The US has the worst voting system intentionally, not accidentally. And mail-in voting shows we aren't even a little serious about election integrity. We're militantly against it: you can get people to rabidly support universal IDs for trivial, nonsensical reasons that have never resulted in significant problems; and to demand digital IDs, device attestation, and real names on social media; but to the same people showing IDs to vote is supposed to be the end of democracy.
People have made this proposal every year since the 90s, and depending on the year it was the Republicans rabidly opposing it or the Democrats rabidly opposing it. Good luck getting things accomplished with a good argument. That's not how things get done. The people who get the final say about this would love to get rid of voting altogether, but they'll settle for vendor kickbacks.
The US doesn’t have a national ID system, so your proposal doesn’t make sense. The closest thing is social security cards but those are not photo IDs.
A signed affidavit or local ID should be fine to establish identity. That can be done when signing up for mail in voting (although I personally prefer in person).
Voter fraud is extremely rare under the current system.
> The US doesn’t have a national ID system, so your proposal doesn’t make sense. The closest thing is social security cards but those are not photo IDs.
RealID is a national ID system (that they pushed since the 90s for no reason), and we're all issued voter IDs when we register as voters.
> A signed affidavit or local ID should be fine to establish identity.
I don't think you understand that people are against showing any ID to vote; if you pull one out, the poll workers' eyes get big and they fall over themselves trying to get you to put it away (I just took it out so you could read my address to pick my precinct, ma'am.) An ID which, very soon, will be required to be a RealID if it isn't already in your state. It is in mine.
I also don't think you really mean that a signed affidavit is enough to establish identity, even though you said it clearly. If you actually do mean what you said, I'd love to hear the argument.
> That can be done when signing up for mail in voting
Mail-in voting allows other people to watch you as you vote, and is the opposite of voter integrity. You should not be able to prove who you've voted for, or else you can be forced to prove who you voted for. This is why you are not allowed to take pictures of your ballot in the voting booth.
There's absolutely no reason to spend any time on open source voting code if you'll allow churches to call their entire memberships in to fill out their mail-in ballots together (under pain of expulsion), or hypothetical gangsters to go door to door threatening to shoot people if they don't give their ballots up.
> Voter fraud is extremely rare under the current system.
1) There is no way to know, and 2) if so, that makes this proposal even sillier.
I personally am very interested in electronic voting and voting algorithms. I've read a million papers and think about it all the time. But this is not a technical problem. There is no country that has a worse voting system than the US. Normal countries don't take weeks to count up the votes.
> we're all issued voter IDs when we register as voters.
I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. I have never been issued a voter ID at the time of registration.
> Mail-in voting allows other people to watch you as you vote, and is the opposite of voter integrity.
Or you could just vote in person which is an option even in universal vote-by-mail states.
> hypothetical gangsters to go door to door threatening to shoot people if they don't give their ballots up.
Why make up hypothetical situations and invent a problem that doesn’t exist? You can just as easily cite made up problems for any proposed solution.
High tech electronic voting schemes and voter ID schemes solve problems that literally do not exist, and frankly do a poor job at solving even those made up problems.
The US has the worst voting system intentionally, not accidentally. And mail-in voting shows we aren't even a little serious about election integrity. We're militantly against it: you can get people to rabidly support universal IDs for trivial, nonsensical reasons that have never resulted in significant problems; and to demand digital IDs, device attestation, and real names on social media; but to the same people showing IDs to vote is supposed to be the end of democracy.
People have made this proposal every year since the 90s, and depending on the year it was the Republicans rabidly opposing it or the Democrats rabidly opposing it. Good luck getting things accomplished with a good argument. That's not how things get done. The people who get the final say about this would love to get rid of voting altogether, but they'll settle for vendor kickbacks.