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What is Election Mail and its History in the US?

From the National Postal Museum: Chances are your mailbox fills during election time. What is all that mail about? How did the mail come to have a role in US elections?

Official election mail goes way back in U.S. history. There was election mail in the early republic if we consider the mail exchanged between election administrators. Take for instance a 1792 letter in the museum’s collection, which is discussed in the online exhibition. A clerk for the Parsonsfield town, York County, mailed the report on the local vote count to the Massachusetts secretary of state. Pictured above is a Civil War election cover, 1864.

This kind of official mail features in the exhibition, Voting by Mail: Civil War to Covid-19, on view at the National Postal Museum in Washington, DC, from August 24, 2024 to February 23, 2025, and in the online exhibition … (click to read more)

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