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How this site works

Ballot by Mail is an independent project with no organization, funding, or party behind it. Newsrooms and civic groups start here.

It It answers one question, whether you can vote by mail where you live, and points you at the office that actually handles it. It doesn't take positions, doesn't run ads, and doesn't store anything you type.

Where the answers come from

Each state is sorted into one of three categories using three sources that agree with each other: the National Conference of State Legislatures' absentee tables, the Movement Advancement Project, and the U.S. Vote Foundation. Where a state changed recently (Connecticut, July 2026) the statute and Ballotpedia were checked directly. Deadlines come from Vote.org's 2026 table; North Carolina was cross-checked against its State Board of Elections because the two disagreed. What has not been done: opening all 51 official state pages and confirming every rule and deadline against primary text. That's the next verification pass, and the daily page monitor exists partly so changes surface before it's finished. Every entry carries the date it was last checked, and the official site always wins over anything here.

State rules last checked 2026-09-09. Deadlines last checked 2026-09-09.

Registration deadlines come from Vote.org's table. Early in-person voting dates come from the Center for Election Innovation & Research's 2026 report (data as of April 8, 2026). Signature-cure rules come from NCSL Table 15 (updated Aug. 31, 2026). Permanent mail-list rules come from NCSL (May 2026) and the U.S. Vote Foundation. Witness, notary, and signature-verification rules come from NCSL Table 14.

Primary-source verification

Each state's official absentee page is being read directly and compared to what this site says, fact by fact. So far: 47 verified, 4 corroborated, 0 partially verified (some facts still rest on a secondary source, noted below), 0 blocked by the state's bot protection, 0 not yet checked.

Corroborated is a weaker claim than verified and we keep them separate deliberately. In four states the fact we publish is not on the state's own website at all — not buried, absent. New Jersey's vote-by-mail page was extracted in full, 28,000 characters, with no request deadline in it. New Mexico's the same at 13,000. Virginia's page mentions the deadline for applying several times without ever printing the date. Missouri never states a ballot return deadline across four sources including its own application form. For those, we read the statute and a second independent tabulation of it, and publish only where they agree. It is the best available answer, and it is not the state telling you directly, so we say which one you are getting.

• Alaska · verified · Wed, Sep 9 · source
  No-excuse; by-mail application deadline for the general election stated as October 24, 2026; return postmarked by Election Day (state suggests hand-cancelling at the counter) or dropped at a voting location by 8 p.m.; ballots mailed ~25 days out; in-person absentee from 15 days out. All match.
• Alabama · verified · Wed, Sep 9 · source
  Excuse list, 7-day mail request rule, noon-Election-Day mail return and 5 p.m. day-before hand return all match. Emergency absentee available to 5 p.m. day before for listed reasons.
• Arkansas · verified · Fri, Sep 11 · source
  RE-CHECKED BY HAND 2026-09-11 after the verify agent flagged a mismatch. The agent was wrong and the data is right: the page still says 'By Mail: received at clerks office by 7:30 p.m. ON election day', 'In Person / By Designated Bearer: by close of business the Friday BEFORE the election' (Oct 30 for a Nov 3 election), and 'By Mail or by Electronic Means: by 7 days before the election' (Oct 27). Nothing changed. The agent could not find the time string in its extracted text even though the page shows it, which is a bug in the agent, not a data problem. Excuse list, mail application 7 days before, mail return received by Election Day, in-person by Friday before all match.
• Arizona · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  Confirmed by the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission (a state agency, not the SOS): all voted ballots must be RECEIVED no later than 7 p.m. on Election Day and postmarks are not sufficient, whether mailed or dropped off; request deadline is 11 days before (Oct 23); postage prepaid; drop boxes county-wide. SOS pages (early voting, calendar, ballot processing) were read by hand and confirm no-excuse status, the 11-day request rule, Oct 5 registration, Oct 7 ballot mailing and drop-box return, but never print the receipt deadline; statute is A.R.S. §16-548.
• California · verified · Wed, Sep 9 · source
  All-mail, postmark by Election Day + 7 days, signature cure, drop boxes from Oct 6. State advises mailing 5+ days early; we say 7.
• Colorado · verified · Fri, Sep 11 · source
  RE-CHECKED BY HAND 2026-09-11 after a verify-agent mismatch, which was wrong. The FAQ still says 'Mail ballots must be received by the county clerk and recorder no later than 7:00 PM on Election Day' and 'Postmarks do not count; ballots must be in the hands of the county clerk by 7:00 PM on Election Day in order to be counted.' Exactly what we publish. The agent's plain fetch gets a page whose FAQ answers are not in the served HTML, so it compared against navigation only. Received by Election Day, postmarks do not count. Matches.
• Connecticut · verified · Wed, Sep 9 · source
  No excuse required (Public Act 26-42, stated on the page); request deadline Nov 2, 2026; ballots issued from 31 days before; must be received by close of polls on Election Day; town clerk contacts you to cure. All match.
• District of Columbia · verified · Fri, Sep 11 · source
  RE-CHECKED BY HAND 2026-09-11 after a verify-agent mismatch, which was wrong — the third false positive of five. DCBOE's Early Voting and Election Day FAQ states both rules we publish: 'Absentee Ballot Requests must be requested no later than 15 days before an election' (15 days before Nov 3 = Oct 19) and ballots must be 'postmarked or otherwise demonstrated to have been sent on or before Election Day' and 'arrive no later than the 10th day after Election Day to be counted' (Nov 13). Drop boxes close at 8 p.m. on Election Day per DCBOE's drop-box location page. WATCH TARGET MOVED: was https://www.dcboe.org/, the DCBOE homepage, which is a portal and states no rules at all — so the agent was comparing our facts against a page that never contained them. Now points at the FAQ. Official DCBOE mail-ballot instruction sheet read directly (PDF, June 2026 primary edition; dates differ, rule is the same): mailed ballots must be postmarked by Election Day and received at the Board no later than the 10th day after; drop boxes open until 8 p.m. Election Day; return postage prepaid; sign and date the Voter's Oath; one ballot per envelope. Matches what we publish. FVAP's D.C. guide independently gives Nov 13 for the general, consistent with the 10-day window.
• Delaware · verified · Fri, Sep 11 · source
  RE-CHECKED BY HAND 2026-09-11 after a verify-agent mismatch, which was wrong — the fourth false positive of five. The absentee page still says 'Your Voted Absentee Ballot Must be returned to your county Department of Elections Office by 8:00 p.m. (close of polls) on Election Day', exactly what we publish. Note the sentence is jammed onto the end of a list item with no space after the preceding full stop, and the page is mostly navigation and county office addresses — the same nav-heavy shape that defeated the agent on CO. Excuse-required (ways-to-vote page); request deadline stated as October 30, 2026 (permanent-absentee notice); return to the county office by 8 p.m. Election Day. Notice dated after Sept 4, 2026: permanent-absentee statute upheld in Chancery, appealed, Supreme Court arguments Sept 16; Department advises permanent absentee voters to submit a new request. Added to the card.
• Florida · verified · Fri, Sep 11 · source
  RE-CHECKED BY HAND 2026-09-11 — the fifth and last false positive of five. The vote-by-mail page (last updated Jan 14, 2026) says 'A returned voted ballot must be received, regardless of postmark, by the Supervisor of Elections' office no later than 7:00 pm (local time) on Election Day' and 'The deadline to request that a ballot be mailed is no later than 5 p.m. on the 12th day before the election' (12 days before Nov 3 = Oct 22). Both match what we publish. The page also confirms the cure deadline is 5 p.m. on the 2nd day after the election. NOTE: this page serves full content to a browser but only ~256 characters to a plain server-side fetch, so the agent cannot read it at all — this is the clearest case of the guard failing rather than the data changing. Request by 5 p.m. 12th day before; received by 7 p.m. Election Day regardless of postmark; cure by 5 p.m. 2nd day after with a copy of ID. All match. Added the ID-copy detail to the cure text.
• Georgia · verified · Wed, Sep 9 · source
  Read by hand (state sites block automated access). No-excuse; requests accepted 78 to 11 days before Election Day; ballot must arrive at the county office before polls close on Election Day; ID required with the application; cure process exists (3-day window from NCSL). Early voting Oct 13–30 confirmed on the early-voting page. Added the indoor, office-hours drop box detail. RE-CHECKED 2026-09-11: georgia.gov is NOT bot-walled, unlike sos.ga.gov; the absentee page fetches cleanly from the monitor's own path (200, full content). Georgia is now watched automatically rather than read by hand. Page confirms: no excuse; requests accepted 78 to 11 calendar days before Election Day (Oct 23 for Nov 3); ballot must reach the county registrar before polls close at 7 p.m. on Election Day; at least one indoor drop box per county, open office hours only; UOCAVA ballots posted on Election Day must arrive within 3 days; once you return an absentee ballot you cannot switch to voting in person. The 2026 general election page adds registration by Oct 5, registrars may mail ballots from Oct 5, and early voting opens Oct 13. All match what we publish.
• Hawaii · verified · Wed, Sep 9 · source
  All-mail by Act 136; ballots mailed ~18 days before; received by 7 p.m. Election Day; voter service centers open 10 days before. Signature required on return envelope.
• Iowa · verified · Wed, Sep 9 · source
  Any registered voter; request received by 5 p.m. 15 days before (Oct 19; added the 5 p.m.); received by 8 p.m. CT Election Day by mail or hand; ballots available 20 days before.
• Idaho · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  Official election calendar read directly: absentee application must be RECEIVED by the county clerk by 5 p.m. Oct 23; voted ballots received by 8 p.m. Nov 3; registration 5 p.m. Oct 23 (preregistration) with election-day registration at the polls; in-person absentee/early voting ends Oct 30; emergency absentee applications through 5 p.m. Nov 2 for hospitalization beginning after the Oct 23 deadline (added to card). Casting-your-ballot page separately confirms the arrive-by-8-p.m. banner, annual re-request, and postage requirement.
• Illinois · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  Read by hand (site blocks automated access), page plus the State Board's Voting by Mail fact sheet (10 ILCS 5/19, 5/20). Any registered voter; mail requests received by 10/29/2026, in person until the day before; ballots from 40 days out; postmarked by Election Day and received within 14 days; drop boxes postage-free until polls close; assistant must be named on the envelope; state recommends a manual postmark. All match.
• Indiana · verified · Wed, Sep 9 · source
  Excuse required (must expect to be absent all 12 polling hours, or other listed reasons); ABS-Mail application received 12 days before (Oct 22), postmarks not accepted; ballot received by 6 p.m. Election Day, postmarks not accepted; in-person absentee 28 days before. Application needs a matching ID number or a photocopy of ID. Added to tips.
• Kansas · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  Advance Voting Information page read directly. CORRECTED 2026-09-10 (second pass): the page's VISIBLE text says Kansas statute sets the deadline at the close of polls on Election Day, that a Douglas County district court entered a statewide injunction requiring ballots postmarked by Election Day and arriving by the last delivery on the Friday after to be counted, that the Court of Appeals rejected the Secretary of State's request to stay it, and that voters are urged to return ballots by the close of polls regardless. A sentence stating the 3-day grace period is gone exists ONLY inside an HTML comment on that page, i.e. the state disabled it; our first read wrongly treated it as live because the extractor did not strip comments. We now present the statutory rule and the injunction together. Also confirmed: 20 days of advance voting, application requires a driver's license number or photo ID copy, return to county office, any county drop box, or any polling place in the county before polls close, up to two replacement ballots.
• Kentucky · verified · Wed, Sep 9 · source
  2026 summary: mail-in request by Oct 20; ballot received by Election Day; in-person excused absentee Oct 21–28; no-excuse early in-person Oct 29–31; registration postmark Oct 5. Excuse requirement for mail ballots rests on statute/NCSL.
• Louisiana · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  Absentee FAQ plus the official 2026 Elections calendar (Revised 07/2026) read directly. For Nov 3: registration Oct 5 in person/by mail and Oct 13 online; request a mail ballot from the registrar by Oct 30; registrar must RECEIVE the voted ballot by Nov 2; early voting Oct 20-27. All match. Envelope needs voter signature, mother's maiden name, and a witness signature with printed name and address; cure in person by 4:30 p.m. the day before; 65+ four-year absentee program.
• Massachusetts · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  No excuse; application received by 5 p.m. on the 5th business day before (Oct 27). CORRECTION: for the November biennial state election, mailed ballots postmarked by Election Day count if received within 3 days (Nov 6); drop box or office by close of polls; not accepted at polling places. We had 'received by Election Day.' Fixed. Second confirmation from the Absentee Voting page (read by hand), which also gives the emergency-ballot rule for hospitalized voters (added) and in-person absentee until noon the day before.
• Maryland · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  Mail-in Voting page plus the 2026 Gubernatorial Election page read directly. Request must be RECEIVED by Oct 27 for a mailed/faxed ballot, or Oct 30 for print-at-home (added). Return: postmarked, or in a drop box, polling place, early voting center, or local board by 8 p.m. Nov 3; mailed ballots counted if received by 10 a.m. Nov 13. Early voting Oct 22-29, 7 a.m.-8 p.m. Permanent mail-in list; requests take about a week to process; must cancel a mail request to vote in person. All match.
• Maine · verified · Wed, Sep 9 · source
  No excuse; request by close of business the Thursday before (Oct 29); return by 8 p.m. Election Day; in-person at the clerk from 30 days out. Witnesses are required only if someone other than the voter or immediate family obtained the ballot, or the voter had help marking it. Softened our tip accordingly.
• Michigan · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  All voters; mailed applications received by 5 p.m. the Friday before (Oct 30); in-person applications to 4 p.m. the day before; ballots received by 8 p.m. Election Day by mail or drop box; signature cure; ballots out 40 days before; permanent list. Detroit returns by drop box or clerk only.
• Minnesota · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  No excuse; ballots from Sept 18; state recommends applying before Oct 20 (adopted); return by Nov 3; witness is any U.S. citizen 18+ by Election Day or a notary (our tip said Minnesota voter; fixed); permanent list.
• Missouri · corroborated · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  Excuse list; mail/fax requests received by 5 p.m. the second Wednesday before (Oct 21); in-office absentee until 5 p.m. the day before; no-excuse in-person from the second Tuesday before (Oct 20); permanent list for permanent disability. Return rule (close of polls) not on the how-to-vote page or the 2026 election calendar; remains from Vote.org/statute. Calendar confirms the Oct 7 registration deadline. How-to-vote page re-read 2026-09-10: adds that applications must go to the LOCAL election authority not the SOS, that a second-degree relative may file in person, and that voters who registered by mail and have never voted in person must include a copy of their ID with the request (added to tips). Return deadline still not stated anywhere on the SOS site: three pages checked (how-to-vote, 2026 election calendar, elections index) and the calendar covers only candidate filing, registration and certification dates. The close-of-polls rule is RSMo 115.293 and matches Vote.org and NCSL. Registration Oct 7 confirmed on the calendar. Full absentee section read 2026-09-10: six-item excuse list captured verbatim (added to card); mail/fax requests received by 5 p.m. the second Wednesday before; in-office absentee until 5 p.m. the day before; no-excuse in-person from the second Tuesday before; ID and notary requirements waived for overseas, active-duty military and immediate family, and permanently disabled voters and caregivers (added to tips); in-person absentee voters cannot cast a provisional ballot. Official absentee application form (PDF, rev. 8/2022, §§115.279/115.283/115.284/115.427) also read: repeats the 5 p.m. second-Wednesday request deadline and the first-time-voter ID rule, and again does not state a ballot RETURN deadline. Four Missouri sources checked; the close-of-polls return rule is statutory (RSMo 115.293) and not published in voter-facing form. CORROBORATED 2026-09-11: the return deadline is not published voter-facing anywhere on the SOS site, so it cannot be primary-verified. NCSL Table 11 independently reads RSMo 115.293 as close of polls on Election Day, matching Vote.org and the statute. Two independent secondary readings plus the statute now agree; the state itself still does not say it.
• Mississippi · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  Excuse list; ballot marked before an official authorized to administer oaths or a witness; mailed ballots must be received within 5 business days, stated as November 10, 2026; ballots available by Sept 19. WATCH: HB 908 (approved March 19, 2026) would require all absentee ballots to be received by the day before a federal election, but only IF the U.S. Supreme Court holds that state absentee/mail-ballot laws are preempted by federal law for federal races. That contingency has not been triggered, so the postmark-plus-five-business-days rule stands.
• Montana · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  Any registered voter; applications received by noon the day before; ballots mailed 25 days before; received at the election office or polling place by 8 p.m. Election Day. All match.
• North Carolina · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  Any registered voter; request two weeks before Election Day (Oct 20, matching the NCSBE notice); two witnesses or a notary; assistant must sign if you had help; return to the county office by 7:30 p.m. Election Day; return postage $1.98 (added to card).
• North Dakota · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  Re-checked 2026-09-10 with the corrected extractor. CORRECTION: the SOS key-dates list says 'November 3, 2026 - Absentee Ballots Must Be Returned by Close of Polls' with no postmark provision; North Dakota repealed its postmark rule in HB 1165 (2025). We had been showing the old postmarked-by-the-day-before rule, which would have cost votes. Also confirmed: absentee begins Sept 24; application deadline Nov 2; county canvass Nov 18.
• Nebraska · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  Official 2026 Election Calendar (PDF, statutory citations) read directly. Request: last day to RECEIVE an application for a mailed early voting ballot is Oct 23 at 6 p.m. (§32-941) — we showed Oct 23 with no time, now corrected. Return: by close of polls, 8 p.m. CT / 7 p.m. MT, in person, by agent, or secure drop box (§32-950, §32-943, §32-950.01). Also: replacement ballot request by 6 p.m. Oct 23 and in person until 8 p.m. Election Day; in-person early voting ends Nov 2; agent pickup until one hour before polls close. Early-voting page separately confirms no-excuse status, 35-day mailing, and the ID-with-application rule.
• New Hampshire · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  Excuse list (incl. a forecast winter storm warning); by-mail request by noon the day before (now shown); in-person request/return by 5 p.m. the day before; mailed ballots received by 5 p.m. Election Day; state recommends requesting 2+ weeks out and mailing a week before.
• New Jersey · corroborated · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  Postmarked by Election Day and received by 8 p.m. on the 6th day after (Nov 9); unpostmarked ballots delivered by USPS within 48 hours count; drop-off by 8 p.m. Election Day; ballots mailed from 45 days out. Request deadline (Oct 27) confirmed ABSENT from the page after a clean full-text extraction (28k chars) on 2026-09-10; it remains from Vote.org and N.J.S.A. 19:63-3. Full Vote-By-Mail page re-read 2026-09-10: mailed ballots postmarked by 8 p.m. Election Day and received by the county board by NOVEMBER 9 (the state prints the date); unpostmarked ballots valid if USPS delivers within 48 hours; drop box or Board office by 8 p.m. Election Day; ballots may NOT be returned at early voting sites or polling places (added to card); state advises asking a postal clerk for a manual postmark; blue or black ink; certificate stays attached to the inner envelope. CORROBORATED 2026-09-11: NCSL Table 5 (updated 2026-09-01) reads N.J. Rev. Stat. 19:63-3 as seven days before the election for mailed applications, which for Nov 3, 2026 is Oct 27 — the date we publish. In-person requests are due 3 p.m. the day before. Agrees with Vote.org.
• New Mexico · corroborated · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  Return to the county clerk or any Election Day polling place by 7 p.m.; permanent absentee list confirmed; affidavit to vote in person if the mailed ballot didn't arrive. Request deadline (Oct 20) confirmed ABSENT from the page after a clean full-text extraction (13k chars) on 2026-09-10; it remains from Vote.org and NMSA 1-6-5. Return rule verified 2026-09-10 from the SOS absentee page: all absentee ballots may be returned to the County Clerk's Office or any Election Day polling location no later than 7:00 p.m. on Election Day. Permanent absentee list and its removal conditions also confirmed. CORROBORATED 2026-09-11: NCSL Table 5 (updated 2026-09-01) reads NMSA 1-6-5 as fourteen days before the election, which for Nov 3, 2026 is Oct 20 — the date we publish. Agrees with Vote.org.
• Nevada · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  Mail Ballot Voting page and Election FAQs read by hand. All active registered voters mailed a ballot (AB 321); must be registered 14 days before to receive one (added); postage-paid envelope; drop-off by 7 p.m. Election Day; mailed ballots postmarked by Election Day and received by 5 p.m. on the 4th day after; BallotTrax tracking; first-time-voter ID rule; don't initial corrections (added). All match.
• New York · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  Read by hand. CORRECTION: applications by mail must be received no later than 10 days before the election (Oct 24); we had Oct 19 from Vote.org. In-person applications until the day before. Any voter (early mail); postmarked by Nov 3 and received by Nov 10; hand delivery to the county board or any poll site by 9 p.m. Nov 3, or early voting sites Oct 24–Nov 1; postage-paid; ballots from 46 days out; permanent absentee for permanent illness/disability; cure process; affidavit-only in-person voting after a mail ballot is issued.
• Ohio · verified · Mon, Sep 21 · source
  Re-read by hand 2026-09-21 (ohiosos.gov is Cloudflare-walled to our fetcher, 403). The Elections FAQ states both published facts in one place, which the voting-schedule page did not: "Ohio law requires all non-UOCAVA ballots to be received by 7:30 p.m. on Election Day" and the absentee application must be received "no later than close of business seven days before Election Day" (Nov 3 - 7 = Oct 27). The non-UOCAVA qualifier confirms the military/overseas carve-out we publish. This also closes the SB293 question: the bill revised the return deadline, and the removal of the postmark grace is already logged as correction #1, so the published rule already reflects it.
• Oklahoma · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  No excuse; request received by 5 p.m. the third Monday before (Oct 19); affidavit notarized (two witnesses for accessible ballots and nursing-home voters); mailed ballots received by 7 p.m. Election Day; hand-delivered by close of business the Monday before (added). Free notary services; notaries may not charge.
• Oregon · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  All active registered voters receive a ballot; received or postmarked by 8 p.m. Election Day; challenged-signature letters for cure; inactive status explained (added to card).
• Pennsylvania · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  No-excuse mail-in for any registered voter; application received by 5 p.m. Oct 27; ballot received by 8 p.m. Nov 3, postmark not sufficient; emergency absentee after 5 p.m. the Tuesday before; can't vote in person after returning a mail ballot. All match.
• Rhode Island · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  Official 2026 Rhode Island Election Calendar (PDF, statutory citations) plus the Vote from Home page. Application deadline Oct 13, received by local boards of canvassers not later than 21 days before (RIGL §17-20-2.1(c)). Ballots must be received by the STATE Board of Elections at 2000 Plainfield Pike, Cranston, or an authorized drop box, by 8 p.m. Nov 3 (§17-20-16) — added, since sending to the local board is an easy mistake. Emergency mail ballot period Oct 14 to 4 p.m. Nov 2 (§17-20-2.2). Early voting Oct 14-Nov 2. Braille/tactile ballots also due Oct 13. Postage prepaid; witness only if unable to sign.
• South Carolina · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  Excuse list; application received by 5 p.m. on the 11th day before (Oct 23); witness is anyone 18+, no notary; received by 7 p.m. Election Day; ballots mailed ~30 days out; state advises mailing a week early. All match.
• South Dakota · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  In-person application until 5 p.m. the day before; ballot must be received by the county in time to reach the precinct before polls close on Election Day (return text tightened accordingly).
• Tennessee · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  Read by hand (CDN blocks automated browsers). CORRECTION: application must be received no later than 10 days before (Oct 24); we had Oct 27 from Vote.org. Excuse list (60+, out of county, illness, caretaker, student, nursing home outside county, CDL/TWIC, jury duty, etc.); request needs SSN, DOB, reason, signature; ballot received by close of polls on Election Day by mail or courier only, no hand delivery (added); permanent absentee list for those who qualify. RE-CHECKED 2026-09-10: the 10-day deadline is stated three times on sos.tn.gov (the Guide to Absentee Voting plus the two request FAQs) and matches VOTE411; the 7-day figure appears only on commercial aggregators. Also added: ballots available 45 days out; requesting an absentee ballot bars in-person voting that election except provisionally.
• Texas · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  Read by hand (two pages). Eligibility; application received by the 11th day before (Oct 23); ID number on application and carrier envelope (not the VUID); helper must sign; carrier-envelope page: postmarked by 7 p.m. Election Day and received by 5 p.m. the next day, unpostmarked envelopes must arrive by 7 p.m. Election Day, in-person return on Election Day at the early voting clerk; state recommends a manual postmark at the USPS counter (added).
• Utah · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  Active registered voters receive a ballot automatically. CORRECTION: ballot must be received by the clerk by 8 p.m. on Election Day or placed in a drop box by 8 p.m.; ballots received after Election Day are not counted. We had the old day-before postmark rule from Vote.org. Ballots mailed without postage are still delivered. CAUTION: the vote.utah.gov page is still the 2025 municipal-election version throughout (Nov 4, 2025 dates, Oct 14-28 mailing window), so it is NOT a reliable 2026 source. The 8 p.m. receipt rule is confirmed independently by HB 300 (2025), Utah News Dispatch (Oct 2025), and KSL (June 2026) quoting the Salt Lake County clerk. Also added from HB 300: voters with a Utah ID must write its last four digits on the return envelope starting 2026. HB 209 (2026) adds citizenship verification before a ballot is sent (ACLU of Utah). Utah's official page needs to be re-read once the state posts 2026 content.
• Virginia · corroborated · Mon, Sep 21 · source
  Postmarked by Election Day and received by noon on the third day after; ballots mailed from 45 days out; permanent list; mailed ballot without an ID copy (for voters who registered without one) is provisional (added to tips). Request deadline (Oct 23) confirmed ABSENT after a clean full-text extraction on 2026-09-10: the page refers to the deadline for applying several times without ever printing the date. It remains from Vote.org and Va. Code §24.2-701. Absentee page re-read 2026-09-10 via headless browser: postmarked on or before Election Day and received by the general registrar by noon on the third day after (moved if a holiday); drop-off locations listed in the ballot packet; ballots returned without an ID copy (for voters who registered without one) are treated as provisional; emergency absentee available until 2 p.m. the day before for hospitalization, illness, or a death in the family; permanent absentee list via Citizen Portal. WATCH: SB 58 / HB 82 (enacted April 6, 2026) move the receipt deadline for absentee ballots, cure information and provisional ID from noon to 5 p.m. on the third day after the election, with a DELAYED EFFECTIVE DATE of January 1, 2027 — so noon is correct for November 2026 and must be changed for 2027. CORROBORATED 2026-09-11: NCSL Table 5 (updated 2026-09-01) reads Va. Code 24.2-701 as eleven days before the election at 5 p.m., which for Nov 3, 2026 is Oct 23 at 5 p.m. — what we publish. Agrees with Vote.org. RE-READ BY HAND 2026-09-21 from elections.virginia.gov: "If you are returning your ballot by mail, it must be postmarked on or before election day and received by your general registrar’s office by noon on the third day following the election" — matches what we publish, and independently confirms SB58/HB82 have NOT taken effect. The page still does not print the request deadline, so VA stays corroborated rather than verified; that is the correct label, not a gap to paper over. Also states an emergency absentee path open until 2 p.m. the day BEFORE the election (hospitalisation, illness, death of spouse/child/parent), which is later than the Oct 23 request deadline we show.
• Vermont · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  Ballots mailed automatically to all active voters for the general election; requests by 5 p.m. or clerk's closing the day before; return to the clerk before close of business the day before or to the polling place by 7 p.m. Election Day. (Page text still cites 2024 in one paragraph.)
• Washington · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  No request needed; drop box by 8 p.m. Election Day; no stamp needed; state recommends mailing more than a week early; in-person registration until 8 p.m. Election Day; voting centers from 18 days out.
• Wisconsin · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  MyVote deadlines page read directly (JavaScript-rendered; extracted via headless browser). For Nov 3: absentee request received by the MUNICIPAL clerk no later than 5 p.m. Oct 29 for regular and overseas voters; Oct 30 for indefinitely confined and military-not-away; Nov 3 at 5 p.m. for military away and hospitalized-by-agent. Ballot must be received by the municipal clerk no later than 8 p.m. on Election Day. Registration by mail/online Oct 14, in clerk office Oct 30, at the polls on Election Day. In-person absentee Oct 20 to Nov 1. All match what we publish. Witness rule remains from NCSL Table 14 (not restated on this page).
• West Virginia · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  Application received by the 6th day before (Oct 28); ballots mailed from the 46th day before; mailed ballots postmarked by Election Day; hand delivery by the day before (added); two-ballot limit on delivering for others.
• Wyoming · verified · Thu, Sep 10 · source
  Any registered voter; request any day of the election year except Election Day; ballots mailed 28 days before; received by 7 p.m. Election Day, no exceptions.

Why ballots get rejected, and where those numbers come from

The rejection rate shown for your state is computed directly from the EAC's 2024 Election Administration and Voting Survey, which we download and re-process from eac.gov rather than copying from a secondary summary. Across 6,461 reporting jurisdictions and 47,957,093 returned mail ballots, 1.22% were rejected, which matches the EAC's own published figure. We also publish a rate for 2,934 individual counties. The survey is biennial, so 2024 is the most recent comparable election; treat it as a measure of structural risk in your county rather than a live number.

The "Will your ballot count?" check on each state page is built on published research, not opinion. The EAC's 2024 Election Administration and Voting Survey found roughly 1.2% of mail ballots were rejected nationally, with non-matching signatures accounting for about 41% of all rejections. A USC Center for Inclusive Democracy analysis of California's 2024 election found 59% of rejections were signature mismatches, 27% arrived late and 11% had no signature. Research by Baringer, Herron and Smith found first-time mail voters are up to three times likelier to be rejected. A University of Pennsylvania study of Pennsylvania's 2024 election found voters notified of a defect before Election Day were 25 percentage points likelier to have their vote counted.

That is why the check ranks signature and timing first: together they are most of the risk, and both are within your control.

Nationally in 2024, 584,463 of 47,957,093 returned mail ballots were rejected (1.22%). Reasons given:

Source: U.S. Election Assistance Commission, Election Administration and Voting Survey 2024. Per-state rates shown in the check on each state page come from the same survey. The next survey, covering 2026, is expected in 2027.

When two sources disagree

Every fact on this site used to rest on a single reading. That is fine while the reading is right and silently awful when it isn't, because nothing is there to catch it. The highest-stakes fact — whether a mailed ballot must ARRIVE by Election Day or merely be POSTMARKED by it — now rests on two independent readings: the state's own page, and NCSL's tabulation of the underlying statute.

Right now, on that question, the two sources agree for 50 of the 51 jurisdictions. There are no unexplained disagreements. Kansas is marked contested: the statute and a court order currently point different ways, and both are shown.

Second source: NCSL, Table 11: Receipt and Postmark Deadlines for Absentee/Mail Ballots, which NCSL last updated Wed, Aug 19; read by us Thu, Sep 10. We compare the arrive-by versus postmark-by distinction only. Exact clock times are worded too differently between sources to compare mechanically without raising false alarms, and that distinction is the one that decides whether a late-arriving ballot counts. NCSL's deadlines for military and overseas voters differ in most states and are not what this site publishes.

Watching the legislatures

A daily job searches all fifty state legislatures through LegiScan for mail-voting bills and flags enacted ones for review, because official voter pages are often updated long after a law changes. Legislative data used under CC BY 4.0.

Languages

Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and Tagalog versions are machine-drafted and marked as awaiting native review on the page. Dates, state notes, and return rules are shown in English in every language so the numbers can't drift in translation.

What it doesn't do

• No cookies, no accounts, no ad tracking. One exception, and it is worth stating plainly: if you switch the colour scheme at the top of the page to Light or Dark, that one word is saved on your own device so the site does not forget it on the next page. It is not a cookie, it is never sent to us, and it is the only thing the site ever writes. Leaving the switch on Auto stores nothing at all, and moving it back to Auto deletes it. The ZIP you type is matched to your state inside your browser, so the basic answer needs no request at all. Two features do need one, and it would be wrong to leave that vague: looking up your county sends the ZIP to our server and on to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, whose public crosswalk maps ZIPs to counties, and looking for drop-off locations near you sends it to Google's Civic Information API, which carries the Voting Information Project's data. Nothing identifying goes with it, we store no ZIP against any person, and typing a county name instead avoids both requests entirely. There is also a “use my location” option, and it is the most private of the three: your device hands the coordinates to the page, the page works out your state and county itself, and the only thing that leaves is a two-letter state code so we can send back that state’s county outlines. Your position is never transmitted to us or to anyone else. One more thing you can turn on, and it is the only part of this site that fetches anything from a third party while you use it: where we know the coordinates of drop-off locations near you, a “Show streets” button will draw them on a street map. The map tiles come from OpenFreeMap, a free service that needs no account, and loading them tells OpenFreeMap which area you are looking at. Nothing is fetched unless you press the button, and the site works exactly as before if you never do. The only measurement is Vercel's page-view analytics, which counts visits without cookies or anything that identifies you.
• County office links are a search, not a curated directory. Absentee voting is run by counties and their pages move often, so we point you at a search for the official office rather than a link that might be stale.
• No legal advice. If your situation is unusual, call your county election office. They answer the phone.

Alerts

If you sign up for alerts, we store your email address, the state you chose, and the language. We email you only when that state's rule, a deadline, its official election page, or the federal USPS rules change, and only after you click a confirmation link. Every email has an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing deletes you from the send list immediately. Nothing else is collected and the list is never shared or sold.

County and court data

Your county is looked up from the HUD USPS ZIP-County Crosswalk (a federal dataset). The ZIP is sent to that lookup and cached; it's never tied to you. Court filings come from CourtListener, the Free Law Project's public archive of federal dockets, shown in the clerk's own words.

Open data

Everything the checker knows is at /data/states.json. There's also a tiny API: /api/state?zip=43215 or /api/state?state=TX. Both are free to use with attribution and re-check everything against official sources before you rely on it.

Report an error

If something here is wrong, use the report form or email fix@ballotbymail.org with the state and a link to the official source. Corrections show up in the changelog below.

Changelog

• Fri, Sep 11 Every state's county rejection map can now be downloaded as a shareable image, from a link under the map itself. It is drawn differently from the one on the page: the interactive map groups everything above 2.5 percent together, which is the right way to answer whether your own county is unusual but hides how wide the range actually is. The downloadable one has six bands and opens the top at 5 percent, so the outliers separate. Where the counties that matter are too small to see, it adds an enlarged panel - New York City is five counties in a rounding error of the state's area, and without that panel you cannot see that Manhattan rejects about one in a hundred while Brooklyn rejects about six.
• Fri, Sep 11 Several new things at once. There is a weekly page for newsrooms at /digest, listing every official page that changed and every mail-voting bill that became law in the last seven days, each linked to its source and free to quote. If you have moved states, /compare puts the rules you knew next to the rules where you live now and marks every row that differs, because carrying the old state's habits is a real way ballots get rejected. Every state has a printable poster for noticeboards with the dates large enough to read across a room and a code to scan. The verified deadline data is now downloadable as plain data, in the public domain, so anyone building something similar inherits the corrections rather than repeating the research. And every state card can now be read aloud, using the voice already built into your phone or computer, so nothing is sent anywhere to do it.
• Fri, Sep 11 Tick off the signature step and a signature writes itself onto the envelope, on the line where yours goes. Where your state needs a witness, that one signs too. It is deliberately an illegible scrawl rather than a famous one: the step it illustrates is to sign the way you signed your registration, and a mismatched signature is one of the two biggest reasons ballots get rejected, so putting a flourish on screen for people to imitate would teach exactly the mistake the step exists to prevent.
• Fri, Sep 11 The envelope drawing now has two sides, because the first version did not. It had the stamp, the postmark and the address on the same face as the flap and the signature line, which is an envelope that cannot exist. On a site whose whole argument is that the details are right, drawing an impossible object is worse than drawing nothing. The back now carries the flap and the part you sign, which is where the affidavit is on a real ballot envelope, and the front carries the stamp, the postmark and the address it is going to. It turns over on its own to whichever side the step you are reading is on, and you can turn it yourself.
• Fri, Sep 11 Where we know where the drop boxes are, there is now a Show streets button that puts them on a real street map, so you can see which corner rather than roughly which part of the county. It is off until you press it, deliberately: loading map tiles tells the company that serves them which area you are looking at, and that is the only thing on this site that would report anything about you to anyone else while you use it. Press it and you get streets; ignore it and nothing is requested. The tiles come from OpenFreeMap, which is free and needs no account, and the about page says all of this plainly.
• Fri, Sep 11 When you zoom into your county, confirmed drop-off locations now appear on the map as green markers. They are drawn from the coordinates the official data already carries, projected the same way everything else on the map is, so no part of this asks another company where you are looking. Two honest caveats built in rather than hidden: the official data does not include coordinates for every location, so the map says how many of the list it was able to place and the written list below it remains the full answer; and if a location came from our record of a past election rather than a live lookup, it says so. A box with no marker is still a box.
• Fri, Sep 11 The dates timeline now has week markers, and today's own date under the TODAY line. Small ticks mark each week counted forward from today, with a heavier one labelled every four, so you can see how far apart two deadlines are by counting rather than by doing the subtraction in your head. Counting from today rather than from the start of the calendar is deliberate: the useful question is how many weeks you have left, not which week of the year it happens to be.
• Fri, Sep 11 Where two deadlines fall on the same day, the timeline now shows them as one. In eighteen states the day to request a ballot and the day to post it are the same date, and drawing them as two dots on the same spot with two labels fighting for the same inch made a single deadline look like two. Election Day is deliberately left out of this: in states where you can register and vote on the same day the registration deadline is Election Day itself, and joining them would read like a mistake rather than the useful fact, which the note underneath already makes.
• Fri, Sep 11 The map now uses a proper zoom library rather than the one we wrote by hand. That brings the things a hand-rolled version never quite gets: pinch to zoom on a phone, momentum when you flick it, double-tap, and a single shared idea of where the map is looking so a gesture cannot fight the animation that flies you to your state. It still refuses to take the scroll wheel until you are zoomed in, so the page scrolls past the map normally, and the code is only downloaded if you touch the map. The date timeline also got its spacing rebuilt: every label is now a fixed width so the collision checking is exact rather than estimated, and there is more room between rows.
• Fri, Sep 11 The dates are laid out across the page again, but this time the labels cannot land on top of each other. The page measures how much room it actually has, works out how wide each label is, and moves a label further from the line whenever it would collide with one already placed. In most states the day to request a ballot and the day to post it fall on the same day or within one of each other, which is what made the first attempt unreadable. Checked against all fifty-one: none of them needs more room than there is.
• Fri, Sep 11 The dates timeline is now upright. Laid out across the page, the labels sat on top of each other: in most states the day to request a ballot and the day to post it fall within a day or two, so the words overlapped and the thing meant to make the dates clearer made them harder to read. Turning it vertical keeps what made it worth building, the order of the dates and the real gaps between them, and gives every date a full row of its own. Where two dates genuinely fall close together they are nudged apart just enough to be legible, so a cluster still looks like a cluster.
• Fri, Sep 11 Three more things you can now see rather than read. Your dates are drawn on a single track from today to the last one that matters, so the order and the gaps between them are obvious at a glance instead of being five separate lines to hold in your head. The envelope walkthrough now shows an actual envelope, carrying only the fields your own state requires: a witness line appears in Wisconsin and does not in California, and the part you are reading about lights up on the drawing. And where a state publishes daily counts, the number is joined by a small line showing the last couple of weeks, because whether returns are speeding up is the part a single total cannot tell you.
• Fri, Sep 11 The dark border around the state is back on the zoomed map, but drawn a different way. It used to come from a separate, simpler outline of the country, which is why it drifted away from the county shapes along the coast. It is now worked out from the counties themselves: any edge shared by two counties is an internal border, and any edge belonging to only one is the state's own edge or its shoreline. Built that way it cannot disagree with what is drawn underneath it, because it is made from the same shapes.
• Fri, Sep 11 Removed a stray line that ran through the water beside San Francisco. It was the state border, which comes from a simpler national outline than the county shapes do, so the two were drawing slightly different coastlines for the same stretch of shore and the disagreement showed as a floating edge. When the county view is up it now replaces the state shape rather than sitting on top of it, so there is only ever one coastline on screen and it is the more detailed one.
• Fri, Sep 11 County borders are drawn from much better data. We had been using a national dataset simplified for whole-country maps, where San Francisco was described by twelve points and the whole Bay Area came out as a set of boxes once you zoomed in. The county map now uses the Census Bureau's detailed boundary file: San Francisco has fifty-nine points, San Mateo ninety-nine. Two counties that had been renamed since that file was published, Oglala Lakota in South Dakota and Kusilvak in Alaska, would have had no shape at all and no way to match their own figures; both are now mapped correctly under their current names.
• Fri, Sep 11 Two fixes to the county suggestions. The list now floats over the page rather than pushing everything below it down as you type, which made the page jump around while you were still deciding. And it shows every match and scrolls, instead of stopping at eight: there are seventeen Monroe Counties and thirty-one Washingtons, so a fixed cap was quietly hiding the one some people were looking for. Searching for Monroe in New York used to return nothing useful.
• Fri, Sep 11 Added a use-my-location button, built so that your location never actually goes anywhere. We had considered address autocomplete, where every keystroke of a home address would be sent to a third-party geocoder, which is not a thing a voting site should be doing. This does the same job better: your device hands the coordinates to the page, the page works out which state and county you are standing in on its own, and the only thing that leaves your browser is a two-letter state code so we can send back that state's county outlines. It is one tap instead of typing, it is exact rather than approximate, and it is more private than typing a ZIP code, which does get sent. The code that does the calculation is only downloaded if you press the button.
• Fri, Sep 11 County search now suggests as you type, rather than waiting until you press enter. It still refuses to guess between the thirty-one Washington Counties, but a few letters narrows it and arrow keys pick one. The list is fetched as you type instead of being built into the page: the full list of county names is 78 kilobytes, and everyone was downloading all of it, including the large majority who type a ZIP and never search by name.
• Fri, Sep 11 Corrected something we were saying about privacy that had quietly stopped being true. The about page said the ZIP code you type never leaves your browser. That was right when the only thing we did with it was work out your state, which still happens on your own device. But looking up your county sends it to our server and on to a federal housing database that maps ZIPs to counties, and looking for drop boxes near you sends it to Google's civic data service. Neither carries anything identifying and we keep no record of who typed what, but the page said one thing and the site did another, and on the page where we ask people to trust us that is the worst place to be loose. It now says exactly where it goes, and notes that searching by county name instead avoids both requests.
• Fri, Sep 11 You can now type a county name instead of a ZIP code. Plenty of people know they live in Travis County without having their ZIP to hand, and in most states it is the county that actually runs the election. One rule built into it: the site never guesses which one you mean. There are thirty-one Washington Counties and twenty-six Jefferson Counties, so a shared name gets you a short list to choose from rather than a confident answer about the wrong state. A name that belongs to only one county takes you straight there.
• Fri, Sep 11 Fixed how we translate a location into a position on the map. The old method was about ten pixels out, which nobody could see on a map of the whole country but which put a Palos Verdes ZIP code in the Pacific Ocean and a Sacramento one in the neighbouring county once you could zoom in. It had been stretched slightly differently across than down, which cannot be right for this kind of map, so the error was being hidden rather than measured. Refitted against the outlines of all fifty-one jurisdictions: it is now accurate to a twentieth of a pixel, and across 673 real ZIP codes in sixteen states, 98.7% now fall inside the correct county instead of near it. The stragglers are coastal and PO-box ZIP codes whose official centre genuinely sits offshore; those still fall back to marking the county rather than guessing a point.
• Fri, Sep 11 You can now see rejection rates for your own county, not just your state. This is the thing state averages hide: St. Clair County, Illinois rejects about twice the share its state does, and on a state map that is invisible. Two rules carry over from the underlying data because a map makes it much easier to mislead by accident. Counties that handled fewer than 200 mail ballots are left unshaded instead of being given a percentage, because a rate off a hundred ballots is noise and colouring it dark would be a lie told in colour. And the rates still leave out ballots voided only because the voter went and voted in person, since those people did not lose a vote.
• Fri, Sep 11 Four more maps, tucked behind a More views link so the row of buttons stays readable on a phone. Whether a postmark saves you, which is the most misunderstood rule in mail voting and decides whether a ballot posted the day before counts. Whether you get a second chance if your envelope has a problem, including the fourteen states where you do not. Where drop boxes let you skip the post entirely. And where someone other than you has to sign. The postmark map is deliberately not coloured good and bad: neither rule is better, they are just different, and shading thirty-five states red would be us editorialising.
• Fri, Sep 11 A quieter fix behind that: the fourteen states with no ballot-cure process were missing from our data rather than marked as having none, which in code is indistinguishable from never having checked. They are now explicitly recorded, with the source, and the build refuses to ship if any state is missing an entry. It matters because the map tells people in those states that a rejected ballot stays rejected, and we should only say that when we have actually looked.
• Fri, Sep 11 You can now choose Light, Dark or Auto at the top of the page. Auto follows your device, which is what the site did before. Picking Auto stores nothing, and switching back to Auto deletes what was stored, so the site only ever writes something if you actively ask it to remember a choice. That one word is kept on your own device and never sent to us. It is the only thing this site writes anywhere, and the about page says so.
• Fri, Sep 11 Added a walkthrough of the return envelope. The advice was already on the page, but as a list of seven things, and a list of seven things gets read as a wall. The leading reasons ballots get thrown out are not obscure legal traps, they are a missing signature and a missing witness line: things people would have got right if anyone had walked them through the envelope once. So it is now one step at a time, in the order you physically do them, using your own state's rules, and each step says what actually happens if you skip it rather than just telling you not to. Nothing is saved, and ticking a box is only a reading aid.
• Fri, Sep 11 The amber used for warnings failed the contrast standard we claim to meet. At 3.64 to 1 against white it was below the threshold for the small text it carries, which is exactly the text a voter squints at on a phone in bad light. Darkened to 4.9 to 1. Every colour the site uses for text now clears the standard in both light and dark mode.
• Fri, Sep 11 Virginia's absentee receipt deadline moves from noon to 5 p.m. on the third day after the election, but not until January 1, 2027, so noon is correct for this November. A comment in the code was never going to survive until then, so the build now refuses to ship from December onward unless someone has actually applied the change and marked it done.
• Fri, Sep 11 Ohio's official 2026 elections calendar was read directly, from the state's own PDF, after the website refused to serve it to us. It settles a conflict we had been flagging on the card: two Ohio sources gave different times for the absentee request deadline, and the calendar agrees with the application form that it is close of business on October 27, not 8:30 p.m. We had already been showing the earlier, safer reading, so nothing changes for voters except that the hedge is now a citation. The calendar also confirms the October 5 registration deadline, ballots going out October 6, and the hard 7:30 p.m. Election Day receipt rule with no postmark grace. One thing it told us that we did not have: if you or your minor child end up hospitalised by an accident or medical emergency, you can still apply for an absentee ballot until 3 p.m. on Election Day. That is on the Ohio card now.
• Fri, Sep 11 Ohio was re-tested and stays unreachable to our automated checks: its election site answers with a refusal over a megabyte long, and the separate voter-facing address turns out to be the same system under a different name. What matters is what happens now when that arrives. Until today a refusal returned through a real browser was stored as though it were the state's page. Ohio's is over a megabyte, so every size-based safeguard passed it. It is now rejected on three independent grounds and nothing was recorded, which we confirmed on the live site rather than in testing. Ohio and Nevada are both verified by hand and both correctly reported as unreachable rather than quietly shown as fine.
• Fri, Sep 11 Nevada cannot be watched automatically, and checking why turned up a flaw worth more than the page was. Every official Nevada address sits behind the same commercial bot protection, including the Secretary of State's own ballot-processing dashboard, and it defeats a real browser as well as a plain request. What matters is how it refuses: one Nevada address answers with nearly 18,000 bytes that look like an ordinary page, with the only sign of the block buried at the very end, past where we were looking. We would have filed that as Nevada's official page, and the next time the protection rotated its token we would have published a rule change Nevada never made. The check now reads the whole document, recognises this vendor, and independently rejects anything that contains no readable prose no matter how large it is. Nevada stays verified by hand.
• Fri, Sep 11 Georgia is being watched automatically again. We had it recorded as blocked by bot protection, which was true of the Secretary of State's own site but not of georgia.gov, where the absentee guidance actually lives. That page loads cleanly and every fact on it matches what we publish. Fixing it turned up a wider problem: when we moved a state's watched page to a more specific one, the monitor started reading the new page but kept recording the old address, for 38 of 51 states. It was reading the right page and citing the wrong one. Recorded changes were never affected, because those always stored the page actually read. All 51 now cite the page they came from, and coverage is 51 of 53 pages, up from 49.
• Fri, Sep 11 The last four unverified facts are now corroborated. In Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico and Virginia the thing we publish is not on the state's own website at all. Not buried, absent: New Jersey's vote-by-mail page was pulled in full, 28,000 characters, with no request deadline in it; New Mexico's the same; Virginia's page mentions the deadline for applying several times without printing the date; Missouri never states a ballot return deadline across four sources including its own application form. Reading harder was not going to fix that, so each one was checked against the statute and against NCSL's independent tabulation of that statute, and the dates were re-derived from Election Day to confirm they land where we say. All four agree. We are labelling them corroborated rather than verified, because a weaker claim honestly labelled is worth more than a strong one that is not quite true.
• Fri, Sep 11 Drop-off locations are now saved as they are published, so they survive the data being withdrawn after the election. Anything shown from that record is marked with the election it came from and a warning to confirm with your county, since counties move and drop sites between elections. The location list also now appears in all six languages rather than English and Spanish only.
• Fri, Sep 11 Added a counting tracker at /counting: when each state may start counting mail ballots, when results are certified, how long you have to fix a rejected ballot, and live ballots-out counts where states publish them. It is a counting tracker, not a results tracker: no vote totals, no projections, nothing about who is ahead. The point is that a slow count is a state following its own law.
• Fri, Sep 11 Florida added to the live ballot counts (statewide totals only; the state breaks its table out by party and we deliberately ignore those columns). Scheduling is now duplicated in the database as a backstop, so the daily monitor, alerts, watchdog and agents keep running even if the host's scheduler fails.
• Fri, Sep 11 The map now has three views. The default still shows each state's rule. 'Time left' shades states by how close their request deadline is, so through October the map turns amber and then grey state by state. 'Ballots moving' shades by how many mail ballots are out, using the daily counts states publish. Deliberately no party coloring: absentee request counts are a poor proxy for who is winning, and this site does not take sides.
• Fri, Sep 11 Added a drop-off line to every state card: whether drop boxes are widely available, run by your county, restricted, or not offered at all, with the official locator where one exists. Added live mail-ballot request counts for states that publish them daily, starting with North Carolina. The link checker now watches all of these too.
• Fri, Sep 11 Real drop-off addresses added. Type a ZIP and, where the Voting Information Project has them, you now get actual locations with hours rather than only a link to your state's locator. The state policy line stays above them, because that is knowable today and stays true while the addresses only exist once the November election is loaded and disappear after it. One deliberate choice: when we have no locations we show nothing at all, never a message saying there are none near you. An empty result nearly always means the data has not been published yet, and telling someone there is nowhere to drop a ballot when there is could cost them their vote.
• Thu, Sep 10 Kansas's rejection rate was showing as 0.37% on the card and 0.38% in our published table. Neither was wrong exactly, which was the problem: two pipelines read the same EAVS file under different rules. The Supabase loader falls back to counted-plus-rejected where the survey's own returned-ballots field is blank, and skips jurisdictions with under 25 returned ballots; the data file does neither. Across the country that is 238 jurisdictions and about 259,000 ballots counted one way and 495 tiny jurisdictions counted the other. The card now reads the data file, which is the one the build validates, so there is a single published number per state. The database copy still feeds the agents. Wyoming's reload also landed: it now reads 0.53% there as well as here.
• Thu, Sep 10 Dark mode added. It follows whatever your device is already set to and nothing else: there is no theme switch and nothing is stored about you, which keeps the no-account, no-cookies promise literally true on every page. Colours were re-pointed rather than inverted, because a few of them do two jobs at once. Amber is a good example: as a warning label on a white card it needs to be dark, and as a status chip carrying white text it needs to stay dark in both themes. Every text and fill pairing in the dark palette was checked against WCAG AA and the lowest came out at 5.5 to 1.
• Thu, Sep 10 Cross-source checking added for the fact that matters most: whether a mailed ballot has to ARRIVE by Election Day or only be POSTMARKED by it. Until now every fact here rested on one reading, which is fine while the reading is right and silently awful when it is not. That fact now rests on two independent readings, the state's own page and NCSL's tabulation of the statute. They agree for 50 of the 51 jurisdictions. The exception is Kansas, where the statute and a standing injunction point different ways; both are now shown on the card instead of one being chosen quietly. Where sources ever disagree, the site says so rather than picking a winner.
• Thu, Sep 10 County-level rejection data added for 2,934 counties, read straight from the EAC's 2024 EAVS jurisdiction file rather than any summary of it. Two counts are kept for every county: all rejections, and rejections excluding ballots voided only because the voter went and voted in person. The second is what we show, because those voters did not lose a vote. The difference is usually nothing and occasionally enormous: St. Clair County, Illinois looks like a 20.0% rejection rate on the raw count and is 3.5% once ballots superseded by in-person voting are removed.
• Thu, Sep 10 Wyoming's 2024 rejection rate corrected from 0.6% to 0.53%. Our earlier figure came from a secondary tabulation; the EAVS file itself reports 204 rejections out of 38,421 ballots returned. Every other state's rate was confirmed unchanged against the raw survey, and the state rates on the site no longer rest on a secondary source at all.
• Thu, Sep 10 Chicago, Rockford, Bloomington and East St. Louis run their own election boards separately from their counties, and EAVS reports them as separate jurisdictions. Their ballots are now folded into Cook, Winnebago, McLean and St. Clair counties; without that, Cook County would have been missing 224,337 returned ballots. Kansas City's board spans four counties with no published split, so its ballots are left out and those four counties are labelled as incomplete rather than given an invented number.
• Thu, Sep 10 The ballot-count check now opens with what actually happened in your state: the EAC's 2024 survey found, for example, 3.5% of Texas mail ballots rejected against 1.2% nationally. Full reason breakdown and sources on the trust page.
• Thu, Sep 10 The ballot-count check now uses real numbers: we download the EAC's 2024 Election Administration and Voting Survey and compute the mail-ballot rejection rate for each state and county ourselves. Our national figure of 1.25% across 42.2 million ballots matches the EAC's published rate, which is how we know the columns are read correctly.
• Thu, Sep 10 Added a "Will your ballot count?" check to every state page: three questions, then the specific things most likely to get that person's ballot rejected, ranked by what the research says actually causes rejections. Sources are listed on the trust page.
• Thu, Sep 10 Added a plain-English federal litigation status at the top of every page, so the first thing a worried visitor learns is whether anything actually changed for them today. Added full structured data to state pages (FAQ, step-by-step, government service, election date) so search engines can answer deadline questions directly.
• Thu, Sep 10 Added a daily bill watcher across all fifty legislatures (LegiScan) so law changes surface before official voter pages are updated. Its first run flagged two we had not caught: Virginia moves its receipt deadline from noon to 5 p.m. on the third day after the election effective January 2027, and Mississippi has a contingent law that would require receipt the day before a federal election if the Supreme Court rules state mail-ballot laws preempted. Neither changes anything for November 2026.
• Thu, Sep 10 North Dakota corrected during a full 51-state re-verification: ballots must be RETURNED by the close of polls, and the postmark rule was repealed by HB 1165. We had shown the old rule. That makes four states (Ohio, Utah, North Dakota, and the contested Kansas case) that dropped postmark grace periods for 2026.
• Thu, Sep 10 Kansas corrected again, and this one was our error. Our earlier entry said Kansas had eliminated its 3-day grace period. That sentence turned out to sit inside an HTML comment on the state's page (the state had disabled it), and our text extractor was not stripping comments. The visible page says the statute sets a close-of-polls deadline while a court injunction currently keeps the postmark grace period in force. The card now shows both and tells voters to act on the earlier deadline, which is also the state's own advice.
• Thu, Sep 10 Wisconsin verified (four different request deadlines depending on the voter, all through the municipal clerk). Fixed a text-extraction bug that had made several JavaScript-heavy state sites look unreadable; New Jersey, New Mexico and Virginia were then re-checked properly and their request deadlines confirmed to be genuinely absent from the state pages rather than missed.
• Thu, Sep 10 Nebraska verified from the state's official 2026 election calendar: the mail application deadline is 6 p.m. on Oct. 23 (we showed no time), and the return deadline is close of polls, which differs by time zone. Added agent pickup and the two-time-zone note.
• Thu, Sep 10 Kansas corrected from the Secretary of State's advance-voting page: starting in 2026 mail ballots must be RECEIVED by close of polls on Election Day and the three-day postmark grace period is gone. A court injunction currently allows a postmark exception but is under appeal, so the card shows the hard rule and notes the case. Sixth correction found in this verification pass.
• Thu, Sep 10 D.C. verified from the Board of Elections' own ballot instruction sheet: postmark by Election Day, received within 10 days, drop boxes until 8 p.m., prepaid postage. Added the sign-and-date oath and one-ballot-per-envelope rules.
• Thu, Sep 10 Started measuring mail transit times instead of quoting a guideline. Volunteers mail themselves a postcard and report two dates; county and state medians are published at /transit with sample sizes, and where a state has data its mail-by date is derived from the measurement. Until then the USPS service standard is used and labeled as an estimate.
• Thu, Sep 10 Editing pass on the state card. It had grown to 20 blocks and three phone screens. Now it leads with the answer, the dates, the mail-by date, the return rule, your county, and two actions; everything else sits behind four labeled sections. Same information, a third shorter.
• Thu, Sep 10 The link checker found nine county links and one Iowa link that my earlier verification pass had wrongly cleared; all ten were removed rather than replaced with another guess. Those counties fall back to a search for the official office.
• Thu, Sep 10 Added direct election-office links for 88 of the largest counties, so the county block points at the real office instead of a search. Every URL was fetched and confirmed; nine candidates that failed were dropped rather than guessed at, and the link checker now watches them.
• Thu, Sep 10 Added four scheduled checking jobs (drift auditor, link checker, newsroom watcher, corrections triage), a public error-report form at /report, and a three-question self-check on each state card. The jobs can only file findings for a human to confirm; none of them can change what the site publishes.
• Thu, Sep 10 Utah re-checked: the state's vote-by-mail page is still showing 2025 election content, so the 8 p.m. receipt rule was re-confirmed against HB 300 itself plus news coverage from Oct 2025 and June 2026. Added two 2026 changes the stale page omits: the last-four-digits-of-your-ID requirement on the return envelope, and citizenship verification before a ballot is sent.
• Thu, Sep 10 Added the things people used to open another tab for: your state's voter portal (polling place, sample ballot, registration status), voter ID rules at the polls (NCSL categories), when your state starts counting mail ballots and when results are certified, and links to the official daily mail-ballot counts where states publish them.
• Thu, Sep 10 Added Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and Tagalog (machine-drafted, marked for native review; dates and official rules stay in English). Fixed accessibility issues found by an automated WCAG 2.1 AA audit (contrast on amber badges, map focus order, button labels). Post-election mode tested with a date override. Daily watchdog now emails the site owner if any automated part fails.
• Thu, Sep 10 Utah corrected from vote.utah.gov: mail ballots must be RECEIVED by 8 p.m. on Election Day; the day-before postmark rule no longer applies. Primary-source pass now covers all 51 jurisdictions: 38 verified, 13 partial.
• Thu, Sep 10 Tennessee corrected from the Secretary of State's guide: absentee applications are due 10 days before (Oct. 24), not 7; ballots must be returned by mail only (no hand delivery or drop boxes); eligibility starts at age 60. First pass of primary-source verification complete for all 51 jurisdictions.
• Thu, Sep 10 New York corrected from the State Board of Elections page: mail ballot applications are due 10 days before the election (Oct. 24), not 15. Return options spelled out (county board, any poll site, or early voting site).
• Thu, Sep 10 Verification batch 4d: Vermont, Washington, West Virginia (added its day-before hand-delivery rule), Wyoming verified; Virginia (added its ID-copy rule) and Wisconsin partial; Utah page moved.
• Thu, Sep 10 Verification batch 4b: Oklahoma (added the Monday-before hand-delivery deadline), Oregon, Pennsylvania verified; Rhode Island partial.
• Thu, Sep 10 Verification batch 4a: North Carolina verified (added the $1.98 return-postage detail); New Jersey and New Mexico partial with return rules confirmed; New York page moved.
• Thu, Sep 10 Ohio corrected from the SOS 2026 Voting Schedule: absentee ballots must be RECEIVED by 7:30 p.m. on Election Day (no postmark grace period for domestic voters); application deadline is 8:30 p.m. Oct. 27. The mail-by date moved earlier accordingly.
• Thu, Sep 10 North Dakota verified from the SOS key-dates page: application deadline Nov. 2 now shown; return rule states both the day-before postmark for mail and close-of-polls hand delivery.
• Thu, Sep 10 Verification batch 4c: Vermont, Washington, Wyoming verified; Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin partial; Utah page moved. Added West Virginia's day-before hand-delivery rule and Virginia's ID-copy warning for mailed ballots.
• Thu, Sep 10 Verification batch 4b: Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas verified. South Dakota return rule clarified (ballot must reach the precinct before polls close); Texas application time added; South Carolina witness rule clarified (any adult, no notary). Rhode Island partial; Tennessee blocked.
• Thu, Sep 10 Verification batch 4a: New Jersey, Oklahoma, Oregon verified. Added Oklahoma's Monday-before deadline for hand-delivered ballots and New Jersey's 48-hour rule for unpostmarked ballots. New Mexico and North Carolina partial; New York, North Dakota, Ohio need their current pages.
• Thu, Sep 10 Verification batch 3b: Montana, New Hampshire verified (NH now shows its noon-Nov.-2 by-mail request deadline); Nebraska partial with its ID-with-application rule added. Nevada page rendered blank.
• Thu, Sep 10 Verification batch 3a: Massachusetts return rule corrected (mailed ballots postmarked by Election Day count through Nov. 6 in the November state election; not accepted at polling places). Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi verified; Minnesota witness rule and recommended apply-by date (Oct. 20) updated from the state page. Missouri partial. Louisiana page not found.
• Thu, Sep 10 CORRECTION, Massachusetts: mailed ballots postmarked by Election Day count if received within 3 days after (state page). We previously said received by Election Day. Verified against sec.state.ma.us.
• Thu, Sep 10 Primary-source verification, batch 3 (LA–MO): Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri verified; Massachusetts and Minnesota partial with corrections; Louisiana page still not found.
• Thu, Sep 10 CORRECTION, Minnesota: an absentee witness can be any U.S. citizen 18+ by Election Day, or a notary (state page). We had said a registered Minnesota voter.
• Thu, Sep 10 CORRECTION, Massachusetts: mailed ballots postmarked by Election Day are accepted through Nov. 6 for the November state election (state page). We had shown received-by-Election-Day. Ballots still can't be dropped at polling places.
• Wed, Sep 9 Delaware verified. Added a card notice from the Department of Elections: permanent absentee voters should submit a new 2026 request while the court challenge to the permanent list is on appeal.
• Wed, Sep 9 Primary-source verification, batch 2 (GA–MD): Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine verified; Idaho, Kansas, Maryland partial; Illinois blocked; Louisiana page not found. Added Iowa's 5 p.m. request time, Indiana's ID-number/photocopy rule, Maine's narrow witness rule, Georgia's indoor drop-box note. No rule or deadline discrepancies.
• Wed, Sep 9 Primary-source verification, batch 1 (AL–FL): 6 verified, 3 partial, Arizona blocked. No rule or deadline discrepancies found. Florida cure text now notes the ID-copy requirement from the state page.
• Wed, Sep 9 Added early in-person voting windows for every state (CEIR, data as of April 8, 2026, with each state's official early-voting page), permanent mail-ballot list info (NCSL, May 2026), and panels for military/overseas, students, disability, recent moves, and past convictions.
• Wed, Sep 9 Added: registration deadlines and same-day rules (Vote.org table), signature-cure deadlines per state (NCSL Table 15, Aug 31 2026), add-to-calendar, Election Protection hotlines, a three-question voting-plan wizard at /plan, RSS feeds, a status page, and a post-election mode that switches the card to "did my ballot count" after Nov 3.
• Wed, Sep 9 Corrected wording: state rules were checked against NCSL, MAP, and USVF, not individually against all 51 official sites. Status strip and this page now say so.
• Wed, Sep 9 Added: your county from your ZIP (HUD crosswalk), rejection-proofing tips per state (witness/notary/signature/ID rules per NCSL), email alerts when your state's pages change, a court-filings watcher on the USPS-rule cases (CourtListener), and per-state pages.
• Wed, Sep 9 Fixed broken official links for Iowa and Missouri (both had moved). Added the daily official-page change monitor and the "mail it by" date.
• Wed, Sep 9 Added 2026 general election request and return deadlines for all states, with official ballot trackers. Source: Vote.org table, North Carolina cross-checked against NCSBE.
• Wed, Sep 9 Connecticut moved from excuse-required to no-excuse. Public Act 26-42, effective July 1, 2026.
• Wed, Sep 9 Site launched. State categories verified against NCSL, Movement Advancement Project, and U.S. Vote Foundation.

State list

All-mail state (9): California, Colorado, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Washington

No-excuse absentee (29): Alaska, Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming

Excuse required (13): Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia

Money

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