No stamp? No problem: Your mail-in ballot will get there anyway

Democracy is never easy — or cheap. And that includes the act of mailing in a ballot, a messy collection of thick cards that are weighty on the issues and just as weighty on the postal scale.

One stamp or two? Or maybe three? Is the envelope regular-sized or oversize? Does that cost extra? How much?

And what happens if you leave off the stamp entirely and drop a completed ballot into the mailbox stark naked?

The answer is — don’t worry. The mail will go through. All mailed ballots are delivered immediately to county registrars of voters, according to U.S. Postal Service spokesman Gus Ruiz, whether they are mailed with the proper amount of postage, or without any postage at all.

“It’s a little-known secret,” Ruiz said. “The Postal Service will always deliver a ballot, whether there is a stamp on it or not. We know how important this mail is, and we want to get it where it belongs as soon as possible.”

The issue is far from trivial. More citizens than ever are voting early. In 1964, 1 voter in 25 voted by mail in California. In the 2012 presidential election, 1 voter in 2 voted by mail. This election, registrars say, the percentage of mail-in voters can be expected to keep going up.

Some voters don’t need to affix any stamps — five of the nine Bay Area counties, including San Francisco, now supply mail-in voters with postage-paid return envelopes. But elsewhere, mail-in voters are asked to slap a stamp on the envelope, and many of them drop their ballots into the mailbox with insufficient postage or no postage at all.

“We don’t eat it,” Ruiz said. “The registrars of voters have agreed to reimburse us after the election for insufficient postage.”

One place where mail voting isn’t free is Contra Costa County. According to the county’s clerk-recorder-registrar, Joseph Canciamilla, individual counties perform a random check of returned ballots for insufficient postage, then compare that result to the Postal Service’s random check. Together they agree on a postage-due sum that the county reimburses to the Postal Service.

In the 2012 election, Canciamilla said, about 1 ballot in 20 was mailed in without stamps or without enough stamps — a fairly constant ratio in the registrar of voters trade. Contra Costa County reimbursed the Postal Service about $5,000.

But if word gets out that voters need not affix a stamp to have their ballot counted, Canciamilla said with a sigh, that amount could change dramatically.

“We don’t like to broadcast it,” he said, “because everyone would dump their ballots in the mail” without stamps.

The size and weight of the ballot envelopes, and the policy of whether to provide a postage-paid envelope, vary by county. In San Francisco, because of the many city ballot propositions, this November’s returned-ballot envelope weighs 4 ounces and, depending on how the ballots are folded, may be too thick to qualify as a standard envelope. That means returning each San Francisco ballot costs the city and county up to $1.57 in postage.

Since 2003, San Francisco has sent out all ballots with postage-paid return envelopes, said John Arntz, the city’s elections director.

“We have such a large ballot with so many cards, and more than one stamp was required,” he said. “It was a hassle. Voters were complaining.”

In decades past, Arntz said, the Postal Service did not always forward postage-due ballots to the registrar as it does now. The policy before 2003, he said, was for postage-due San Francisco ballots to be returned to the sender. That meant some people’s votes were never counted, which contributed to the city’s decision to pick up the tab.

This year, Arntz said, 310,000 out of the 506,000 registered voters have requested mail-in ballots, and the city’s postage bill is expected to be about $350,000.

The San Francisco ballot is so thick that Arntz has provided a tutorial on a two-minute video on how to fit all the ballot cards into the postage-paid envelope. Long story short: Fold each ballot card individually before you put them in the envelope. If you fold them all together, disaster looms.

“If a voter folds all the ballot cards together before inserting them into the return envelope, the envelope becomes very thick and can jam the equipment, slowing the process,” Arntz said in a statement to ballot-challenged voters.

In Alameda County, nearly 2 out of 3 ballots are sent out by mail in advance of election day, said Dwayna Gullatt, the assistant to the registrar. The county has mailed out 569,000 ballots.

Alameda County voters are asked to affix postage. One Berkeley voter who did found himself out $1.57, which included the premium he had to pay after discovering at the post office that the return ballot envelope was too thick with ballot cards to count as a regular envelope.

The postage-due issue cuts both ways, however. In Contra Costa County, the ballot envelope weighs slightly under 2 ounces and the postage required is 68 cents — 47 cents for the first ounce and 21 cents for the additional ounce. But since most people use only “forever” stamps that cost 47 cents each, most ballots are coming back with two stamps on them — which is too much postage, not insufficient postage.

And what happens to the 26-cent overpayment? The Postal Service, which runs an annual deficit of $5 billion, keeps it. Every quarter-and-penny helps.

Price of voting

The cost in postage of returning a vote-by-mail envelope varies by county.

San Francisco, San Mateo, Sonoma, Santa Clara and Marin counties: No stamp required.

Alameda County: Postage required — 68 cents to $1.57, depending on weight and thickness.

Contra Costa and Solano counties: 68 cents postage required.

Napa County: Stamps required (68 cents) for voters in 11 precincts that still have polling places. Stamps not required in 159 precincts where voting is by mail only.