In August, Ann Arbor software engineer Zack Hecht kept seeing articles about the disassembly of postal sorting machines and the limited availability of ballot drop boxes in big cities. “It made me sick to see such blatant corruption right before an election,” he emails. So he created what he thinks is the only website to display every ballot drop-box and drop-off location in the U.S., dropoffballot.com.
After work and on weekends, Hecht meticulously searched online for counties that allow absentee ballots to be dropped off rather than mailed. Clicking on numbered green and yellow circles on the map on the site’s home page opens up the locations. Click two more times to see ballot-box icons throughout the area. Alternately, searchers may enter a zip code and state or click a button to find locations and, if available, hours of operation. Each has Google Map directions.
There are also links for searchers to apply for, and, when available, track their ballot. Another link leads to voter information for each state. Hecht has programmed the page to update for future elections.
Hecht hopes the website will “take as much pressure off the USPS as possible by having people drop off their ballots rather than mail them in,” he writes. It lists “100,000+ sites for dropping off ballots in forty-four states and Washington, D.C.”
Why only forty-four states? Even during Covid, he writes, “Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas, and South Carolina don’t allow no-excuse [absentee] voting.”
