First things first, voting is important, and I encourage anyone and everyone who is legally able to vote, to vote. This really has to do with the concept of automatically sending out ballots to every registered voter rather than opt-in absentee mail-in voting. In the United States, there are over 150 million registered voters, and it would take much longer than a few months to make such a system work.
A few months ago, the Post Office Inspector General released a report regarding their investigation into the Wisconsin election and the events that led to thousands of people never receiving ballots that they had requested, and people receiving ballots too late.
While the changing dates of the election did nothing to help the Postal Service or Election Commission in holding this election, the report was a lesson in how inefficient local government can be. Much of the blame for the errors in this election can be placed on the Election Commission.
The Wisconsin Election Commission allowed voters to request absentee ballots until Friday, April 3rd at 5 pm, four days before the election. Some offices didn’t send out these ballots until Monday, April 6th, only a day before the election. In the report, it is noted that absentee ballots requested less than 7 days before an election run the risk of not being delivered, filled out, and returned to election offices in time.
In the report, the Inspector General also noted that Intelligent Mail Barcodes, used to track the ballots throughout the election process, were not used on all ballots as there was no standardized ballot format. Each election office created their own, with several deciding against using barcodes.
Use of these barcodes would have helped indicate that a computer glitch on March 22nd led to almost 2,700 requested ballots not being sent to voters.
Human error did play a role in the ballots. Addresses placed on ballots in the village of Fox Point led to an inattentive USPS employee that had the village office on their route delivering ballots there, simply because the first line of the address was “Village of Fox Point”. This happened more than once, and following other policies regarding logging and tracking political mail using a political mail log could have clued someone into what was happening.
It’s these types of errors that may bring into question how well the federal government, state and local governments, and the USPS could handle a large amount of ballots.
Sources:
- USPS Inspector General Report: https://www.uspsoig.gov/document/management-alert-–-timeliness-ballot-mail-milwaukee-processing-distribution-center-service
- US Registered Voters Information (November 2018): https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/voting-and-registration/p20-583.html
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