Here's a nice kick-up for good ol' Big Gub'ment:
The [Federal] Postal Service on Monday ordered every post office in the nation to deliverall absentee ballots to boards of elections even if voters send in the ballots without enough stamps.
A Cleveland postal official said he had never seen such a far-reaching directive.
I mentioned
this problem in a comment at another diary a few days ago, describing how some Ohio voters had not included extra postage to cover their mail-in ballots. In Summit Co., for example, the Board of Elections had sought merely to return the ballots to senders, marked "insufficient postage." This would likely have disenfranchised most of these voters.
[Postal Service spokesperson Victor] Dubina said nothing specific prompted the decision, but several boards of elections, such as Summit County's, have struggled with what to do with absentee ballots that don't have enough postage.
Summit County Council was prepared to cover unpaid postage, contradicting a Summit County Board of Elections directive to postal officials to return ballots with insufficient postage to the senders.
Council stepped in because printing errors delayed the mailing of 28,000 absentee ballots to voters until the middle of last week. Officials feared that some voters, upon getting the ballots returned for insufficient postage, would not have time to return them by the Nov. 7 deadline.
"Why should you disenfranchise voters?" said Karen Doty, the county's law director. "People are so scared about the changes in technology, it seems petty for 50 cents not to do it."
Petty indeed.