Drop it off, Dan. Drop it off.
Even as the Seattle Times once again editorializes in favor of changing our ballot deadline from postmarked on election day to received by election day, it is important to note that a huge chunk of ballots are already routinely tossed out for missing the deadline. For example, in King County alone, 6,621 mail-in ballots were invalidated in the 2009 general election for late postmarks… equivalent to 1.2 percent of the 574,298 ballots ultimately counted.
That’s a helluva lot of disenfranchised voters, and I’m guessing most of them dropped their ballots in the mail on or before election day.
So don’t take any chances. Drop off your ballot at one of the drop boxes around the county. Or, you can do what I do, and vote in person at one of King County’s three accessible voting centers.
(FYI… even if you’ve lost your ballot, or left it at home, you can still vote in person. That’s what I do every election day, because… well… I just kinda like it.)
Fuckin’ hooray, Goldy! I’m going down to Union Station to vote in person like daddy taught me. Thanks for the news.
The Seattle Times can’t go away fast enough. They are a shower of flaming lunatic right wing extremist arseholes in 95% of any given scenario.
Also: your link to the times is broken.
I highly doubt those ballots invalidated for late postmarks were mailed before election day. Heck, I doubt most of them were even mailed during the normal post office hours on election day.
What probably happened is those six thousand something voters either put their ballots into a curb-side mailbox after the last pick-up time (4:30 for the one I know in Eastern WA) or just mailed it after the proper day.
Bitch.
And if you do have to put your ballot in a mailbox, double-check the pick-up times posted on the box, to make sure there is still a pick-up today after you deposit your ballot.
The Post Office has been cutting back on postal box collections, and you cannot assume that an afternoon deposit will be picked up and postmarked the same day.
You link to the drop boxes didn’t work.
gus, I certainly hope you’ll be wearing something fabulous. Voting is for a day, but fashion is forever.
Hopefully the dry weather today will result in a good turnout. I’ve skipped live voting before because of horrible weather and the prospect of standing outside of Fremont Baptist for 45 minutes in the rain to then squeeze into their tiny, humid space was not acceptable. Mail-in ballots are the only way to go in this area, as you can normally expect it to be cold & wet this time of year.
@2, @5
The links are valid, but Slog does this weird thing where it briefly redirects embedded links before going to the destination, I suppose to track them. So perhaps that wasn’t functioning… though it is for me now.
is it really disenfranchisement when people do it to themselves after they’ve already had over two weeks to vote
Canuck, my outfit is tragic I’m afraid, but I do have my Fluevog Future Angels redeeming it all!
@7 you can still drop off ballots in Ballard.
Fluevogs redeem anything, gus, even tragedy. Don’t get ink on your fingers, pumpkin.
@11 Thanks for the FYI, but my story was from a few years back. I’m in SnoHoCo now, which is all mail-in voting.
Though it should be pointed out, if you are a non-car owner who just got home @ 6:30pm after a wet Metro ride, and were planning on live voting, you don’t have a ballot to drop off, nor a car to get to Ballard. Price for living in the big city, I guess.
Do you still have to request mail-in ballots in KingCo? I did, after the aforementioned vote-fail.
can people who don’t have disabilities use the voting sites?
(ballot never arrived in the mail)
If you don’t care about these things:
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salmonella poisoning the eggs your family eats
E. coli poisoning your meat and veggies
PCBs poisoning the milk Baby sucks from Mommy’s breasts
those “Aspirin” you’re buying are actually Rat Poison
your kid’s teacher is a convicted –and unsupervised– sexual predator
low-income kids not having a hot lunch at school
neighbors losing their homes to foreclosure
being paid a decent wage, and receiving help when unemployed
elections that are 1st Tuesday Silent Auctions
————————————-
Or if you think all government regulations are stupid, and that taxes are “a waste of MY money,” then vote for one of those GOP/TP “Charlie McCarthy” ventriloquist props.
————————————-
Otherwise, vote for a Democrat!
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The choice is simple, and “a waste of taxpayer dollars” never enters into it.
The operative word isn’t “waste,” it’s “investment.”
Never trust the posted pick-up times at USPS curbside mailboxes. THERE’S NO UNIVERSAL QC SYSTEM to ensure that they are even loosely adhered to. Even if the route drivers are supposed to scan a barcode inside the box, their scanner data dumps have to be checked and enforced by somebody. I’ve seen them pick up hours early from boxes with one pick-up a day, and I’ve dropped letters into boxes that were obviously pretty full within an hour after the last scheduled pick-up. Even if they get picked up in time, they usually have to go to some centralized site (not the nearest post office) for postmarking–who’s to say whether that gets done before midnight?
Quite awhile back, my local post office put barcodes inside all the home mailboxes, and the carriers had to come up the walk and scan even if there was no mail to deliver or pick up. If I were home I’d hear the little *boop* from the scanner. That lasted about six months, then they stopped scanning. Some time after that the barcodes were removed. That was several years ago now.
Either get your ballot into a mailbox first thing in the morning (too late now), leave it at an official election drop box/polling place, or hand it directly to a post office counter employee and ask him/her to hand-cancel it for you.
So if I no longer live where I was regestered, (not too far just not the same house) and did not get my ballot, where can I vote in person?
Use them to toilet paper, that’s all their good for in King County anyway!
Use them to toilet paper, that’s all their good for in King County anyway!