Are mail-in ballots marked with R or D to show political affiliation? Fact Check

ByCraig Haley

A video on social media claims to show that mail-in ballots for the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election are marked with the voters political affiliation on the envelope.

The person making the video then goes on to claim that postal workers could simply discard votes they do not agree with based on the markings on the envelope.

MOSTLY FALSE

An example of the video on social media is below.

The video is circulating to the backdrop of claims that mail-in voting is likely to lead to significant election fraud in the upcoming US Presidential Election.

However, the claims in this particular video are misleading. Despite the narrator of the video discussing the upcoming 2020 US Presidential Election, the mail-in ballots she examines in the video are actually primary mail-in ballots, not general election ballots. Primary elections are where members of each political party pick the candidate(s) they want to represent their own political party for their specific region.

You can see from the video that the voting area the narrator lives in is Palm Beach County in Florida, since that area is written on the envelope. Florida holds closed presidential primaries, meaning only registered members of a political party can vote to pick a candidate for their own party.


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While the video does show real mail-in ballots and markings on those ballots, since the mail-in ballots being examined are for that area’s primary election only, the markings do not demonstrate a way for postal workers to commit election fraud in the way described in the video.

Wendy Sartory Link from the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections office responded to the viral video on Twitter, confirming that the video shows primary ballots, and that general election ballots will not be marked by political affiliation.

Florida is a “Closed Primary” state meaning voters can only vote for members of their party in the primary election. That is, Republicans can only vote for Republicans that are running against each other and Democrats can only vote for Democrats that are running against each other. Because of this, voters are sent ballots according to their party affiliation. It would be a federal crime for any post office employee to tamper with this process and we have received no such reports of anything like this happening.
All ballots for the general election in November will look the same, as voters can vote for whoever they would like. There would be no way to tell the party affiliation of a voter based on their vote-by-mail ballot envelope for the general election.

Blaine Moss, the Communications Coordinator from the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections office told us through email –

The ballots in that video are primary ballots. The numbers that can be seen below the bar code are there for the purposes of the canvassing board. To properly canvass votes, they must know the party and precinct. The alternative would be to open the envelope and look at the ballot itself to ensure that the voter voted the proper party and precinct style. We want to maintain ballot confidentiality, so those numbers are on the outside. It would be a federal crime for any post office employee to tamper with this process and we have received no such reports of anything like this happening…
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All ballots for the general election in November will look exactly the same, as voters can vote for whoever they would like. There would be no way to tell the party affiliation of a voter based on their vote-by-mail ballot envelope for the general election.

And Cynthia Paes from the San Diego Registrar of Voters told us through email –

I couldn’t bring up the video but I know the video related to Florida’s primary election has been debunked. The simple answer to your question is that The San Diego County Registrar of Voters does not now and has not in the past marked “D” or “R” on the outside of mail ballot envelopes for the purposes of identifying political party preference.
With that said, it is not uncommon for elections officials to have a process in place for identifying political party preference during presidential primary elections ONLY.

If, theoretically, a postal worker did throw away ballots marked R for Republican (to point out, there is no evidence that postal workers do this on any meaningful scale) this would have no bearing on the general election between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, since general election ballots are not marked with political affiliation.

At the time the video was published, no general election ballots have yet been distributed in Florida.