this is not a case under the VRA. It’s a lawsuit against the post office. The VRA concerns the courts orders with regard to states, not the post office.
To receive a ballot in jersey, one must be a registered voter.
Allan
Once they are in the mail they are exactly the same and they both count one if a proper vote.
Allan
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Perhaps you should go back and read my post.
Do all States require this if a mail in (better term universal mail in) ballot? Or do some states send ballots out unsolicited to registered voters? Voters who may no longer reside at the residence, voters who have died…
Did you request to vote by mail and confirm your identity or do you automatically just get a ballot without requesting one?
I never said they didn’t.
Most states that have mail in ballots do it via Florida’s method…only a couple are sending out ballots, and even there they are constrained (registered voters who have been active…voted in the last two elections).
And your post made it seem you believed Florida had two separate processes for absentee ballots and mail in ballots. There aren’t two processes…there is only one.
All states have checks in place to make sure the ballots received were received from the actual voter and are not fraudulent.
In florida, if you ask for an absentee ballot or a mail in ballot…you get the same thing
So once the ballot is in the mail on the way to be counted. They are exactly the same.
The main difference is in how they are procured by a registered voter to start the voting process.
Either requested or sent to every registered voter.
Once filled out and returned via mail…
Allan
I don’t get the angst over the USPS delivering. I have every expectation that they would deliver election mail just as efficiently as any other first-class postage. (After all, either the state gives you a postage paid envelope, which gets the USPS more $$ than a first-class stamp, or the voter affixes the same 55 cents he would on the letter to Aunt Millie.
They handle magnitudes more mail over the Christmas season than the surge of mail-in voting will produce.
To me, the whole USPS issue is a manufactured problem.
What I am concerned about is the way it all will be handled once the ballots get delivered to the local precincts.
In my opinion Colorado has a very robust mail-in voting process. Has had it for years. Upwards of 75% of voters use the mail-in ballots. And there are scads and scads of drop-off locations all over the state. I have seen that 90% of those who use mail-in actually drop them off. (Saving the postage.)
And it has worked essentially problem free for years.
But it took 10 years for the state to get it to this point. Glitches and bottlenecks. Complaints… But now it’s trustworthy and easy and efficient.
Other states can use Colorado as a model. But I just wonder how many can crank up the infrastructure and personnel and processes to make it work like this in just a few months.
That’s going to be the big problem on election night. In Colorado you can expect that 99.9% of all ballots will have been counted by the next morning, and lots of them are already counted by the time polls close. (Your drop-off ballot has to be in a drop-off box by 7PM, when polls close. And if your ballot hasn’t arrived in the mail by election day, well, too bad.) I doubt other states will be geared up to do this. They’ll still be counting ballots from outlying towns days after election day. They’ll be “finding” piles of uncounted ballots in town hall closets and under desks.
Colorado is really good about doing PSAs about getting your ballots in on time. Three business days (and often sooner) the PSAs and news broadcasts are all urging people not to mail them at that point. Use a drop off box instead.
It shouldn’t take a judge to tell the USPS to do what it has always been doing. We don’t need a judge to force them to deliver Christmas cards! Other first-class mail should be no different.
Colorado is primarily a mail-in voting state. But it also provides in-person voting access. (Just not as many polling places as it used to provide before it went to a mail-ion system.)
That’s a separate issue, in my opinion. (And it’s an issue on which I agree with you.)
I just don’t see mail-in voting being any different from all other first class mail.
Expecting to fix the USPS for the larger issue as a part of cranking up mail-in voting is a misplaced vector for that change.
USPS isn’t even a branch of the US gummint.
Plenty of examples are out there of this. I expect everyone has seen some posted before.
Another thing Colorado does: If you haven’t voted in x-many prior elections (not sure of the amount) your voter registration is flat-out canceled. You get a letter stating so, and instructing you how to re-register.
Ya think?
No it didn’t.
I like that 
Yes…it did.
You said my state…Florida…absentee ballot…requires registering, proof of ID, etc
Mail in voting…requires no such thing.
This implies there were two different processes in Florida.
You gave no clue you were now talking about other states (most of which you were wrong about anyway even if you were).
Even moreso because they aren’t called absentee ballots in Florida anymore.
And SCOTUS took much of the bite out of the VRA in 2013…
The power of the Voting Rights Act was in the design that the supreme court gutted – discriminatory voting policies could be blocked before they harmed voters. The law placed the burden of proof on government officials to prove why the changes they were seeking were not discriminatory. Now, voters who are discriminated against now bear the burden of proving they are disenfranchised.
Immediately after the decision, Republican lawmakers in Texas and North Carolina – two states previously covered by the law – moved to enact new voter ID laws and other restrictions. A federal court would later strike down the North Carolina law, writing it was designed to target African Americans “with almost surgical precision”.
