A colleague in the elections community sent along this observation, which is pertinent to any state that requires ballots only be postmarked, but not delivered by Election Day.

They are sitting in post offices or they’re in postal bags somewhere.

What if somebody, who already knows the Murkowski/Miller race is close, wanted to try and affect the outcome of the election and decided not to deliver a batch of ballots or discarded them?

Allowing timely postmarked ballots adds a security threat to the election when there are ballots out there floating around and elections officials don’t even know where they are. It also adds an extra difficult issue of what to do when the postmark is unreadable or is totally missing.

Check your next stack of mail. There are almost always some items in there missing a postmark.