If people vote by mail, each ballot will have genetic residue of the person who voted. In a batch of 1000 ballots, there should be genetic residue of more than 1000 people: the voters, the people who counted the votes and so on.
But if someone creates fraudulent ballots, the entire batch would only have genetic residue of the several people who did it.
Genetic tests cost about $50. It should be enough to test a couple dozen ballots from each batch to be sure, so a couple thousand dollars per batch.
Can this be done, is anyone planning on doing it?
The idea is not to find the fraudsters, but to find whether there was fraud. More tests could be used to find the fraudsters later.
I believe a hundred tests per each batch would be sufficient.
This is more realistic that that stupid retarded watermark isotope larp, but too many people would have touched the ballots during printing/transport/before election/after election to get a meaningful result. How would you distinguish when said sample of however many come in contact with the ballot? There could be so many samples on a single ballot it would take forever to trace them all, just for one ballot. It's not really realistic.
Disagree. Yes, there are dozens of people who came in the contact with the ballots, but still much less than the thousands who have voted. So a real batch of ballots is going to have genetic residue of thousands who have voted plus dozens of printers, mailmen and so on; but a fraudulent batch will have just dozens of fraudsters, printers, mailmen and so on. The two should be easily distinguishable.
The goal at this point is not to find out who the fraudsters are but just to show that there is fraud.