On Tuesday, I filled out my second ballot in the 2020 presidential election and in the coming days, up to 100,000 New Yorkers will be joining me.
No, this is not a large-scale incident of voter fraud. It was the result of a vendor error which saw ballots sent to the wrong people last week. The issue panicked New Yorkers worried about whether their vote would count and provided ammo for Donald Trump’s ongoing fight against mail-in voting. “Big Fraud, Unfixable!” the president said.
But the unfixable incident has apparently been fixed, providing a lesson on the role of human error in elections and how that can be addressed. And this year, with an unprecedented number of Americans voting by mail, and Congress leaving the election severely underfunded, differentiating between election hiccups and chaos is crucial.
Perry Grossman, voting rights project attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), put it bluntly. “Vendor errors happen,” Grossman said. “We’re 30, 40 days out from the election now. There’s time to get this fixed. My preference would be everybody should fucking relax.”
Grossman said he could spend hours explaining how to improve elections in New York, but the issue at hand was identified and resolved promptly thanks to a set of existing quality controls.
Roughly 24 hours after the issue was made public, the city announced it would be sending out new ballot packages which would supersede the original ballots if both were sent in. In New York, absentee voters can also vote in person as late as election day. The in-person vote will be the only one that is counted even if they have already mailed in a ballot.
“If you have to or just want to vote by mail, don’t worry, you’re going to get a new ballot package, feel confident that if you fill it out, return it early, you’re going to be a-OK,” Grossman said.
But no matter how many safeguards are in place, it is a charged election year and Brooklyn resident Ryan Grubbs was undecided about how to vote after he and his partner received the wrong ballots. On Tuesday, they also received new ballots.
“I’m glad that the BOE [board of elections] resolved this issue relatively quickly, but I’m still debating whether I will vote using this new absentee ballot, or go in during the early voting period,” Grubbs said in an email. “I am happy, though, that it looks like my vote will get counted correctly either way.”
I had also started dreaming up a new voting plan. But I am anxious about the virus, and like the idea of my ballot being on its way a month before the election. I also want to trust in the vote by mail process because, like the president, it’s how I have voted for most of the past decade.
While I have not voted by mail as many times as the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, who did so 10 times in 11 years, I have done it more often than not because I grew-up in a state where it is a totally normal thing to do: California.
In 1988, 14% of California voters cast mail-in ballots. By the state’s 2018 general election, more than 65% of votes were mailed in or dropped off. It is not perfect, but it is normalized. Unfortunately, it is also unusual for voting to be this easy in the US.
In other parts of the country, politicians are closing ballot drop-off sites, bar absentee voters from changing their mind, and are involved in legal battles about whether voters qualify for an absentee ballot because they are afraid of Covid-19.
Myrna Pérez, a voting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, said there would be some bumps in the road this year because of how many states had to scale up to mail-in voting, fast and without much support from the government.
In September, North Carolina election officials said up to 500 voters accidentally received two ballots after officials tried to correct an error in which they mislabeled ballots. This week in New Jersey, election officials said a vendor error caused nearly 7,000 voters to receive ballots labeled with the wrong congressional district.
“What we do need to remember is mistakes happen,” Pérez said. “The sooner we find them, the sooner we can fix them. What I think is a big learning moment is as a country we underfund our elections in even the best circumstances.”
Some politicians are trying to make voting more difficult and Pérez said it is essential for citizens to do what they could to ensure they, and the people around them, could vote. This can include volunteering to babysit, letting someone panicked about missing work cut in the voting line or even just asking friends if they have received their mail-in ballots.
“This is unfortunately a time when Americans are going to have to step into the breach because our politicians didn’t do enough to set up for success,” Pérez said.
