Recent Developments in Absentee Voting

With the votes cast and counted, the political signs down, and the final dollars tallied, most people were glad to have election season behind them. For the election community, however, the groundwork for future decisions was beginning anew. The 2009 session of the Virginia General Assembly again saw a large number of bills related to election administration.1 Included in those were a large number of absentee voting bills.2 For the last fifteen years, legislators have introduced numerous bills related to absentee voting, and roughly half of these bills have succeeded. 3 While the rest of the country considers large election reform such as vote centers and all vote-by-mail, Virginia cautiously makes incremental reform by adding permissible reasons for absentee voting