How does US "early voting" works logistically speaking ?

Submitted ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Ziggurat@sh.itjust.works⁩ to ⁨nostupidquestions@lemmy.world⁩

I’ve seen picture of US lemming already voting, How does that even work

I volunteered a few time to run a voting station in France, one of the first stuff I learned is always have two persons near the ballot box. If a dishonest person is alone, it’s pretty easy to add a few ballots in the box and sign near the name of persons who are too sick/old to go voting in person.

Logistically speaking, it’s in general not too hard to find enough volunteers (especially on a Sunday) to keep an eye on the vote from Let’s say 7:30 when the empty box is sealed to 22:30 when counting is done and you’ve signed the paperwork. But this work if the vote occurs only over one day.

I see US-Americans voting almost 2 weeks before the election, how does it happen practically, do you have enough volunteer to run ballot station for 2 weeks ? Are civil servant paid to do so ? How do you make-sure nobody tampers the box at night ?

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ricecake@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
The exact specifics vary based on the state, but it’s roughly the same in each of them.
You track the voter, ballot, collection and counting.

Voter A issued ballot 3. Ballot 3 collected Ballot 3 counted.

The counting phase involves removing the tracking number from the ballot before removing a cover that keeps the vote private.

You can’t slip an extra ballot into the box because then the totals don’t add up, and you know where in the process the discrepancy occurred.
Making sure there are multiple eyes on issuing and counting means it’s hard to create or count a fake ballot.
When not observed by multiple people, the containers are locked with multiple locks with keys held by different people.

It’s why most voter fraud is a voter going to multiple valid voting locations to vote multiple times. Once the tabulations begin, you see you counted the number collected, collected the number issued, and that you issued one ballot to each voter except one, who got three.

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- themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  How do people vote at different locations? Here we are only registered to vote in a single location, if we’re away then we have to go to the police station and sign a delegation form to allow a trusted person to vote for us in the original location.
  
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  - Sequentialsilence@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Where I am there’s simply too many people to have a single location, so there are 4 different locations you can vote at in the district.
    
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  - ricecake@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I have an assigned voting location, but there are several in my district that are all “valid”, and I was just assigned the one closest to my house. If I were to be confused and go to a valid location I wasn’t assigned to, I’m still in the ledger. Since I’m attempting to vote in the correct district, they don’t really have grounds to turn me away.
    
    If I were in the wrong district, I’m still allowed to cast a provisional ballot, which lets you vote but they sort it out later.
    
    You can also vote absentee and then also in person and not disclose that you need to invalidate the absent vote. Here that’s automatic, but in some places it’s a crime.
    
    You’re also allowed to go to a clerks office, which has the equipment to print any ballot and handle it correctly.
    
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- ryathal@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  This sounds nice in theory, but there’s a county in my state which hasn’t had a good count in my lifetime. All the collected ballots still get counted, and because the count doesn’t match a recount can’t be conducted by rule. Once ballots are in the box it’s functionallly impossible to determine illegitimate ones. There’s definitely legitimate mistakes that can cause that, but it’s essentially impossible to prove it was fraud and not losing a few stubs, a missing spoiled ballot, or someone just keeping a ballot that were merely accidental.
  
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  - ricecake@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    What county is that? That sounds like the type of discrepancy that you don’t hear about often.
    
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Deceptichum@quokk.au ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
How would a dishonest person add extra? Here in Australia you go in, get signed off on a book, and they give you a piece of paper for your voting preferences. You don’t get unlimited papers to vote multiple times.

For early voting they mail us out a sheet and envelope, and we mail it back.

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- Squirrelsdrivemenuts@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  The person giving out the papers would be the dishonest one in this case. He could grab papers for himself or hand out more than one to a friend.
  
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- Ziggurat@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  How would a dishonest person add extra? Here in Australia you go in, get signed off on a book, and they give you a piece of paper for your voting preferences. You don’t get unlimited papers to vote multiple times.
  
  My hypothesis is that the dishonest person is an official, so they can be the person giving the ballots/envelope, they were present when we opened the box with ballots/envelope to put them on the table, and have access to the box where they’re stored to refill the table over the day. So getting ballots/envelope is quite easy, and all in less than 2 minutes you can put them in the box and sign near a sick/old person name. Looks like even easier if you close/open the voting office every morning/evening for a week, and store the box for the night. So I am curious about the safeguards.
  
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  - originalfrozenbanana@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    In general that would be pretty easy to identify. If the number of votes were large enough to impact an election you’d see voting numbers that are far greater than you expect based on the population and demographics of the area served by a particular voting office. In addition you’d see counts greater than you expect when certain people are working but not for others.
    
    In addition usually you have to check in at a desk or table to get your ballot. An official dishonestly stuffing the ballot box would also have to somehow fabricate real voters checking in at the desk, or else there’d be more ballots than people who checked in and they’d identify the fraud. Where I live you check in with your ID card so unless the official had a bunch of IDs of valid registered voters they’d be caught.
    
    Lastly voting fraud is a crime pretty much everywhere, so getting caught is bad.
    
    A more realistic version of voting fraud is what is being planned in the US: getting supporters of a candidate (in this case Trump) to volunteer at voting locations and having those people fabricate evidence of fraud. This can just be their testimony, but it can be used later in lawsuits to give face value validity to accusations that the election was stolen, and used as justification for violence or a coup. This is what Trump tried, poorly, in 2020. They will try better in 2024.
    
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  - Kelly@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    sign near a sick/old person name
    
    With postal voting and mobile polling places the sick and elderly are given opportunities to vote in Australia.
    
    Even without those facilities it would take a fair bit of effort to identify and sign for a statistically significant number of sick/elderly.
    
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grue@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Early voting is consolidated into fewer locations than the voting precincts on Election Day.

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HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
There are two types of early voting.

For in person voting, the local election board opens up fewer voting locations before the election. If approved, you can vote there and then instead. A lot of states eliminated any requirements to early voting after Covid.

For mail-in voting, the ballot gets mailed through USPS to voters. The ballots are usually supplied with an envelope with a way to verify identity, usually with signature. From there, the voter has the option to either mail the ballot back or directly deliver it to specific drop boxes.

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Mostly_Gristle@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
In my state (Colorado) early voting works exactly like regular voting, just, you know, earlier. Registered voters get their ballots automatically sent to them in the mail. You can return your ballot by mail, drop it off at an official drop box, drop it off at a voting location, or you can show up at one of the early voting locations in your county and vote in person the traditional way if you prefer that. Right now in my county there are six locations where you can do in-person early voting. There will orders of magnitude more in-person voting locations open on the day of the election, but I think most people choose return their ballots by mail or drop box.

Every voting/counting location is staffed with a bipartisan team of election judges, and election observers. I believe the locations are run by paid county officials, but largely staffed by volunteers who have completed a training program. I’ve never heard of there being a shortage of volunteers

The voting drop boxes are big reinforced steel boxes which are securely anchored into concrete. You would need some seriously heavy duty cutting tools to get one open without the key. They are placed in front of city offices like City Hall, the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the city library. They’re usually in open high traffic areas, and are under 24/7 video surveillance. I believe they’re also emptied multiple times per day. I wouldn’t say they’re impossible to tamper with, but it would be extremely difficult to do so and get away with it. To my knowledge, so far nobody has tried. I’m not actually sure what it would really accomplish. I guess you could destroy ballots, but stuffing one with counterfeit ballots would probably be caught almost immediately.

There’s a pretty robust system in place to track who has cast a ballot, how, when, and where. If multiple ballots show up in the name of the same voter, that gets automatically flagged and triggers a fraud investigation. Also there’s signature verification system. Every ballot that’s returned by mail or drop box must be returned in its security envelope, which has the name of the voter and several unique QR and bar codes containing information tying that envelope to that specific voter. This envelope must be signed by the voter for the ballot to be counted. If the signature on the security envelope doesn’t match the signature on file, the ballot gets flagged for investigation, and doesn’t get counted until the voter can be contacted to verify it was them casting the ballot and not someone pretending to be them. Voter fraud is really pretty rare here, but it’s taken very seriously, and gets seriously investigated. When it does happen it’s usually someone trying to cast the ballot of a deceased spouse, or family member, and even that usually gets caught.

There are a lot of safeguards and redundancies in place here that make getting away with voter fraud extremely difficult, but lot of the reason why our system works as well as it does is that people genuinely care about their votes being fairly counted and so are willing to staff and fund the offices who investigate voting irregularities. Our voting system is considered kind of the gold standard for the United States, and I’m lucky to live in a place that has that. Voting systems in other parts of the US are unfortunately not run with the same vigilance or sense of equity.

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