eAbsentee
Virginia’s online absentee ballot application ran across eleven separate pages, so a form that should take two minutes took about fifteen. Canvassers had it worst, since they went door to door helping voters sign up to vote by mail. eAbsentee asks every question on one page, then fills in the state’s official application and emails it to the voter’s registrar.
I’ve been its Director of Technology since September 2022. Every voter on this page is made up. Below are the parts that took the most work, first in the form and then in the operation around it.
The form
The state’s own application, filled as you type
Registrars only accept the official form, so eAbsentee writes each answer onto the state’s application at fixed positions. In July 2023 I re-mapped every field to the state’s new July 2022 form. Type below and watch the application fill in.
The questions that decide the boxes
One checkbox splits the form. Asking to vote by mail in every election swaps the election questions for a party question, and a different mailing address opens its own section. The form asks only what that path needs, and only those boxes get an X.
Straight to the registrar
The finished application goes by email to the voter and to the registrar for their county or city, one of . The email cites the Department of Elections memo that lets registrars accept a typed signature.
A link for every mailer
Campaigns learn which outreach works by adding a code to the link: eabsentee.org/form/ plus anything they like. The code travels with each application into a list they can download and a map of where applicants live. I wrote the guides campaigns used to set these up.
A check every morning
After the site went down briefly during the 2023 primary, I wrote a daily check. It adds a test application to the database and asks the live site to email me. If no email arrives, something is broken, and I hear about it before a voter does.
The operation
A form only matters if campaigns send voters to it and registrars accept what it sends. Winning over legislators wary of a tool run by high school students took years of trust-building, election after election.
A typed signature the state accepts
Registrars weren’t sure they could accept an application signed by typing a name, so eAbsentee couldn’t launch until the Department of Elections settled it in writing. Getting that September 2019 memo was a big part of the work. It tells registrars to accept a typed signature when two things are true, and every eAbsentee application meets both.
What it reached
After running eAbsentee through several election cycles, we received $900,000 in funding, and our mailers and outreach reached 92,000 prospective voters. More than 10,000 voters applied through the form.
Who used it
Campaigns put eAbsentee on mailers, on their websites and at the door. Senator Surovell and Aneesh Chopra started the tool in 2015. In the 2023 general election alone, I set up links and reports for 20 candidates.
Every registrar, kept current
An application sent to a stale address never reaches the registrar, and registrars change addresses without telling anyone. My notes called the email step the most fragile part of the system. In August 2023 I corrected of the addresses at once.
Through 2023, eAbsentee ran on Flask. It stamped each application onto the state's PDF with ReportLab and PyPDF2, emailed it with yagmail, and kept applications in MySQL. Vote Absentee Virginia, a nonpartisan nonprofit, sponsors it.