What you can and can't tell voters about returning a ballot

The short version: your campaign website should tell supporters how to vote. What it should almost never do is explain, in your own words, who may carry someone else's ballot to the drop box — because that rule changes at every state line, in several states it is a criminal statute, and a paragraph written by a helpful staffer is how campaigns walk into it. This guide covers what your voting page can safely say, what it should link out for instead, and the one operating rule that is correct everywhere.

The mistake almost nobody makes on purpose

Here is the shape of it. A volunteer is at a supporter's door in the last week. The supporter has their mail ballot on the kitchen counter, filled out and unmailed, because they weren't sure about the postage or they kept forgetting. The volunteer — helpful, trained on nothing in particular, wearing your campaign's shirt — offers to drop it off.

Whether that was a kindness or a felony depends entirely on which state the door is in. In some states any person may return a ballot for a voter, sometimes with a cap on how many. In others it's limited to family, household members, or caregivers. In a few, the statute reads as the voter and nobody else. In Arizona, a person who knowingly collects a voted ballot from someone who is not their family member, household member, or the person they care for commits a class 6 felony — a felony, for conduct a volunteer could easily have assumed was just being neighborly.

Nobody sets out to break an election law here. The failure mode is a website that says something generically encouraging — "have a friend drop it off for you!" — written by someone who last ran a campaign in a different state, and a volunteer who reasonably assumes the campaign's own instructions are lawful.

Why we're not going to tell you your state's rule

You might reasonably expect a state-by-state table here. We're not publishing one, for the same reason we're about to tell you not to put one on your site.

These are criminal and election-code provisions. Several are ambiguous in their text — a couple of states say only that the voter may "cause" the ballot to be delivered, which is not an answer. Several have been litigated recently and some are still moving. A national summary of fifty-one of them is a research starting point, not something to act on, and the gap between "a table said family members" and what your state's statute actually defines as a family member is exactly where campaigns get hurt.

Two places to look it up properly. The National Conference of State Legislatures maintains a state-by-state ballot collection table with the statutory citations, which is the right way to find out what shape of rule you're dealing with. Then read the statute itself, or have counsel do it. If your campaign is considering any organized ballot-return activity, that is a twenty-minute conversation with an election lawyer, not a search result.

Three things to get right on the page itself

1. "Postmarked" and "received" are different deadlines

About fifteen jurisdictions count a ballot that arrives after Election Day as long as it was postmarked in time. Roughly thirty-five require it in hand by a deadline on Election Day itself, often at a specific hour — noon in Alabama, 5 p.m. in New Hampshire, 7 p.m. in Arizona and Florida, 8 p.m. in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Two failure modes follow. In a receipt state, telling supporters to "mail it by Election Day" is telling them to have their ballot rejected. In a postmark state, it's technically right and still bad advice, because postmarking is not something the voter controls once the envelope leaves their hand — collection times, non-barcoded mail, and regional processing all sit between them and a legible date.

The instruction that is safe in every state is a date certain and a place: if it's within a week of Election Day, don't mail it — take it to a drop box or your election office. Our closing-stretch guide has the return deadline for all 51 jurisdictions in one table, and the filing-deadline hub has a page per state.

One more reason to check locally rather than trust any single national summary: while compiling this, two authoritative national trackers disagreed with each other about whether Virginia's post-Election-Day arrivals count. If the trackers disagree, your county election office is the tiebreaker — not us.

2. Drop boxes exist in some states, and not in others

Availability, hours, staffing, video monitoring, and how many a county must provide all vary, and several states have changed their rules in the last two cycles. A campaign site that shows a map of drop boxes is doing a real service — and is also publishing operational claims that go stale. If you list locations, list them from your county's own published list, date the page visibly, and check it again the week ballots go out.

3. Federal law sets a floor for voters who need help

Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act entitles a voter who needs assistance because of blindness, disability, or an inability to read or write to get that assistance from a person of the voter's own choice — with the narrow exception of the voter's employer, that employer's agent, or an officer or agent of the voter's union. Courts have held that this federal protection can override more restrictive state ballot-collection rules, and the boundary has been litigated more than once.

What that means in practice for your site: do not tell a voter with a disability that they cannot get help, and do not build your voting page as if the strictest reading of your state statute is the whole law. It also isn't your campaign's job to adjudicate that boundary. Point those voters to their election office and, where one exists, a disability rights organization in your state.

What your voting page can safely say

The useful version of this page is mostly logistics and links. Every item below is safe in every state.

• When ballots go out in your state, and when early in-person voting opens
• How to check registration status, linked to the state's own lookup tool
• How to request a ballot, if your state requires a request, linked to the official form
• The return deadline as a date and time, stated as a receipt deadline unless you have confirmed otherwise
• Where to return it — the county's published drop-box and office list, dated
• "Return your own ballot yourself when you can" — the one piece of collection advice that is correct everywhere
• Who to call with questions: the county election office, by name and number

What to leave off, or link out for

• Who may carry someone else's ballot. Link to the statute or your state's own page. Do not summarize it in your own words on your own site — this guide doesn't either, and for the same reason.
• Any offer, by the campaign, to collect or deliver ballots. Even where legal, it converts a volunteer's good afternoon into a chain-of-custody question you will be asked about later.
• Postage claims. Whether return postage is prepaid varies by state and sometimes by county.
• Signature-cure instructions written from memory. Cure deadlines and procedures are state-specific and short. Link to the official process.
• Anything copied from another state's campaign. This is the single most common source of the problem.

Train the doorstep, not just the website

The website is the easy half. The volunteer at the door is where the exposure actually lives, and a page nobody on your canvass has read will not protect anyone. Put one line in the canvass script and one line on the walk packet: we never take a ballot from a voter. In states where collection is broadly legal, that is still a defensible operating rule — it costs you a small number of returned ballots and removes an entire category of risk, allegation, and news story.

If your state does permit collection and you have decided, with counsel, to run a program that uses it, that program needs written rules, named people, and a log. That is a decision for your lawyer and your campaign manager, not for a paragraph on a website.

How Electbase fits in

Electbase builds the compliance parts of a campaign site in by default — your "Paid for by" disclaimer generated from your committee details and placed where the rules require it, accessibility that meets WCAG standards on every template, and a site your team can correct the same afternoon someone spots a problem. Ballot-return law is different in kind: it is state criminal and election code, it changes between sessions, and no website builder should be telling you what it says. What we can do is make the page fast to publish, easy to date, and quick to fix when your Secretary of State updates the guidance in October.

The voting-page checklist

• Every procedural claim links to the Secretary of State or county election office
• The return deadline is stated as a date and time, and confirmed as receipt or postmark
• No instruction on your site about who may return someone else's ballot
• Drop-box locations taken from the county's published list, with a visible "checked on" date
• A line pointing voters who need assistance to their election office
• The canvass script says the campaign never takes a ballot from a voter
• Counsel has read the page — this is the one page on your site worth a lawyer's twenty minutes
• Your "Paid for by" disclaimer is correct and conspicuous on this page too
• A calendar reminder to re-check the page the week ballots go out in your state