billroper | (Reply)

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If mailed ballots arrived after election day, then that's on the PO, mostly. But if people are waiting until Friday or Saturday to mail ballots for a Tuesday arrival, even before the current slowdown, they're just asking for their ballots to be late.

Around here, the clerks starting making public noises (articles in the news, radio ads) that people should put their ballots in the drop box for their precinct on Thursday before the election, because the mail is being slow. I understand that they were making private noises about drop-offs being preferred from day one - I know that my absentee ballot had a note from the township clerk that said that the drop box was their preferred way of receiving ballots.

And that's really the way to go. Vote absentee, but drop your ballot off at the dropbox -- that way, the only step that the PO can slow down is the ballot getting from the clerk to you, and it's pretty easy to find out if one's been mailed. (Some states actually have that info available online, and you can check whether your absentee ballot has been mailed, and if it has, when it was marked as received back by the clerk's office. If not online, your clerk's office has a database...)

The new scanners that Washtenaw County uses don't flag for undervotes unless it's a totally blank ballot, but they flag overvotes, because those are the ones that affect how the ballot gets counted.

And when you get nearly two hundred ballots that get spat back out because the voter effed up, swearing at the voters becomes a thing. Four of them were just stray marks on the ballot, and we were able to duplicate the ballot so that the voter's votes were cast as they desired, but the rest of them? They didn't follow the instructions.