[conspire] Alameda County Overseas Ballot QR Code

[Nick Moffitt]

On 09Sep2021 05:13pm (-0700), Rick Moen wrote:
>   Any voters who've lost or never received their ballots have in California,
>   since November 2020, a fallback option:  the RemoteAccessible Vote by
>   Mail[1] (RAVbM) ballot, which you print out at home and then vote.  

The comms on this have been a bit rocky for overseas voters, but we finally got ourselves on whatever e-mail list sends out the link.  I would expect that military bases have drives to promote this sort of thing, but we've never really been plugged into much of an ex-pat community here.

It helps that I now know to just bookmark the acvote.org site as my registration will likely always stay in Alameda County.

>   RAVbM was created in 2017 specifically for active military and
>   overseas voters, but starting 2020 can be used by any California voter.
>   If you opt for such a ballot, you attest online that you're registered
>   and provide your driver's license / state ID information and date of
>   birth to authenticate your identity, fill out and return RAVbM paperwork
>   by election day, your ballot selections will be transferred to an
>   official ballot by election workers, and the county election system will
>   void the voter's official ballot (when the voter self-authenticates to
>   elect RAVbM balloting), so that nobody can also vote the voter's
>   official ballot.
[...]
> I hope that accords with your experience so far, because you at this point
> doubtless know more about RAVbM than I do.  I'd only barely heard of it, but
> suddenly was hearing far-right claims that it's a major vehicle for vote
> fraud, and so looked far enough into its basics to give a basic description
> and sufficient reasons for readers to see for themselves that the fraud
> claims were yet more bushwah.

This is pretty much it.  I first had to provide: 

 * My legal name and birthdate
 * My California address from my entry in the voting register (not my mailing address)
 * The last four digits of my SSN :rolling-eyes-emoji:
 * a (fake) driving licence number (since I have never in my life learned to drive), which seems to be any seven-digit number preceded by an 'A'.  I've seen A0000000 and A1234567 recommended in different guides.

This then got me to an eight-page PDF in English and Spanish that I needed to print out.  I had to fill out two of the pages: one was an "Oath" that I was submitting my ballot honestly and would face penalties if any part were fraudulent, and the other is the voter identification sheet where I just needed to sign, date, and give my CA address.  I had no trouble printing this out from Evince or the Firefox PDF gubbins, but for some reason a family member's business Macbook couldn't handle "some of the pages in this document are another orientation from the others".

Then I was presented with a web form that was very professionally laid out to look like a classic paper ballot.  The checkboxes I clicked on were sized just like the ones you'd expect to see at a polling station in person, solid black bars between questions...the works.  That then resulted in the PDF that had a printout of my selections and the QR code that I wrote about earlier.

> [on Question 2:]
> 
> > I would hope that the order is randomised in some way that the id
> > field can be correlated with the value of this to determine the
> > correct candidate's name.
> 
> What I heard is that each of California's 58 counties does a random draw
> to determine candidate-name presentation order.

Ah, interesting! That would suggest that Alameda County only needs one lookup table to decode that field before reporting their results.