If you mail your ballot before Election Day, it should count.
Unsnarling the clusterfuck of competing rules would be daunting, even assuming good faith, which is an insane thing to assume.
Wonder how other countries attempt to make this right.
There must be a fair number of doctoral dissertations tackling this issue.
When elections come down to the speed and efficiency of the U.S. Postal Service …
The USPS would lose its head if it was not attached to its neck. Placing any faith in the U.S. mail to deliver mail ballots is an abomination.
But even if it does, the rule for most submissions, is that it must be postmarked by a certain date; voters can’t be responsible for more than that.
These rules are deliberate roadblocks, intended to have a cumulative effect of suppressing the vote.
Individual acts, even if done independently, that act toward a common goal constitute a conspiracy.
Perhaps I’ve binged too much on old Law and Order episodes, but I would just love if they used the RICO Statutes on these unAmerican ratfuckers.
That isn’t how the law reads in Florida, however.
Ballots have to be in the Supervisor of Elections office by the end of the day on Election Day.
Ok, ok… stop all the nonsense and just have a new vote in FL
I believe that is overstating the issue in this particular case.
Florida has pretty expansive VBM rules…rules a lot of states don’t have, including anyone can request a VBM ballot, no “reason” is required. Florida also has two weeks of early voting, including in most counties (sadly not mine, we only get one) two Sundays.
Could some of the details be improved upon? Absolutely. But the cumulative effect of both of these relatively recent changes in voting in Florida is not “to suppress the vote”. Quite the opposite.
So once a voter mails their ballot it’s up to the USPS to get it there, except when some one else decides to mail pipe bombs, or the sorting facility the ballot goes through has a workplace shooting incident, or a hurricane or other natural disaster strikes.
What needs to be looked at is when this rule was enacted how many voters used the mail in option? As the number of voters voting this way increases then the time to go through them gets shortened. And on the other end is if this is becoming the most popular way to vote then the number in person polling places decreases and voting machines are not allocated fairly.
FL has come a long way. It’s one of the easier purple states to cast a ballot now. I do wish the law would change to allow ballots postmarked by e-day to count. CA did that and it’s why it has so much higher participation in the VBM.
But this is on the FL Dems. We messed up the ballot design in Broward. We continue to do a poor job leaving VBM ballots on the table and not getting them back. I really think winning FL is all about doing the basic block and tackle stuff better. To turn the state into a reliable lean blue state, we need to also do better in the I-4 exurbs, but we can win the close ones like the last few if we stop leaving votes on the table. In addition, there is a far left group of Dems that participates in our primaries but then votes 3rd party in the general. Gillum got screwed by such voters. So did HRC. So did Gore. In fact, had these far lefties not voted en masse for Gillum, Graham would’ve been the nominee and she would’ve done much better among Cuban voters and latino voters overall and probably would’ve won the race given how much better Dems did among suburban white voters in the State. Dems need to figure that out. Either figure out how to get these 3rd party folks on board, and quickly assess whether they are implacable or not. If they’re implacable, seek your votes elsewhere.
Democracy belongs online… not to eliminate the voting booth, but make it the exception rather than the rule. People who worry over “hacking” and fake votes forget that face-recognition beats fingerprints these days.
And there should be no such thing as proprietary programming for ballot collection and tallies, the public should own those codes, not some Republican businessman.
You’re there, so your opinion carries a lot of weight, and sure, bringing in RICO is probably pure whimsy. I remember back in Florida2000, though, there was dispute @ overseas military votes, and I remember they gave discretion about ballots that came late.
The possibility that some votes are more equal than others really rankles.
The same large southern Florida processing center (Opa-Locka) that was distracted pre-election by having to search for all the MAGAbomber’s pipe bombs. Things that make you go hmmm.
So thousands of mailed ballots were not processed due to unspecified mail delivery issues. How many thousands more were thrown out due to junk science signature mismatch claims?
Especially in this case!
One factor that isn’t mentioned in the article is that one of Florida’s mail distribution centers was shut down for several days before the election because of the mail bombs sent to Democrats from Florida.
So a right-wing lunatic may have helped the GOP maintain its hold on Florida.
They had a hurricane on the panhandle. That sort of thing backs up service across a broad area. You’d think there would be some leeway after a natural disaster.
So, just as you can suppress votes by jiggering the number of voting machines and polling places in different areas, you can do it by disrupting mail delivery. Whee.
I think the “must be in the building by end of election day” rule is just crying out for unfortunate mishaps, rather like the “must cross the border at a legal port of entry” rule.
In Ohio, it just has to be postmarked before (or maybe even on) election day. Then it is counted if received within the next 10 days. You do have to go in person to the post office and request a postmark as mail is no longer automatically postmarked. Otherwise, it’s best to mail the ballot a week early even if it only has 10 miles to go.
It’s not who enters the data, it’s how the data is manipulated in the black box. No cure known yet.