Brian, our daughter received "official," that is New Jersey state and local governmental information, including postcards about voting (polling places, dates, etc.) for five years after she left New Jersey, settled in Minnesota and had registered to vote there. She had to send a notarized request to be removed, or she would have been removed after a certain number of years and required to re-register if she wanted to vote.
Now those were the days before widespread mail-in voting was possible, but of course absentee voting - which she had done during her college years in Minnesota - was possible.
Beloved Spouse, a long-time member of the League of Women Voters and two-term president of the local New Jersey chapter, wondered about the possibility of voting in more than one venue. Through the national League of Women Voters we learned that most states had various safeguards in place to keep the voting rolls "clean." And remember that states manage and run elections, so may handle it different ways.
Some bottom line conclusions.
From then.
-If it were possible for some people to vote in two venues, it would only be for an incredibly small number of persons. Vote in Massachusetts at 9 am., and dash across the border to New Hampshire and vote again at 3 p.m., that sort of thing.
-Almost all states have some ways of removing inactive - that is, moved or deceased - voters from the list of registered voters. And if the removal is not complete, the possibility of an organized attempt to use those voters to swing an election is small.
Today.
Mail-in voting today has brought in more safeguards, we were told by workers at the polling place where Beloved Spouse and I cast our ballot.
We had requested mail-in ballots. But before they arrived, we decided to vote in person because Minnesota has the possibility of early voting, and we knew that the post office was being manipulated to prevent ballots from being received on time.
At the polling place we filled out essentially the same form we had used to request the mail-in ballot. We asked what we should do when our ballots arrived in the mail, as they were to be sent out three days hence.
"Just tear them up and throw them away," the poll worker said.
"Can't cast them anyway?" I said, making it clear I was joking.
The poll worker said the envelope she had just given me had a bar codes on it. I would put my ballot in that envelope and that is what would go in the ballot box. The counters would scan the bar code on the envelope, which would then mean that my vote had been cast, just as if I had signed in at the polling place on election day.
The mail-in ballot would also have a bar code. Should I try to cast it, the machine would reject it because I had already voted. A complex system built into the technology kept anyone from knowing how I had voted in early voting, it only told them that I had voted.
And there was a way we could go online and find out - using our state ID, or other official ID number - that our votes had been received and tallied (which of course we did).
My conclusions, assuming most states have similar protections
-Mail-in voting can be protected much easier than in person voting.
-It would be extremely difficult to "stuff the ballot" box through mail-in voting
-Those who want to do nasty things might have ways of preventing mailed ballots from reaching counters, although it would be hard to do that on a massive scale. And I could find out if my ballot had not reached the counters.
So, folks...
It remains my not-so-humble opinion that the possibility of massive voter fraud today would be difficult. It would certainly be very hard to swing a vote by many hundreds, let alone thousands and thousands of phony ballots.
And we all know, since we read a variety of news sources, that no one today has provide any evidence or even hints of evidence that there were tens of thousands of invalid votes cast in any state. Some legal challenges to this year's presidential voting have already been laughed out of court because of this.
