Armstrong: Colorado’s mail voting; modest risk for maximum access
Complete Colorado
Election day is a good time to reflect on how we cast votes. Let’s start with the admission that no system of voting is absolutely impervious to potential fraud and sabotage, so the proper aim is high reliability with good security checks and thorough investigation of problems. Engaging in election fraud or sabotage is a horrible crime that strikes at the heart of our democratic institutions. Making false claims of election fraud also undermines our democracy.
There is no all-knowing, perfectly benevolent deity running our elections. Elections are human institutions, and people sometimes make mistakes, get careless, or act with malice. We can and do achieve a high level of election security.
The Mesa County example
Colorado’s mail voting system dramatically expands voter participation with minimal loss of security. This is a good trade-off. Voting is super easy here. Pretty much any qualified person who wants to vote easily can do so. Voters don’t have to take time off of work, drive to a polling place, wait in line, or any such nonsense. We get our ballots by mail in advance, and we have plenty of time to research the relevant candidates and issues, complete our ballots, and drop off or mail in our ballots. Or people can vote in person if they want.
With our system, people can look up diverse voters’ guides at will. They can talk over the issues with friends and family members. One voter I know set up ChatGPT to help analyze the records of judges in the state. This is all good. Our system promotes not only widespread voting but informed voting.
As the case of voter fraud in Mesa County illustrates, mail voting is not absolutely risk-free. No system of voting is.
CPR offers a good summary of what happened there. Some party stole around a dozen ballots before the recipients got them, then mailed them in. The good news is that only three ballots were processed before the scheme was discovered. Two levels of security help limit such fraud. Officials verify each voter’s signature while the ballot is still sealed. And voters can get notified of when ballots are mailed out and received. These checks ensure that the sort of voter fraud at issue hardly ever happens.
The bad news is that three votes were illegitimately cast. As Matt Crane, executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, explained to Ross Kaminsky, once the ballot is taken out of the envelope, there’s no way to identify a fraudulently cast ballot. Such separation is necessary to preserve the secret ballot, and I don’t think anyone wants to give up such secrecy. The person whose ballot was stolen still gets to vote, but the fraudulent ballot remains in the stack.
As Kaminsky points out, this creates the hypothetical possibility that the fraudulent ballots could flip the results of an election. But it is vanishingly unlikely that three votes could do this. The last congressional race including Mesa County was extremely tight, but Lauren Boebert still won by 546 votes.
Whoever stole the ballots is a terrible person who deserves a long prison sentence for tampering with the election. But let’s not pretend that this case shows a fundamental problem with our system of voting. Again, there’s no perfect system. What this case actually shows is that the existing security checks worked very well. And, now that we’ve seen a case of such fraud, election officials will be all the more alert for problems.
Access matters
Consider a thought experiment that illustrates why voter access matters. Let’s say we have a society of 100 qualified voters. We could have a super-secure system of voting that requires retinal scans, DNA testing, and palm prints for each voter. But then voting would be a major hassle, so maybe only 40 people would vote. Or we could have a relatively secure in-person system with well-monitored government-issued IDs. Maybe 55 people would vote under these rules. Under mail voting, let’s say 70 people vote. So we have to consider, not only the potential for fraud under a system of voting, but the effects that the rules have on voter turnout. Voter fraud disenfranchises people. But rules that reduce voter turnout have the same effect.
And the evidence is in: Mail voting does increase voter turnout. One study finds “a positive overall turnout effect of approximately 8 percentage points.”
Notably, Mesa County Clerk Bobbie Gross complained about the handling of the case in question by Secretary of State Jena Griswold. Gross said (via CPR): “While we understand the Secretary of State’s desire to make public statements, this is our community and our investigation. It is critical that we follow proper procedures to ensure a thorough and effective investigation without tipping off those involved. The people of Mesa County deserve transparency and accountability, but it must be done in a manner that protects the integrity of the investigation.” We’ll have to wait to see how this all turns out legally. (We won’t even get into the problem of Griswold’s office posting voting system passwords online.)
I do still have some minor concerns about mail voting. Specifically, I worry that some people in an abusive relationship might be pressured, or even compelled, to vote a certain way. But I’ve never actually heard evidence of a case of this. If this were found to be a problem, safeguards could be put in place, such as a “hold” period for ballots and a hotline to report problems. But we shouldn’t throw out a system that obviously works very well based on theoretical problems, or even on a handful of real minor problems. Instead, we should rely on election officials to handle issues as they arise. (We should also make it easy for people to escape abusive relationships.)
Thankfully, we are dealing with relatively minor problems, not with arson of ballot boxes, as happened in Washington and Oregon. We can’t expect any election system to always work absolutely perfectly. We want elections that are secure and that also make it easy for qualified people to vote. We should be thankful that we have achieved a system of voting in Colorado that works extremely well.
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.
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