New York shows one of the many ways Election Day can go wrong this year
The problem is that relatively few New Yorkers used absentee ballots before covid-19 hit, and election officials were unprepared for this year’s unprecedented flood of mail-in ballots. The Times reported that officials dispatched 403,203 mail-in ballots to New York City residents for the June primary. By comparison, the city’s voters sent in only 76,258 in the 2008 general election. Though it would be hard to quickly buy all the equipment and obtain all the training needed to run a smooth mail-in election, the state should at least have had more staff on hand.
It would be one thing if election officials had spent the past several weeks ensuring New Yorkers’ votes were counted. Instead, they have been discarding an astonishing number of absentee ballots — perhaps a quarter of all mail-in ballots received in Queens, according to one tally the Times cited. Unlike some states, New York does not allow election officials to contact voters whose mail-in ballots are on the verge of being thrown out. The result is disenfranchisement for even small errors — like forgetting to sign in the right place, failing to sign in a way that resembles one’s signature on file or sealing a ballot envelope with tape.
Otherwise-valid ballots may also be tossed because they were postmarked too late. Some voters may have thought that their ballots were safe because they dropped them off by the June 23 deadline, yet if the post office failed to postmark their ballots that day, those ballots have still been disqualified.
The lessons are clear and extend far beyond New York’s borders. States need to hire more election workers and start training them immediately. They must give voters a chance to object before trashing their ballots. And absentee ballot deadlines must be flexible enough to allow for voter misunderstandings and post office delays.
Every one of these needs was predictable for New York, and is even more so across the country this fall. Policymakers must not assume that their November votes will occur smoothly because they always have before, or because elections officials claim they will. Election administration must be high on their list of funding priorities. State legislatures must fix laws and governors must get involved in nitty-gritty logistical questions to ensure that Americans have reasonable, safe ways to exercise their right to vote, beginning in just a couple of months. The clock is ticking.
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