To Ensure Your Vote Counts, Return Your Ballot And Avoid Preventable Mistakes

The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set newsroom policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com. For years, both political parties loved absentee ballots. To a campaign operative, absentees were a gift. They allow for the creation of a sophisticated voter identification and turnout operation, where potential voters for your candidate are turned into guaranteed voters that can be “put in the bank,” as the saying goes. Often, absentee ballot requests and returns were an early indicator of how a race was likely to play out.