Please feed your provisional ballot here (for the folks without "proper" ID.)

[Igel]

2. Nope.

A lot of states had some similar mechanism. I don't know that all did or that they all had the same safeguards and procedures.

HAVA regularized a haphazard system, or at least put constraints on how states had to have their provisional ballots organized.

New York State, for instance, had "affadavit ballots" that were exactly provisional ballots; you signed a bit of legal language on the envelope holding your ballot to swear you were a duly eligible voter, a poll worker countersigned and noted that you'd cast an affadavit ballot, and then your ballot envelope was put in a box. Affadavit ballots were checked out in the days after the elections, at least in the county I lived in, and any found to be a ballot legally cast it was just chucked into the pile of paper ballots for the official cout. Most ballots were cast by lever machines.