Spencer: Vote By Mail Introduces Security Risk

If Vote By Mail and party registration become law, a huge security issue at rural mailboxes will be the downside, as the completed ballots are being sent back to the Clerk.

In Oregon, 29% of the completed ballots were received back on a single day (Oregon primary May 16, 2006). This means that a person armed with a list of people who voted for a specific party (D or R) could steal the completed ballots of the opposing party members from the rural or otherwise vulnerable mailboxes, and there would be up to a 29% chance that those ballots would be there waiting to be picked up by the carrier or anybody who wanted to steal them.

Unless they were caught in the act, if they destroyed those ballots nobody would realize there was a problem. People who have never had a problem with stolen mail would not think about this vulnerability, and they would never realize that their completed ballot had been stolen and their vote had not been counted. There is no fix to this gap in security.

Larry Spencer

DFO: Larry ran this by me this afternoon in a phone call. I believe the risk is minimal. I don’t think that states who have adopted a vote-by-mail approach are having trouble with this sort of fraud. Also, I’d hate to be the party operative fool who got caught raiding mailboxes to steal ballots. However, he does raise an interesting point.