After many concerns over election truth in the last two elections, Alabama is trying to let every voter know that their vote does count and multiple ballots by a single person will not be tolerated. Republican Governor Kay Ivey signed legislation in March to prohibit the trafficking of absentee ballot applications in Alabama elections. This new law defines ballot harvesting and states the punishment for violating it.<\/p>\n
Ballot harvesting is used when \u201ca third party, such as volunteers or paid workers, go to residences, nursing homes, and other locations to pick up completed ballots and drop them off at election offices or another designated drop-off location [1]<\/sup><\/a>.\u201d The strategy is often used by a single party to gather votes for one party over another.<\/p>\n According to\u00a0Ballotpedia<\/a>, Alabama is the only state in which the law explicitly requires only the voter and no one else to return his or her mail-in ballot. The law also specifies that absentee ballots may only<\/strong> be submitted by the voter in person, by U.S. mail, or via commercial carrier.<\/p>\n This new law makes it a Class C felony<\/a> to violate it. Individuals or parties found guilty of collecting, prefilling, or distributing the ballots will be charged with a Class B felony.<\/p>\n However, absentee voters who are blind, have a disability, or can\u2019t read or write and require \u201cassistance to vote\u201d are permitted to receive help from an \u201cindividual of the voter\u2019s choice.\u201d Nonetheless, this individual may not be the \u201cvoter\u2019s employer or agent of that employer or officer or agent of the voter\u2019s union.\u201d<\/p>\n This ballot harvesting halting law took effect immediately upon Governor Ivey signing it into law.<\/p>\n Republican Governor Kay Ivey signed legislation in March to prohibit the trafficking of absentee ballot applications in Alabama elections.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7338,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[144],"tags":[243,223,203,205,249],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.altonmo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31740"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.altonmo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.altonmo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.altonmo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.altonmo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31740"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.altonmo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31740\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31750,"href":"https:\/\/www.altonmo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31740\/revisions\/31750"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.altonmo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.altonmo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.altonmo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.altonmo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Violations<\/h3>\n
Notes:<\/h4>