#vote-by-mail

[andthentheresanne]

This page is one of the few things keeping me sane at this point i stg

[zimshan]

Attention Pennsylvania voters!

Senator Bob Casey’s race is now at a margin of 0.53%.

An automatic recount in PA is triggered with a margin of 0.5%. That’s a difference of 0.03% or a little over 2,000 votes. We need to make sure every ballot is counted here, and there’s thousands of uncounted ballots right now due to voter error.

Did you mail in a ballot? Check to see it was accepted here:

If it says anything other than accepted/counted/etc, your ballot needs your attention. A mistake in filling it out means that your ballot will not count unless you “cure” it. Check your county’s curing policies:

See full instructions for curing by county here.

You have until November 12 to cure your ballot in PA.

Do you know someone who mailed in a PA ballot? Please pass these links on to them. You may be the difference between their vote counting or not in a super close race.

Everyone else, you can help PA voters cure their ballots. If you live in Pennsylvania, you can help canvass in your county (see links in this thread). If you are in another state, you can sign up to call voters and help them cure by phone.

Want to help another state? Sign up for a shift through November 19.

[philsmeatylegss]

Because it’s this week!!

Polling place locator

[kirby-the-gorb]

[potofsoup]

Guess who's excited to get their ballot in the mail tomorrow? Me! So I slapped together a quick comic, as well as a map based off of this and this. A list of when same day registration is available is at the bottom of this article.

But also: wow, early voting stuff is so confusing! For example, I get my ballot in the mail tomorrow, and I can immediately mail it back. But if I want to drop it off in person, I need to either go to a special ballot drop box by city hall, or wait for early in-person voting sites to open, which isn't until Oct 22nd for my state.

Or like, early voting in Louisiana is apparently from Oct 16 to Oct 29th? And then there's a week of no voting, and then polls open again on Nov 5th? Or like how the only day you can register and then immediately vote is Oct 26th?

Anyway, best way to figure out the info for your area is to check your state and county's election website. I've found usvotefoundation.org to have clear fact sheets for each state (including ID requirements, polling location finders, as well as direct links to state election websites): https://www.usvotefoundation.org/state-voter-information . You can also jump to each state's election websites via usa.gov, or by searching directly, though some websites are more confusing than others.

Happy voting!

Oh, and here's the voter registration deadlines map from last time, in case you haven't registered and want to register. Oct 7th is the last day for a bunch of states!

[newsbites]

The proposed amendments include:

placing restrictions on intentionally making false statements about objective biographical information about candidates and senior officials of political parties;

cracking down on the spread of deliberate disinformation about the electoral process, such as including disinformation about voting eligibility, dates, times and locations; and

streamlining the vote-by-mail process to make it more accessible for people.

The amendments will authorize the chief electoral officer to require all digital platforms that publish election advertising to remove non-compliant content within a specified timeframe. Platforms that fail to remove non-compliant content may also face significant and meaningful fines.

Although mail-in voting has been an option for more than 30 years in B.C., the 2020 provincial general election was the first election in which more voters voted at advance voting or by mail than on general voting day.

The proposed amendments complement extensive amendments made to the Election Act in 2019 to implement voting modernization and in 2017 to amend campaign financing rules.

[destielmemenews]

A fire was also set at a ballot box in Portland, Oregon where three ballots were damaged.

"The Portland Police Bureau reported that officers and firefighters responded to a fire in one ballot drop box at about 3:30 a.m. and determined an incendiary device had been placed inside. Multnomah County Elections Director Tim Scott said a fire suppressant inside the drop box protected nearly all the ballots; only three were damaged, and his office planned to contact those voters to help them obtain replacement ballots.

A few hours later, across the Columbia River in Vancouver, television crews captured footage of smoke pouring out of a ballot box at a transit center. Vancouver is the biggest city in Washington's 3rd Congressional District, the site of what is expected to be one of the closest U.S. House races in the country, between first-term Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Republican challenger Joe Kent."

source 1

source 2

source 3

[glitchphotography]

Election Anxiety (A Triptych), Deluxe Paint IV, 2024

[whenweallvote]

Today is Spirit Day, a national day of action to stand with LGBTQ+ youth against bullying. 💜🌈 One way we can fight for our LGBTQ+ community is to VOTE on the issues impacting us most.

Last year, more than 500 state bills were introduced to target LGBTQ+ rights, and 75 became law. The people WE elect have a direct impact on our community. 

So make a plan to vote today at WeAll.Vote/voterhub — and let’s vote LOUD and PROUD this year! 🗳️

[reasonsforhope]

For all the concern in recent years that U.S. democracy is on the brink, in danger or under threat, a report out Tuesday offers a glimmer of good news for American voters worried that casting a ballot will be difficult in 2024.

Put simply, the new data shows that voting in America has gotten easier over the past two decades. More voters have the ability to cast a ballot before Election Day, with the majority of U.S. states now offering some form of early in-person voting and mail voting to all voters.

"Although we often talk in a partisan context about voter fraud and voter suppression and whether voters have access to the ballot, the reality is, over the past 25 years, we've greatly increased the convenience of voting for almost all Americans," said David Becker, the founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), which authored the new report...

The data shows that, despite real efforts by some Republican-led legislatures to restrict access at the margins, the trend in the U.S. since 2000 has been toward making it easier to vote: Nearly 97% of voting-age American citizens now live in states that offer the option to vote before Election Day.

"The lies about early voting, the lies about voting machines and efforts in some state legislatures to roll back some of the election integrity and convenience measures that have evolved over the last several decades, those efforts almost all failed," Becker said. "In almost every single state, voters can choose to vote when they want to."

Forty-six states and Washington, D.C., offer some form of early in-person voting, the report tallied, and 37 of those jurisdictions also offer mail voting to all voters without requiring an excuse...

In 2000

In 2024

Infographic via NPR. If you go to the article, you can watch an animation of this map that shows voting availability in every election since 2000.

There are some political trends that show up in the data. Of the 14 states that don't offer mail voting to all voters, for instance, 12 have Republican-led legislatures.

-via NPR, March 19, 2024. Article continues below.

But maybe the more striking trends are geographic. Every single state in the western U.S. has offered some form of early and mail voting to all voters since 2004, according to the data. And those states span the political spectrum, from conservative Idaho to liberal California.

"It's really hard to talk about partisanship around this issue because historically there just hasn't been much," Mann said. "We've seen voting by mail and early in-person voting supported by Republican legislatures, Democratic legislatures, Republican governors, Democratic governors. We see voters in both parties use both methods." ...

In 2020, New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts all made changes to make voting more easily accessible, which have since partially or fully become permanent. Delaware is currently embroiled in a legal fight over whether it can implement early and mail voting changes this election cycle as well.

The South, with its history of slavery and Jim Crow laws, has long lagged behind when it comes to voting access. The CEIR data shows that, although some states have slowly started expanding options for voters, generally it is still the most difficult region for voters to cast a ballot.

As options nationwide have become more widely available, voters have also responded by taking advantage.

In the 2000 election, 86% of voters voted at a polling place on Election Day, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

In 2020, during the pandemic, that number dropped to less than 31% of voters. It went back up in 2022, to roughly half of the electorate, but was still in line with the two-decade trend toward more ballots being cast early.

...in reality, Becker says, more voting options actually make elections more secure and less susceptible to malicious activity or even human error.

"If there were a problem, if there were a cyber event, if there were a malfunction, if there were bad weather, if there were traffic, if there were was a power outage, you could think of all kinds of circumstances. ... The more you spread voting out over a series of days and over multiple modes, the less likely it's going to impact voters," he said...

-via NPR, March 19, 2024

[thashining]

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A post shared by Joy-Ann Reid (@joyannreid)

Between 10,000 and 20,000 voters in Erie County, Pennsylvania still haven’t received their mail-in ballots, according to a new lawsuit filed by the Pennsylvania Democratic Party.

The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday, says that 40,844 mail-in ballot applications were approved in Erie County but, as of Oct. 28, only 21,536 ballots have been returned — a return rate of 52%, which is 15 percentage points under the state’s average return rate of 67%. Because of this, the plaintiffs alleged that up to 20,000 mail-in ballots requested by Erie County voters were never delivered.

The lawsuit also alleges that more than 300 voters received two mail-in ballots, one of which may not correlate to the local races those voters are eligible to vote for. The plaintiffs also allege that the United States Postal Service has no record of having received 1,800 mail-in ballots from the third-party vendor that the Erie Board of Elections contracted to distribute mail-in ballots.

The lawsuit says the vendor is still “in the process of trying to locate” the lost ballots. Under state law, mail-in ballots are required to be delivered to voters who requested them at least two weeks prior to the election.

The plaintiffs are asking the court to force the Board of Elections to fix the error by releasing the names of all the voters who might have been affected, to allow those voters to cancel their mail-in ballot status and cast a provisional ballot at an in-person polling place.

This might not happen on Nov 5

[orangerosebush]

Colfer does a good job of capturing the tension between Artemis' intelligence and his youth.

For example, Artemis' understanding of aurum potestas est privileges the "gold" in the family motto.

Necessarily, gold was the currency of power at the time of the motto's inception, but in the context of the 21st century, the nature of power is (in some ways, in some cases etc) more complicated.

By no means did Artemis make a poor deal in divesting the People of a metric ton's worth of gold, but arguably the most "valuable" "thing" he gained from his clash with the People was proof of their existence.

There's also this scene in TLC:

“Artemis was a little dazed. ‘Well, apparently I’m almost eighteen.’ ‘God help us all. Artemis Fowl, eligible to vote.’ Artemis chuckled. ‘I’ve been voting for years.’ ”

It's such a funny form of voter fraud!

Artemis is rich! And yet, he influences elections by casting illegitimate votes (whether by compelling someone to vote as he would like or by casting votes using another identity) instead of, like, bribing and/or blackmailing politicians?

[godisarepublican]

They’re illegal aliens. Say it right: Illegal aliens!

[we-are-inevitable]

hey gang. if you are american and going to be 18 by November 5th (which is only two days away now, oh god) you better be voting. you better have a plan! you better be exercising your right to try to make our country better than it’s been!!

[bananonbinary]

so like, fun fact i found out about voting recently (it's never come up for me because i live in a vote-by-mail state)

you can bring help into the voting booth with you! i have never seen it mentioned before, but if you're too disabled to vote on your own, if you're blind, or if you can't speak or read english very well, you can bring someone you trust into the booth with you. as long as it's not your employer or union rep, and as long as they sign a thing saying they will not influence your vote (this bit varies by state i think, but i assume most at least have you swear an oath or something), they can help you however you need. they can even fill out the ballot on your behalf.

people don't talk enough about how hard it is to vote while disabled, but there ARE in fact protections in place for us. you just have to find them out yourself, because they sure as shit aren't going to tell you about them.

[macmanx]

California offers mail-in ballot drop boxes. Check your county’s website for details and consider using those instead.

If you’re outside of California, your state might offer the same, so check your state and county websites.