If you tear your ballot into pieces and send it in

[BWdem4life]

Last edited Fri Nov 4, 2022, 08:12 PM - Edit history (1)

(Something no true DUer would do, of course)

How would you expect the elections office to handle it?

I’ll tell you how it’s handled in King County (for non-Washingtonians, that’s the largest county in the state, expecting to process more than 1 million ballots this election).

The ballot gets taped together if possible, to determine if there are actually any votes on it.

I can’t imagine that smaller counties are any less careful, so I’ll go out on a limb and say most likely this is a statewide thing.

So, here are your takeaways:

1.) Washington state really, REALLY wants to make sure all votes are counted, even if the voter goes out of the way to make it difficult to do so.

2.) Lurking R’s:

a.) You may well be causing extra work for someone who shares your political affiliation; election workers are not any more likely to be Democratic.

b.) If you’re trying to make some kind of point, that point will never reach anyone but that low-level elections worker, and possibly an election observer.

c.) Oh yeah, that Republican observer? Also thinks you’re a dick.

[OAITW r.2.0]

1. If you tear up your ballot and send it in, the key point you are making is-

fuck this democracy thing. I wouldn't bother counting any vote that has been obviously destroyed. If you can't present the vote to the reader, it should be discarded....should have a law that makes it a crime to deface a ballot.

[BWdem4life]

4. I don't think that would be possible

It’s not like a ballot is like U.S. Currency, property of any government. Not until it is deposited into the mail or a dropbox. There would be the obvious First Amendment issues - also, sometimes a person’s ballot will be late arriving, they’ll request a new one, then the original ballot will arrive. Currently we tell them to just recycle the other ballot - otherwise, they’d have to return it to us, and then we’d have a bunch of duplicate ballots to deal with.

[OAITW r.2.0]

6. Do you get to destroy your ballot when you get to the ballot box? What if every Republican

did that? I'd relocate to the "don't give a shit" wastebasket.

[BWdem4life]

7. I see no reason why you couldn't destroy your own ballot at the drop box.

I'd file that under the same category as flag burning. Once you've dropped it into the box, though, it's no longer yours.

If every Republican did it, I'd be overjoyed.

Actually, I think the real reason we tape it back together is not so much that we care about the person who tore up the ballot getting to vote - more likely, we don't want an observer to see us toss it out and then it turns out there were votes on it and they make a public stink about us not counting them. Maybe implying that someone in Ballot Opening surreptitiously tore up the ballot. That kind of thing.

[OAITW r.2.0]

8. You want to tape 50MM ballots back together? How? And will it be a bi-partisan review?

This road leads to Nutzville.

[BWdem4life]

9. Of, you mean they all turn them in torn up

If that really happened, I guess we'd have to figure out what to do at that time. I could see Trump suggesting it just to create mayhem. But as it is, right now it's a rare enough occurrence that it doesn't cause that much disruption.

Oh, and we have actually had people call us up and ask for their ballot back "because they messed up." No can do.

[SharonClark]

2. I'm confused.

Poll workers and people who work in the election office are not the same thing. Did someone mail in or hand in a ballot to the election office and a worker had to tape it together?

Is this for real?

[BWdem4life]

3. I'll change "poll workers" to "election workers"

I often use the terms interchangeably - guess that’s wrong. Yes, I’ve seen this happen which is why I posted about it. Working KC elections right now.

[jmbar2]

5. I volunteered today to be a ballot processing observer.

They have Democrat and Republican observers present for every step of that process.

It was very well-designed, with multiple checks and double checks at every step. The people were conscientious and very exact in performance of their duties. No way that part of the process could be tampered with.

A couple of the ballots were really nasty. One ballot processor scraped a ballot and said she thought there were boogers on it. Some ballots just came in blank.

My Republican counterpart was part of a team that "canvassed" in neighborhoods, apparently trying to confirm if people on the voter rolls actually lived at their addresses. I asked her a bunch of questions about it, but didn't get much of a sense that there were any real cases to back up the paranoia.

I suggested that we form a local bipartisan committee to exam election processes and make recommendations for change to alleviate such worries. We could even use the "data" that they collected while "canvassing".

She wasn't too keen on the idea. Shucks.

[Buzz cook]

10. Thanks for volunteering

That makes you a hero in my book.

[jmbar2]

11. You are very kind - thanks