Once a rarity, ballot tracking is
now available in most states.Nicholas Little / for NBC News
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Sept. 23, 2020, 12:00 PM EDT
By Kevin Collier
Forty-six states have quietly
adopted a free way for every voter to track their ballot this year, a potential
rebuttal to fears that voting by mail is inherently risky.
Ballot-tracking systems, a first for
most states this presidential election, are a potential way to combat
Americans' growing distrust in election results in general
and the accuracy of voting by mail in particular.
For most states, it's a simple
online lookup that shows simple fields for each voter's ballot, like whether
it's been sent or received, according to a tally from the National Vote at Home
Institute, a nonprofit that advocates allowing Americans to vote without having
to visit a polling site.
Five states, plus several hundred
counties, go further. They offer a service that marks every voter's envelope
with a unique barcode like a shipped package and lets them receive updates via
text message or email every step of the way.
That's a sharp increase from 2016,
when only a handful of states allowed ballot tracking of any sort.
"With all the misinformation on
mail ballots, we've got to deal with the inaccurate information out
there," said Amber McReynolds, the National Vote at Home Institute's CEO
and a former director of elections for Denver, which pioneered such a system.
Plan your vote: What you need to know about mail-in voting
Sept. 18, 202001:35
"Not only does it notify that
your ballot's been accepted, it notifies you if your ballot has a
problem," she said. "That instant notification is helpful, and it
streamlines the administrative process."
Many states are experiencing an unparalleled surge in mailed
ballots, thanks in large part to the trend of states allowing voters to vote
absentee because of the coronavirus pandemic. But that surge has been
accompanied by increased concerns about whether voting by mail is safe and
accurate. Fewer than half of American voters are confident
the 2020 vote count will be accurate, an August NBC News/Wall Street Journal
poll found — a sharp drop from 2016 — and a majority say that mailed votes
won't be counted accurately.
Top government officials have
contributed to that uncertainty. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a Republican
donor who started in June, quickly implemented cost-cutting
moves to the U.S. Postal Service, then reversed them in August amid lawsuits that
alleged they could result in unreliable ballot delivery. And President Donald
Trump has repeatedly instructed followers in North Carolina and elsewhere to
vote twice — both by mail and in person — an illegal act that can potentially
bring criminal charges.
Karen Brinson Bell, the top election
official in North Carolina, said she was grateful her state had already
instituted a ballot tracking program when Trump made those comments.
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PLAN YOUR VOTE: How to vote by mail and register to vote in
each state
"We didn't have a crystal ball
that these things would be said or be called into question. When a voter has
doubts, we feel fortunate these things were already put into place," she
said. "For the first time in history, they can see their absentee mail
ballot from the start to finish."
North Carolina is one of four states
that use a program called BallotTrax statewide, which lets eligible voters sign up online
to receive emails, texts or voicemails telling them when their ballot reaches
one of four stages: printed, mailed, received and counted. Some BallotTrax
states, like Colorado, automatically register voters who have registered their
email addresses with the secretary of state's office.
In Michigan, which Trump previously falsely claimed was sending ballots to voters who
didn't request them and threatened to withhold federal funding before encouraging voters to vote by mail there, voters
can check the status of their ballot against the state's database.
Virginia, as well as a number of
scattered counties, use a similar program called Ballot Scout that gives voters
the option to get updates by text or email.
Even as Election Day looms,
McReynolds said that she's talked to states that are still considering adding
such a system, which she says is also a smart investment.
"The reason we designed it in
Denver is when we started to see a big increase in people requesting their
ballots, the main calls into our office were, 'Did you get my ballot?' and
'When is it coming?'" she said.
"I'd rather not have 50 people
staffing our phone bank asking that question."
