Hello, hello! How’s everyone doing this first Wednesday of November? I’m writing this on election day, so I have no idea how everything is turning out. Fingers crossed for a bunch of blue. Probably not here, but maybe in other states! Anyway, we’ll find out. (Update at 11:49PM 11/3: Holy fuck. It happened here.) But I don’t have anything else to ramble about, so I guess I’ll share my Voting Saga. If you follow me on my personal Facebook, you’ve seen all this. I’m too lazy to write everything out in a cohesive rant, so here are the copy/paste versions of the three real-time Facebook posts I made.
Post 1: October 22, 2026 at 12:00AM
Tried to vote by mail. My ballot was rejected because I missed a tiny check box saying Dad didn’t get compensated for helping me stuff the envelope and put it in the mail. My bad.
But there’s a Corrective Action Form! However, according to the Early Voting Ballot Board Presiding Judge, there is a “NEW LAW: Assistant must indicate whether they received compensation or other benefit from a candidate, campaign, or political committee in exchange for providing assistance. Incomplete information about an assistant cannot be corrected and will result in a rejected mail ballot.” and so, “I am not able to send you the Corrective Action Form because that from (sic) cannot be used to correct the “assistant compensation” part of a carrier envelope.” Even though I found the form on the Secretary of State website and the “Notice of Defective Carrier Issued by the Early Voting Clerk” form (6-15), which is dated 2026, clearly indicates that this issue is correctable under the Defect Correction Process by Number, specifically Defect #3 (Incomplete Information with Respect to an Assistant). So, this “new law” is highly suspicious and unfair. If you aren’t going to let people correct their mistakes, then don’t put it on the form. It’s misleading.
In other words, I tried. I made a mistake. My vote doesn’t count. Whatever.
Post 2: October 22, 2026 at 7:40PM
Voting Update!
I got annoyed yesterday and sent the information about the Corrective Action Form I found to the Early Voting Ballot Board Presiding Judge. She wrote me back today. No apology, but a number of thank yous for the information I sent about the 2026 Corrective Action Form. She apparently had absolutely no idea it had been updated (this is literally your job and you don’t keep up with it?) and they will put it in the mail today. It makes me wonder how many other people made my mistake and just took her at her word.
Moral of the story: NEVER assume someone in a government position knows what they are doing. Do the research. If what you find contradicts what they say, confront them. Be the Karen you hate so much, but do it with proof. Because we all know people doing government and government-adjacent jobs are either inept or they believe we are. Advocate for yourself.
Post 3: November 03, 2026 at 6:52PM
Voting Update 2:
It took USPS 9 days to get the Corrective Action Form to me from roughly 25 miles away (the other side of Dallas). That was the 30th. According to the rules, as long as it was back by the 9th, my ballot would count. I had little faith in USPS, but I filled it out and sent it back on the same day. I also informed the Early Voting Ballot Board Presiding Judge of that and politely shared my thoughts on how everything went down.
Today, election day, I received a second Corrective Action Form. There’s no way it would make it in time with USPS, so I didn’t plan on returning it, but I did email the Early Voting Ballot Board Presiding Judge to basically ask WTF? only nicely. Anyway, she wrote me back to let me know that she checked my ballot status and it has been marked as “Good” and will thus be counted, so I don’t have to do anything else. It will take the ballot tracking system about 24 hours to update and say my vote was accepted, but supposedly it is done. I count. The saga is over and I have bitching rights no matter how this shit turns out.
