Well I would too if any candidate was worthy of it! 
If Trump had gotten me my $1200 stimulus every month for the last seven months, that would certainly buy him seven votes from me! 
Stan County, CA: This county is going all mail-in. (I don’t know if that’s true of the entire state.) Expect ballot by early October. In the past, I’ve always brought my mail-in ballot in person on election day, either to the local polling place, or to the County Clerk office, where they always have a drop-box.
This year, I’ll plan to turn it in early. And I will certainly take it to a drop-box, not mail it via the sabotaged USPS.
In the past, the drop boxes at the polling place and at the County Clerk office have just been simple cardboard boxes with a lid on them with a slot in it. The one at the County Clerk was sitting on the walkway outside the office, with an attendant sitting there also. Apparently, they’ll be making them a whole lot more secure this time around.
I have already requested my absentee ballot (Ohio) and will be returning it ASAP, either by mail or at the county dropbox (Ohio law has only ever allowed one location per county, though there’s a lawsuit challenging that interpretation). Unlike some states, Ohio processes ballots as they’re received, so the concerns in other states about slowing down the count don’t apply here (it’s the opposite, in fact).
I have requested an absentee ballot and will be dropping it off (at the town drop box) early. In my state, the absentee ballots have to arrive by election day and they are all fed through the machine to count them along with the in-person ballots before the district releases any numbers. We have paper ballots marked with a black dot to indicate your vote, and the machine reads the black dots.
Like Lord_Feldon, my ballot will be processed and approved prior to election day, and some poll worker will feed all the ballots in the “approved” box into the reader on election day. The early ballots won’t delay anything. They will just make the lines shorter for the in-person voters.
If there’s a recount they might look at late arriving ballots, I’m not certain of the rules. But in the ordinary course of events, all accepted, legible ballots get counted shortly after the polls are closed. Of course, my state is very blue, so it will be an enormous upset if Biden doesn’t win the electors in my state. Other races might be more interesting.
This is one county in one state thirty years ago but I and DesertWife would watch the registrar count votes on election day. The ballots were Votomatic cards, made infamous by Floridians in 2000. Those mail-ballots (rare at the time) that had been received in time to be validated – generally the Friday before election day – would be loaded into the card readers after the test ballots had been run.
At 8pm, when the polls closed, the start buttons on the readers would be punched and the votes tabulated in a matter of seconds. Then it was wait for about 45 minutes until the ballots from the nearest precincts started coming in. After that it was a rising crescendo until the half-dozen card readers could not keep up and the card trays started stacking up nearby.
Then after the peak was passed the readers would gradually catch up until, as the most distant precincts came tricking in, we were waiting for cards again. Generally speaking, the last precinct would be in and counted by 11pm. The mail-in votes that had come in too late to be verified would be checked and added to the vote totals by Thursday but we never had an election where they were signifigant. Ditto for write-in votes – they would not even be looked at on election day but be counted and added to the results released in the official canvas, released the Monday or Tuesday a week later.
There’s a ruling, but it won’t change anything.
Hooray. My wife and I mailed in our ballots a couple days and yesterday we got emails from elections bureau that they had been received and accepted. So the PO is delivering at least some ballots.
I plan on voting on election day, at my designated polling location. Like I’ve done for every other election in my lifetime.
Yes. I will be in line on 10/13, which is the first day of early voting here in Texas.
we can vote early starting Oct 15
Yep, I’m gonna watch that puppy drop in the box on the very first day!
I’m probably voting in person. I did watch the nightmare over the river in Wisconsin (the April primaries). But most of that was due to the extreme reduction in polling places.
My small city (~5000 people) already only has 1 polling place.
I voted in the August election here and it was no big deal. Of course November has more candidates and will have a higher turnout.
Ideal for me would be to get a ballot early and be able to drop it off at my polling place. But my choices are either do it by mail or go to the county seat and vote early in person (or of course vote in person on election day – my polling place is two blocks from my house)
Brian
CNN reporting a 3-hour wait on the first day of early voting in Fairfax, Va. (Video)
Before the pandemic, election forecasters were telling us that they were seeing all the indications of a record turnout for the '20 election, possibly north of 150 million total votes (about 135 million voted for president in 2016). It could be that people are just that determined this year, health risks be damned.
If the yoots turn out bigly, Trump is toast, imho.
I’m with you, although I’m going to do early in-person voting. The polling place is convenient and if I go midday in the middle of the week sometime towards the middle of the early voting window, I’ll have it all to myself.
I think mail-in voting is great and I’m glad we are encouraging it. However, I would still like to see all determined Democratic voters that can safely vote in person do so.
I think an Election night victory is important, I don’t want to see what will happen if Trump is ahead the morning of Nov 4th and mail-in’s reverse the call.
But I used the phrase “determined” Democratic voter for a reason.
If you are one of those people that gets up on Election Day intending to vote, but you can’t get away at lunch and then you get a call from an old friend that wants to meet for drinks and she’s only in town for the day so you’ll go vote after but by then you are tired and what does one vote count for in the larger scheme of things and you PROMISE you’ll vote next time…if that’s you, for God’s sake request a mail-in ballot.
Thanks to someone replying to this quote, I just noticed I typed in the wrong affiliation. I meant to bolster the number of votes for the Democratic party’s candidates, not the scum currently trashing the country.
Coincidentally, my ballot just arrived today via e-mail. I’ve already got it filled out; I’ll wait until the weekend is over (in the States) to fax it in.
Not thrilled about faxing it, but apparently it goes to a secured elections office with restricted access to faxed ballots, with the ballots immediately placed in a secrecy envelope. Given that it’s taking 3 months for first-class international mail to get from Australia to the States…well, I’ll take the risk. At least I can check the status online.
In Oregon we have only mail-in or drop-off ballots, so we all vote early here. That said, I’m not exactly sure when the ballots go out, so I don’t know exactly when I’ll be voting.
I thought I read somewhere that ballots in Oregon will be mailed out on October 15th for this election. The website says the last day for officials to mail out the ballots is October 20th, so for sure they’ll all be mailed out by then.
Block and a half for me. We vote outside in open tents. The election officials are my neighbors. We’re a unique town in that we don’t have party voting, which I recommend at the city level.
Faxed in. It’s all out of my hands, now, to the miniscule amount it ever was. At least I vote in a battleground state (Florida).