Every absentee ballot packet I receive comes with the following notice:
Attention!
Your enclosed absentee ballot may cost more to mail this election. To keep your postage costs to $0.41 cents, please remove the stub from the top of your ballot before you mail it.
Ballots without postage can be dropped off at any polling location on Election Day from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.
That always got me thinking… Couldn’t they shrink the ballot a bit so EVEN if you don’t remove the stub (which is about 1″ wide), it’ll still just cost $0.41 cents (I realize the ‘cents’ is redundant here). There’s plenty of unused space on the ballot itself, so decreasing the ballot size doesn’t appear to would have caused any problems.
The only answer I can come up with is that they have a bunch of blank ballot sheets which don’t have the questions and multiple choices printed on it yet and need to use them up before they can shrink the ballot sheet size.
Probably the ballot dimensions/formatting are specified by a code (i.e. law) that’s difficult to change. And don’t the forms have to be read by machines? Those would need some kind of retrofit to handle smaller forms, I would think.
Good points, but the fact you’re asked to remove the stub means they can mail it to you with the stub separated. I don’t really see the point of having the stub connected to the ballot, which I’m assuming the stub is just proof that you’ve voted.