[font color="navy" face="Verdana"]Why would anyone dangle any of their outgoing mail from the outside of their mailbox like that?!?

If they can't get to the post office or a blue box outside, at least leave the outgoing mail locked inside their box with a note on the door for the mail carrier.



No, it's not vote-by-mail that's a bad idea. It's not educating people on how to treat their ballot securely that's a bad idea.

the recipients' boxes. They are INCOMING mail.

[font color="navy" face="Verdana"]I read it again. I got the idea they were outgoing from a little farther down in the article: "Where we live in Los Angeles, we often see completed Vote-by-Mail ballot envelopes on their way back to the county, set on top of the building's mailboxes, waiting for pickup by the postal worker."

That's still no excuse, though. Postal workers need to be strictly instructed and admonished about getting ballots to the correct voters, and FIRED for the kind of security breach shown in this article.

Proper post office procedures and common-sense security measures by postal customers should be in place for all mail, but especially voting ballots.

people's attempts to get them to the correct recipient?

occupant puts envelope out like that for the mail person to pick up.

That's a LOT of ballots to put into the wrong box, unless the postal carrier was drunk or blind or something! Also, the fact that everyone put them into the other person's boxes (under your theory) the same exact way seems quite unlikely as well.

Our county registrar has a process for replacing absentee ballots that didn't get to the voter (happened to me once) and a way of checking whether or not the ballot was received and counted. Voters whose ballots got lost in the mail can request provisional ones, and have to swear they're only voting once (and they do check). This does require voters to have some common sense and a little initiative, but it's still a convenient way to vote (I send off my November ballot this morning!).

How does that work when, in a small-ish municipal election like the one coming up in San Francisco (where the ballots seen above are from), voters who are "Permanent Vote by Mail" people don't notice that their ballot didn't get to them until after the election is over?

Down here in L.A. we have small elections all the time. We also have some 1.3 million "Permanent VBM" voters in this county alone, as I note in the article. If I was a permanent VBM person, I can't say I'd really notice when a ballot just never showed up for some small election or another. Would you?

Those have been up for a couple of months now. In September, the county registrar sent a voter information pamphlet to all registered voters with the text of the ballot, instructions, a vote-by-mail request, and all the usual election information, including the notice that mail-in ballots would be sent out 30 days before the election. Then it's up to the voter to wake up and use his or her brain.

My town did one off-cycle election entirely by mail. This year there's only one thing on the ballot. When we have these single-issue elections, though, it's about something very local and people get very agitated on both sides. So far it hasn't become as heated as the compost vote 2 years ago.

I've been voting since the 26th Amendment took effect and haven't missed an election. Since they tend to occur at regular times (November, June, occasionally March) I know when they're about to happen and when to expect my ballot. And, like anyone on DU should be, I'm interested in politics.

That no more indicates a broken system than the time ballots in a precinct I was working were cut too widely to fit in the scanner. Sloppiness and human error are problems in any system.