Vote Repair: Everything you need to know about fixing broken mail-in votes

These policy variations are known to have caused controversy in recent elections, as they give the impression that they benefit one political party over the other.

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With a week to go until Election Day and more than 50 million votes already cast, questions remain about the voting process and whether it will cause problems in close races. Below is everything voters need to know about it.

What is Mood Healing?

Ballot processing is being offered by many states, including all seven of the major battleground states in the 2024 election, as a refuge for voters who submit defective mail-in ballots.

Mail-in ballot voting problems often involve missing or mismatched signatures on the envelopes in which the ballots are returned. Addressing these shortcomings typically allows thousands more votes to count in elections.

To recover a voter’s ballot, election officials notify the voter that he or she has mailed in a problematic ballot that will be discarded, and provide the voter with an opportunity to resolve the problem so that the ballot can be discarded counted.

How do battleground states handle ballot handling?

Some states require mail-in ballots to be recovered before Election Day, while others allow this in the days after the election. Most voice recovery policies focus on fixing signature errors.

In Georgia, election officials must notify voters that their mail-in ballot has been rejected, and voters have until three days after Election Day to make any necessary corrections. Michigan similarly allows voters to fix ballot deficiencies up to three days after the election.

Nevada law gives voters up to six days after the election to correct missing or mismatched signatures.

In extremely close races, which all of these states could see on Tuesday, this could cause delays in the vote-counting process while election officials heal the ballots.

Wisconsin requires that mail-in ballots with missing voter signatures, missing witness signatures, or signatures that do not match signatures on file be recovered by 8 p.m. on Election Day.

In Arizona, county officials are required to reject a mail-in ballot if a signature is missing, but they must then, under state law, “make reasonable efforts to contact the voter, notify the voter of the missing signature, and the voter to add the voter’s signature no later than 7:00 p.m. on Election Day.”

Why is Pennsylvania drawing so much attention for its voting policies?

Pennsylvania, a must-win swing state in 2024, is unique in that it does not have a national standard for ballot measures, instead allowing each of the state’s 67 counties to set its own policies.

The differences at the county level can sometimes lead to confusion in a state where voting by mail is common. More than 2 million people, out of 8 million registered voters, have requested ballots in Pennsylvania for the 2024 election.

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, explained that the General Assembly explicitly adopted this policy on a county-by-county basis and alluded to the headaches it has caused.

“This is something that the Legislature has allowed even though, frankly, election officials and others have begged them to standardize it,” Becker said.

A analysis A local newspaper found that 37 counties, including closely watched Bucks County and populous, left-leaning Allegheny County, are offering voters what are often described as various notice-and-cure options to correct their bad ballots.

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Some red counties, such as Lancaster, Washington and York counties, do not have notice-and-cure options.

The inequality has attracted attention because of how it could benefit one political party over another.

Henry Olsen, an election analyst and senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, noted that mail-in ballots “will be disproportionately Democratic in Pennsylvania,” a statistic that coincides with the state’s top Democratic strongholds, including the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia regions . allowing for a form of ‘notice-and-cure’ process.

“There was concern (in 2020) that heavily Democratic counties were spending a lot of resources on that, where every vote matters, tracking someone down … and healing was something people were concerned about,” Olsen said. “It’s certainly strange that different counties are allowed to do different things when it comes to the lengths they can go to get a ballot healed.”

Norm Eisen, a prominent left-wing legal analyst, said ballot measures were not a “Democratic versus Republican issue.”

“People make mistakes on their ballots, regardless of party,” Eisen said, adding that “if the election is close, the election could go either way.”

Which election-healing battle in Pennsylvania is before the Supreme Court?

A new legal battle has made its way to the Supreme Court, focusing on “naked ballots” — ballots missing an inner sealed envelope known as a “secrecy envelope.”

Some Pennsylvania counties have a policy of notifying voters in the run-up to the election that a mail-in ballot will not be counted because it is missing a secrecy envelope. One curative option voters have been offered is to show up to the polls on Election Day and fill out a provisional ballot to replace their defective mail-in ballot.

The Republican National Committee has argued to the Supreme Court that this violates state law, which prohibits voters who have chosen to mail-in their ballots from filling out provisional ballots.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court last month ruled against the RNC and in favor of Democrats, saying voters could in fact correct their defective ballots by filling out provisional ballots on Election Day. The RNC has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene and block this option.

Why did North Carolina Republicans file a lawsuit over voting rights?

There is a lawsuit in North Carolina regarding ballot handling play out in federal court between the RNC and the state election board.

The RNC filed the lawsuit after the Board of Elections issued statewide guidance this year telling election officials that, to streamline the healing process, they could count mail-in ballots that used their own personal envelopes instead of special ‘container -return’ envelopes. Normally, such ballots would have to be discarded and election officials would offer the voter the opportunity to submit a new ballot.

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Like Pennsylvania, North Carolina is another hotbed for addressing concerns after the Board of Elections allowed voters in 2020 to fix missing signatures by filing affidavits.

A study found that nearly 20,000 votes were counted in North Carolina in the 2020 general election due to the healing process.