I’ve long been a proponent of all-mail voting. We’ve been doing it here in Oregon for 21 years and pretty much everyone loves it. Other states (WA, CO, UT, HI) that have gone to it also have a very high approval of it. It’s unfortunate that more had not before this election.
I understand some states went to all-mail voting for this election because of the pandemic. DC and Montana and maybe some others. California was supposedly on track to go to all-mail voting before the pandemic happened. I think they moved that up to do it this year. But every time I try to find the status of all-mail voting in California (both before and after this year), I get a hodgepodge of different and contradictory information in the google search. So I’m always very confused about its exact status.
Anyway, has any state decided to go to all VbM permanently because of this election?
I don’t know the answer to your question, but may I ask a related question?
Do all those states using vote by mail (exclusively or not) have the mechanism to report back to the voter that their ballot has been received and will be counted? I live in California, and I find that a great comfort for mailing in ballots. I got the impression that the particular mechanism in California is a state service, not a federal or other kind of service.
In Washington (State) the website in question is votewa.gov, which is a clearinghouse for election information in general and ballot status in particular.
In WA, “must” is an overly strong term. But the default is mail. If you are a registered voter, your ballot is sent via mail to you a few weeks before “election day” and you’re expected to either mail it back or drop it off (at an official drop off place) by election day.
There are “voting centers” where you can go if you need help with your ballot (e.g., accessible ballots) or if yours doesn’t arrive or late registration or something. But there aren’t polling places the way that there traditionally were in the olden days.
Oregon’s is the same as Washington’s, except we don’t have voting centers. Unless you count the county Elections Office as a voting center. That’s where you go if you have problems with your ballot.
At least in my county (Pierce), they’re in the same location. And last I looked (which was a while ago) they had one or two voting machines for diehards.
Ohio has such a system. When you request an absentee/vote by mail ballot there are several tracking points displayed on a web site, including the “final and will be counted.” This tracking also applied last year when I requested my ballot by mail and dropped it off in the box at my local BOE.
It’s way too late to challenge the results of the 2020 election. But if you’re talking about “audits”, then no. The one “audit” actually being carried out is in one county of Arizona and no matter what they come up with, it won’t change the 2020 results even for that state. In Georgia, some judge has ruled that voters can examine the ballots (for one county only, I think), but what that means, I don’t know.
The states with all-mail-voting are Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Utah, and Hawaii. And now Vermont, although only for general elections. For some reason, the VT legislature only wrote a law for those and not for all elections.
Not really. First, most of them went to all mail long ago and the ones that were more recent were still heavily absentee, so covid quarantines weren’t inventing new processes on the fly. Everything was pretty close to business as usual, which didn’t leave as much room for people unhappy with the outcome to find imaginary irregularities.
Some of what happened happened because states were trying to get creative fast, under pressure, and while overall the various states’ boards of elections did an amazing job, there was some confusion.
Second, none of them are swing states. There was never really a question of which way Utah was going to vote. No one that anyone takes seriously is going to jump up and say that they think Biden really won the state. (The losing gubernatorial candidate in WA started filing some lawsuits, but the party was not behind him. I would not be surprised if something similar and non-noteworthy happened elsewhere.)