Cure Ballots
Every election, some ballots don’t get counted. Maybe a ballot signature doesn’t match the signature on record, or the ballot was damaged in transit. In one recent case, a wildfire burned down a USPS with mail inside…there are many reasons your ballot might wind up in limbo! If your ballot goes entirely missing, you’ll need to catch that before the election deadline, but other issues like a mis-matched signature can be cured through election certification in most states. (Usually a few weeks.)
How to do it:
After every election it’s a good idea to check your election board’s record: do they have your ballot? Are there any issues? Challenges can be legit (maybe your signature changed) or partisan (in close elections sometimes party volunteers will challenge more ballots from areas that lean away from them.)
How you verify your vote was counted varies by state. In Washington I can watch my ballot progress from received to counted online, using my personal information. (NOTE: none of this exposes how you voted. Only that you did vote.) Vote.org has a convenient list of links to help you get started.
Once you’re in the habit of checking your own ballot, how about volunteering to cure ballots? This involves contacting voters whose ballots have been challenged to tell them how to cure the problem. Your local party is the the most likely place to check for groups doing this work, but before large Presidential elections there are also often dedicated ballot-curing organizations.
During the 2024 election cycle VolunteerBlue organized ballot curing volunteers and built this short video about the process. It is likely they will do so again in 2028, and possibly for the midterms.
NOTE: we no longer refer to vote.gov, due to the Trump takeover of the site. Instead, we use Vote.org as a robust alternative for federal election information, and encourage you to visit your state elections board for specific information about your voting system. Elections are state controlled!
