The 2020 presidential election is turning out to be unlike what most Americans expected. This year has not been in anyone’s favor, dealing with climate change issues at the beginning of the year to the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic since March. The pandemic has made life different for everyone. From having mandatory mask orders, to stay at home orders, and eventually having businesses close and social distancing in public.
November is the month when the American people come together to vote for who they want to become the president for the next four years. This year has a different standard based on how social distancing is making people spread far apart. So the solution they are pushing for is mail-in voting, which is not the best option. 

Voting usually takes place in buildings called voting polls, which allow citizens to enter and vote for the candidates of their choice. These voting polls are run and collected via paper ballots, which are counted and help auditors verify accurate information. 

With the COVID-19 pandemic and the upcoming election, the American government has announced a new way to vote. They have announced that mail-in ballots will be an option for people that do not want to go to a polling place. If people were to go to a polling place they would have to operate at half capacity, enforce social distancing, enforce the use of masks and everything would have to be sanitized. The mail-in voting will create positives and negatives regarding people’s ballots. 

If mail-in voting actually occurs this election, it will create chaos based on different accounts.  Mail-in voting will take a long time for the actual ballots to arrive through the postal service and take a longer time to actually count the ballots once arrived. Another problem with mail-in voting is when people’s votes get sent off, there could be possibilities that their vote is lost in transit. All of these issues can lead to extended voting hours which is upright illegal. 

Mail in voting is also not checking if the citizen that is sending it is a citizen or not. This can overall change the ballot results, because the only people allowed to vote are US citizens. So if non-citizens are voting for someone that will represent them as president, it will overall create chaos in the reelection process. 

Mail-in voting has its positives, especially with not having everyone in big crowds and overall slowing the spread of the pandemic. Mail in voting also does not lead to attacks, those include ransomware designed to disrupt voting machines and state computers and have hackers that display false information like an incorrect election date on state websites. Hackers can also have attacks on voter registration which would cause tracking and counting absentee ballots for people. 

To conclude, there should only be places that you have to go and vote through ballots in order to get the correct amount of votes. This will lead to less miscounts of peoples’ votes and will ensure only citizens from the US will vote.