Edit: 11:30 AM Monday 11/6/2023 — no change.
I finally gave up and emailed the elections office. Sure, they have my ballot. They’ve had it for more than a week now. And it’s been accepted.
The problem is Fairfax County’s description of the ballot tracking system. They say it tracks your ballot. Right up to the point where they’ve accepted it as valid. Full stop.
They don’t say that it only tracks ballots returned by mail. Which appears to be the case. So the accurate description of absentee voting is that if you do the entire transaction by mail, they’ll let you know when your ballot was received and accepted. But if you drop the ballot in a drop box, you get no further information.
I didn’t expect to that, because you have the right to “perfect” (i.e., correct) your mail-in ballot if you filled it out wrong, e.g., failed to fill in the date. If you mail it back, you get an on-line site where you can find out if your ballot was defective. But if you drop it in a drop box, it’s up to the County to track you down, if they can.
Original post follows:
I like to vote by mail.
Among the things I like about it is that the mail ballot is tracked across four “handoffs”:
- Office of Elections to USPS
- USPS to you
- You, back to USPS, filled out.
- USPS to Office of Elections
Fairfax Country knows who has my ballot, based on those four handoffs.
Except when it doesn’t. As above. Which happens to depict the incorrect-and-getting-incorrecter status of my ballot.
My ballot’s real status is that I had it for a month, I filled it out and dropped it in a drop box over the weekend.
The County, by contrast, thinks the USPS has still has it, and never delivered it to me. (It must not have been scanned as “delivered” by my carrier.)
For the nerds among you, note that the extremely long time apparently held by the USPS set off no red flag with the County? Possibly, once the letter leaves the mail carrier’s hand un-scanned, that error cannot be easily fixed. There’s no longer anything to “scan out” that’s in the possession of the USPS.
I’m sure all will work out in the end, but still … it’s not what I wanted to see.
