States reject tens of thousands of mail ballots in this year’s primaries, setting off alarm bells for November
New Yorker Sasha Aickin, 43, has no idea if his vote counted.
It took weeks for his absentee ballot to arrive — appearing in his mailbox just three days before the election on June 23. It came with two sets of instructions in very fine print. Neither set, Aickin said, told him to sign the envelope or had complete information about his options for returning the ballot. He saw the city’s Board of Elections account tweet confirming that he could drop it off at his local polling location.
Come Election Day, however, the Brooklyn poll worker to whom he handed his ballot seemed unsure.
“I walked away with very little confidence that my vote was going to 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 handed it to someone who didn’t seem to know what to do with it.”
New York is one of the more than a dozen states that drastically expanded the ability of eligible voters to cast a ballot by mail in this year’s primary elections due to the coronavirus public health emergency.
But that expansion — necessary, government and public health officials have argued, in order to reduce the spread of COVID-19 — has strained systems accustomed to handling only thousands of mail-in or absentee ballots at a time, causing weeks of delays in counting that have experts worried that Election Day in November could drag into Election Week. [Continue reading…]