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Ballot Recovery: Everything you need to know about fixing defective postal ballots

Ballot Recovery: Everything you need to know about fixing defective postal ballots

Part of ballots which are poured by mail into the 2024 election it will inevitably contain deficiencies due to human error, but if voters are given a chance to fix, or cure, the problems on their ballots it depends on the state or sometimes the county.

These policy variations have been known to stir controversy in recent elections because they are perceived to benefit one political party over the other.

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With a week until Election Day and more than 50 million votes already cast, questions linger about the ballot healing process and whether it will cause problems in close races. Below is everything voters need to know about it.

What is ballot healing?

Ballot retrieval is offered by many states, including all seven of the top battleground states in the 2024 election, as a recourse for voters who send in incomplete mail-in ballots.

Often, problems with postal ballots involve missing or mismatched signatures on the envelopes in which the ballots are returned. Fixing these deficiencies usually allows thousands of extra votes to be counted in an election.

To cure a voter’s ballot, election officials notify the voter that they mailed in a problematic ballot that will be discarded and give the voter an opportunity to fix any problems so the ballot can be counted .

How are battleground states dealing with vote healing?

Some states require mail-in ballots to be cured by Election Day, while others allow it in the days after the election. Most ballot cure policies focus on fixing signature errors.

In Georgia, election officials must notify voters that their mail-in ballot has been rejected, and voters have up to three days after Election Day to make the necessary corrections. Similarly, Michigan gives voters the opportunity to correct ballot deficiencies up to three days after the election.

Nevada law gives voters up to six days after the election to correct missing or inappropriate signatures.

In the extremely close races that all of those states have the potential to see on Tuesday, that could cause delays in the vote-counting process while election officials heal ballots.

Ballot Recovery: Everything you need to know about fixing defective postal ballots
A Michigan voter puts his absentee ballot into a box in Troy, Michigan, on Oct. 15, 2020. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

Wisconsin requires that mail-in ballots with missing voter signatures, witness signatures, or signatures that do not match those on file be pinned by 8:00 p.m. on Election Day.

In Arizona, county officials are required to reject a mail-in ballot if a signature is missing, but then, under state law, they must make “reasonable efforts to contact the voter, inform the voter of the missing signature, and allow the voter to add the voter’s signature no later than 7:00 p.m. on Election Day.”

Why is Pennsylvania getting so much attention for its vote-healing policies?

Pennsylvania, a must-win state in 2024, is unique in that it does not have a statewide standard for curing the ballot and instead allows each of the state’s 67 counties to set their own policies.

Variance at the county level can sometimes lead to confusion in a state where voting by mail is predominant. More than 2 million people out of 8 million registered voters have requested mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania for the 2024 election.

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Research and Innovation, explained that the General Assembly expressly adopted this county-by-county policy and alluded to the headaches it caused.

“This is something the legislature has allowed, even though, frankly, election officials and others have asked them to standardize it,” Becker said.

A analysis by a local institution found that 37 counties, including closely watched Bucks County and populous, left-leaning Allegheny County, offer what are often described as various “notice and cure” options for voters to fix their ballots. bad vote by mail.

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Some red counties, such as Lancaster, Washington and York counties, have no notice and cure options.

The unevenness has attracted attention because of how it could benefit one political party at the expense of another.

Henry Olsen, an election analyst and senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, noted that mail-in ballots “will be disproportionately Democratic in Pennsylvania,” a statistic that coincides with major Democratic strongholds, including the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia regions , from the state. allowing for some form of notice and cure process.

“There was a concern (in 2020) that heavily Democratic counties were spending a lot of resources doing this, where every vote counts, going after someone … and healing was something that people were concerned about,” Olsen said. “Certainly, it’s strange that different counties are allowed to do different things in terms of the effort they can put into trying to heal a ballot.”

FILE – Allegheny County workers scan mail-in ballots and ballots at the Allegheny County Division of Elections Election Depository in Pittsburgh, Thursday, Nov. 3, 2022. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)

Norm Eisen, a prominent left-wing legal analyst, said ballot healing is not a “Democrat versus Republican issue.”

“People make mistakes on ballots, regardless of party,” Eisen said, adding that “if the election is close, it could swing the election either way.”

What battle to heal Pennsylvania’s ballot is on the Supreme Court’s docket?

A new legal battle has reached the Supreme Court that centers on “loose ballots” — ballots that lack a sealed inner envelope known as a “secret envelope.”

Some counties in Pennsylvania have a policy of notifying voters before the election that the mail-in ballot they sent in will not be counted because it is missing a secret envelope. One cure option given to voters is to go to the polls on Election Day and fill out a provisional ballot to replace the defective mail-in ballot.

The Republican National Committee argued to the high court that this violates state law, which prohibits voters who have opted to mail-in ballots from completing provisional ballots.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled against the RNC and in favor of Democrats last month, saying that voters can, in effect, correct their defective mail-in ballots by completing provisional ballots on Election Day. The RNC asked the US Supreme Court to step in and block that option.

Why did the Republicans in North Carolina sue for voting cure?

In North Carolina, a lawsuit related to curing the vote is playing in federal court between the RNC and the state election commission.

The RNC introduced the lawsuit after the board of elections sent statewide guidance this year telling election officials that, to simplify the healing process, they could count mail-in ballots that used their own personal envelopes in instead of special envelopes “returning the container”. Normally, such ballots would have to be thrown away and election officials would give the voter a chance to cast a new ballot.

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Like Pennsylvania, North Carolina was another hotbed for handling concerns after the election commission allowed voters to cure missing signatures in 2020 by filing affidavits.

One study found that in the 2020 general election, nearly 20,000 votes in North Carolina were counted because of the healing process.