Patent Application
20220177195
The present invention generally relates to marking articles contained within closed enclosures, and it is specifically directed to a method and system for applying a timestamp or other type of identifying marking onto a voting ballot at some time after it is deposited and sealed within a mailing envelope.
As was most vividly revealed in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, questions concerning precisely when a voting ballot, that is cast by mail, was deposited with the U.S. Postal Service (“USPS”) or, subsequently, arrived at a vote processing facility are ripe for controversy and, depending on a state's voting laws, the correct answer to either of those questions can determine whether a ballot has been legally cast and, therefore, its votes should be counted. So, voting by mail (including what may be referred to as “absentee voting”) presents a potential chronology-related problem that is yet to be resolved to the satisfaction of many Americans. To understand this challenge, the vote-by-mail process should be understood.
Typically, a voter who intends to vote-by-mail is provided a voting ballot and a return envelope for mailing the completed ballot to a processing center (and, sometimes, a third article which is another envelope or security sleeve inside which the ballot is to be directly placed prior to their being deposited into the mailing envelope). After marking the ballot to register voting choices, a voter is to place the completed ballot into the mailing envelope, seal the envelope, and deposit it with the USPS for delivery to a ballot processing center address written on the envelope. Upon taking custody of that mailing envelope, the USPS will stamp a postmark on the outside of the envelope and deliver it to processing facility address.
When that ballot-containing and postmarked mailed envelope reaches the processing facility—at least in jurisdictions where the ballot arrival date (as opposed to the mail postmark date)—is consequential in determining whether the ballot has been timely cast, an important step in the ballot processing exercise is for the election officials to timestamp the [outer] mailing envelope to indicate its date of arrival to the processing facility. This is intended to ensure that later arriving ballots can be retained for some time, but properly segregated from timely arriving ballots.
The problem lies, however, in the reality that the only recorded proof of the ballot's date of arrival at the vote collecting facility is the timestamp appearing on the outside of the envelope that the ballot was mailed in—an envelope that the ballot will eventually be removed from and could wind up being discarded or separated from the ballot in such a way that the notation regarding a ballot's arrival date (i.e., the postmark) is forever separated from that ballot. Consequently, the fact of the timestamp not being on the voting ballot, itself, can be highly problematic in elections where various aspects of ballot handling by election officials is called into question. This is particularly true concerning the issue of when ballots were received by the ballot processing facility in jurisdictions where that question bears on the issue of ballot validity.
Consequently, the present inventor recognizes a need to be able to directly mark a voting ballot with a timestamp while that ballot is inside of a mailing envelope and without the need to open the envelope to do so. Furthermore, he also recognizes that that same need to stamp a marking onto a document that is enclosed within a sealed pocket enclosure is felt in other contexts not related to voting and not limited to ballots or even mailing envelopes. The present internal imprinting enclosure and method for its use fulfills this outstanding need.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a system for directly applying markings, be they timestamps or other indicia, to voting ballots or other articles while they are contained within mailing envelopes or similar enclosures.
In one aspect of the present internal imprinting system, the system is formed by an [outer] enclosure and a transfer sheet that is situated within the enclosure and is for stamping a marking(s) onto an article to be contained within the enclosure.
In another aspect of the invention, the enclosure can be a mailing envelope that is to be deposited with the USPS or other package delivery service, or it could be some other type of sealable enclosure. The transfer sheet can be a pressure-sensitive sheet of material, such as carbon paper or graphite paper, that is useful for imprinting an ink, coating, or other marking substance onto a substrate upon it being pressed against the substrate. The “article” can be a voting ballot or a wide range of other things within the scope and spirit of the invention.
It is another object of the invention to provide an additional layer of retainable tracking information about a mail-in voting ballot to better instill confidence in the election process. By enabling completed ballots to be timestamped (typically, at the election facility to which they were mailed by voters) after they are already sealed within mailing envelopes, the method of the present invention permits those ballots to be removed and separated from their postmarked envelopes without any fear of losing track of when the ballots arrived at the facility. Heretofore, in voting jurisdictions where the voting deadline is a specific date by which a remotely completed ballot are required to arrive at designated vote processing facility, it may have been incumbent upon elections officials to either (a) immediately remove every received ballot from its postmarked mailing envelope and timestamp the ballot itself; or (b) immediately timestamp the outside of each received envelope and, thereafter, make absolute certain that each such timestamped envelope is never separated from it ballot contents which have no corresponding dates of receipt marked on them.
This disclosure, as defined by the claims that follow, broadly relates to an assembly for stamping markings onto articles that are contained within pocket-type enclosures. A preferred embodiment of one such assembly that is useful for directly timestamping mailed-in voting ballots while they are still inside their respective mailing envelopes is described in the discussion that follows.
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Although depicted as a letter envelope in this preferred embodiment, within the scope of the invention, the enclosure 10 can be other types of pocket enclosures, and the pocket-closing mechanism employed can be altogether different from the adhesive-type mechanism of the illustrated embodiment. For example, it could be defined by any number of different fasteners.
In a preferred embodiment, the transfer sheet 20 is a one-sided, adhesive-backed sheet of carbon paper (See
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This non-provisional application claims the benefit of provisional application No. 63/122,422 filed Dec. 7, 2020.
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 63122422 | Dec 2020 | US |
