Your mail-in vote is just as good as your inperson vote
My biggest question heading into the 2020 election is why isn’t DraftKings running the whole operation. I’m not kidding, either. I can place a $2,000 bet on the Cowboys, I can put $5,000 down on a blackjack hand, I can parlay 16 different games, and without fail, money is exchanged, wins are paid out, the whole thing goes off without a hitch.
Of course, it could be any online merchant you’re telling me Amazon or Facebook or just about any whip smart Silicon Valley group of nerds (I wish I was a nerd; what you’ve been dealing with the last 20 years is a garden variety dork) couldn’t put together a foolproof way for Americans to cast their vote from the comfort of their own homes? Seriously: This doesn’t exactly seem all that hard.
But until my voting utopia comes to pass, we’re stuck with the old-fashioned way of doing things: Checking to make sure your signature scribble matches the one you scribbled when you were 18 or whatever, and then pressing a few buttons in a voting machine.
Or, this year, using the USPS to carry your mailin vote from your kitchen table to the secret cabal of socialist lizard people who are going to steal the election for Joe Biden and then use the coronavirus vaccine to implant microchips in your bloodstream so you too will become a pizza-store front for a bunch of Clinton-supporting child molesters.
OK: Why all the upset over mail-in votes? I don’t get it. I can only imagine that Trump and Co. believe more mailin votes will equal more votes period, and more votes period almost certainly means more votes for Biden (see: any current poll). Of course, this being a democracy and all, nothing would please me more than to see every American cast a vote, but whatever. For now, I’d like to take this moment to dispel the myths surrounding mail-in voting in New Jersey. To do so, let’s bring in Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute of New Jersey Politics at Rider University and noted lizard person. (Please note Rasmussen typed up his answers for me, and I put them in my own words.)
You can still vote in person: At least one polling place will be open in your town, and at least 50% will be open in each county, so you’ll be able to vote in person without much hassle. But why anyone would choose to vote in person - pandemic or otherwise - when a perfectly good ballot will be mailed to your home, I have no idea.
All ballots are the same: In other words: The same goofy process - checking to make sure signatures match - is in place no matter if you vote in person or while watching “The Masked Singer.”
Your vote is anonymous: Sure, you don’t get to go under a curtain like not-quite Vegas magician, but the way the mail-in votes are set up - two envelopes and a bar code
- the sum total of zero vote counters will know that you secretly wrote in “Mickey Mouse.”
Only active voters will receive mail-in ballots: Have you not voted in the last few federal elections? If so, you’re one of over 400,000 New Jerseyans. You also won’t get a mailin ballot as a result.
Multiple ballots: Yes, you’ve already seen pictures on Facebook of people getting multiple mailin ballots for other elections. And it will almost certainly happen again.
But if you get 10 ballots and try to vote 10 times, only one will count. Once they check off the signature in the counting process, that’s that.
Time: It will be shocking if at 11 p.m. election night Biden is giving his victory speech. The counting of ballots will take a little more time. Who cares, though? Aren’t we all more concerned with making sure the count is correct?
Nothing is really all that different: County clerk offices in the state are made up of people who have been down this road before. They know what to do with mail-in ballots.
In short? The mail-in vote worry is not a worry. Carry on. Vote with your conscience. All hail the lizard people.