The first two parts of this series argued about what is wrong with the questions and who to tell about it. This is the practical half — and arguably the half that should have come first.

The ballot is in front of you. You disagree with some of it and cannot honestly answer other parts of it. What do you actually do with the pen?

Yes. And it will not harm the rest.

Leave Question 2 blank and your votes for every candidate and every other measure are counted in full. Each contest and each ballot question is tallied independently of the others.

The term for this is an undervote. It is entirely lawful and entirely routine — it happens on hundreds of thousands of ballots in every election held in this country. A skipped question is simply not added to either the yes or the no column. That is the whole of the consequence.

A ballot is rejected in its entirety only in rare and fairly obvious circumstances: it is physically damaged, it is unsigned where a signature is required (critical for mail voting), or there are indications it is not authentic. A blank square is not on that list.

So if your position on a question is “neither yes nor no, because the question is built in a way that admits no honest answer” — leaving it blank is a legitimate response. It is, in fact, the only mechanism available for expressing exactly that.

The instinct is understandable: if I leave empty space, someone could fill it in. Close it off. Draw a line through it.

Here that instinct works against you, for a mechanical reason.

A Virginia ballot is an optical scan form. A vote is registered by a cleanly filled oval or box. The scanner does not read intent; it reads marks. Any stray mark near a field you did not want to use — a cross, a stroke, hatching — can be read as an overvote: an attempt to select two options in a single question. The result is that the contest is discarded as unreadable.

In other words, trying to protect an empty field can spoil precisely the question you meant to leave unanswered — and occasionally the one next to it.

The rule is short: fill in what you chose, and leave everything else alone. No extra lines, no notes in the margin, no initials beside the boxes.

The fair follow-up: if not the pen, then what stops anyone from writing in an answer for me?

The protection is procedural rather than papery.

The ballot goes directly into a scanner that you feed yourself. There is no intermediate human between your hand and the count.

A two-envelope system. The completed ballot goes into an inner envelope, which goes into an outer envelope that you sign. On receipt, the signature on the outer envelope is checked. Only then is the inner envelope separated and opened — by which point it is no longer connected to your name. The person who removes the ballot for scanning does not know whose it is.

There is a consequence of this design worth internalizing: that signature is the critical element. A missing signature on the envelope is a real and common reason a mail ballot is not counted. An empty square inside it is not.

Alongside this runs a documented chain of custody — a record of who had physical access to the ballots, when, and in what capacity, at each stage.

None of these protections depends on whether you crossed out the blanks.

Mail voting in Virginia opened in September, well ahead of 3 November. If the ballot is already in your hands, you have something no one in a polling place has: time.

Use it. The full text of all three amendments, the official voter explanations and the state’s own brochures are posted by the Department of Elections — Question 1, Question 2, and Question 3 — each on its own page, in English, Spanish, Vietnamese and Korean.

Given that every one of the three questions contains three clauses, and that the full amendment text runs considerably longer than what is printed on the ballot, reading at home is not pedantry. It is the only realistic way to know what you are marking. Parsing a three-clause constitutional amendment while standing in a booth with a line behind you is not a fair test of anyone.

Send it back early. Deadlines are tied to Election Day, and trusting the mail in the final days is an avoidable risk.

Editorial note: this part describes general procedure and is not official election guidance. Deadlines, replacement-ballot procedures and local practice are administered by county registrars and can change; confirm anything that matters to your own ballot with your county office of elections. Nothing here is legal advice.