Democratic candidate for Alabama’s 5th Congressional District Candice Duvieilh is maintaining that she cast an absentee ballot in the 2024 general election despite no evidence of her vote appearing in the Alabama Secretary of State’s Office records.
In a statement provided to APR Thursday, Duvieilh reasserted that both she and her husband applied for, received and returned mail-in absentee ballots in Marshall County in 2024 before moving from Arab to Triana in December of that year. The Marshall County Board of Registrars confirmed to APR that the Duvieilhs did receive absentee ballots for the general election, but was unable to confirm whether those ballots were ultimately cast.
Duvieilh also provided APR with images of her voter registration cards dating back to 2022. Duvieilh’s registration status has not been disputed, as the records held by the Secretary of State’s Office only reflect a voter’s most recent registration date—which for Duvieilh was in 2025.
In her statement to APR, Duvieilh maintained that both she and her husband completed and submitted their 2024 ballots, and claimed that “the Alabama Secretary of State’s website does not reflect [her] voter record accurately in the state of Alabama.” When asked if it is her stance that her and her husband’s 2024 ballots were mishandled by the postal service or registrar’s office, Duvieilh declined to speculate on “who or how they were mishandled.”
A representative from the Marshall County Circuit Clerk’s office told APR that there would be no circumstance in which an absentee ballot would be rejected without the voter being notified of the rejection. The official also said that all absentee ballot rejections are documented and would appear in the Secretary of State’s Office records. According to the official, the only scenario in which a properly-submitted absentee ballot would not be counted would be if it was mishandled by the postal service.
While it is possible for mail-in ballots to be lost by the U.S. Postal Service, such instances are recorded as “nonreturned” in elections data, making it difficult to differentiate between ballots that are actually lost in the mail and those that were simply never filled out and returned by the voter. Additionally, a mail-in ballot that is returned too close to an election can risk arriving late, in which case it would also be recorded as “nonreturned.” In 2016, the nationwide nonreturn rate of mail-in ballots was 19.7 percent.
While there is no comprehensive data tracking the postal service’s error rate when handling mail-in ballots, experts tend to suggest that voters, not the postal service, are typically responsible when a ballot goes uncounted. Charles Stewart, a professor in MIT’s Department of Political Science who performs quantitative assessments of election performance, said in 2020 that postal service problems are likely “the least important source” of lost mail-in votes.
It remains unclear whether Duvieilh and her husband actually filled out and returned their absentee ballots in the 2024 general election. Both of their ballots could have been mishandled by the postal service, they could have returned the ballots too late to be counted, or they could have never returned their ballots at all. Any of these scenarios could have led to Duvieilh’s vote not being recorded in the 2024 election.
Duvieilh is currently set to face Andrew Sneed in the Democratic primary runoff for Alabama’s 5th Congressional District on June 16.
