Dixie,
Here is a quote from your post I (Barbara McLaughlin) find VERY MISLEADING.
“That was a very good article written by Cyrus Javadi about distrust in our vote by mail election system. I explain the distrust.”
This implies to me that Javadi mistrusts mail in voting in Oregon. Quite the opposite is true.
Here are a couple of quotes from Javadi’s post:
“A 2020 analysis by Oregon’s Legislative Fiscal Office found 38 criminal convictions for voter fraud across 20 years and nearly 61 million ballots cast in Oregon. That works out to roughly 0.000006 percent.
Thirty-eight. Out of 61 million. (How can you not be impressed by that?)”
“Scale matters.
If the problem is microscopic, the solution should be proportionate. Tighten safeguards where needed. Improve auditing. Improve transparency. Improve public confidence.
What you don’t do is redesign the whole system around a statistical speck and then congratulate yourself for saving the republic.”
“Fix what needs fixing. Make it more transparent. Make it easier to understand. Make it easier for lawful citizens to vote. Make it harder for anyone to cheat. That is the standard.
Don’t burn the system down because people are afraid. Fear is useful for spotting danger. It is much less useful for drafting policy.”
Here are some other excerpts from Javadi’s post:
What People Are Actually Afraid Of
Some people are convinced that any ballot counted after Election Day must be suspicious. Some think voter rolls are packed with dead voters, noncitizens, or ghosts with forwarding addresses. Some argue that if a person can make it to Costco, they can make it to a polling place. Others treat convenience itself as proof of corruption.
Underneath all of it is the same assumption: if voting is easy, cheating must be easy too. And that sounds reasonable right up until you think about it for more than six seconds.
I mean, sure, a front door is easy to open with the right key. But, that doesn’t mean the prudent next step is a moat, a drawbridge, and armed sentries asking for your baptism certificate.
No. The real question is not whether voting should be easy or hard as some kind of moral test. The real question is whether it is easy for lawful voters and hard for cheaters.
That should be the standard every time. Voting should be easy, but hard to cheat.
Oregon Didn’t Dream This Up Last Tuesday
A 2003 survey found 81 percent support for Oregon’s vote-by-mail system, including 85 percent of Democrats and 76 percent of Republicans. Oh, and this fun fact: thirty percent said they voted more often after it was enacted.
Security Matters. Hysteria Doesn’t Help.
Now for the part that irritates the absolutists—
Concern about election security is not crazy.
Of course voter rolls should be accurate. Of course signatures should be checked. Of course chain of custody matters. Of course deadlines should be clear. Of course the public should have confidence that lawful ballots are counted and unlawful ballots are not.
But seriousness about security does not require melodrama.
The Numbers Are Not on the Side of Panic
This is where the argument gets awkward for people who talk as though every mailbox in America is an active crime scene.
A 2020 analysis by Oregon’s Legislative Fiscal Office found 38 criminal convictions for voter fraud across 20 years and nearly 61 million ballots cast in Oregon. That works out to roughly 0.000006 percent.
Thirty-eight. Out of 61 million. (How can you not be impressed by that?)
And, the Brookings Institution later found that nationally, mail-voting fraud occurred at an average rate of about four cases per 10 million votes, or roughly 0.000043 percent.
None of that means fraud never happens. It does. Human beings will cheat at anything that offers power, money, or a free toaster.
But scale matters.
If the problem is microscopic, the solution should be proportionate. Tighten safeguards where needed. Improve auditing. Improve transparency. Improve public confidence.
What you don’t do is redesign the whole system around a statistical speck and then congratulate yourself for saving the republic.
Why the SAVE Act Gets It Wrong
That is why the SAVE America Act worries me.
On paper, it sounds simple. Require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. Easy. Clean. Tough. Politically marketable.
But life is not lived on paper.
People change their names. People misplace documents. People don’t have passports. People don’t spend their weekends cheerfully digging through old file boxes to prove to the government that they are, in fact, who the government already generally knows they are.
Only about half of Americans have passports. Critics have also warned that married women whose legal names differ from their birth certificates could face particular problems.
And the broader problem is obvious: if you pile enough documentation requirements onto voting, you will absolutely make it harder for some ineligible people to get through. You will also make it harder for a much larger number of eligible people to get through.
That is not targeted reform.
A good election reform should solve a real problem in a targeted way without sweeping lawful voters into the same trap. Too much of this legislation fails that test.
