Mail-in vote experiment reveals potential problems with postal service

by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – An experiment on the US Postal Service’s ability to handle mail-in-voting for the November election found that 3% of voters may effectively be disenfranchised, CBS News reports. This issue has raised concern as a close call election would require all votes to be counted: many voters are expected to mail-in their ballot because of COVID-19 worries.

The test was conducted by CBS This Morning in an experiment to see how many days voters should allow themselves to make sure their ballot arrives in time to be counted. The USPS recommends: “voters should mail their return ballots at least one week prior to the due date.”

CBS sent out an initial 100 mock ballots from simulated voters across Philadelphia. A PO box was put in place to represent a polling station. A further 100 ballots were sent a few days later. A major difference between the mock and real ballots was that real mail-in ballots have a logo on them that is intended to speed up delivery: CBS said it was unable to obtain that logo. In any event, the mock ballots were mailed in the same size envelope, same class of mail, and same approximate weight, CBS reported.

A week after mailing, 97 out of 100 initial ballots had arrived. This means that 3% of the electorate would not have had their say by only giving themselves a week. Four days after the second set of mock ballots were mailed, 21% of the votes had not arrived, CBS reported.

The rules for mail-in voting vary from state to state and there are variations on when voters can receive and then send out their ballot. Over 73,000 out of 33 million mail-in ballots arrived too late to count in the 2016 presidential election.

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