The filled out ballot is intended to be fully anonymous.
It is then slipped into a security sleeve to make it harder to read within the envelope.
The envelope is sealed and signed by the citizen.
Security is provided by the envelope which is the attestation that the citizen cast their ballot. Offhand, the county voting office is likely required to retain the ballot as part of the state/federal records. I haven't checked but that or a centralized ballot repository are the only things that make sense.
Once the ballot is removed from the envelope, it is just a sheet of paper with votes on it. There's no name, serial number, or signature on it.
Hence "stuffing" in more ballots cannot be detected.
Printing the ballots on security paper will not eliminate this risk, but it will make it much harder.
I don't know if there is an auditable "chain of custody" of ballots from mailbox to the counting center. The fraud here would be "losing" ballots that are from precincts that tilt significantly in one direction or another.
There's bigger issue than stuffing. In "rural" Hungary chain voting is customary where people are taken to the voting place by gangs and are either awarded with some money or a bag of potatoes, or threatened to be beaten if they do not comply. The first voter of the chain goes in, takes the ballot, hides it and takes it out. It is then pre-filled by the gang. The next voters take the prefilled ballot in, throw it in the box and bring a fresh clean ballot out, and so on...
In other cases, people get money/bag of potatoes for a photo of their correctly filled ballot.
That sounds good. But it doesn't account for the ballot from your mail box to the processing center. Nor does it check citizenship & residency status. Ballot harvesting is also legal and takes place in Washington state.
>The envelope is sealed and signed by the citizen.
Alas, the signature must reasonably match one on file (from somewhere ... presumably a state ID) or the ballot may be rejected. Since human signatures can vary wildly for reasons, this non-deterministic feature requires a human guess for -each- ballot. No mechanism to dispute that decision.
Mine has been disputed several times (because it changed due to name change and wasn't updated). There is a very clear mechanism to dispute that decision, and in fact that's why they ask for your phone number and/or email on the envelope--so when they want to dispute it, they have a way of contact for you to do what's necessary to make the ballot count (provisionally, only if the race is close enough for your vote to matter).
It is then slipped into a security sleeve to make it harder to read within the envelope.
The envelope is sealed and signed by the citizen.
Security is provided by the envelope which is the attestation that the citizen cast their ballot. Offhand, the county voting office is likely required to retain the ballot as part of the state/federal records. I haven't checked but that or a centralized ballot repository are the only things that make sense.