If you’re an NRA voting member, you should have received your ballot magazine in the mail by now. If you did, then you can go right back to our endorsement post and fill out the little circles next to the names of all of those fine gentlemen.
However, I be a good number of you are about to start commenting and emailing that you never got your ballot this year! Type and rant away…please. Unless you belong to one of the following groups:
- You live in Hawaii. (I’m jealous.)
- You went green (or simply hassle-free) and get your magazine digitally.
- You just recently became eligible to vote.
- You don’t take a magazine at all.
This isn’t the full list of exemptions, but it’s the overwhelming majority. I’m in this category because of the digital subscription.
Anyway, we all get our ballots by first class mail, and the first mailing is going out on February 1. So, provided Congress doesn’t say to hell with it and shut down the USPS, your ballot should arrive sometime shortly after this date. I presume that members in Hawaii get their ballots by first class mail because of the snail’s pace mail at other classes can take to get out there.
For anyone who has recently become eligible to vote or will become so before the “deadline” in mid-February, there will be another first class mailing towards the end of February.
If you are not in any of those categories and your February magazine has not yet arrived, give it a little extra time. It’s not impossible that mail is moving a little slower right now, as it has been for us for the last couple of months. I would say that if you still haven’t received it by February 4, give NRA a call and inquire. You will probably need to ask to speak with the Secretary’s Office about a missing ballot, but they may have procedures for their standard member number phone folks to handle it with so many different kinds of ballots now going out thanks to the digital subscriptions.
I just became a life member a few weeks ago, and have only been a member for about 4 years-I should be eligible to vote this year, correct?
Yes, you can vote as a fully paid life member. In that case, you should have received your ballot in the magazine. (Or, if you get a digital subscription, it will be mailed on February 1.) If by a few weeks ago, you mean in the last 2-3 weeks (maybe even 4 weeks), you may not have made the cut off to when they pull addresses for the specialized mailing. In that case, they will be doing another mailing in February so that you get your ballot by First Class mail instead of in the magazine.
For anyone looking for the First Class ballot worried that they will miss it, it has been rather huge the last few years. They basically take those pages from the magazine and send them out without folding them.
Hadn’t thought about it, but you’re right, I haven’t seen mine either… (heading to the mailbox)!
I’m in the fourth year of my current incarnation as an NRA member, so I’m not yet eligible.
I’ve been a member on and off half a dozen times or so since I was 18.
I received mine last week, made my selections, and returned it.
talk to me about the digital subscription. Is it Kindle compatible? Would love to read American Hunter on my Kindle.
I plan on casting my vote in St. Louis
I have no idea on the Kindle. I’ll ask. I never thought about it, but I only have a Kindle wifi and kind of just assume that the only Kindle content relevant to me is stuff I store up and download via Amazon for traditional hardcore reading (i.e. novels).
As for “casting [your] vote in St. Louis,” that won’t work for anything other than 76th director. To vote for the 25 up now, you have to vote by mail.
I got mine and always follow your lead.
That’s good to know re voting in St Louis. Will mail in my ballot tomorrow.
As for the Kindle, I have a fire (and love it – on it now). Its wifi only but i get both Outdoor Life and Field and Stream delivered via Amazon subscription and it seems to work fine so far.
Ah, I just have a Kindle Touch. Regardless, I’ll tag the NRA people in my FB post tomorrow if I haven’t heard anything terribly useful by mid-day. I know the email reminders about it tout an image of an iPad, but I really don’t know about the technology.
As for voting, yeah, definitely vote by ballot. The single 1-year term is the only person you vote for at the actual annual meeting. Otherwise, voting credentials are just for the annual meeting of members. Sometimes you have feel-good resolutions. Other times, you have a dose of crazy. I believe it was St. Louis the last time when some guy got up with a resolution to ban all NRA materials in languages other than English. In other words, it would end pretty much all work at the UN, and it would have hurt recent (at the time) efforts when gun owners from other countries reached out for information on gun bans they were facing in their own countries. The crazy guy who pushed it even got up and ranted on how the Second Amendment was a distinctly American thing that should only be relevant to Americans. Needless to say, the membership voted him down by an overwhelming majority.