There’ve been a lot of speculative scenarios in the media about the upcoming election, dramatic projections about unprecedented turns the voting and vote tallying could take. We won’t know the results for weeks thanks to a flood of mail-in ballots! It could go to the U.S. Supreme Court! State legislatures could overturn the voting results and seat a slate of electors for the opposite candidate! All of these ideas are farfetched and likely the result of media bored with a static presidential race, devoid of roller coaster ups and downs.
But these stories are driving panic among voters, exacerbated by attacks on the voting process coming from a president who appears to not know how elections work. In particular, he’s singled out mail-in voting as rife with fraud (false) and open to manipulation by shadowy actors sending out “millions” of unsolicited ballots. (Never mind that he himself votes by mail and that his own campaign just sent out an email urging its supporters to do so). And the all-too-real problems at the U.S. Postal Service, with deliberate mail slowdowns, have increased the “Don’t mail your ballot!” hysteria.
The truth is that elections are professionally run, that voter fraud is vanishingly rare and that your mail-in vote is secure and will be delivered on time, even if you send it through the post office. And apparently, voters in Cuyahoga County aren’t daunted by the attacks on mail-in voting. According to Mike West, Cuyahoga County Board of Elections community outreach manager, they’ve already received more than 300,000 ballot requests — close to half the voters in the county. All those received have already been sent out.
One of the scare stories we hear is that mail-in ballots are being rejected for various reasons and just tossed in the garbage can, potentially disenfranchising a large number of voters.
Not here, says West.
“If they send a ballot and forgot something, we can fix everything over the phone except the signature, and if they don’t include a signature, we send them a new ballot. We let the voter know as soon as possible. We call it curing the problem. If it comes to the ID envelope that ballot is inside of, we send them a form to fill out and send back to us that will cure ID envelope that has missing information. The name of the game is don’t procrastinate.”
(You can also go on the county BoE website and track your ballot; click on “Track my ballot“).
As for the potential of “millions” of mysterious, illegal ballots to flood board of election, that’s impossible. “Every ballot has a stub number,” West points out. “We keep track of all ballots and who they go out to. On the other end, we look at all the ballots we receive and who they came from.”
A flood of late-arriving mail-in ballots that could hold up the announcement of the result is unlikely too.
“We’ve never had problems with excessive ballots delivered after the election,” says West. “If it’s postmarked on Monday [the day before the election, as required by law], it has ten days to get here. And you better believe that the postal service knows the eyes of the world are upon them. In 2016, 617,000 votes were cast and 3,600 came in after the election. I can’t imagine how it could take any more than a week unless it came from Alaska.”
And at least in Ohio the drastically increased number of mail-in ballots won’t slow down an election night count or a result the same night, which West calls “very, very likely.”
“We don’t have to wait until election night to scan 300,000 ballots,” he says. “That’s the labor-intensive part. We can begin scanning ballots as soon as we get them, but we cannot count them. We won’t be faced with avalanche of ballots to scan on Election Day. In Ohio, the results ought to be [announced] on election night or early the next morning. Where it’s going to happen is in Pennsylvania where the law says they can’t open ballots until Election Day. They’re trying to change that.”
So voters should take a deep breath and not worry, but as West says, don’t procrastinate. As campaigns and voter turnout groups are urging, make a plan to vote. Sure, the media (and perhaps even the president) would love the counting to drag on for weeks with the result up in the air — it would glue people to their TVs, newspapers and online news sites. But despite the huge increase in mail-in voting, the process of electing the next president is likely to be less eventful than you might fear.
Get more info about voting in Cuyahoga County here. If you’re in another county, google your county name and “board of elections.”
2 Responses to “The Truth About Mail-In Voting and the Election”
Jill Hubbard
FYI Here in Lorain County, the website has listed that our ballots were mailed on October 6. We have yet to receive ours as of Oct 14. And we are nowhere near as far away as Alaska as your article suggests should take no more than a week. Others here in Sheffield Village and Sheffield Lake all report that they haven’t received ballots yet. So there is concern about relying on the USPS.
Penny Jeffrey
We received our ballots on 10/8/2020, filled them in and mailed them at the 44130 post office the same day. Tracked them on the BOE website, and they were received there on 10/10. No problem!