Learning objectives
- Enumerate every custody transfer in their own jurisdiction's mail ballot lifecycle
- Identify which transfers are documented, by whom, and in what format
- Articulate why a log held by an interested party cannot settle a dispute involving that party
- Distinguish an integrity problem from a provability problem
Content
- The lifecycle walk: print vendor → USPS outbound → voter → USPS inbound → receiving → signature verification → sorting → extraction → tabulation → storage. Eight to twelve transfers depending on jurisdiction.
- Exercise (20 min): participants map their own county's transfers on a worksheet. Most discover two or three they had never counted.
- The core asymmetry: at each transfer, the record is a log entry held by the party performing the transfer. It may be perfectly accurate. It is not independently verifiable.
- The key reframe: Your records are almost certainly correct. The problem is that "correct" and "provably correct" are different properties, and only one of them ends an argument.
- Discussion (15 min): "Describe a time you were asked to prove something you knew to be true and had no way to demonstrate."
Run the exercise
Assessment
submit their completed lifecycle map with each transfer marked: documented / partially documented / undocumented. ---