# Ballot Drop Box A **ballot drop box** is a secured receptacle for returning a voted mail ballot without handing it to a person. It is the one point in the custody chain where a ballot enters official possession with **no election officer present at the moment of deposit**, which is why the controls on it sit almost entirely on the hardware and on the retrieval rule rather than on the deposit. Where statutes reach the hardware, they require the box to be affixed to a foundation, kept under 24-hour video surveillance, and constructed so ballots cannot be removed without tampering being evident (for example Vt. Stat. tit. 17 § 2543A). The retrieval rule carries the rest: emptied by two people of different party affiliation, at a stated minimum frequency, with a record of the date, the time and the names of the persons removing them (for example Ky. Rev. Stat. § 117.086(f)). Drop boxes became a central object of [[Election Denialism]] after 2020, and the structural reason is visible in the chain: the deposit is the only unwitnessed hand-off, so it is the easiest stage about which to make an unfalsifiable claim. Expand with: the state-by-state legal status including bans and caps, the litigation history, the 2026 cycle's rules, and the documented retrieval-log practices. This is a stub — created in the 2026-10-03 ASCII map build for [[Election Ballot Chain of Custody Flow]]. Expand as noted above. ## See Also - [[Election Ballot Chain of Custody Flow]] · [[Chain of Custody]] - [[Mail-in Voting]] · [[Election Denialism]] · [[Voter Suppression]]