My friend is reporting it.

This can happen if the envelopes get damp, but they should send you a replacement. Otherwise, someone could swap out your ballot and then just tape it closed.

Same thing happened to me in Pennsylvania. Will be watching very carefully on the ballot status emails to make sure it's still accepted.

I'd call your local TV station or newspaper. Let them investigate and publicize it, and if it's all aboveboard at least it'll be out in the open.

Just to be real, they really don't care about the popular vote. They care about the electoral vote. And even that isn't totally true. They care about the electoral victory. They long ago abandoned democracy; they don't care about having democratically granted power. They just want the power.

A little felony by blacking out a mail-in ballot is literally the least they're ready, willing, and able to do to win.

I continue to be incredibly frustrated by how little democrats have done to counter the fraud, voter suppression, constitutionally dubious laws, takeover of state election boards and volunteers, and armed, volunteer "ballot watchers" the Republicans have deployed.

The republican "ground game" that extends beyond simply GOTV efforts and campaigning and into the wide-ranging and widespread strategies and tactics to literally dismantle and inhibit the democratic process has been met with very little resistance by the democrats. Somehow they're going to be blindsided by this, cry foul retroactively, and then be hamstrung trying to play defense from behind. Wilfully ignorant, short-sighted, and incredibly dangerous idiocy for something so fundamentally important.

The democrats don't have to be unethical because the Republicans are, but they should have been being proactive and serious about countering these attacks on the democratic process. Instead the approach seems to be sticking their fingers firmly in their ears and going "lalalalala."

They're the ones always claiming there's fraud. They must know something we don't.

Excellent point. I alerted my friend to your post. I don’t have the envelope, they just sent me the picture. They go to bed early but I’ll update you in the morning.

For mail-ins, yeah, you sign it to do the final "I authorize this document to be my vote".

If you don't authorize it, it's not legally your vote.

For mail in balloting at least in my state you sign the return envelope NOT the ballot itself.

I've always had to sign my vote by mail ballot envelope in CA. They keep a signature on file from when you last registered to absentee (not vote at your polling place) vote and compare the two to see if someone else is trying to vote in your name.

something you have to remember about the US is that while it's a democracy, all the democratic practices were started in the 1800s, often with explicit intention to negate the votes of some discriminated group

You sign the envelope that contains the ballot. That way, an election worker can compare the signature on the envelope to your signature on file.

This is how they make sure that someone didn't steal the ballot from your mailbox and fill it out for you.

Once the signature is verified, the envelope is opened and the anonymous ballot inside is removed and stored with all the others. When they are counted, there will be no way to tell who filled out each ballot.

In order for a mail in ballot to be valid, the person must sign the envelope.

Yep, we have the same system in the UK. In fact, the envelope looks almost exactly the same so they might even be printed by the same company.

You get two envelopes (one big, one small), a postal voting statement, and a ballot paper.

The actual ballot paper just has a list of options for you to put your X against; there's no personally identifiable information on it. Once you've filled it out you seal it in the small envelope.

You then fill in the voting statement (it has your name and address on it so they can cross your name off as voted, and you sign it so they can check your signature matches the one on file) and both that and the sealed ballot go in the big envelope. That way your vote is still private because they check the vote is valid in one step and then add your ballot to a pile to be counted with the others in a second step, at which point it's anonymous.

https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/voting-and-elections/ways-vote/how-vote-post

I don't believe there is, and if there was, it could be used for some really nefarious purposes!

I don’t know if all states have it, but Virginia does have vote history on their voter registration page. It doesn’t show what your vote was, but does show that it was received and counted.

Ughhhhhhhhh. Sorry, but I need to rant.

Those fuckers are so fucking sensationalist. They use the same simple-mined tactics as right-wing propaganda mills. A 20 minute video of theirs could be condensed into 5 without those tactics and actually do far more to push forward their "law based coverage".

I quickly put them in the "not worth the sensationalist propaganda" bucket after watching a handful of their videos