This happened in Roanoke, which is left leaning. Republicans are going all out to cheat in this election.
OP I am an absentee voter in Blacksburg just next door. Shine a light on the blacked out part. I am 99% sure this is legit, they just crossed out the witness requirement. I can see the word witness under the sharpie in your picture. Virgina doesnt have to do that witness thing anymore. We did at the last general election, so I am guessing they just reused the same envelopes. You should call and ask your elections office before alerting the news. They are hardworking folks whose jobs are already 100 times harder then they used to be. Stirring up reports of election fraud where it isn’t happening makes us just as bad as them.
Agreed. Just commented with a reference to the recommendations for blacking it out.
Thank you for the info! My friend called and you are correct. I edited the post to reflect this information!
Excellent point. I alerted my friend to your post. I don’t have the envelope, they just sent me the picture. They go to bed early but I’ll update you in the morning.
Yeah, clear cut election fraud.
Anyone want to take bets on it being a Republican behind this?
They’re the ones always claiming there’s fraud. They must know something we don’t.
Do you know who the fraudster is
This is a felony, and can likely be traced back to the election helper who did it.
Report it!My friend is reporting it.
I don’t usually recommend this but also post on Reddit and X. This needs to get out there.
I don’t have an account on either. I use to have one on Reddit, but you know how that went over the past 16 months. Never had an account on twitter. Feel free to post this yourself if you have an account on either.
Report it to the news stations as well.
Bless Lemmy for being able to edit a post.
Could be old instructions for witness signatures vs anything malicious. Be sure this is a real issue first. Last time they sent out conflicting instructions which was worse. But yes, report it to be safe.
Joan Porte, vice president of the Virginia League of Women Voters and an Arlington resident, said she was furious when she saw the error on the envelope, which could have been solved, she said, by crossing it out with a marker.
Thank you for the info! My friend called and you are correct. I edited the post to reflect this information!
Thanks for this information. I alerted my friend. I’ll update the post if you are correct.
Always vote in person if you can
So somebody reported this to the State election board and told all the news agencies, right?
My friend reported it to the election board, but doesn’t want to report it to the news. I can’t make him and I don’t live in Virginia. If anyone wants to share this, my friend nor I will be opposed.
News tip submission forms for Roanoke, Virginia:
@UnpopularCrow, since you have more information about this than the rest of us, would you mind submitting the details to these news organizations?
So this is what a modern day “hanging chad” looks like. They’re really drawing on every previous election to insure there can be fraud claims.
America is going to have a rough one, no outcome will see legitimate - which is great for Putin regardless of whether he’s involved or not.
Let’s hope that mostly low information repube voters fall for this ballot tampering
They aren’t going to tamper with ballots in predominantly conservative areas. They’ll focus their efforts on more left leaning areas.
Gotta be prosecuted for it to be a crime.
A lot of the virginia ballots were mailed out with the return envelopes already sealed up. I called the election office and they said to cut them open and just seal them back with tape 🤣
And the Republicans will scream about how democrats are using provisional ballots to vote twice. They’ll try to cast doubt on any non-favorable election result, and they’ll have the provisional votes as proof. The fact that it doesn’t mean the vote was counted twice will get lost in the noise, and it’ll be one more BS piece of “evidence” to cast the election as illegitimate.
I’m not saying you’re doing anything wrong, I think you’re doing the right thing. But we’re just in a very fucked up place politically right now.
If worse comes to worst*
Same thing happened to me in Pennsylvania. Will be watching very carefully on the ballot status emails to make sure it’s still accepted.
The question of course being: what will you do or can you do if it’s not accepted? How far will someone go to make their vote count? Many people would likely not bother with it, which could make this a quite succesful way of sabotaging.
You usually have to go to a county office in PA. They may try to contact you if it’s early enough
I’d call your local TV station or newspaper. Let them investigate and publicize it, and if it’s all aboveboard at least it’ll be out in the open.
This can happen if the envelopes get damp, but they should send you a replacement. Otherwise, someone could swap out your ballot and then just tape it closed.
Which is exactly why I called my local election office, and I even mentioned it might have been because of the rain we were having, but I was told no, it wasnt the damp that caused it because they had confirmed with the factory that sent the ballots out that some had been sent out like that. They then told me to tape it and when I was hesitant because I had the same thought as you they told me they had checked several times with the registrar that taping them up was what to do. They said it was a known issue so it would be accepted.
it would be accepted.
Bullshit.
…what…
How can an election office accept envelopes that have been tampered with? Call them back and record the answer, then call local news, blast them on every social media you have, put a crazy persons handwritten sign in your window about it, whatever it takes. The person who said they would accept envelopes that had been cut and taped just admitted they will accept votes that may have been tampered with…
If the election results aren’t to their liking, these will be easy votes to start kicking out. And then the votes that are doubled through provisional voting, i.e., voting in person as well as mail-in in order to be sure your vote was counted.
It won’t matter if they’re counted correctly in the end. The point will be to immediately kill off democratic votes, create as much chaos as possible, declare victory, and when the dust settles, the republican, right-wing national network of fast-response staff, politicians, lawyers, and friendly judges that they’ve been preparing for four years while democrats did basically nothing will have effectively taken the election by force. SCOTUS already made a decision that will allow them to effectively decide this election. So the right-wing ideologues already have local, regional, state, and national plans that extend all the way to the highest court in the land.
And the Democrats have “but that’s not fair.”
holy shit they are going to steal your election
This and the original Op image are why I refuse to do absentee/mail in voting.
Theres just so many ways it can be fucked with, and potentially handwaved away. Especially at an institutional level in the less reputable coughconservativecough states.
Mail in ballot used to be fine, and safe, and secure… but 8 years of fucking domestic political terrorism/usurpation/insurrection/etc have kicked that out the door, down the stairs, into the street and infront of the bus.
I don’t care what I have to do, what sacrifices I have to make, and what I have to endure.
I’m voting in person this election, cause its too important not to.
and everyone else should too.
Cause in person voting is the only way to minimize the fuckery they can pull.
Even during Covid I felt a similar way. My “compromise” has been in person early voting. It’s pretty much always dead when I go in and is very quick. I don’t think I have actually voted on election day in over a decade.
nah my state rules and doesn’t have this shit going on. remember to check that your ballot is received and recorded after you vote either way
Another way is to discourage people from early voting and then lose some percentage who end up not voting on election day either.
You’re not wrong. I’ll be voting in person for this reason. But if you’re not 100% sure you’ll make it on election day, vote early. Preferably do it in person.
Some votes will likely count more than others.
Yep. Increase the need for in-person voting, decrease the amount of voting locations, have armed republican “volunteers” patrolling places, and then see how many people are willing to wait hours with armed right-wing militants eyeballing whether your glasses make you a “libtard.”
I have no statistical evidence to back this up, but my gut feeling is that the aggregate of all the voting fuckery, election board fuckery, voting laws fuckery might end up be worth as much as 3-5% in battleground states. There’s no statistical model that accounts for the illegal/quasi-legal voter suppression and disenfranchisement efforts.
All polls assume that everyone that can vote and intends to vote will get to vote and that their vote will be counted and that the counted votes will be accurately reported. That’s a serious blind spot in election polling. And since the Republicans have been screaming that elections are fraudulent because of democratic/immigrant fantasies for four full years, when legitimate fraud can and does occur, no Democrat will be able to say it loud enough that it matters.
I mean sure, I pretty much agree with you, but…
There were so many fucking trumpers hanging out at the parking lot of my voting site last time, I don’t want to be (or for my family to) around that shit.
IT was like that in 2016 for me.
I shouldered my way through anyway. They are stupid, but they aint complete fucking morons. They know starting shit at an election venue is a good ticket to federal pound-them-in-the-ass prison.
A lot of states have places for early in-person voting. You might have to drive a bit of a distance, but it allows for in-person voting in a less chaotic environment.
You might have to drive a bit of a distance, but it allows for in-person voting in a less chaotic environment.
And thus we see how voter intimidation at polling places on election day is still effective even with early voting, since it skews towards people with cars/the means to get to the early-voting locations.
Can someone explain this to a non US person please? You sign your votes?
You sign the envelope that contains the ballot. That way, an election worker can compare the signature on the envelope to your signature on file.
This is how they make sure that someone didn’t steal the ballot from your mailbox and fill it out for you.
Once the signature is verified, the envelope is opened and the anonymous ballot inside is removed and stored with all the others. When they are counted, there will be no way to tell who filled out each ballot.
When I did absentee voting, the voter signature and voter id information were on a perforated slip attached to the outside of the envelope.
That way, the process is something like:
- Look at the slip. Verify voter signature, eligibility to vote, and mark as having voted in the voter rolls.
- Detach perforated slip from sealed envelope. Sealed envelope now contains no identifying information. (This envelope was mailed inside an outer mailing envelope.)
- Entire sealed envelope and contents thereof goes into big bin of accepted ballots.
- Later, election workers open the sealed envelopes from the bin and run the actual ballot papers through the scantron machine.
And yet the “scary machines” are too easy to tamper with… they are scared of them because of how hard it would be to get away with tampering with them. And they know their supporters and others in government don’t know any better and will jump on the bandwagon of the machines being vaguely scary.
As I understand it, a fairly bulletproof method is to vote using a machine that prints out a human readable card with a punch through the candidates you voted for. So you can confirm the machine understood the options you tapped and then drop the paper ballot into a secure box, which can be used as a backup for manual recounts.
Anybody know if this is what the experts [still] want?
Honestly, while it would certainly help sell it to less technical people. There is no need for a paper copy to make it impossible to get away with tampering with digital voting, building in safeguards entirely digitally is actually enough.
But yes, most commonly recommended option is to have the machines do a quick result, and then paper to verify.
Right on.
Found an article from four years ago that I must’ve read by the way - maybe you already know all about it:
I could be mistaken, but most places check your signature against the voter roll. If your signature doesn’t match, then they’ll ask for an ID. At least that’s how it was where I volunteered in 2020. This is done before you get your ballot. You don’t actually sign the ballot itself.
just imagine gremlins running around in your election system at every level. thats pretty much whats happening
Yep, we have the same system in the UK. In fact, the envelope looks almost exactly the same so they might even be printed by the same company.
You get two envelopes (one big, one small), a postal voting statement, and a ballot paper.
The actual ballot paper just has a list of options for you to put your X against; there’s no personally identifiable information on it. Once you’ve filled it out you seal it in the small envelope.
You then fill in the voting statement (it has your name and address on it so they can cross your name off as voted, and you sign it so they can check your signature matches the one on file) and both that and the sealed ballot go in the big envelope. That way your vote is still private because they check the vote is valid in one step and then add your ballot to a pile to be counted with the others in a second step, at which point it’s anonymous.
https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/voting-and-elections/ways-vote/how-vote-post
Wrong. We don’t sign our ballots.
Stop talking.
I think we found the guy that’s blacking out the envelopes. 🤣
Thanks for informing me of the details.
I’ve always had to sign my vote by mail ballot envelope in CA. They keep a signature on file from when you last registered to absentee (not vote at your polling place) vote and compare the two to see if someone else is trying to vote in your name.
In order for a mail in ballot to be valid, the person must sign the envelope.
something you have to remember about the US is that while it’s a democracy, all the democratic practices were started in the 1800s, often with explicit intention to negate the votes of some discriminated group
And one party is doing their best to keep that heritage of disenfranchisement alive.
The key point is that if it’s not signed, it gives them an excuse to throw it away.
Do that to enough people and you end up with a big problem. The uncounted votes could swing the election, or you get a messy court case where some judges step in and basically decide the election on their own, or who knows what else.
At a minimum, it’s sets the stage for chaos. And from the chaos can emerge a chaotic outcome.
For mail in balloting at least in my state you sign the return envelope NOT the ballot itself.
In Illinois they give you two, well 3 technically. The one everything comes in, the one you put the ballot in, and the one you put the ballot envelope in. So the signature is not on the outside or on the ballot itself.
For mail-ins, yeah, you sign it to do the final “I authorize this document to be my vote”.
If you don’t authorize it, it’s not legally your vote.
NY requires you to also sign the registration book when you vote in person.
There’s a difference, signing the book is done before you vote in person in ny, and is not associated with your ballot or who you voted for. So in person there’s no way to know who you voted for.
For mail-in, you don’t sign the ballot itself. You sign the envelope, which is used to validate / track who voted, but is then separated from the actual ballot before counting so there’s no way to track who you voted for.
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Get this paid spam out of here.
Rooki won’t allow it, too busy cashing the checks.
Don’t just call the election office, call the local news, get it trending.
You might see if you can get this to the Meidas Touch guys too. They could help research and amplify this to the national media
Ughhhhhhhhh. Sorry, but I need to rant.
Those fuckers are so fucking sensationalist. They use the same simple-mined tactics as right-wring propaganda mills. A 20 minute video of theirs could be condensed into 5 without those tactics and actually do far more to push forward their “law based coverage”.
I quickly put them in the “not worth the sensational isn’t propaganda” bucket after watching a handful of their videos
Isn’t the whole point int this case to make a sensation?
They all are like that. They all use heavy clickbait titles to get attention to their videos, and those titles have a tenuous at best relationship with the actual topic, which they all blow way out of proportion and act as if this will finally be the thing that brings down Trump. These are the ones who the right refer to as having “Trum Derangement Syndrome”, as they post daily videos that are almost exclusively about Trump, while peddling products that you can tell they’ve never used or even heard of in their lives by the way they read the script.
Don’t get me wrong. The information they give is at least truthful (exaggerated, but truthful) and the products they’re shilling are actual products and not crypto scams or something, which puts them far ahead of Trump’s supporters. But they’re still basically grifting and trying to ride the Trump train as long and as hard as they can, as I don’t know what half of them are going to do once Trump is actually out of the public eye.
