No, like this:
https://www.co.washington.or.us/AssessmentTaxation/Elections/News/drop-off-ballots-november-2016.cfm
Washington’s primary is next Tuesday. We got our ballots in the mail one day before we expected to. So, as of now (July 2020) the Post Office is delivering on time.
It would be interesting to see how postal workers feel about the upcoming election. They can’t be all that thrilled with an administration that wants to shut them down. It might be in their interest to keep the mail moving in November.
Californian here who has opted-in for vote-by-mail. Works wonderfully. Except that we never notice that the return envelope is clearly marked “To ensure that your ballot is counted by election day, please mail before (election day minus 7, or so)”. And so every election we fill in our ballots the weekend before election day and then schlep to the nearest drop-off location, a robustly secure box on the steps in front of our City Hall.
In the California Primary in March we did better, and got the ballots in the mail in time. Except that my wife voted for Amy Klobuchar, who dropped out of the race after we mailed in the ballots. D’oh. We’ll have no such problem this time, and we’ll be mailing in our ballots some time in October.
Like @dtilque, I invariably drop my ballot in a drop-off box instead of mailing. In most states, you can always drop your ballot at the County Elections office. I imagine those drop boxes will be closely watched this year.
I hope everyone votes as early as they possibly can in this election. Early voting will help “flatten the curve” of a tidal wave of votes to be counted on Election Day. Election officials can count the votes as they come in. They just can’t release the results.
Many counties offer the option of verifying that your ballot was received by the County Elections office. I hope people will take advantage of these systems, too. If it was received, it will be counted. If there is a large discrepancy between anticipated results based on exit polling, etc., your paper ballot can be recounted without concern of fiddling.
It’s actually quite difficult to steal an election. Undermining confidence in its results, sadly… that’s pretty easy.
I understand most states prohibit (by law) election officials from counting votes before the polls close on Election Day. That wasn’t a problem until they started to get so many absentee ballots, as in the primaries this year. They just don’t have the procedures in place to process so many of them efficiently. Hopefully they’ll have better procedures in place for the General Election, but don’t count on it.
In my county, early ballots are scanned into the computer on or before Election Day, but the program that reads them and tabulates votes doesn’t get run until the deadline (8 p.m. of Election Day). That gets them a preliminary total which sent to the state election office and (I think) released to the press. Of course, they’ll run it again later, once all the ballots have been scanned. There’s lots of people who wait until Election Day to drop off their ballots. I don’t know if there’s a law that forbids running the program sooner, but probably is.
I guess I used the term, “count,” a little too loosely there.
I do know that Elections Boards the country over are appreciative of early-arriving ballots. It does allow them to get a jump on the work needed to be done in order to provide timely election results.
I see claims that there are official orders from the Postmaster General to post offices to “slow the mail down.”
Which makes me wonder: is there any way to really tell how such actions affect Democratic candidates vs. Republican ones?
I was listening to Pod Save America on this topic and the host mentioned that he can’t see how this benefits either party seeing as how Republicans as well as Democrats use the mail service. He further suggested that it may disproportionately effect Republicans as they tend to live in rural areas which will experience more delay than urban areas.
See this post from July 30 in the Clusterfuck thread. Discusses, including a link, a Twitter thread in which this is discussed:
ETA: Okay, here’s the link to the Twitter thread. Recommended reading!
They’re advising people to submit their ballot 21 days early? Generally, people voting by mail live in the same city or at least county to which the ballot is being sent. It should arrive within two or three days at most.
I guess BrooklynDad_Defiant! isn’t taking any chances, and doesn’t want anyone else to either.
Voting early doesn’t just help the post offices to deliver ballots timely. It helps elections boards to tally results for timely release, too.
If you listen to the Republicans’ line on this, you can see what they’re going to try to do. From Trump to Bill Barr to several Senate Republicans, they have all made comments that they will abide by the results of all “timely” submitted ballots. Trump is already trying to delegitimize ballots that straggle in after Election Day – which many of them will.
Dems are more comfortable with vote-by-mail according to polls. Some 56% of Dems will likely vote by mail. In contrast, Republicans are more distrustful of absentee voting and 79% of them indicate they will probably vote in person. Trump hopes to validate in-person voting and find reasons to disregard any mailed ballots not counted by Election Day.
This is where we are. I encourage everyone to vote as early as you can.
I’m torn. Normally I would vote in-person, as in my small city it usually takes me < 10 min. But I saw the clusterf_ck in nearby Wisconsin in April. Of course a lot of that was due to severe reduction in polling places (Green Bay had TWO). Right now there is only one (possibly two*) polling place in my city, Can’t go down from there unless they make folks go to the county seat or something.
Brian
- My city has a few houses in a different county so that is a different precinct (there are two others). I think precinct 3 may have been in a different polling place.
There was a story a couple weeks ago about how various Republican officials and operatives were urging Trump to stop campaigning against voting by mail. The reason was that it was discouraging R voters (but not D voters) from applying for absentee ballots, but many of them were also discouraged from voting in person because of the epidemic. So he was suppressing Republican voters. That was when Trump started to distinguish between absentee and mail-in voting.
Of course, there’s no real distinction between absentee and mail-in voting. Unless you live in half a dozen states[1] that have all-mail voting, you have to apply for an absentee ballot to vote by mail.
[1] OR, WA, CO, UT, HI, CA and certain counties in some other states.
Here’s a question about mail-in voting: how accurate are the mail-in equivalent to “exit polls”? How do you “call” a state that is trying out massive exit polling for the first time? Do you simply wait until somebody has an apparently insurmountable lead in the actual count? What is the chance that a close election will not have a projected winner for days, especially if the state will count votes postmarked on election day but not actually counted until days later?
Except for very close races, most can be called within a day, based on how many ballots have been tallied vs how many have yet to be accounted for.
Way back when we first had an all-mail presidential election here in Oregon (2000), I asked basically the same question here. Well, actually I asked how they would do exit polls and call the winner before the total votes were released. No one had an answer here and it turned out they didn’t do exit polls or call the state early.
In that early election, Multnomah County took a few days to get their votes tabulated because a lot of people turned in their ballots on Election Day, rather than mailing them in. More than they’d planned on, apparently. So the state sat in a media limbo for about three days until the totals were finally released. Of course, everyone was paying more attention to Florida in that election, but some people wondered why, since Bush had the lead among the numbers that had been reported, the state wasn’t called for him. And it turned out Gore took the state, since the bulk of Democratic voters are in Multnomah County.
This may give you an idea of what may happen in this election. Only half a dozen states are full vote-by-mail and none are swing states. But in many other states, including those swing states, a majority of votes may be cast by mail. And the elections officies in those states may not be prepared to process all of them in a timely manner. Many of them certainly had problems in the primaries. So don’t be surprised if some states are left in limbo for a couple days.
Both my Wife and I work for county government. Our libraries are opened in a limited fashion.
I don’t see why closed libraries could not open with even just one staff member so that people could walk in, drop off their vote and go on their way. I would think we could even employ sheriffs deputies, fireman or other public servants to do this. Even volunteering a few hours in a rotating shift for the week before the election.
Places that have their vote drop off boxes in a closed building should be very easy to solve.
Ours are opened in a limited fashion too, but the building is closed to the public.
They probably could do it that way, but they didn’t for the primary. But what’s really needed, what with the pandemic and all, is a drop off which can be done without getting out of the car. Some libraries and other drop-offs have that, but not all.