Those are good reasons to help election offices use the technology. They are not good reasons to refuse their mail.
A tool designed to track a ballot should not become a veto over whether the ballot begins its journey.
Amanda Gonzalez, the clerk responsible for elections in Jefferson County, Colorado, has described what that journey looks like before the voter ever sees an envelope. Her county administers elections for approximately 450,000 registered voters. On the principal mailing date, its contractor arrives at a Denver postal facility with multiple pallets of ballots. The county then sends daily updates for people who register, change addresses or need replacement ballots. A file delivered to the contractor before 3 p.m. can result in another set of ballots being printed and mailed that same day.³
This is not a tidy, one-time transfer of a perfect list. It is a moving operation involving voters, county officials, contractors, changing addresses, fresh registrations and unforgiving deadlines. Under the USPS proposal, those pallets would arrive with another question hanging over them: Will the federal system accept them?
“USPS should be delivering ballots,” Gonzalez wrote, “not acting as a gatekeeper between voters and the ballot box.”³
She is right. The Postal Service insists that states would remain responsible for deciding who may vote, but that reassurance misses the practical point. A state can decide that a voter is eligible. A county can prepare the voter’s lawful ballot. Yet the ballot can still sit outside the mailstream, or be sent back to the county, because of a certification problem, barcode discrepancy, envelope defect or data mismatch.
The voter does not care which government database caused the failure. The voter cares that the ballot did not arrive.
For Nick Papadopoulos, receiving a ballot at home is not a matter of convenience. Papadopoulos is a rural Georgia voter with cerebral palsy who uses a power wheelchair. The only time he voted in person, he first had to find transportation, possibly pay for it himself and arrange for a caregiver to prepare him. He then had to confirm that the polling place could accommodate his chair.⁴
“That’s why I rely on voting by mail,” he wrote. “It is my lifeline to make my voice heard.”⁴
That is the person missing from the sterile language of portals, identifiers and certifications. A ballot returned to an election office is not merely a rejected mailing. Somewhere at the other end is a voter who may not be able to jump into a car, take time off work, find child care or travel to a polling place as a substitute.
Rights are often lost through a sequence of small administrative failures. A record is entered incorrectly. A barcode does not match. A batch is rejected.