Thanks for answering, and thanks for being a precinct judge. Your firsthand knowledge corroborates what I assumed. The system likely depends on the honesty of assisters, who also get to interpret whether the voter is compos mentis, and actually the registered voter. Since it would be nearly impossible to actually check up on every absentee ballot, I would like to see the laws requiring the assisters to be the voters’ next of kin, guardians, or holders of power of atty.
Maybe the instance of this sort of fraud is a lot lower than I assume. My suspicion is that in some areas, political operatives work through nursing homes with “cooperating” staff to turn out lots of votes. This could be a blockbuster subject for one of the O’Keefe hidden videos.
The proper remedy would be to impound those precincts until a careful audit is conducted by another county. If that happened a few times, the incidents of skullduggery would nosedive.
I would agree with your views re: the assisters to be the voters’ next of kin, guardians, or holders of power of atty. It makes perfect sense.
We got a lot of comments from voters during the May Primary that it was a shame we couldn't enforce a properly passed voter ID law. All I could do was agree with them but remind them that our job was to enforce the law per the county instructions, not as we'd like them to be.