EDIT: See @AnimePhantasm comment below! My friend called the election board and they confirmed what @AnimePhantasm and @fmstrat commented! This was Virginia reusing last year’s envelopes.
OP I am an absentee voter in Blacksburg just next door. Shine a light on the blacked out part. I am 99% sure this is legit, they just crossed out the witness requirement. I can see the word witness under the sharpie in your picture. Virgina doesnt have to do that witness thing anymore. We did at the last general election, so I am guessing they just reused the same envelopes. You should call and ask your elections office before alerting the news. They are hardworking folks whose jobs are already 100 times harder then they used to be. Stirring up reports of election fraud where it isn’t happening makes us just as bad as them.
I totally hear that, but at the same time it’s really important for a functioning democracy that the vote be secret. For one, it empowers a suppressed class to vote against their suppressor’s interests without fear of retaliation.
There is already a record of who voted for what, all of your fears could be taking place as things are now. Making it accessible to the person, even with hoops to jump through, would only be an improvement.
No, there’s not. There’s a record of who voted. There is a record of your political party in most states. There is no record of who you actually voted for.
The majority of votes in the USA are electronically counted, and a ballot itself is a record of a vote as well. What there isn’t is a searchable index of who voted for what, and I apologize for my unclear language.
But the likelihood of oppression based on availability of those vote records is still very much there even if the voter themself doesn’t have access.
Back to school. Vote-buying breaks democracy. Not having proof of who you voted for makes vote-buying pointless. Yes, your vote could be miscounted. This is generally less of a problem than the general population being able to sell their votes and can be mitigated in a variety of ways which don’t tie votes to voters.
You can still buy votes with absentee ballots, are you opposed to that as well?
What’s to stop me from filling it out the way I said I would, going to the voting office and saying the ballot I had previously was lost/damaged/spoiled and then voting differently than how I was paid to vote?
The premise behind a secret ballot is it can’t be proven how you vote. You can still sell your vote (illegally), you just can’t prove you voted the way you said you would. As shown above, absentee ballots don’t remove that distinction. I suppose the criminals could just trust each other…
If you submit multiple ballots its voter fraud. If your buyer drops off your ballot on election day then there is nothing you can do to stop it that you couldn’t do in the other circumstance.
This topic has been discussed for a couple thousand years now, and you clearly have access to the internet. Feel free to search for the answers on your own.