What to Do If You Still Haven't Mailed In Your Ballot

Photo: Henry C Jorgenson (Shutterstock)

The pandemic makes it challenging to plan anything ahead of time, including voting. Maybe you previously thought you would be out of town on November 3, but now your trip is cancelled and you want to vote in person. Or perhaps you got caught up in all the excitement surrounding requesting a mail-in ballot a few months ago, but now have decided you’d rather make the trip to the polls. Or maybe your ballot has been filled out for weeks, but you keep forgetting to drop it in the mail, and now you’re worried it’s too late.

Even the best-laid voting plans change sometimes. If you’ve found yourself in one of the situations above—or others that involve not yet mailing in the ballot you requested—you haven’t missed your chance to vote. Here’s what to know about your options.

What if you still haven’t mailed it?

If you haven’t mailed your ballot yet, it may be time to rethink your voting strategy. The United States Postal Service recommended putting your ballot in the mail by October 27, at the latest (which was yesterday). While some (but not all) states do accept mail-in ballots that are postmarked on or before Election Day—even if they don’t physically arrive at the elections office until after November 3—this isn’t the best time to rely on the mail.

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Yesterday, Geoff Bennett, a White House correspondent for NBC News, tweeted about this timeline:

The moral of the story is to avoid sending your ballot by mail, if at all possible. Instead, drop it off yourself. Your options depend on which state you vote in, but can include ballot drop boxes, your local election office, an early voting location, or your polling place. You can check on what’s available in your state here.

What if you requested a mail-in ballot, but want to vote in person?

While most states do offer some type of accommodation for these circumstances, election officials, including Jason Hancock, Idaho’s deputy secretary of state, encourage people to vote using your mail-in ballot. “I encourage people who have received an absentee ballot to go ahead and vote that ballot,” Hancock told ProPublica. “Spoiling ballots and issuing new ones adds to the cost and administrative burden of running an election and may slow down the voting process for anyone behind the voter in line at the polls.”

If that argument doesn’t sway you and you still want to vote in person, here’s what to do. First, poll workers will need to confirm that you haven’t already voted, which in some—but not all—cases involves looking you up in a voter database.

Even if your polling location does happen to be one of the fancy ones with the databases, it’s best to come prepared. This means being ready to explain your situation to the poll worker, and physically bringing in your mail-in ballot, which could help speed the process along.

If given the all-clear, you should be able to either vote with a regular ballot, or in some cases, via a provisional ballot. But if that’s not an option and all else fails, you’ll have your mail-in ballot with you at your polling place, so just fill it out and drop it off while you’re there. And before attempting any of this, check on your state’s rules to make sure it’s even possible. ProPublica has put together this handy state-by-state guide.

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