee voting without any kind of excuse.
And both excused and non-excused absentee voting or systems that have been adopted
in many other countries. So if whether an excuse is required or
not, there are several forms that an absentee voting accommodation could take.
One form is called early voting. And this just means we're going to allow
the voter to show up at the poll some number of days before the scheduled
election. Now, this has some security implications,
because for instance with DREs that means that we have to be supervising the
machines in the field in order to assure a chain of custody for a much longer period
of time. That same precaution applies of course to
paper ballot boxes as well. Someone has to be supervising them if
they're going to be available for early voting.
Another possible accommodation is voting by proxy.
In many places, you can appoint someone else to cast your vote for you.
Now, of course, this has both integrity concerns because you have to trust that
person to actually vote the way you asked them to, and ballot secrecy concerns since
you're telling someone else how you intend to vote.
Finally, there's a third class, and this is probably the most common, and this is
called remote voting. Remote voting takes many different forms,
but the one that most of us know best is postal voting, or vote by mail.
Vote by mail means that you're going to receive a ballot, probably in the mail
addressed to your registered address, you fill it out at home and either mail it
back or drop it off. Most states allow vote by mail for, for
absentee voting but it, it turned out that in some states where, it turns out that in
some states where vote by mail is allowed without an excuse it's gotten very
popular. Something like 30 percent of California
ballots in recent elections have been submitted via postal voting.
But two states, Washington and Oregon, took things a step further.
Voters in those states decided that they'd like to make the, almost the entire
election process take place by mail. And so vote by mail is essentially the
method of voting that almost everybody uses in both of those states.
There are a few reasons why voters wanted to do this.
One was that vote by mail is thought to be more convenient since you can do it from
home and you don't have to go to a polling place, etcetera.
But maybe the, the, argument that most resonated with civic minded people was the
belief that allowing universal vote by mail would increase voter turnout.
Now that both states have had several election cycles, to, to look at this, and,
and see what the effects have been. We can look back and ask whether voter
turnout actually increased. The signs are mixed.
Oregon initially had a spike but then things seemed to level off and return to
their earlier levels. Washington State also has seen mixed
results, so perhaps actually the jury is still out on whether vote by mail as a
universal voting system actually does have a positive effect on turnout in the
long-run. Vote by mail, however, also has security
implications. And let me give you an example of a way a
system like this might work, so you can try to figure some of those out for
yourself. So, the voter fills out their ballot at
home after receiving it in the mail. And it comes with a set of two nested
envelopes. The ballot goes directly into an inner
privacy envelope. And then that privacy envelope is sealed,
and put into an outer mailing envelope that's addressed to the election
officials, and is signed by the voter. So the signed outer envelope is what the
election officials use to make sure that the voter was entitled to cast a vote.
But the inner privacy envelope isn't opened until the ballots have been
shuffled and it's time to count them. This provides some amount of privacy from
the election officials so they can't just look at every ballot and see the name on
it, for instance, and see who voted. But there's still security concerns even
with this system. So let's see if you can figure some of
them out. Try to think for yourself what could go
wrong. Vote by mail raises a number of security
concerns especially when it's practiced so widely as in many US states.
One concern is ballot misdirection. As we saw in an earlier lecture if an
attacker can change the voter's registered address and cause their ballot to be
delivered somewhere else, that can potentially disenfranchise voters or be
used even to steal their votes. Another issue is theft of blank ballots.
Even if your ballot is delivered to the correct address, it could be stolen out of
your mailbox or out of the mail system. Another question is whether the va-, the
ballot that you voted is going to make it back to the election officials.
You could imagine a dishonest letter carrier discarding ballots from a
neighborhood that would be likely to vote for a certain candidate based on
demographics for instance. Another issue is vote buying.
Since your ballot is blank, you just need to sign the outer envelope.
You could sign it and then sell the blank ballot and envelope to a criminal.
This is something that vote by mail makes super easy.