Your ballot or other mail may not get postmarked by USPS the day it's dropped off

[BumRushDaShow]

17. Trust me, I was shocked

I had been attending Telephone Town Halls given by my State Senator for a number of years and more recently had asked him about whether we would ever have mail voting and he laughed. And then one day in fall of 2019, it happened - Act 77.

The impetus behind it was that the GOP here HATED the option for "straight party voting" (i.e., being able to vote for an entire slate of candidates of one party with one lever click, button push, or filled-oval) and wanted to get rid of it. So they offered the mail voting (a/k/a "no excuse absentee ballots" ) in exchange for getting rid of the straight party voting as an incentive for our (D) governor Tom Wolf, to sign off on it. And he did.

And the first election to use it would end up being the April 2020 primary, which got pushed to June due to COVID.

We got new ES&S ExpressVote XL touchscreen machines here in Philly in fall 2019 and the November 2019 election was my first AND last time using that mess, and I have thankfully been able to mail vote since then!



(The chute on the right with the paper ballot strip that a voter would review before it got sucked into the machine had no backlight and where I voted, there was not enough overhead light to even read the damn thing... plus the "blank" paper ballots appeared to be some kind of "thermal" type paper, which was concerning to me)