Right now, lots of noise is being made to sow doubts on a democratic process called elections. The pandemic has highlighted the virtues of postal voting and also its drawbacks.
Taking as an example the voting process in Australia, the ballots are mailed to all those who are enrolled to vote with an envelope to place the ballot. A flap is attached to the envelop containing the details of the voter name and address pre-printed with a must sign declaration of date of mailing the ballot and also put down the date of birth of the voter. This will raise alarm bells ringing all over our heads and rightly so dreading things that can happen if those flaps fall into wrong hands – like loss of privacy or theft of identity.
There is also a provision for the political parties to send the ballot papers to the voter, but the voter can decide either to send it back to the party HQ or send it directly to the electoral commission. If the ballots are received at a political party’s HQ, they must in turn send them to electoral commission before the election closing date. There are dangers of mail fraud if that political party withholds all those mail-in ballots from electoral commission. But there will be heavy penalties for not doing so as electoral commission tracks all those who have not voted seeking an explanation. At that time either the voter or the political party to where the voter claims to have sent the ballot can be tracked and heavily fined. This is because voting is a must for the citizens of Australia.
Since a country like USA does not have such mandatory requirement for voting at an election, it all depends on the electoral commission having a prior knowledge of collections being made by a political party to pursue the submissions. Under these circumstances, mailing ballots to US post would be a preferred choice as the process to count mail-in ballots received through US postal service has much more checks and balances than those received through a political party’s submission to validate that the ballots are indeed genuine.
Back to losing privacy. By not only signing the flap attached to the ballot envelope, but also putting down the date of birth on the flap is a big concern at the outset for me. But again the stringent processes at the electoral commission that requires detaching the flap before opening the envelop ensures the privacy of voting and also ensures the right person is identified as having voted through the identity checks. Here is where, I think, I can find some opportunities that may exist for identity fraud because of the availability of the sensitive data to anyone who wants to mine it. I am still researching this process behind the doors of electoral commission to provide more details on how such thefts may not happen. It will be in my next blog.