Quote (Goomshill @ Oct 9 2020 01:43pm)
Signature matching is not a reliable form of security for an election. The false positive and false negative rates are so astoundingly unacceptable that it winds up being just ignored in practice most elections. If I submitted my vote by mail this election, I estimate 20%+ chance it wouldnt be received and 40%+ chance if received they'd say my signature doesnt match and discard it, because my signature is a mess
This is one major league fuckup. You cant just put the cat back in the box here. What will happen to these 50000 ballots? When thet mail out 50000 more, will votes be cast twice? Who will resolve the conflicts?
The false negative rate is indeed very high. The false positive rate is almost non-existent because the threshold for matching is so high. So yes, hundreds of thousands of people are disenfranchised each election and we have tons of evidence of that. However, how many people wouldn't vote otherwise since voting by mail is so much easier to do? You win more than you lose if your goal is to turn out the vote. Convenience has a cost and if your signature is messy, you should find other ways to vote.
Quote (Santara @ Oct 9 2020 01:39pm)
Whether the signature matches or not is not what I'm concerned about. As was previously noted, how closely do you think tired election workers are going to be when matching them?
I want to know how they could possibly catch the person who fraudulently returned someone else's ballot.
I imagine the vote will be rejected since they reject a substantial amount of legitimate votes. In terms of catching the person, it depends on the type of error. If it's a clerical error, they have the actual address on file. If it's a postal error, it would be more difficult and it depends how badly the post office fucked up.