OK, now I do want to vote by mail

Way back before I created this blog, I used to post on Brian's blog The Modern Troll. My posts there weren't mainly about ecofrugality; I would just toss out thoughts on whatever happened to be on my mind, from the advent of middle age to discovering Jeeves/Wooster slash fiction. And one particular bee that got into my bonnet eleven years back was the extent to which New Jersey's Democratic Party was pestering me to vote by mail. It's not that I objected to the concept; even back then, I was heartily in favor of giving people more options to make it easier for them to vote. But I happened to prefer going to the polls, and it really bugged me that the Democratic Party seemed to want to take away the option of voting not by mail. Or, if not actually take it away, at least try to make me think it was being taken away, and that my only choice was to vote by mail.

Now, even in 2009, voting in person wasn't as much fun for me as it used to be, because New Jersey had switched away from the old-fashioned voting machines with levers — which made a nice satisfying clunk when you pushed them — to newfangled electronic machines, which made only a tinny little beep. But I still felt an emotional connection to the November ritual of going to the polls, standing in line with my neighbors, and going into the booth to participate in the democratic process. It had an emotional and social component that just sticking a ballot in the mailbox seemed to lack. And even when I started hearing that these newer electronic machines weren't as secure as the older ones, I figured the risk of hacking was low enough to be worth running for the sake of that ritual.

But this year, I read an editorial that exposed exactly how insecure those electronic voting machines are. Turns out, the machines I think of as "new" are actually pretty old. The machines themselves date back to around 2000, and they're based on technology from the 1970s. And since the estimated shelf life of the components in these machines is ten years, they're already ten years past their expiration date. Malfunctions are a serious concern — and what makes them more serious is that, if they occur, there's absolutely no way to check, because these machines leave no verifiable paper trail. There's no point demanding a recount with these things, because there's nothing to count.

And glitches aren't the only concern. There's also deliberate hacking. Over ten years ago, a Rutgers professor demonstrated how ludicrously easy it would be to hack one of our antiquated machines in a matter of minutes, with no special tools or programming knowledge. And it's not like it would be hard to gain access to the machines for that long, because between 2004 and 2008, a Princeton professor regularly went into places where voting machines were being stored before elections and photographed himself standing next to the machines, with no security in sight. And it's not like these concerns are farfetched, since we know from a 2019 Senate report that Russian hackers have, in fact, been targeting U.S. "voting infrastructure" at least since 2014.

Now mind you, our state is not unaware of these problems. In fact, it passed a law way back in 2006 requiring all voting machines to produce paper ballots as a backup, and another in 2008 requiring regular audits to compare these paper ballots to the electronic record. And as of the beginning of 2020, the number of New Jersey voting machines in compliance with this law was...zero. (This year, two NJ counties finally upgraded their machines. But Middlesex County, where I live, wasn't one of them.)

The editorial called on New Jersey to use the $10.2 million it had set aside for election security to upgrade voting machines across the state in time for this month's primary. But after hearing that we had already had a law in place requiring secure voting machines for fourteen years and we still didn't have them, I was not prepared to count on the state to get it done by June. So, for the first time, Brian and I filled out applications to vote by mail for this election. (You can sign up for just one election or for all future elections, but if you do that, you can't change your mind unless you "request otherwise in writing," and it's not clear how to do that. So we decided to sign up for mail-in ballots for just this one primary, and then see how things were looking before deciding whether to do the same in November.)

Now, at the time, we knew that our decision to change our mode of voting just over abstract concerns about security might seem quixotic. But now, it seems prescient. Because just a month after we sent away for our mail-in ballets, the COVID crisis hit. Right now, the beloved ritual of going to the polls — standing in line with a bunch of strangers in a room, and then going into a tiny booth and touching the same buttons all the people behind you have touched — looks like a really bad idea.

At this point, I probably wouldn't blame the state if it did tell people that voting by mail was their only option, at least for the upcoming primary, if not for the general election in November. Provided it made sure every registered voter got a mail-in ballot and knew to use it, I would consider this a sensible precaution.

But even if the state isn't doing that, it seems like a really good idea for New Jerseyans to opt for mail-in voting on their own. Aside from the obvious health risks of going to the polls, we've already seen how several other state primaries in the middle of this pandemic (notably Wisconsin's and Georgia's) have been utter fiascos. Why take a risk on a voting system that's never been stress-tested to handle conditions like these, especially when we know it's not secure in the first place, when getting a mail-in ballot is so easy?

We haven't decided yet whether we want to commit in voting in all future elections by mail. But once we've mailed in our first set of mail-in ballots, we'll definitely send in our requests to receive two more for this November's general election. With so much riding on this election and so much uncertainty about what will be going on in the country come November, why would we want to leave our votes to chance?