Mail-in Ballot Attack
Ampersand lives in Oregon, which does its voting entirely by mail. On Monday—the day a lot of Oregon voters got their ballots—someone knocked over Ampersand’s “No on 36” sign and stole his mailbox, presumably hoping to get his ballot and prevent him from voting “no” on Amendment 36. In fact, he’d happened to receive his ballot the previous Saturday, but it could easily have worked.
From “Alas A Blog”
On Monday, someone came into our yard, knocked over our “No on 36” sign, and stole our mailbox (with Monday’s mail inside it).
I doubt this was just random vandalism; Oregon mailed out voter ballots last week (Oregon does the vote entirely by mail), and a huge number of Oregonians got their ballots on Monday. So I think someone grabbed our mailbox and ran hoping that they’d get our ballots and thus keep us from voting against measure 36.
I doubt this was part of any widespread effort. Surely anyone doing it on a large scale would get tired of hauling off mailboxes, and just steal the mail inside. It’s also hard to avoid getting caught, since you have to steal the mail during the day—after it’s delivered but before the resident comes home to get it.
Still, it is interesting how the predictably timed mailing of ballots, and the prevalence of political lawn signs, enables a very narrowly targeted attack.
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Israel Torres • October 29, 2004 3:29 PM
this is a prime example of how simple the mechanisms in play are with almost anything done on a mass scale. This includes drivers licences, social security cards, credit cards, receiving boxes of checks, packages (ups/fedex)… the original design was to make it easy not secure. So when someone puts it together that it really is this easy to screw over “a system”, and maybe even “the system” and that opportunity presents itself to benefit the exploiter then it is an action hard to deny oneself. Sure, it doesn’t make it right. But perhaps it shouldn’t be made to make it so easy. And enter catch-22.
Israel Torres