Thursday, October 10, 2024

Permanently Absentee Balloting In Texas


The envelope you see here arrived in my mailbox yesterday. In the envelope is my Absentee Ballot.

Being in Texas I had little confidence an Absentee Ballot application would succeed.

Whilst living in the state of Washington, if I remember correctly, I went to the permanent mail-in ballot method in the 1980s. Til moving to Texas I'd not voted in a polling location for decades.

I found voting in Texas to be a clunky experience. Often with long lines, such was the case with the last General Election. I first tried to vote in the Sikes Senter mall polling location. The line was hundreds of people deep. Drove to the next closest polling location. Same problem. So, drove to the downtown Wichita Falls polling location, found the line not quite so long, and so spent an hour or two waiting to vote.

To get an Absentee Ballot in Texas one first had to request, on-line, an Absentee Ballot request form.

You could not just fill this out on-line.

The form arrived in the mail.

The print on the form was small, the information to be filled in was a lot. I filled out the form, checking off the section which requested permanent Absentee Ballot status. I mailed the form to the Wichita County Elections Administrator. 

And a couple weeks later the Absentee Ballot showed up in my mailbox.

I have not yet opened the Absentee Ballot envelope. I am assuming there is a return mail envelope inside, already addressed.

I likely will get to stick stamps on the envelope.

I do not remember doing so when mailing ballots in Washington. 

In Washington there are ballot drop-boxes strategically placed in convenient locations...

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