Idaho election ballots haven’t yet been mailed

BOISE — If you requested a ballot to vote in the November election but haven’t received it yet, don’t panic. They haven’t even been mailed out.

One of the changes made during the extraordinary session of the state Legislature in August was the date by which county clerks must mail ballots to voters.

The deadline was pushed back from Sept. 18 to Oct. 5.

The change helps county clerks finalize and assemble the ballots, get them printed and mail them.

“When you’re only talking about, say, a few hundred overseas ballots, that’s not a problem,” Ada County Clerk Phil McGrane said in a phone interview. “Or typically, I’d say there might be a few thousand absentee ballots, but when we’re talking about 100,000 ballots, that changes the scale of it entirely. And for 42 of the 44 counties, these jobs are hand-assembled, and so the additional two weeks is to allow people the time to assemble and get those absentee ballots ready to go in the mail.”

Even though in-person voting still will be available in Idaho, McGrane has said he anticipates as many as 75 percent of Idaho voters to vote by absentee ballot because of concerns about COVID-19.

As of Friday, 325,707 Idahoans had requested an absentee ballot, according to Idaho Chief Deputy Secretary of State Chad Houck. The number is close to the 334,700 votes cast in the May primary and is close to the halfway point to the expected voter turnout of 700,000 for the November election, Houck noted. Idaho has 907,276 registered voters, as of the June report. Ada County has 269,658 voters.

“Obviously, we’re in a good position to have phenomenal voter turnout,” Houck said Friday.

McGrane said county clerks still must hit that Sept. 18 deadline for overseas ballots, but clerks likely will wait as long as they can before mailing regular absentee ballots. Depending on what’s going on in an individual county, clerks likely will start getting those final ballots ready next week and prepared for the mail.

A look at what’s happening with the presidential candidacy of Kanye West illustrates the challenge of printing ballots too early. A legal fight has thrown into question whether West’s name should be on the ballot in Idaho. Printing hundreds of thousands of ballots with his name on the ballot only to have a judge rule his name shouldn’t be on the ballot or vice versa shows why clerks will wait as long as they can before printing ballots this year.

McGrane, who is also chairman of the elections committee of the Idaho Association of County Recorders and Clerks, said some clerks might start mailing before Oct. 5, but for the most part, ballots will start hitting mailboxes the week of Oct. 5.

McGrane said the time needed to receive the ballot will vary depending on where you live in Idaho, but he said if you haven’t received yours by the week of Oct. 12, you should call your county clerk to check.

After Oct. 5, clerks will be mailing out ballots as they receive the requests. McGrane said you should allow seven to 10 days once you’ve requested a ballot -- time for the request to get to your clerk, for the clerk to compile your ballot and get it in the mail, and for the Postal Service to deliver it.

If you haven’t requested an absentee ballot yet, no need to worry. There’s still time; just go to idahovotes.gov.

The deadline to request an absentee ballot is 5 p.m. Oct. 23. Keep in mind that’s only 11 days before the election, so that might be cutting it close for a mail-in return.

Alternatively, once you get your ballot, you could fill it out and return it by hand to your clerk’s office, at a drop-off location or at a mobile voting site.

To check on your ballot, go to idahovotes.gov, put in your name and birth date, and it will tell you the status.

If all else fails, you’ll still be able to vote in person at your polling place from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Nov. 3. Check ahead of time where your polling place is, though, as some are likely to change because of the coronavirus. The deadline for county clerks to set their polling places is Oct. 2.