Five days ahead of the November 3 election, millions of requested absentee ballots around the country have not been returned—42 million out of the 92 million requested, according to the nonpartisan early vote trackers at U.S. Elections Project. The deadline for the U.S. Postal Service to guarantee on-time delivery of your ballot is past, so if yours is among those 42 million, don't put it in the mail.
For those ballots already in the USPS system, there is now a federal judge monitoring its daily performance. Judge Sullivan has also required the USPS to make sure all carriers are informed to prioritize election mail and that late trips and extra trips are now allowed to make sure it all gets delivered. So there's efforts in place to make sure already-mailed ballots get there. But to make sure your mailed-in ballot is received could take some work. In the majority of states—45 plus the District of Columbia—you can track your ballot. CNN provides all the links there. If your state doesn't have a tracking capability, you can call your local elections office for guidance.
Voting America also is a one-stop shop for finding out your voting options.
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If you have an absentee ballot in hand, filled out and ready to go, call your local elections office—in my case it's the county clerk—and find out where you can drop it off either in a ballot box or office. If you really want to make sure that your vote is cast and ready to be counted, in most states you can take your absentee ballot with you to the polling location and surrender it. It will be voided and you can cast your in-person vote. In many states, even if you don't have your absentee ballot, you can still vote with a regular ballot provided elections officials can confirm that they haven't already received a completed ballot from you. This takes work, and in-person voting frankly involves safety concerns with coronavirus surging. So it's a very personal decision, but many states will allow you a safe way to cast your ballot.
The good news is that millions of ballots have been returned—42 million. That adds to the total 75 million people who have already voted as of Wednesday. That's more than half of the total turnout in 2016. Democrats have so far out-voted Republicans as of this week 45% to 33% in the battleground states that provide partisan voting data.
Many of the outstanding ballots could be from voters who requested them early on but then decided to vote in person—it's unknown how many that could be. North Carolina's Board of Elections Chairman Damon Circosta says that there are about 600,000 votes still out from the 1.4 million requested. “Some of those voters may have chosen already to go and vote early in person; some may vote on Election Day,” he said. “But there’s still a significant number of outstanding absentee ballots, and we’re asking them to mail them or drop them off as soon as possible.”
There are about half a million ballots out of the 1.5 million requested in Georgia that have not been returned, Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs told the Washington Post, because people are concerned about mailing in their ballots. “You have a handful of candidates who are saying you can’t trust it,” Fuchs said, “so you’re seeing a response from those who intended to vote absentee and are now going to vote in person.” It's not just Trump, though. The USPS sabotage and mail delays have been huge news for months, so plenty of voters have decided that the mail isn't reliable enough and they'll have to vote in person.
That includes Pennsylvania, where just 43% of Philadelphia's first-class mail was delivered on time Tuesday—if you have a Pennsylvania mail-in ballot, drop it off in person. Same in Detroit, Michigan, where just 52.6% of mail was delivered on time Tuesday. "In Northern Ohio, 56 percent; in Wisconsin, 60.7 percent; in South Florida, 62.9 percent." And in 17 postal districts in 10 battleground states—representing 151 electoral votes—"the average on-time delivery rate for first-class mail was 64.2 percent on Tuesday, 27.6 percent lower than the performance score for those districts at the beginning of the year."
You don't want your ballot to have a 60-40 or less chance of being received. Particularly in one of those battleground states. But with all of this confusion, the bottom line is good for democracy thus far. “We’ve never even seen close to this number of early voters,” David Becker, executive director of the nonprofit, nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research told the Post. “I think what that’s telling us is that for all of the partisan gamesmanship, for all of the last-minute litigation, for all of the legitimate concerns we all have about the pandemic and foreign interference, the voters are saving us. The voters have gotten the message to make a plan and to vote early. And they’re working hard to educate themselves about their options, and they’re making their voice heard.”