I’m starting to feel like a broken record writing pieces about why every new action by the State Board of Elections is not some grand conspiracy to rig the election.
Nevertheless, here we go again. The board approved two memos Friday morning governing mail-in ballots, just hours before absentee ballots were scheduled to go out (as every headline immediately points out).
I’ll concede that the timing is not great. If you wanted to invite suspicion, this would be a decent way to do it.
But the explanation is more bureaucratic than conspiratorial. The General Assembly ratified a new election law on Aug. 6. It passed the Senate (unanimously, by the way), and Gov. Josh Stein signed it Aug. 11.
Some of its provisions, including new deadlines for correcting absentee-ballot deficiencies, apply to the November election, meaning the Board of Elections had less than a month to incorporate them before voting began.
At the same time, the State Board had spent the summer trying to put its absentee-ball…
