Somewhere I read that absentee ballots were not counted unless the election was close…then I was told that absentee ballots are counted first before the remainder of the ballots.
Would one of you in-the-know please set me straight on when absent voter ballots are counted?
In Minnesota, people who voted by Absentee ballot are permitted to change their mind, and come to the polling place on Election day and vote there. If they do so, that overrides their absentee ballot, and it is discarded.
So absentee ballots can’t be counted until after the polls close, and the election judges have to look up each one in the voter sign-in book to make sure the person didn’t manage to come in and vote in person.
That can take a fair amount of time, if there are a lot of absentee ballots in a precinct. Experienced election judges have a trick to make this go faster. Before opening, or at slow times during the day, they go thru the absentee ballots, find them in the sign-in book, and mark “absentee” next to the name. Then if anyone comes in and goes to sign-in at that spot, they know that they have to find that absentee ballot and discard it. So at the end of the day, they will have checked all the absentee ballots, and can just count all the ones that are remaining.
Here the absentee ballots are the same as regular ballots, a paper ballot with circles that the voter fills in. Each one is sealed in an envelope, with the voters name & address on the outside. The are separated out, and delivered to the actual precinct where the person is registered to vote. To count them, the judges open the envelopes and just feed them thru the same optical scanner that all voters use.
Under this system, there is no question about not counting absentee ballots.
First, the election judges at this one precinct would have no idea if the overall election totals were ‘close’ – the totals aren’t in yet.
Second, it doesn’t take much time to count the absentee ballots. They are just fed thru the scanner one after another. Usually, the judges doing this are done before the other judges are finished taking down and packing up the voting booths. Besides, they don’t mind much if it does take some time – they are paid by the hour, anyway.
I find that hard to believe. It sounds to me (IANAL) like an unconstitutional violation of the 14th Amendment.
Maybe it used to be that way, but it still sounds fishy. You’d have to have every race on the ballot, including the initatives win by a margin greater than the total absentee ballots for that to be fair. Besides, a ton of people vote absentee now. I read an article in the SJ Merc the other day that estimated 25% of all ballots will be absentee this time.
I do recall hearing that in the 2004 election in Ohio, the absentee ballots were not counted, since the number of them was not enough to change the results from the voting machines. (The accuracy of those counts would be a topic for a different thread, in a different area.)
I do know that in corporate stockholder board elections, the ballot usually has spots to vote ‘for all the nominees’, ‘against all the nominees’, and ‘for all except the ones written in’. It is common, if the votes ‘for’ or ‘against’ are enough to decide the election, the company to save money by not bothering to count the write-in exceptions (which they have to pay people to hand-count). But these are not public elections, and presumably the corporate bylaws allow this.
Absentee ballots which are received before election day are counted first thing on election day, because they are ready to be counted immediately. Thus, the first results reported after the polls close are are absentee ballots.
Absentee ballots which are received on election day are counted after the regular ballots. In some cases they are not counted for several days, depending on how long it takes to get to them. Since most elections are not that close, the news media will generally not wait till all the absentee ballots are counted before declaring a winner.
However, all the absentee ballots ARE eventually counted, whether the election is close or not.
Ed