EDIT: See @AnimePhantasm comment below! My friend called the election board and they confirmed what @AnimePhantasm and @fmstrat commented! This was Virginia reusing last year’s envelopes.
OP I am an absentee voter in Blacksburg just next door. Shine a light on the blacked out part. I am 99% sure this is legit, they just crossed out the witness requirement. I can see the word witness under the sharpie in your picture. Virgina doesnt have to do that witness thing anymore. We did at the last general election, so I am guessing they just reused the same envelopes. You should call and ask your elections office before alerting the news. They are hardworking folks whose jobs are already 100 times harder then they used to be. Stirring up reports of election fraud where it isn’t happening makes us just as bad as them.
Can someone explain this to a non US person please? You sign your votes?
I could be mistaken, but most places check your signature against the voter roll. If your signature doesn’t match, then they’ll ask for an ID. At least that’s how it was where I volunteered in 2020. This is done before you get your ballot. You don’t actually sign the ballot itself.
Yep, we have the same system in the UK. In fact, the envelope looks almost exactly the same so they might even be printed by the same company.
You get two envelopes (one big, one small), a postal voting statement, and a ballot paper.
The actual ballot paper just has a list of options for you to put your X against; there’s no personally identifiable information on it. Once you’ve filled it out you seal it in the small envelope.
You then fill in the voting statement (it has your name and address on it so they can cross your name off as voted, and you sign it so they can check your signature matches the one on file) and both that and the sealed ballot go in the big envelope. That way your vote is still private because they check the vote is valid in one step and then add your ballot to a pile to be counted with the others in a second step, at which point it’s anonymous.
https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/voting-and-elections/ways-vote/how-vote-post
The key point is that if it’s not signed, it gives them an excuse to throw it away.
Do that to enough people and you end up with a big problem. The uncounted votes could swing the election, or you get a messy court case where some judges step in and basically decide the election on their own, or who knows what else.
At a minimum, it’s sets the stage for chaos. And from the chaos can emerge a chaotic outcome.
something you have to remember about the US is that while it’s a democracy, all the democratic practices were started in the 1800s, often with explicit intention to negate the votes of some discriminated group
You sign the envelope that contains the ballot. That way, an election worker can compare the signature on the envelope to your signature on file.
This is how they make sure that someone didn’t steal the ballot from your mailbox and fill it out for you.
Once the signature is verified, the envelope is opened and the anonymous ballot inside is removed and stored with all the others. When they are counted, there will be no way to tell who filled out each ballot.
When I did absentee voting, the voter signature and voter id information were on a perforated slip attached to the outside of the envelope.
That way, the process is something like:
- Look at the slip. Verify voter signature, eligibility to vote, and mark as having voted in the voter rolls.
- Detach perforated slip from sealed envelope. Sealed envelope now contains no identifying information. (This envelope was mailed inside an outer mailing envelope.)
- Entire sealed envelope and contents thereof goes into big bin of accepted ballots.
- Later, election workers open the sealed envelopes from the bin and run the actual ballot papers through the scantron machine.
And yet the “scary machines” are too easy to tamper with… they are scared of them because of how hard it would be to get away with tampering with them. And they know their supporters and others in government don’t know any better and will jump on the bandwagon of the machines being vaguely scary.
As I understand it, a fairly bulletproof method is to vote using a machine that prints out a human readable card with a punch through the candidates you voted for. So you can confirm the machine understood the options you tapped and then drop the paper ballot into a secure box, which can be used as a backup for manual recounts.
Anybody know if this is what the experts [still] want?
For mail-ins, yeah, you sign it to do the final “I authorize this document to be my vote”.
If you don’t authorize it, it’s not legally your vote.
NY requires you to also sign the registration book when you vote in person.
There’s a difference, signing the book is done before you vote in person in ny, and is not associated with your ballot or who you voted for. So in person there’s no way to know who you voted for.
For mail in balloting at least in my state you sign the return envelope NOT the ballot itself.
