The "bamboo ballots" being looked for with Junior-CSI UV lights in AZ are an obvious, and particularly silly, hoax, but it's worth understanding why altering an election via forged mail-in ballots is unlikely to succeed (and easily detected without fancy flashlights). 1/

Mail-in ballot forms aren't security sensitive; some jurisdictions (including military and overseas voters) allow you to print your own before mailing it in. The protections against fraud occur when the ballot is received and processed, not because the forms are hard to forge. 2/

Mail-in ballots generally have the voter's name, signature, etc on an outer envelope. The first step in processing a received ballot is to check that it came from a registered voter, and then, importantly, note that their ballot was received so they can't vote a second time. 3/

At that point, the ballot is separated from the enclosing ID info and sent for tallying.

There are two frauds that someone might try here. One is that a corrupt official might try to bypass this and slip in extra ballots. Another is that someone might mail in forged ballots. 4/

But either of these would be detected quickly. Let's start with the corrupt insider. If extra ballots are slipped in for tallying, the number of ballots scanned wouldn't match the number of ballots received and processed. Such a discrepancy would be apparent immediately. 5/

What about an outsider mailing in a large number of fake ballots? To get them past the initial processing, they'd have to each identify a unique registered voter. But the attacker has a problem: they have no way of knowing which real voters will return real ballots. 6/

So the attacker would have to hope that none of the voters they forge ballots for actually tries to vote. At any kind of scale, they'll guess wrong a significant fraction of the time. And that will be very quickly noticed as duplicate ballots start being rejected. 7/

Duplicate ballots from the same voter are extremely unusual and are an indication of something going very wrong. Multiple occurrences would raise very loud alarms and would be detected immediately, well before election day.
8/

There are other physical security amd chain of custody safeguards, too, to prevent and detect ballot theft or replacement. The exact details vary by jurisdiction. I've just highlighted the basic process.
9

Mail-in voting isn't new. It's long been an option for absentee and shut-in voters in every state, going back many decades. The security mechanisms and protocols for preventing fraud are very well understood, and don't involve UV lights.

10/10

If you liked this, follow my Soundcloud. Wait, I don't have one.

But you may enjoy this excellent (and free!) National Academies study on election security: https://www.nap.edu/catalog/25120/securing-the-vote-protecting-american-democracy

I've written some stuff on voting myself, like this: https://georgetownlawtechreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/4.2-p505-522-Blaze.pdf

And, as always, if you want to help your community and learn a ton about how elections work in the process, sign up in your county to become an election day poll worker.