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As of Wednesday, 497,000 Virginians have cast their ballot, with 323,000 doing so in-person and 174,000 by mail according to L2, a national voter roll vendor. Another 183,000 early ballots have been sent out but not yet returned.
By contrast, on Oct. 22, 2020, 12 days before the presidential election, more than 1.5 million Virginians had already voted, and another 1.1 million ballots were outstanding. While this nearly 70 percent drop in early voting may seem large, it is expected.
When a voter requests an absentee ballot on a paper application, he or she must sign it. Election officials compare that signature to the signature in voter registration files before a ballot is sent to the voter, Raffensperger said.
When those ballots are returned, the required signature on the outer envelope is compared to signatures in the voter registration system.
@jeremyherb
& @fschouten
A county-by-county review by Just the News of accepted and rejected mail-in ballots throughout the state of Pennsylvania show that, when added up, the state only rejected 951 of 2,614,011 mail-in ballots this year, or a rate of 0.03%.
Donald Trump has taken to Twitter to claim his lead in “many key states” has “magically disappeared”, after it was confirmed today that Joe Biden had overtaken the current president in Wisconsin and Michigan.
Mr Trump was leading in both of the rust belt states when he prematurely declared himself the winner of this year’s presidential election on Tuesday night at a White House press conference.
Joe Biden is currently holding a narrow lead over President Trump there. Counting continues in other key battleground states – latest updates:
According to a press release from the county Tuesday night, about half of the ballots received by mail had been counted by 8 p.m. but the process was going more slowly than anticipated due to mechanical issues with the ballot scanner.
After the high speed scanner had been operating all day, a technician was called into the Election Bureau to allow the scanning to continue until 11:30 p.m. before picking back up again around 8:30 a.m. A second scanner is also expected to be available on Wednesday.
(29.10.2020)
In the final days before the presidential election, the Supreme Court has been pelted with requests from parties in battleground states seeking last minute approval to change election rules, especially regarding whether mail-in votes can arrive after Election Day and still be counted.
They planned to stop scanning absentee ballots at 10:30 p.m. and pick it up back in the morning. No official could explain before press time why Fulton was stopping its count of absentee ballots at that time, only saying that was the procedure.
“As planned, Fulton County will continue to tabulate the remainder of absentee ballots over the next two days.
Despite President Donald Trump’s claim that his early lead in Pennsylvania based on partial vote totals is “going to be almost impossible to catch,” most mail ballots had not yet been counted and released as of 3 a.m. Wednesday.
And those ballots will heavily favor Joe Biden.
Four key battleground states — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia — began Wednesday with tens of thousands of absentee ballots uncounted, leaving the White House race between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden up in the air.
Election officials in some states called it a night and planned to resume the count in the morning, while some counties in Pennsylvania weren’t even to start tabulating their mail-in votes until later Wednesday morning.
In August, the respected CATO Institute reported that 62% of Americans acknowledge holding views that many people consider offensive. Among conservatives, that number skyrockets to 77%. With potentially tens of millions of closeted fans, Trump is a pollster’s nightmare. The wife of a pro-Trump buddy of mine detests the 45th president. Yet, when she slams Trump — which is very often — my friend smiles, nods approvingly, and replies, “I hear ya, sweetie,” or, “you sure got that right, honey.” Another guy who does the same thing says, “Happy wife; happy life.”
„The rule of law, as established by the United States Constitution and the Minnesota Legislature, dictates these rules must be followed notwithstanding the Secretary’s instructions to the contrary,“ the assenting judges wrote in explaining their decision.
„There is no pandemic exception to the Constitution.“
The Interregnum comprises 79 days, carefully bounded by law. Among them are “the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December,” this year December 14, when the electors meet in all 50 states and the District of Columbia to cast their ballots for president; “the 3d day of January,” when the newly elected Congress is seated; and “the sixth day of January,” when the House and Senate meet jointly for a formal count of the electoral vote. In most modern elections these have been pro forma milestones, irrelevant to the outcome. This year, they may not be.
“Our Constitution does not secure the peaceful transition of power, but rather presupposes it,” the legal scholar Lawrence Douglas wrote in a recent book titled simply Will He Go?
(27.10.2020)
For the 2020 election, the states have until Dec. 8 — six days before the electoral college must meet — to count votes and settle all election disputes.
(September 27, 2020)
This year may feature the most turnout ever, according to some projections, and combined with an expected surge in mailed ballots could mean that Americans don’t get a definitive result on election night.
(September 21, 2020)
There does seem to be general agreement on one provision of the 1887 act: the “safe harbor” clause. It provides that, if a state submits its final tally in the Presidential contest by six days before the meeting of the Electoral College, that decision is “conclusive” and thus free from legal challenge. This year, the safe-harbor deadline is December 8th; the Electoral College meets in each state capitol on December 14th.
It is unclear, however, what will happen if a slow vote count puts a state in jeopardy of missing the deadline.
(September 3, 2020)
More than at any time since 2000, the possibility that states could have problems meeting crucial December deadlines for their electoral totals hangs in the air. The sheer challenge of tallying mail-in ballots during a pandemic could delay final results, as could litigation in swing states with narrow margins between candidates.
With about 240,000 ballots mailed, that meant one in five voters received a wrong ballot. The error happened Saturday afternoon when someone changed a setting on a machine that places absentee ballots into mailing envelopes, Franklin County elections officials said Thursday.
„Well, they’ll go out and they’ll go vote, and they’re going to have to go and check their vote by going to the poll and voting that way, because if it tabulates, then they won’t be able to do that,“ Trump said on the tarmac in front of Air Force One. „So, let them send it in, and let them go vote, and if the system is as good as they say it is, then obviously they won’t be able to vote. If it isn’t tabulated, they won’t be able to vote. So that’s the way it is. And that’s what they should do.“
(8 hours ago)
President Trump is scheduled to speak at RNC Monday, 12:30PM ET.
«Sie benutzen Covid, um eine Wahl zu stehlen», sagte Trump. «Sie benutzen Covid, um unser Volk, unser ganzes Volk, um eine freie und faire Wahl zu betrügen.»
Zum Abschluss der weitgehend virtuellen Veranstaltung wollte Trump ursprünglich am Donnerstag mit einer Rede im Weissen Haus die Nominierung annehmen.
President Trump set a dark tone in his first speech of the Republican National Convention on Monday, accusing Democrats of exploiting the pandemic to steal the election, and calling the push for mail-in voting the “greatest scam in the history of American politics,” even as he joked himself about serving “12 more years” in office.
Für dieses Gesetz mussten die Abgeordneten sogar ihren Sommerurlaub unterbrechen: Top-Demokratin Nancy Pelosi hatte das Repräsentantenhaus ausgerechnet an einem Samstag nach Washington zurückbeordert.
The takeaway:
– An absentee ballot is generally used in every state to refer to a ballot filled out by a voter who cannot, for various reasons, physically make it to a voting location on Election Day.
– A mail-in ballot is used more broadly to refer to ballots sent through the mail, including in all-mail voting states and some forms of absentee voting.
In popular discussions, some people will use the terms absentee ballots and mail-in ballots to mean the same thing: voting by mail, regardless of why. However, many people will use absentee ballots specifically to refer to ballots that are mailed when a person can’t vote in person, and use the term mail-in ballots in the context of voting policies that enable all people to vote by mail.
Pelosi first announced on Sunday that she would call the House back early from its August recess to vote on legislation that would prevent the Postal Service from making changes to delivery operations during the coronavirus pandemic. The House is scheduled to convene on Saturday to vote on the bill in a rare weekend session sandwiched between the Democratic and Republican conventions.
Today, using the coronavirus as an excuse, the Democrats seek to abolish how we conduct elections in the United States.
Our current system of voting came into being as a result of a great progressive reform movement in the latter part of the 19th century and early 20th century.
Ardent progressive reformers, like the socialist Henry George in 1886, strove to prevent corruption in the electoral process. The progressive reformers championed a system of voting by an official ballot printed at public expense by a neutral authority. Previously political parties had printed their own ballots and ward bosses paid people to vote for their candidates, stuff ballots and vote repeatedly.
The system was intimidating and enormously corrupt. A supervisory public authority was necessary to monitor balloting, ensure fairness, and provide the necessary element of voter secrecy.
The new structure of reform called the ‚Australian ballot‘, (named from its place of origin) specifies that a citizen coming to the poll be registered to vote and identified. At the poll, he gives his name and address. He receives an official ballot; marks it in the secrecy of a booth and hands it in to be counted.
In another exchange, the president said Democrats will struggle to unite at their convention this week, as many of the more progressive members of the party balk at a ticket including former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif.
„These are the same people I beat last time and they’re not gonna unite because they can’t unite, they don’t know how to unite,“ Trump said. „Also, Bernie [Sanders] is very unhappy, but actually, Biden went further left than Bernie wanted him to and Bernie’s still unhappy.“
Elections in the United States are mostly held by secret ballot,[20] although some states use mail ballots instead, which violate requirements 3 and 4 of the „Australian ballot“, as it is distributed to the home, and potentially marked in the presence of other people. The states of Colorado, Oregon, and Washington conduct all elections by mailed ballots.[21] The Constitution for the state of West Virginia still allows voters to cast „open ballots“.
That is why I am calling upon the House to return to session later this week to vote on Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Maloney’s “Delivering for America Act,” which prohibits the Postal Service from implementing any changes to operations or level of service it had in place on January 1, 2020. House Democratic Leader Hoyer will soon be announcing the legislative schedule for the coming week.
To save the Postal Service, I am also calling upon Members to participate in a Day of Action on Tuesday by appearing at a Post Office in their districts for a press event.
„There was a cemetery where the names on the tombstones were registered and voted. I remember a house. It was completely gutted. There was nobody there. But there were 56 votes for [John F.] Kennedy in that house.“
Mazo also found that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s charge that other counties were doing the same thing in favor of Republicans proved to be true—but nothing on the scale of what happened in Chicago.
(May 23, 2016)
And then there’s Julita Abutin.
Records show she voted in Norwalk in 2014, 2012, 2010 and 2008 though she died in 2006.
Abutin’s daughter, Marivic, says it’s impossible that her mother voted.
But the Los Angeles County Registrar confirms they have signed vote-by-mail envelopes with her mother’s name for the 2014 and 2012 election, though she died 10 years ago.
The court’s decision also comes as President Donald Trump has repeatedly disparaged voting by mail as prone to fraud. The President has claimed, without evidence, that there is systemic cheating with mail-in ballots and has made false accusations against states that are expanding absentee and mail-in options, despite voting by mail himself.
Numerous studies suggest that voter fraud is all but nonexistent in the US, and the President’s own voter fraud commission disbanded without finding any evidence to back up his claims.
(30.06.2020)
The city board, like its equivalents throughout the state, has been swamped with an unprecedented volume of absentee ballots and is currently working on sorting through them. Final totals for the number of mailed in-ballots should be available later this week. Ryan said that “more than 10 times” the number of such ballots expected under normal circumstances had been sent out.
(30.06.2020)
With potentially as much as 50% of the vote being cast by mail this year because of the coronavirus, absentee ballots could decide the primary election. Under state law, counting may begin Wednesday, but it could take several days to complete in some counties.
(01.07.2020)
I still support McGrath no matter what though.
Texas currently only allows absentee ballots from elderly, disabled, incarcerated or traveling voters. The state’s Democrats have been seeking to expand the definition of „disabled“ to include those who fear coronavirus exposure during in-person voting.
The state’s primary runoff election, which was postponed in light of the pandemic, is scheduled to be held on July 14. Judge Biery’s ruling also applied to the general election in November.
A press release from the Office of the Attorney General identifies the mail carrier as 47-year-old Thomas Cooper of Dry Fork, West Virginia. An affidavit claims he “fraudulently altered eight absentee ballot requests in Pendleton County,” by changing the party affiliation from Democrat to Republican. Cooper had access to the ballot requests because of his job as a rural mail carrier — he delivered mail in the three towns that the tampered requests came from: Onego, Riverton and Franklin.
(yesterday)
President Donald Trump said during Friday’s coronavirus task force press conference that he would oppose the idea of using mail-in ballots in the November 2020 election, saying it would allow people to „cheat.“ He also added that Voter ID is „the real deal.“
„I think a lot of people cheat with mail-in voting,“ Trump said. „I think people should vote with Voter ID. I think Voter ID is very important, and the reason they don’t want Voter ID is because they tend to cheat.“
(04.04.2020)
The Wisconsin Republican Party has requested that the U.S. Supreme Court block extended absentee voting in the state’s presidential primary scheduled for Tuesday.
Many other states who were supposed to have primaries in April have rescheduled them for a later date due to the coronavirus pandemic, but Wisconsin is still slated to go through with its election as planned.
(31.03.2020)
The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Republican Party of Wisconsin on Tuesday in a case related to Wisconsin’s upcoming election.
The party brought the case against Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell last week.
McDonell issued guidance last week that any Dane County voter confined by the COVID-19 pandemic could mark themselves as „indefinitely confined“ on their absentee ballot application. Doing so would allow them to bypass the state’s voter ID requirement in their application.