Want to track what happens to your mail-in ballot? In Missouri, you probably can’t

Voters in 43 states who cast a mail-in ballot this fall will be able to track its progress from the moment their request for one is approved until the completed ballot is returned to the election office.

Most Missourians have no such option.

In an election year with a seismic shift towards mail-in voting, the Show Me State is one of just seven in the country with no statewide mechanism to show voters the status of their mail-in ballot.

“All that is done at the local level,” said Maura Browning, a spokesperson for the Missouri Secretary of State Office. “That’s the way that Missouri’s election system has been set up — that it provides authority to local election authorities.”

Boone County and the city of St. Louis have both implemented ballot-tracking systems, but a majority of Missouri voters are still without such a resource.

Kansas City Election Director Lauri Ealom said her office simply can’t afford a mail ballot tracking feature when expanded mail-in voting in Missouri is only a temporary measure.

In a year rife with uncertainty and disinformation — including President Trump’s outspoken efforts to delegitimize voting by mail — advocates say ballot-tracking helps build confidence in the integrity of election systems.

“Being able to look up and see if your ballot is on its way to you, or, once you’ve voted it, that your ballot has made it back to your elections office, is an important sign of confidence that the process is working the way it should,” said Elena Nunez, director of state operations for Common Cause, a nonpartisan watchdog organization for government accountability.

“Especially for voters who aren’t familiar with voting by mail or who are hearing all this misinformation about how the system works.”

Why not in Missouri?

Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft is up for reelection against Democrat Yinka Faleti, who said Missouri voters deserve to know the status of their mail-in and absentee ballots.

“Missouri should absolutely have a statewide ballot tracking system,” Faleti said in a statement. “We can track our package when we send by UPS or FedEx. Why can’t we track our vote, our most fundamental of rights, to ensure it’s been received?”

The secretary of state’s office has a simple answer: Ashcroft lacks the authority to implement such a system.

“The Secretary of State’s office can provide guidance but is not in a position to mandate policies that are not set forth in state statute,” Browning said.

Mike Wolff, a Saint Louis University School of Law professor and former judge on the Missouri Supreme Court, said the decentralized nature of elections in Missouri does limit the secretary of state’s authority.

“The people who run for secretary of state say, ‘I’m going to be the chief election officer of the state.’ Well, that’s true if the election officer doesn’t do anything,” Wolff said. “The action in this state is local.”

“So, if you’re going to have, for example, a tracker on your ballot envelope, that’s something that the local election authority can do. The secretary of state, I think, does not have the authority to do that.”

Nunez of Common Cause, said one appeal of a statewide ballot-tracking system is its efficiency.

“Ultimately, it’s still our local officials who are sending the ballots out and receiving them, but there are economies of scale and greater convenience if the entire state is using a single system, versus having individual counties build out their own tracking systems,” Nunez said.

Wolff said efficiency isn’t necessarily the highest priority in Missouri.

“I’m not so sure that efficiency is the value that people are looking for. I think they just wanted the state government to not be that powerful,” he said.

What works?

For the first time ever, Kansas voters this year can track the status of their mail-in ballots.

The VoterView tool, an expansion of the state’s existing voter information system, also allows voters to confirm their party affiliation and polling place and preview a sample ballot.

“Misinformation is often a big issue in elections, and we’ve found success using this tool and cutting down some of the outside noise and letting voters go straight to the source for information,” said Katie Koupal, deputy assistant secretary of state.

Koupal said she could not provide an exact cost for the VoterView program, but Kansas paid over $8 million in 2005 for its entire voter registration system contract. The program costs the state $650,000 in licensing and support fees every year, she said.

The system is supported entirely by federal funds from the Help America Vote Act, passed in 2002 to improve voting systems and accessibility after the 2000 election exposed serious flaws.

Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon said a statewide ballot-tracking system could make use of the state voter database local election authorities already use.

“From a ballot-tracking perspective, we have something on our website that voters can look up their record and see if their ballot has been mailed yet or if it has been received, and the trigger for that is whether we’ve put it into the statewide system or not,” Lennon said.

This mechanism is less sophisticated than the intelligent barcode-tracking system Boone County and St. Louis use to track ballot progress through the postal service.

Browning said the statewide database isn’t currently equipped for such a task.

“I wouldn’t know whether it would be a burden on local election authorities to capture that information, but I do know currently our office doesn’t have a mechanism to track that,” Browning said.

Lennon said updating ballot status in statewide wouldn’t be a burden on local election authorities.

“The very simple part where we’re putting on our voter lookup tool, ‘Hey, we’ve received your ballot’ or ‘Hey, we’ve sent your ballot’ — that doesn’t require anything additional really except a way to look that up,” Lennon said.

“We as the local election authorities are the ones updating it obviously, because the source of the information is us putting that information into the state system.”

Nunez said a ballot-tracking program is ultimately worth the investment.

“When [voters] don’t have that, it puts a strain on the office because they’re going to get a lot of phone calls. They’re going to have people showing up if they’re not sure if their ballot was received,” Nunez said. “So, it’s not like there aren’t costs to not having a tracking system.”

This story was originally published October 13, 2020 at 10:59 AM.