Denys Beecher

Hi Scott! FWIW: SA: "You wouldn't know if a postal worker discarded mail-in ballots from a Red zip code." SR: Yes you would. People can track their ballots to see if they get back to tabulation center. And if an entire precinct didn't vote, the jurisdiction would investigate. It would look really weird on the partisan density maps (that you see on all the television networks) if all the sudden there was just a big whole. SA: "You wouldn't know if the millions of overseas ballots that require no identification are even cast by Americans." SR: Military and overseas ballots require identification verification, just like other mail ballots. For example, we do signature verification on these return ballot packets. And there aren't "millions of overseas ballots" even across all 50 states. There were approximately 890,000 military and overseas votes in the 2020 general election. Across the WHOLE COUNTRY. SA: "You wouldn't know if a state actor and an insider accomplice hacked voting systems." SR: I'm not sure what you mean by "voting system," but if you mean ballot tabulation systems, then almost all states do post-election tests of tabulation equipment. This often includes a post-election hand count audit performed by the political parties to make sure that tabulators accurately read the ballots. It also ignores that tabulation systems are under lock and key and 24/7 video surveillance and usually have other physical security impediments. Additionally, the software is typically state and federally certified and isn't as manipulable as simply rewriting a line of open access C++ code. SA: "You wouldn't know if someone printed fake ballots and inserted them into the process." SR: If a voter votes in person, he is given one ballot that is specially designed to be compatible with the tabulator. The voter marks his ballot and then feeds the ballot into the tabulator himself. If a voter votes by mail ballot, the ballot must come back in a return envelope that is linked to a particular voter through a barcode. Election offices don't accept loose ballots dropped off at the doorstep. That barcode ensures that each voter only votes once. Once the return mail envelope is verified, bipartisan teams remove the ballot from the envelope, and they keep a log of the number of batches in ballots. When it goes to tabulation, the number of ballots read by the tabulator needs to match the number of ballots in the batch according to the log. This process is done by bipartisan workers and overseen by partisan observers. SA: "You wouldn't know the extent of ballot harvesting in states where it is illegal." SR: I agree that small scale ballot harvesting is exceptionally hard to police. For example, if your neighbors fill out their ballots, put them in their return envelopes, sign their return envelopes, then give them to you, and then you drop them off at the USPS two weeks before the election, then that is ballot harvesting according to many state laws, and it is very hard to police. That being said, if you started knocking on every door in your neighborhood, even the doors of the neighbors you don't know, and saying "hey, give me your ballot," then I find it hard to believe that none of these neighbors would call the police or an election office. If you tried to steal a whole bunch of ballot packets out of the mail, you'd also have to come up with decent imitations of the voter's signature, and I find it hard to believe that a whole bunch of voters would say nothing about their ballots not arriving in the mail. As soon as the intended voter says anything, the original ballot packet would be cancelled, and a new one would be sent to a voter. If this happened to an entire neighborhood, it would be investigated. Have a nice day.