New Yorker Sasha Aickin, 43, has no idea if her vote counted.
It took her weeks to get her absentee ballot, which appeared in her mailbox just three days before the June 23 election. It came with two sets of very small print instructions. Neither man, Aickin said, told her to sign the envelope or that she had complete information about her options to return the ballot. He saw the tweet from the city’s Board of Elections account confirming that he could drop it off at his local polling place.
However, when Election Day came, the Brooklyn poll worker to whom he handed his ballot seemed unsure.
“I walked away with very little confidence that my vote would be counted,” Aickin said in a phone interview. “And I don’t know if I’m ever going to find out if my vote was counted, because I gave it to someone who didn’t seem to know what to do with it.”
New York is one of more than a dozen states that dramatically expanded the ability of eligible voters to cast a vote by mail in this year’s primary election due to the coronavirus public health emergency.
But that necessary expansion, government and public health officials have argued, to reduce the spread of COVID-19, has strained systems accustomed to handling only thousands of mail or absent ballots at a time, causing weeks of delays in the count. that they have experts concerned that Election Day in November could drag into Election Week.
The avalanche of additional mail ballots in the primaries has also revealed another problem that could have huge consequences for November: a sharp increase in ballot rejections. Ballots may be thrown out due to voter errors, such as not signing in all the right places, having a signature that does not exactly match the voter registration signature, or arriving at election officials too late.
In California alone, a state that allowed all eligible voters to cast a ballot by mail before the pandemic and is used to processing millions of those ballots, more than 102,000 ballots were rejected in the March 3 primaries, compared to 69,000 in 2016. primary.
That number includes some mail ballots that were delivered by voters who chose to vote in person, but most of them, some 70,000 ballots, simply came too late, according to data reported by The Associated Press and provided to NBC News by the California Secretary of State’s Office. Nearly 13,000 voters forgot to sign the ballot, while more than 14,000 signatures were declared incompatible by officials.
In the Wisconsin April 7 primary, the rejection rate was 1.8 percent, with more than 20,000 mail ballots rejected, according to state data. That’s 12 times the number of rejected mail ballots in the 2016 presidential primaries. Another 79,000 late ballots were only counted in this year’s primaries after a court order required that the state’s count ballots be killed on time but they were delayed by mail.
“I am quite concerned that there are many voters deprived of their rights for involuntary noncompliance with absentee voting rules,” said Rick Hasen, professor and expert in electoral law at the University of California, Irvine.
That is because many voters have never voted by mail, and “in part because some states do not have much experience in processing these ballots,” he said.
Studies also show that minority voters are more likely to have their ballots rejected than white voters.
In the March 17 Florida primaries, election officials cast 18,500 ballots, about 1.3 percent of all cast, according to a recent analysis. Ohio rejected more than 20,000 ballots, 1.2 percent of mail-in ballots, in its April 28 primary, according to state election results.
The Kentucky State Board of Elections has not finished collecting data from its June 23 primary, but in Jefferson County, more than 8,000 ballots were cast, or about 4.4 percent of the county’s ballots, more than the half because the voter had forgotten to sign the ballot or its envelope. In 2018, the state rejected 8 percent of absentee ballots, just 294 ballots, according to local reports.
Georgia’s secretary of state’s office said counties should not report absentee ballot rejection rates to the state, but in 2018 they rejected 3 percent of absentee ballots. The state saw more than a million people vote by mail in its June 9 primaries.
A late vote is the number 1 reason absentee ballots are rejected, according to data published in the 2018 and 2016 Election Administration and Voting Survey (EAVS). Mismatched or missing signatures continue as second and third most common reasons. A rejected ballot does not mean that a voter is ineligible to cast a ballot, although it could, and experts say voter error often seems to be the cause, such as forgetting to sign one of the signature lines. multiple on the ballot. or not to seal an inner envelope.
Sometimes it’s not even a voter mistake – a missing or illegible postmark can be rejected, just like delays by mail.
Proponents and experts say seemingly low ballot rejection rates will have major impacts and millions of ballots could be rejected in the general election. States with large, healthy mail-in voting operations generally have rejection rates of less than 1 percent, but the average state rejection rate for absentee voting in 2018 was 1.4 percent.
“This year, the rejection rates will be higher,” said Wendy Weiser, vice president of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. An electorate with no mail voting experience will be more error prone, and poll workers and systems are not used to processing as many mail ballots.
“Take a look at New York: New York always has high rejection rates, it has been alarming in this cycle,” he said, noting a NY1 report indicating extremely high rejection rates in certain districts of New York City.
Ballot counting is still ongoing in the city, but New York State had the highest ballot rejection rate in the absence of any state in the United States in 2018, according to EAVS data. Nearly 14 percent of returned absentee ballots, more than 34,000, were dropped by election officials in 2018.
The League of Women Voters filed a lawsuit in July alleging that the New York processes throw up too many eligible ballots, arguing that it was unconstitutional not to give voters the opportunity to correct ballot errors. A plaintiff in the suit is a woman with an essential tremor, a neurological condition that prevents her from always maintaining a consistent signature.
Aickin, the New York voter concerned about the status of his ballot, is a former chief technology officer for Redfin, a real estate company, and lived in San Francisco for 22 years. In his experience, he said, voting by mail in California was simple and easy to use.
But when NBC News asked the city and the independent agency that oversees New York City’s elections whether or not Aickin’s ballot had been counted, the agency did not respond, and the city said the agency would not tell them. Aickin hopes to vote by mail again in the November general election in New York, but is concerned that the system is not up to par.
“I don’t know what I could do better to make sure my vote counts,” he said.
