Provisional ballot

In elections in the United States, a provisional ballot (called an affidavit ballot in New York) is used to record a vote when there are questions about a given voter's eligibility that must be resolved before the vote can count. The federal Help America Vote Act of 2002 guarantees that, in most states, the voter can cast a provisional ballot if the voter states that they are entitled to vote.

Some of the most common reasons to cast a provisional ballot include:

Whether a provisional ballot is counted is contingent upon the verification of that voter's eligibility, which may involve local election officials reviewing government records or asking the voter for more information, such as a photo identification not presented at the polling place or proof of residence. Each state may set its own timing rules for when these issues must be resolved. Provisional ballots therefore cannot usually be counted until after the day of the election.

The right of political parties to have observers at polling places is long-standing. One of the established roles for such observers is to act as challengers, in the event that someone attempts to vote at the polling place who is not eligible to vote.

Before the implementation of provisional ballots, some state laws allowed a voter whose eligibility was challenged to cast a challenged ballot. After the polls closed, the canvassing board was then charged with examining the challenged ballots and determining whether the challenge was to be upheld or not.

The Help America Vote Act brings a degree of uniformity to the array of various challenged ballot rules enacted by various states. For example, each state must provide a means for the voter to find out whether his or her ballot was counted, though the states may use different ways of doing so (such as a website or a phone number).

Though the Act mandates the use of provisional ballots nationwide, it exempted the six states that had been exempted from the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 because those states had and continue to have either "same-day" voter registration or no registration requirement at all: Idaho, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. However, those states may choose to use provisional ballots. As of 2015^[update], North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Wyoming used them for some purposes, while the other three did not have provisional ballots at all.

During the 2018 midterm elections, approximately 20 out of 205 provisional ballots cast in Broward County (a subset of the over 600 provisional ballots and 1.1 million total ballots cast in Broward) were rejected under signature matching requirements. After this determination, both valid and invalid provisional ballots—without enclosing envelopes—were mixed together, which provided no way for them to be separated for the recount.