Mail-in ballots are a very good way to conduct voting during the pandemic and even as a long-term procedure. It allows a voter to cast a ballot without attending a voting place which becomes safest during this period and any like effects in the future.
However, there is one potential problem that should be addressed. I have been a teller and a warden at my precinct voting station many times in the past and have found that about one out of one thousand ballots submitted by voters and inserted into counting machines have an error within one or more office selections. The machine will reject an errored ballot, which negates all the selections on the ballot for the other offices. At the precinct or the ward level with the voter present, we were able to find the error and have the voter do a replacement ballot and we held out the invalid ballot.
Mail-ins do not have this ready solution option, all choices would be in effect deleted because the ballot would not go through the machine. The long-term solution is to have the machines reprogrammed to accept those choices which are correctly selected.
But this solution would take time to write and incorporate new algorithms to the system and the current situation does not provide the time necessary to carry this out. A temporary solution would be to have the warden or town/city clerk to copy and recreate a ballot omitting the erred area and including all valid votes, and putting aside the failed ballot.
Somehow, we must find a solution to ensure all valid voters selections are counted to preserve our democratic election system.
William Stewart
Saugus