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.
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This is a felony, and can likely be traced back to the election helper who did it.
Report it!
I don’t usually recommend this but also post on Reddit and X. This needs to get out there.
A lot of the virginia ballots were mailed out with the return envelopes already sealed up. I called the election office and they said to cut them open and just seal them back with tape 🤣
Edit: to all the folks concerned about my vote, thank you for your concern. I’m not too worried about it for several reasons. You can check online to see when your ballot is received and accepted, so I’ll be doing that. If it isn’t accepted in the next week or so I’ll definitely be making some calls. Worse comes to worse, I can always go to my polling place on the day and get a provisional ballot in case something happens to my mail-in. I live in a pretty blue area so I have some trust in the local offices here; they’ve given no reason for me to be suspicious. Nonetheless I’ll still be double checking.
Same thing happened to me in Pennsylvania. Will be watching very carefully on the ballot status emails to make sure it’s still accepted.
This can happen if the envelopes get damp, but they should send you a replacement. Otherwise, someone could swap out your ballot and then just tape it closed.
Which is exactly why I called my local election office, and I even mentioned it might have been because of the rain we were having, but I was told no, it wasnt the damp that caused it because they had confirmed with the factory that sent the ballots out that some had been sent out like that. They then told me to tape it and when I was hesitant because I had the same thought as you they told me they had checked several times with the registrar that taping them up was what to do. They said it was a known issue so it would be accepted.
…what…
How can an election office accept envelopes that have been tampered with? Call them back and record the answer, then call local news, blast them on every social media you have, put a crazy persons handwritten sign in your window about it, whatever it takes. The person who said they would accept envelopes that had been cut and taped just admitted they will accept votes that may have been tampered with…
And the Republicans will scream about how democrats are using provisional ballots to vote twice. They’ll try to cast doubt on any non-favorable election result, and they’ll have the provisional votes as proof. The fact that it doesn’t mean the vote was counted twice will get lost in the noise, and it’ll be one more BS piece of “evidence” to cast the election as illegitimate.
I’m not saying you’re doing anything wrong, I think you’re doing the right thing. But we’re just in a very fucked up place politically right now.
Can someone explain this to a non US person please? You sign your votes?
For mail in balloting at least in my state you sign the return envelope NOT the ballot itself.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Don’t just call the election office, call the local news, get it trending.
