My understanding is absentee ballots are, barring getting lost in the mail or straight up thrown into the trash, safe. They require some kind of verification of state residence or at least properly verifying the person is, ya know, ALIVE.
The states I've voted in all had electronic voting systems that also printed out (like receipt paper) your finished vote. You can't touch the printed copy, it's behind glass, they keep it. But it's extra security for recounting purposes.
Mail-in ballots have no accountability at all. My understanding is you can zerox those suckers and fraud until the cows come home. The only way to make sure they're valid is through the ballot counters. And we've seen how reliable THEY are.
However, I've heard of other states where they use physical, paper ballets that are scanned by a computer to be digitized. I heard of at least one place where the voter fills out paper and then the ballot worker person copies it, and it's the COPY that's counted. All these methods are EXTREMELY dubious and my guess would be that's where a lot of the fraud, outside of mail-ins, happens.
So....... IF by chance this watermarking holds true.... it would be targeting the states that have a weak voting system, that are known to be rife with fraud. Not the places where the voting systems are solid or there's proper vetting. And it wouldn't be counting mail-in ballots, which would be hopelessly easy to forge no matter what they do.
My understanding is absentee ballots are, barring getting lost in the mail or straight up thrown into the trash, safe. They require some kind of verification of state residence or at least properly verifying the person is, ya know, ALIVE.
The states I've voted in all had electronic voting systems that also printed out (like receipt paper) your finished vote. You can't touch the printed copy, it's behind glass, they keep it. But it's extra security for recounting purposes.
Mail-in ballots have no accountability at all. My understanding is you can zerox those suckers and fraud until the cows come home. The only way to make sure they're valid is through the ballot counters. And we've seen how reliable THEY are.
However, I've heard of other states where they use physical, paper ballets that are scanned by a computer to be digitized. I heard of at least one place where the voter fills out paper and then the ballot worker person copies it, and it's the COPY that's counted. All these methods are EXTREMELY dubious and my guess would be that's where a lot of the fraud, outside of mail-ins, happens.
So....... IF by chance this watermarking holds true.... it would be targeting the states that have a weak voting system, that are known to be rife with fraud. Not the places where the voting systems are solid or there's proper vetting. And it wouldn't be counting mail-in ballots, which would be hopelessly easy to forge no matter what they do.
Unless you watermark allthe ballots, how would they know which one of the unmarked ballots are real or not?
Hang on, I found the original discussion. It's way more informative than I am and better thought out: https://thedonald.win/p/11PpBIG1Vk/please-look-at-this-i-think-the-/