← Ballot by Mail

For newsrooms and civic groups

Ballot by Mail answers one question: can you vote by mail where you live? Enter a ZIP code, get your state's rule, the 2026 deadlines, a mail-by date, and a link to the office that handles it. Everything on it is free to use, quote, embed, or rebuild.

Corrections we found

Between Sept. 9 and 10, 2026, every state's mail-voting rules were checked against that state's own official page rather than the secondary tables most sites cite. Five states didn't match. Each is checkable in a few minutes from the sources below.

How the data is verified

Each state's category and deadlines were read directly from its official election page and recorded with a source URL and a date. Current status: 47 of 51 fully verified against the official page, 4 partially verified, meaning the rule and return method were confirmed but one deadline still rests on a secondary source (Vote.org or NCSL), which is stated per state. The full log is at /trust. Rules last checked 2026-09-09; deadlines 2026-09-09.

Secondary sources used where noted: NCSL absentee and signature-cure tables, Movement Advancement Project, U.S. Vote Foundation, Vote.org deadline tables, and the Center for Election Innovation & Research for early-voting windows.

The daily change monitor

Every day the site fetches all 51 state election pages, vote.gov, and the USPS election-mail page, and compares each to the previous copy. Sentence-level additions and removals are published at /changes with a link to the live page. 51 of 53 pages were reachable on the last run. A handful of state sites block automated access; those are listed rather than hidden.

Feeds: /changes.xml (page changes) and /courts.xml (court filings).

The court watcher

Every filing in the 8 dockets challenging the 2026 executive order on mail ballots, pulled from CourtListener several times a day and shown in the clerk's own words at /courts. No summarizing, no characterization.

Use it on your own site

• Embed the checker: one script tag, no tracking. Code and a live preview at /embed.
• Printable one-pagers: a letter-size page per state at /print/oh, free to copy and post. Libraries, clerks, and campus groups are welcome to print them.
• Data: /data/states.json for everything, or /api/state?zip=43215 for one state. CORS is open. Attribution appreciated, not required.
• Languages: English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and Tagalog. Non-English versions are machine-drafted and labeled as awaiting native review; dates and state rules stay in English so numbers can't drift in translation.

What it is and isn't

• Independent and unaffiliated. No funding, no organization behind it, no political party, no position on how anyone should vote or on any candidate.
• No ads and no sponsors. A short list of affiliate links to ordinary supplies (stamps, pens, envelopes) covers hosting; they're labeled and they don't influence anything on the page.
• No accounts, no cookies, no ad tracking. The ZIP you type isn't stored. Vercel counts page views without identifying anyone. Email alerts are double opt-in and store only an address and a state.
• It is not legal advice, and the official election office wins over anything here. That's said on every card.

Measured mail times

Every voting site, including this one, tells people to mail a ballot about a week early. That number is a USPS guideline, not a measurement, and nobody publishes what mail is actually doing in a given county during election season.

So we measure it. Volunteers mail a postcard to themselves, note the date it was deposited and the date it arrived, and report both. A postcard travels the same class through the same local facility as a ballot, so it's a fair proxy, and it's sampled weekly rather than assumed. Results are published as county and state aggregates at /transit, with the sample size next to every number and a minimum of three reports before anything is shown. Raw aggregates are at /api/transit.

Where a state has data, its mail-by date is derived from the measurement rather than the guideline, and the card says which one it's using. Individual reports are never published, and we don't collect anyone's address. If you want to help, or want the dataset for a story, the program is here.

How errors get caught

Four scheduled jobs check the site's own data. A drift auditor re-reads each page a claim was verified against and flags it when the state's wording no longer matches what we publish. A link checker follows every outbound link. A newsroom watcher scans state election-office press pages, which is where Ohio announced its mailing dates. A triage job checks each reported error against the official page and drafts a verdict.

None of them can change what the site says. They file findings; a person confirms against the official page and makes the edit, and the change is logged in the public changelog. That's deliberate: automated writing on a site like this would undo the reason it exists.

Reading the map

The map has three views: the rule in each state, how much time is left before each state's request deadline, and how many mail ballots are moving where states publish daily counts. It is never colored by party. Absentee request counts are a widely misread proxy for who is winning, because parties differ in how their voters choose to vote rather than whether, and a site that checks primary sources should not publish a number it knows is misleading.

Counting, not results

From November, /counting tracks when each state may begin counting mail ballots, when results are certified, and how long a voter has to fix a rejected ballot. It carries no vote totals and no projections. The question it answers is the one that actually causes trouble: why a state is still counting days later, and whether that is normal. Sixteen states may begin before Election Day; the rest start on Election Day morning and finish later, by law.

Ballots in motion

Some states publish a running count of mail ballots requested and returned. We pull those daily and show them on the state page, so a voter can see that ballots are actually moving rather than guessing. North Carolina and Florida are live now; others are added as their files appear for this cycle. Florida publishes its totals broken out by party and we read only the Total column, for the reason given above. Aggregates only, never individual records.

We also record, for all 51 jurisdictions, whether drop boxes are widely available, run by the county, restricted, or not offered, with a link to the official locator. There is no national drop box dataset, so this is assembled state by state and checked by the link agent.

Watching the legislatures

Official voter pages are updated after a law changes, sometimes months after. So a daily job searches all fifty state legislatures plus Congress through LegiScan for bills on absentee deadlines, drop boxes, signature and witness rules, ballot curing and mail-ballot ID, and flags anything that looks enacted for a human to check against the state's own page. Legislative data from LegiScan, used under CC BY 4.0.

It is already tracking things that do not change this election but will change the next one: Virginia moves its ballot receipt deadline from noon to 5 p.m. on the third day after the election, effective January 2027, and Mississippi has a law that would require receipt by the day before a federal election, but only if the Supreme Court rules state mail-ballot laws are preempted.

Contact and corrections

Errors, questions, and interview requests: fix@ballotbymail.org or the report form. Corrections are logged publicly in the changelog on /trust. If you find something wrong, we'd rather hear it than not.

Screenshots

Free to use with credit to ballotbymail.org: share card, and any state page or one-pager (for example /state/oh and /print/oh).