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Scary indeed, but for the sake of completeness, let’s wargame the putative fraudster’s next steps.
Plan A: Pick up a bunch of mail-in ballots from the county clerk, fill them in with the details of the “voters” whom you have fraudulently registered, and mail them in/drop them off. This plan hinges on the ability to collect an arbitrary number of blank mail-in ballots: if ballots are (for example) only mailed to the address of registration, this plan is a no-go. Does anyone know if this is the case in PA?
Plan B: On Election Day (or during the ~2 weeks prior, if early voting is a thing), hit up a bunch of different polling stations and vote multiple times, posing as a different fraudulently-registered voter each time. Obviously this is much easier in the absence of mandatory voter ID. Also, if the voter you are impersonating actually registers and votes (perhaps on the same day, in places where that is allowed—again, PA?), you risk blowing the whole operation.
I don’t mean to suggest that the potential failure modes of such a scheme mean that potential voter fraud is no big deal—it absolutely is. But simply fraudulently registering voters is only one piece of the overall theft of an election. Vigilance at other stages of the process can, in theory, head off obvious cases of fraud.
Then again, the fact that these false registrations were so sophisticated and were only caught so late in the game should perhaps be Bayesian evidence of just how much “vigilance” actually exists in practice.
For plan B, even without voter ID, you're limited by the number of people in on the fraud. A single person would be only able to vote a couple times in a day. Ten, maybe? I can imagine a conspiracy of one or two people doing this, but it becomes much more risky the more people you have doing it.
Plans similar to A seem much more manageable, but do any jurisdictions allow you to pick up unfilled ballots in bulk?
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In Washington state at least you can print the ballot from your home computer if you claim that the one mailed to you was lost or ruined. You can even have it printed with selections you make online: https://wa.omniballot.us/sites/53033/site/app/ob/ballot/mark
I can't find any evidence that this is the case in Pennsylvania.
But also what are the security measures? I doubt there's anything like a cryptographic signature or even a hologram, or even a ballot ID that you can't easily guess or look up. Likely you'd just need the right paper stock and a decent printer and you could create passable mail in ballots. You already have all of the identifying information you need. The only hitch is maybe the people at the addresses you used would send the ballots back and the elections office would catch on, but maybe most people just aren't so concientious that they'll return to sender rather than throw it away.
Printer manufacturers make it so that printers fingerprint themselves on anything that's printed (as requested by the feds), with a pattern of dots imperceptible to the human eye acting as the identifier. So you could see if there's a third party printer printing hundreds of ballots, and then track it to the purchaser.
You can acquire printers that don't do this, but if you found a bunch of ballots lacking the identifier, I'd consider it a strong sign of fraud.
Knowing what printer was used isn't that much of a threat if you plan around it. People leave out perfectly good printers on the street when they move. They sell them in yard sales without taking ID. Collect a few without being traced, print the fraudulent ballots, then dump them somewhere.
Also wonder how hard it would be to hack a printer to change the dot pattern it imparts.
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If any of the polling stations are compromised you can just directly add the fake votes there.
Adding fake votes greater than the number of registered people is risky. But if you know you have a bunch of leeway with registered voters that can't possibly vote ...
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You can't register day-of in PA; registration has closed for this election.
First time voters are required to show ID, but it doesn't have to be a government issued ID - school IDs count, for instance.
Our "early voting" is basically picking up a mail-in ballot at certain locations and then immediately sticking it in the mailbox there. I'm not sure if an ID is needed for that or not, though. Our early voting stuff is weird.
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