Election offices in Arlington and Falls Church are on the lookout for any glitches with the U.S. Postal Service handling official election-related mail.
A relatively small number of ballots from the office of Falls Church registrar David Bjerke were mailed but had not yet reached residents who requested them, Bjerke reported at an Oct. 23 meeting of the Falls Church Electoral Board.
Known problems thus far are few, but “if it’s even one, it’s one too many,” said Renee Bergmann Andrews, the board’s secretary.
“We want every vote to count,” Andrews said.
Separately, some voters had mailed ballots or applications to the election office using pre-addressed, postage-paid, bar-coded envelopes provided by the city. But those envelopes were returned to the voters with a “not deliverable as addressed” notation.
While nondelivery and misdelivery is something to keep an eye on, “it is not statistically significant at this point,” Bjerke said. Still, it was enough for the city government to make the issue known to the public on Oct. 24.
The city’s news alert directed those who applied for a ballot, but had not received one by return mail after a week, to contact the office. It also encouraged residents with early-voting ballots to use the secure dropbox in front of City Hall at 300 Park Avenue to ensure they are received on time.
Voters across the commonwealth can check online to determine if their ballot has been received.
In Arlington, elections director Gretchen Reinemeyer told ARLnow she was not aware of ballots or applications from the public failing to arrive at her office because the Postal Service couldn’t find the county’s government center in Courthouse.
“But we do have several cases of mail sent to voters returned to us with the same error,” she said.
Similar to Bjerke, Reinemeyer’s advice is to use one of the county’s nine dropboxes or return their ballots to early-voting sites, or to polling places on Election Day itself.
As with Falls Church, the dropboxes in Arlington are under video surveillance.
As of Oct. 23, more than 500 mail ballots had been cast in Falls Church, while more than 8,100 were cast in Arlington.
State law requires that ballots cast by mail can be counted if they are postmarked on or before Election Day, and if they arrive at election offices by noon the subsequent Friday.
One new wrinkle for 2025: There is no longer a guarantee the Postal Service will apply postmarks to a piece of mail the same day it is deposited in the mailstream.
For those thinking about casting ballots by mail at the very last minute, that also could provide the impetus to hand-deliver them to dropboxes or precincts, or to ask a Postal Service employee to apply the postmark in their presence.
