Counting Absentee Votes

Perhaps it would have been more accurate in my blog post “Hillary wins the popular vote – not” to characterize the inconsistencies in the handling of absentee ballots as a town-by-town situation rather than a blanket statewide scenario.  There are not, to my knowledge, any formal statutes that forbid the counting of absentee ballots until or unless the in-person state ballots have been counted first.

However, in conversations with town officials, I have learned that it is not unusual for some officials, faced with late-night eleventh-hour time horizons and an overwhelmingly one-sided vote tally up and down the ballot, to adopt a somewhat laissez-faire attitude and call it a wrap when uncounted or unreceived absentee ballots are not of sufficient number to influence the outcome.  To think that every town official adheres to an unfailingly airtight approach – even when the outcome anywhere on the ballot in that district is well beyond even the slightest question  – is to have an unrealistic faith in a theoretical process that is naive to a frighteningly mind-numbing degree.
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Blog: Counting absentee votes