According to Just The News, some voters in Baltimore received their mail-in ballots earlier this month. The bad news is that those ballots were for the 2020 election. On Aug. 5, 2022, a tray of undelivered ballots was discovered. To the post office’s credit, they were delivered to the homes in Southeast Baltimore on Aug. 6. Better late than… never?
Local TV station WMAR reached out to the Postal Service and got a response from a spokesperson acknowledging the SNAFU and stating in part:
We deeply regret the late delivery of these mailpieces. The Postal Service takes these issues very seriously and is working to help avoid issues like this by going over our processes and procedures with all employees ahead of the general elections. The U.S. Postal Service is fully committed to the secure, timely delivery of the nation’s Election Mail. We are in close communication with the Baltimore City Election Board and look forward to a successful election in November.
It’s easy to write this one off. After all, we’re only talking about 26 votes in a traditionally blue state that Biden won with 1,985,023 votes to Trump’s 976,414. The results were probably a foregone conclusion. But during my years as a reporter, I covered a city council election in which the incumbent won by a single vote. And while 26 ballots were not enough to swing things one way or the other for the Oval Office, it would be interesting to see if they would have affected any down-ballot candidate races or propositions. Probably not, but the point is that these ballots sat in that office for two years. Doesn’t anybody ever clean around that place? For two years, those ballots sat around the post office and nobody ever said “Hey, maybe we ought to do something about this.”
More to the point, mail-in voting is supposed to be convenient and secure. For 26 people at least, it turned out to be impossible. And while this is yet another reason to demand in-person voting (one person said they would vote in person from here on out, even if they had to don a HazMat suit during the next pandemic), how many of these people even took the time to figure out they never got a ballot and got a provisional one? That raises two questions. One, how uneducated and unmotivated is the average American voter? And can those problems be exploited for political gain?
It may have been an honest mistake, but in a time in which Election Day has become Election Quarter and well on its way to turning into Election Year, actual people at actual polls have never been more important.
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