Moreover voting by mail results in the votes being recorded in the exact same database as those lodged electronically via a webserver. Therefore voting by mail doesn't change the simple fact that the company can, and always has been able to, see the votes in advance of the meeting.
The only difference between electronic voting and mail-in voting forms to the company is the cost which is borne by the company, and thus shareholders. Its not cheap to print and mail lots of voting docs, custom printed with shareholder numbers and barcodes on them. Individual forms for those that opt out are dramatically more expensive on a ad-hoc basis. Then once the completed forms are received back they need to be processed, ie scanned etc. It all requires physically labor, ie sorting the inbound mail, opening the envelopes and flattening out the forms so that they can be fed into the scanner. There is also audit work to make sure everything got processed. Voting via the website cuts out huge amounts of manual process and reduces the cost.
I agree electronic voting shouldn't be forced onto everybody but the OP shouldn't get confused about what they are hoping to achieve. Electronic voting is every bit as safe, if not safer than mailed in forms. I won't provide any more detail here because I don't want to inadvertently help anybody who has ill-intent but suffice to say that physical forms are much less "secure".
Let me ask the OP one question which may help. Years ago when we used our credit card to buy something in a store, and they asked us to sign the payment slip, how do you think they validated the signature? We now use PINs to validate our agreement to pay via credit card. Why do you think that might be?
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