Seward Public School District voters will want to watch the calendar as they return their ballots to the Seward County Clerk’s office by 5 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 10.
The bond issue ballots were expected to be mailed to voters on Jan. 20. That is a day after some of the preliminary information indicated, because Jan. 19 is the Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday.
Seward County Clerk Brandy Johnson said state statutes require the ballots be mailed no sooner than 22 days prior to the official election day, but no fewer than 10 days prior. With the Feb. 10 election day, that means her office cannot mail them earlier than the 20th.
Seward County residents do have the option of bringing their ballots to the clerk’s office on or before 5 p.m. on Feb. 10, or placing them in the ballot drop box by the north door of the courthouse by that time.
Johnson said the few hundred Seward Public School District voters who live in Butler County must return their ballots to Butler County’s clerk so that their signatures can be verified there. Johnson and the Butler County Clerk’s office then make arrangements to deliver those ballots to Seward.
Mail-in ballots for the school bond and for regular elections also must arrive at the clerk’s office before the designated time for voting to end, Johnson said.
The postmark on the envelope is not a factor. Only the date on which the envelope arrives matters.
Johnson said her office is in regular contact with the Seward post office on election days to assure they receive all mail that has come in by the appointed time.
People who are going to be away from home beginning before the ballots are mailed had until last week to make arrangements for early voting.
“There are so many different circumstances and scenarios, it is hard to cover all of them,” Johnson said.
She recalled past elections where a mailed ballot arrived several weeks after election day.
Seward Postmaster Ernaldy Hernandez said the mail deposited in USPS boxes in Seward has been sent to Omaha for processing for years. The same is true for mail deposited in Milford and Utica post offices.
“From here to Omaha, a lot of stuff can happen,” Hernandez said.
He said postal customers who need mail manually postmarked to meet a specific mailing deadline should bring their mail into the post office or deposit it in the exterior mailbox behind the post office in a larger envelope marked “to the attention of the postmaster” to receive individual postmarking here.
Outgoing mail is postmarked at the point it is processed in Omaha, which may not be the same day it is slipped into a mailbox in Seward County.
The U.S. Postal Service has posted a note on its website indicating that reports that it has changed its procedures on postmarks are inaccurate.
“While we are not changing our postmarking practices,” the USPS noted, “we have made adjustments to our transportation operations that will result in some mailpieces not arriving at our originating processing facilities on the same day that they are mailed.
“This means that the date on the postmarks applied at our processing facilities will not necessarily match the date on which the customer’s mailpiece was collected by a letter carrier or dropped off at a retail location.”
USPS indicates that if a customer needs proof of when they mailed something and the free local postmark is not enough, they can purchase a certificate of mailing or pay more to mail the piece via registered or certified mail services.
