“If the purges [of potential voters], challenges and ballot rejections were random, it wouldn’t matter. It’s anything but random. For example, an audit by the State of Washington found that a Black voter was 400% more likely than a white voter to have their mail-in ballot rejected. Rejection of Black in-person votes, according to a US Civil Rights Commission study in Florida, ran 14.3% or one in seven ballots cast.”
"[…] Democracy can win* despite the 2.3% suppression headwind.
And that’s our job as Americans: to end the purges, the vigilante challenges, the ballot rejections and the attitude that this is all somehow OK."
I work in elections in Washington, there is only mail in voting plus county drop boxes. Yes you can say you lost your ballot or didn’t get it and come in for a replacement, but we give you the same mail in packet you world receive at home.
Yes you can drop it in the drop box in our office or you can take it home and mail it. But any voter can drop their mail in ballot off in our office as well. We don’t have polling places or voting machines, or a way to separate out and assign race to a ballot so we could somehow treat those differently. They all come in as a big stack for processing.
Why do ballots get rejected? Mismatched signatures is the biggest reason. If your signature doesn’t match what we have on file we mail you a form to fix it, we also text and email you. Maybe from demographic groups are less likely to respond? The other one is people who forget to sign, which follows the same procedure.
What I can say is that is there is some sort of disparity, it isn’t happening in the ballot processing room.
Your average citizen would consider dropping it into the dropbox at the location where they just got their ballot to count as in-person voting.