Hi,
Michael R wrote that you can call the county office to see if your vote
has been received. But telephones don't generally work that way. You
can call and hear someone tell you your vote was received. Shouldn't
that be considered rather weak evidence? Wouldn't the county and the
person you call have a strong incentive to claim your vote was counted
(and counted accurately) regardless of whether it was? What evidence is
really available, and how hard is it for voters or election monitors to
inspect?
As for voting by mail, it also has minor downsides: votes can be coerced
or sold, and electioneering can occur near where someone is trying to
vote. Hopefully those behaviors can't be large enough to make a difference.
When the Caltech/MIT Voting Project issued some voting system design
recommendations a few years ago, they ruled out publishing the votes in
a way that would make it possible for the voter to verify her vote was
counted accurately. Mike Alvarez of Caltech told me the reason for that
decision was to make it impossible to coerce or sell votes. I think
they overlooked an alternative: allowing each voter to submit multiple
votes that would all be verifiable by the voter, but only one would
count and only the voter would know which is the one that counts. That
would solve the coercion/sale problems since the voter would be free to
also cast a "sincere" vote that negates the coerced/sold vote, which
would eliminate the value of coerced/bought votes, and thereby eliminate
the incentives to coerce or buy votes.
Regards,
Steve Eppley
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[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
You can call the county election office at any time to see if your vote has
been received. The ballots are only counted on election day, and are secured
beforehand. There are two envelopes -- a return envelope and a sealed secrecy
envelope holding the ballot. On election day, all secrecy envelopes are
separated from their return envelopes to ensure the vote remains secret.
Here is some more info on it: http://www.sos.state.or.us/executive/votebymail/
--- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
From: "Raph Frank" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Michael Rouse" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [EM] Happy election day, fellow Americans
Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2008 21:40:14 +0000
On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 2:45 PM, Michael Rouse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Well, and brag that in Oregon, we have universal vote-by-mail, so we can
lounge around with a beer in one hand and a voter pamphlet in the other
while filling out our ballot. :)
... and cross your fingers that the vote is actually counted? ...
though knowing nothing about Oregon, maybe that isn't an issue.
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