Look, I'm a libertarian. For many or most of us, voting is a moral question: am I agreeing to abide by an electoral decision which impairs my own liberty, perhaps by either major candidate for office? That's not a real choice; it's imposed on me by a corrupt legally protected/privileged duopoly. Cafe Hayek's Don Boudreaux, perhaps my favorite free market economist. provides a more comprehensive and meticulously articulated response here,
Let me point out, provided a paraphrased argument he doesn't explicitly make, that neither Trump nor Biden will retreat from a foreign interventionist policy which is unwanted, unsustainable, and unconstitutional, neither of them will deal with long-overdue unfunded entitlement liability reform when entitlements account for over two-thirds of the federal budget, that neither are committed to a balanced budget or to the limited role of the Presidency as envisioned by the Founding Fathers. Both are protectionists, private-sector interventionists and are immigration-restrictionists, and both favor a law-and-order perspective at the expense of individual liberty. I have to somewhat qualify the reference to immigration; Biden is certainly more reasonable on policy than Trump's cartoonishly bad/xenophobic immigration policies, but he is an unrepentant labor-protectionist who believes in anti-market quotas, e.g., see here.
I've made it clear in posts and tweets that I'll be voting for LP nominee Jo Jorgensen. I recognize that she's unlikely to win even a single state, with available polls showing 2 to 3% support, perhaps less than Johnson's 2016 numbers. But as Boudreaux would point out, I'm doing my fair share to promote a pro-liberty perspective.
Now to a certain point, I've discussed Internet voting which has been done in a very limited fashion e.g., in West Virginia and New Jersey. There are a lot of cybersecurity nuances here, but to summarize some of the basic issues: the voter-owned device may be infected with malware, which could modify the ballot in question from the voter's own choices; the transport of the ballot to the destination could be intercepted, diverted and/or a substitute ballot could replace the original; and/or denial of service attacks on destination hosts may make it difficult for ballots to be submitted in a timely fashion. There are some promising platform innovations, such as a Microsoft open source initiative allowing voters to verify their ballots and device security attestation software from mobile operating system vendors.
Of course, it is possible to run a voting system on a dedicated network, develop hardened secure ballot software and/or maintain special terminal voting labs where access to machines and software is carefully controlled and robustly maintained for security purposes. You could also have a voter show up at a designated office with his printed ballot where an elections clerk could ID the voter and cross-check a detachable issued unique ballot ID.
So the current kerfuffle is over Vote-By-Mail systems. I don't doubt that Trump wants to sow doubt about the upcoming election results on which he could dispute an adverse outcome. And there are no doubt nuances to systems used among the states deploying variations and I don't want to focus on technicalities. But there are several steps here: the ballot has to be distributed to its intended valid voter; each valid voter is entitled to one vote; that vote must be reliably counted.
There are a lot of things that can happen. I'm not going to make an exhaustive summary here, just a few examples to make my point. For example, some voters complain they never got their ballot. Maybe somehow the ballot got intercepted by someone who fraudulently used the ballot for his or her own reasons. Another example is a completed ballot never made it back in usable form to the elections office. Maybe it got lost in the mail, something happened to the ballot itself--it got burned or water-damaged, etc. A lot of these things are controlled for in a traditional polling place. Usually when I vote there is separation of duties: someone verifies my ID, another person hands me a ballot, another stop is to deposit the completed ballot. These steps don't really happen in a Vote By Mail system; we lose some integrity checks on the system. Note: I'm not arguing you can't have fraud under traditional in-person voting. I'm just saying you don't have those safeguards in effect, and there are ways to exploit those vulnerabilities. And election officials know it. As I implied in an earlier tweet, they don't want citizens to panic or to lose faith in an election's results.
So now the leftists are basically accusing Trump of trying to manipulate the election by retiring letter sorters. As I pointed out in earlier tweets, the USPS has a dwindling cash cow of first-class mail. You simply don't need the capacity. Their package delivery service is more profitable and they are trying to allocate space to address that side of the business. Now the conspiracy theory is that Trump is manipulating this transition to hobble Vote By Mail. Granted, he's been attacking Vote By Mail for several weeks now. What I've been hearing is the USPS insists it can handle the rush; it's issued warnings in part because Vote By Mail is of an unexpectedly large scope and a lot depends on the duration of ballot distribution and voter turnaround. But there are ways to work around any dependence on USPS, e.g., free-standing ballot receptacles.
