Action | Action Making an Illegible or Missing Postmark an Immaterial Omission on Absentee Ballot Envelopes |
Stage | Proposed |
Comment Period | Ended on 10/2/2020 |
For an election to be considered valid, all of the votes rendered must be verified as being cast on election day, or on or before election day when voted by absentee ballot. When you remove the necessity for a postmark, you remove the validity of the ballot. Without a postmark, how are the people tasked to count ballots able to verify that the ballot was cast by the end of the election day. An unscrupulous person could decide that he/she did not like the results of the election on election day and collect (or make) enough ballots to change the results. With a postmark, that cannot be done. To keep Virginia's elections valid, we must be sure that the votes that are counted are cast within the proper framework. Thank you for considering my view.