Can I Check if My Mail in Ballot Was Received
- Voting in the 2022 presidential ballot is ending on Tuesday.
- This autumn, election officials in almost states and the District of Columbia will exist offering online election-tracking services, allowing voters to verify when their mail service ballot has been received and accepted.
- President Donald Trump has urged his supporters to vote past mail and then go to polling places to meet if their ballots were accepted.
- Simply going to polls to check whether your vote was counted is unnecessary — in the vast majority of states, you tin cheque your ballot'southward status online.
- Visit Business Insider'due south homepage for more stories.
A tape 65 million Americans take voted by mail in the 2022 presidential ballot, according to the Usa Elections Project. And this twelvemonth, information technology's easier than ever to check online to see if your mail service ballot has been received and counted.
Dozens of states take taken steps to arrive easier to vote past mail service because of the COVID-19 pandemic, with ix states and the District of Columbia, in improver to a number of counties in Montana, sending all or almost registered voters a ballot, and more sending out mail ballot applications to all or most voters.
According to an analysis by the National Vote at Home Plant, a nonpartisan group that advocates for states to make it easier for voters to cast ballots safely from dwelling house, 47 states and the District of Columbia now have online portals that allow voters to track the status of their ballots every step of the way.
"Ballot tracking is very much similar to tracking a package that y'all order online, but for mail ballots," Amber McReynolds, the CEO of the institute, told reporters in September. "It utilizes different information-entry points into the process to let a voter know what the status of their mail ballot is from the fourth dimension it's been printed and mailed, all the way through to when it's been received by the election official at the end of the procedure."
McReynolds played a role in creating the nation's commencement ballot-tracking organization, BallotTrace, while serving every bit the elections manager for Denver in 2010.
Now in the bulk of states and the Commune of Columbia, all voters will have access to a ballot-tracking system. In those states, voters just have to enter some details like their proper noun, accost, and date of birth into the portal to see the condition of their ballots.
Several of those states, including California, Colorado, Georgia, Nevada, N Carolina, and Virginia, as well allow voters to sign up for e-mail and/or text-message alerts for updates on when their election was mailed, received, and accepted, as opposed to the voter having to manually check on their country'southward portal. That option is also available in certain counties in other states.
And even if your land's ballot-tracking organisation doesn't offering text or electronic mail alerts, you tin can sign upwards to be notified whenever you receive a letter or bundle in the post through the US Mail'southward Informed Delivery service.
In 12 additional states, ballot tracking is offered in all or some counties at the local level, where voters can verify the condition of their ballots or sign up for alerts with their canton. You can find out how to track your ballot by going to your country or local ballot office'southward website and entering your name, address, and date of birth.
This ease of access to a ballot's status runs counter to President Donald Trump'south groundless claims of widespread post-in-ballot rigging and his call for voters who mailed in ballots to check the condition at their polling places — when this can be more readily checked online.
Simply three states — Mississippi, Missouri, and Wyoming — have no ballot-tracking arrangement at the state or county level in use for the November election. If you're in ane of those states and have concerns about the status of your ballot, you tin can contact your local election office.
In numerous primary elections beyond the country this year, several states including New York, Pennsylvania, and Georgia had statewide or localized issues with voters not receiving their ballots at all, receiving them besides belatedly, or having their ballots go far back at their ballot offices too late.
Some of the authoritative problems with mail voting and contempo service disruptions and delays with the United states Postal service accept left many voters anxious almost voting by post. And in September, Trump spread farther confusion by urging voters in Due north Carolina and Pennsylvania to vote by mail and then go to polling places to run into if their ballots were accepted and vote in-person if not.
Voting twice in a federal election is illegal nether federal police and in most states, and going to the polls to check whether your vote was counted is unnecessary and volition simply create longer lines at polling places, officials say. In the vast majority of states, you can bank check on the status of your election and ensure that information technology was accepted online from the comfort of your home.
McReynolds said most ballot-tracking systems utilize data points inputted both from ballot offices themselves, like when a voter's ballot request is received and processed, and from Intelligent Mail barcodes. Election officials and their vendors can affix those barcodes to the envelopes containing voters' ballots, which provide voters with updated information on the condition of their ballots when they are scanned at every step.
I of the largest vendors working with election officials to provide ballot-tracking systems is the Colorado-based company BallotTrax, whose technology is now being used in 25 states and hundreds of counties, the company said in a September x printing release. BallotTrax's applied science has helped localities track over 60 meg ballots since 2009, the firm estimated.
"Voters using BallotTrax become a tracking service similar to Amazon'southward package tracking, allowing voters to sign up for text, email, and phone notifications alerting them to the status of their ballot, from when it is printed, sent, delivered and, most importantly, officially tabulated," the visitor's CEO, Steve Olson, said. "No longer do voters take to wonder if their post-in ballot was really counted."
Ballot-tracking systems can also allow officials to quickly alert voters if there's a problem with their ballot that must be fixed, like a missing signature on the outer envelope or a signature that doesn't match what the ballot office has on file in states that employ signature verification. Signature discrepancies take been increasingly common reasons for ballots to be challenged or rejected in 2020, a recent NPR analysis found.
Jocelyn Bucaro, the director of the Denver Elections Sectionalization, told reporters that in add-on to enhancing peace of mind for voters, ballot tracking also helps the security and integrity of a ballot as it goes from each point along the way.
"In urban areas like Denver where people live in apartment buildings with mailboxes that are non necessarily correct outside their front door, people are not always checking their mail every day," she said. "So if they get that notification, and they know that their ballot is waiting for them in their mailbox, it'south a helpful reminder and an important security feature."
Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-track-the-status-of-your-mail-in-ballot-2020-9
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