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This morning, I sent a lot of information off for my property tax appeal.

This afternoon, I got a letter from the IRS about Dad's trust. (I don't get money from this; I only get responsibility.) Early in July, I mailed two checks. One went to the State of Illinois for the taxes on the trust, one went to the IRS for the same at the Federal level.

The State of Illinois check cleared. The Federal check didn't.

Today, the letter informed me that I owed the amount and penalties for not having paid on time.

I will be casting my vote in November at my precinct voting location in the school next door.

Crossposts: https://billroper.livejournal.com/1837049.html

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

patoadam

Hi, Bill!

Are you're subtly complaining about the issue raised in this article? If so, you're more subtle than I.

From:

billroper

Nope. I'm just complaining about how things go in general. If I can believe what I've read, a quarter of the mailed-in votes in the recent New York primary weren't counted. If they were legitimate votes that were mishandled, that's appalling. If they weren't legitimate votes, that's *also* appalling.

I guess you can consider me appalled.

From:

jennlk

It really depends why they weren't counted. (and NY is not IL, nor is it MI, but....) IIRC, NY (like many states) runs both partisan primaries at the same time, on the same ballot. People often vote in both primaries even though they are specifically informed that they shouldn't. If a voter votes in both of the primaries, none of those votes count. That is highly unlikely to happen in November, where splitting your vote is allowed.

I worked an absentee count board (in MI), and we probably had a quarter of the votes not count. The ballots were scanned, true, but due to Voter Error (aka, The Inability To Read AND FOLLOW the Damn Instructions Clearly Printed At The Top Of Each Side Of The Damn Ballot*), many of the votes didn't count. The votes in the non-partisan elections (millage, etc) were counted. If those people had voted in person, their mistakes would probably have been caught.

Whether they would have cared enough to change how they voted? Dunno about that. The people who worked the walk-in floor said that they had probably half a dozen people refuse to change their ballots, even though the scanner threw the plain English code that said that they'd voted in each of the partisan primaries.

(* gosh, jenn, tell us what you really think. No, there'd be even more swearing.)

edit for clarity. i hope

Edited Date: 2020-08-11 10:49 pm (UTC)

From:

billroper

I don't recall all of the reasons that the NY primary mail-in ballots went south, although my recollection is that a big one was the absence of a postmark on a ballot that arrived after election day. Sadly, that's a problem that's only fixable by getting the P.O. to actually apply the postmarks, which isn't always what happens when it's prepaid postage.

Sorry for the necessity for swearing.

I have occasionally had my ballot pop out of the machine for an undervote. It was always an *intentional* undervote, but...

From:

jennlk

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.