No, Your Mail-In Ballot Isn’t Being Tossed in the Trash

I put up a picture of a Trump flag yesterday, so it's only fair that I put up a Biden sign today.Kevin Drum

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Hum de hum:

With absentee ballots flooding election offices nationwide, the officials processing them are tentatively reporting some surprising news: The share of ballots being rejected because of flawed signatures and other errors appears lower — sometimes much lower — than in the past.

Should that trend hold, it could prove significant in an election in which the bulk of absentee voters has been Democratic, and Republicans have fought furiously, in court and on the stump, to discard mail ballots as fraudulent.

Despite all the huffing and puffing from Donald Trump, along with the fear of Republican judges tossing out votes by the bushel basket, guess what? All of the work from Democratic activists, lawyers, and campaign staffers has paid off. Over 100 million people have managed to vote early—a huge record breaker—and mail-in ballots are being accepted at high rates. What’s more, judges are ordering the postal service to prioritize the delivery of ballots over all other first-class mail.

So democracy is working OK for now, and all of our votes to toss Trump on the ash heap of history are being counted. And they’ll continue to be counted until there are no ballots left, no matter how loudly Trump bellows about it. Every last one of them.

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GREAT JOURNALISM, SLOW FUNDRAISING

Our team has been on fire lately—publishing sweeping, one-of-a-kind investigations, ambitious, groundbreaking projects, and even releasing “the holy shit documentary of the year.” And that’s on top of protecting free and fair elections and standing up to bullies and BS when others in the media don’t.

Yet, we just came up pretty short on our first big fundraising campaign since Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting joined forces.

So, two things:

1) If you value the journalism we do but haven’t pitched in over the last few months, please consider doing so now—we urgently need a lot of help to make up for lost ground.

2) If you’re not ready to donate but you’re interested enough in our work to be reading this, please consider signing up for our free Mother Jones Daily newsletter to get to know us and our reporting better. Maybe once you do, you’ll see it’s something worth supporting.

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