Ephraim Alfaro, Freshman
Mail-in voting is a system with many problems, but problems that can all be fixed. As with all new systems, it can be expected that they will have many issues, so mail in voting is not necessarily a bad system. It could be, but it is hard to tell until enough information comes out about it. However, it is quite important that the people in charge of mail in voting get the issues fixed because this affects everybody in the United States, and they have to do it fast because they do not have much longer.
One of the less obvious problems with mail-in voting is that the mail can come to the voting office late or does not get to the voting office at all, and it is actually one of the biggest issues with mail-in voting. The way that issues appear is when the U.S. postal service is acting slow and can sometimes be so slow that a ballot being sent by mail gets there too late and is not counted. Along with that, another issue that is talked about in the news is, of course, fraud. Now this is the most talked about and it is important, however it is the smallest of the issues. Being that these are physical ballots, they can be tampered with, which is what allows fraudulency to happen. What happens is the ballots in states that do not require security sleeves can show who the vote is going to. This means that a postal worker, who is very politically motivated on either party, can throw out the ballot going to the candidate on the opposite party and this has happened. The voting process of voting in-mail is very complicated compared to what is normal. There are several sleeves and everything must be written in pen. A lot of people voting by-mail do not know this, and there are many cases of ballots not being put into the security sleeve, which invalidates the ballot. If the signature is not correct or not close enough, the ballot is obviously rejected, but most states do not allow someone to see if their ballot was rejected or not, so if his/her ballot was rejected, they would not know, and even if this person knew, they would not be able to fix the signature.
To fix these issues, there are steps that politicians must make, and they must do quickly, because there are very few days until the election. In order to fix the delays in the mail, the ballots have to be shipped more reliably; so the first thought is to switch to a private mailing service. Throughout history, private endeavors have worked far more efficiently than government run ones, however, using a private mailing service poses its own problem. If it is going through private mail, there is a higher chance of voter fraud by the mailmen because it is harder to see exactly what the company is doing. If a company is politically motivated, they may try to change the election. To fix both of these issues, what would have to happen is that there is a mail service specifically for the ballots during election time, so that the rest of the mail going through the U.S. postal service does not affect the mail-in voting. To make sure that the ballots are not tampered with, all states would have to require a security sleeve to protect the ballot until it gets to the voting office so that there is no way for people to change votes easily. Because the ballots are rejected due to suspected voter fraud, it is important that the voter is informed if their vote was invalidated so that they can fix the ballot and resend it. To make sure that there is less suspected voter fraud where there is not, citizens need to know how to vote by mail properly. There have been advertisements by the government that show how to do it, but that will not get to most people. In order to fix this problem the best method, due to the short time span to fix this, is to directly put directions on the ballot in large bolded letters so that anyone who uses mail-in voting will see the directions and hopefully read the instructions before turning in the ballot.
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