I should have been more specific. The barcodes are on the return envelopes, not the ballots. They allow a ballot to be tracked by the voter to make sure its proccessed or sorted out before its tallied in the cases that a voter reports an issue, but at no point is who the person voted for tracked or logged. The tally process involved immediately discarding the envelope and separating it from the ballot itself when the votes are tallied, fully preserving anonymity.
The envelopes include voter signatures which are checked against voter registration, and the collection and processing follows a chain of custody. The tallying itself is monitored and transparent as well. The whole process is audited, because the paper ballots are retained and can be recounted if needed. You can view the process here:
I should have been more specific. The barcodes are on the return envelopes, not the ballots. They allow a ballot to be tracked by the voter to make sure its proccessed or sorted out before its tallied in the cases that a voter reports an issue, but at no point is who the person voted for tracked or logged. The tally process involved immediately discarding the envelope and separating it from the ballot itself when the votes are tallied, fully preserving anonymity.
The envelopes include voter signatures which are checked against voter registration, and the collection and processing follows a chain of custody. The tallying itself is monitored and transparent as well. The whole process is audited, because the paper ballots are retained and can be recounted if needed. You can view the process here:
https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/voters/securing-your-vote
Mail-in voting can be wholly secure, and should be the default because of its efficieny in widening engagement with democracy.
It’s still much less transparent with more possibilities of things going wrong and it doesn’t guarantee a vote was done anonymous.
Mandatory voting is the much simpler solution