Update: Reports of Dysfunction Voting Machines and Chaos with Vote-by-Mail Systems in the U.S. 2020 Primaries
WHY Elections Officials Must Expand and Secure In-Person Voting and Protect Elections Results From Fraud
July 15, 2020
A rally outside the Montclair, N.J., town hall on July 1. Protesters hung 1,101 absentee ballots to represent the number of votes that weren't counted in a mayoral election that was decided by just 195 votes.
Kate Albright/Montclair Local
As partisan and legal battles rage over VBM rules, understaffed and underfunded local elections officials have been inundated by increased VBM ballots which overwhelmed processing and tabulation systems in many states and jurisdictions, compounded by problems at the U.S. Postal Service.
Many low income and rural Americans lack reliable access to the postal system, and tens of thousands of voters who requested absentee ballots did not received them by election day. They then must go to an in person polling place, to find they are mostly closed, or voting machines are creating long lines.
According to the Washington Post: “The U.S. Postal Service is bracing for an expected onslaught of mail-in ballots this fall as states and cities push alternatives to in-person voting because of the pandemic. The concern extends to local elections offices that may be unaccustomed to aspects of the mail, such as the time it takes for parcels to reach their destinations and how to design their ballots to meet postal standards.”
These problems and many more listed in this report are anticipated to surge in the November general election, and they will impact minority voters disproportionately.
NEDC is asking officials to support an inevitable increase in VBM by greatly expanding the number of curbside drop off ballot boxes to take the pressure off the Post Office.
However, elections officials must do everything possible now to avoid a looming disaster in November, and a possible post-election crisis due to contested election results.
Senators, Representatives, and Secretaries of State must immediately focus significant resources on expanding safe in-person voting and ensuring secure, verified elections.
This includes emergency Federal funding to states for the following:
· New recruitment of young poll workers in order to keep more polling locations open
· PPE and disinfectant for those workers
· Social distancing through larger polling places
· Providing paper ballots to every voter to hand mark
· Sufficient numbers of working optical ballot scanners
· Trained poll workers to publicly audit the paper ballots, and verify the results of the scanners.
NEDC strongly supports banning the use of touchscreen electronic voting machines in 2020. These machines are a nexus for spreading the COVID virus. They must be disinfected between each voter, causing even longer lines, and reports are that they are not being properly disinfected.
These machines are also prone to malfunction and vulnerable to undetectable hacking (their software is considered “proprietary”), which could cause delays in election results or even contested results.
Training for using electronic systems is also a problem for new poll workers recruited with little time before the election.
Hand-marked paper ballots and public audits will help mitigate many easily foreseeable problems and assure the election results are verified and will not be contested.
The following compiled media describes some of the breakdown in voting processes we’re seeing around the country:
PBS VIDEO Report: Primary election chaos highlights a voting system deeply flawed
Scattered problems with mail-in ballots this year signal potential November challenges for Postal Service
Postal workers found three tubs of uncounted absentee ballots the day after the Wisconsin primary. Some Ohioans did not receive their ballots in time for the election because of mail delays. And in Dallas, absentee ballots some voters sent to the county were returned just days before Election Day, with no explanation.
California tosses 100,000 botched mailed-in ballots for presidential primary
Most of the discounted votes arrived late, while others were lacking signatures.
The California secretary of state’s election data obtained by the AP showed 102,428 mail-in ballots were disqualified in the state’s 58 counties, about 1.5% of the nearly 7 million mail-in ballots returned. That percentage is the highest in a primary since 2014, and the overall number is the highest in a statewide election since 2010.
Two years ago, the national average of rejected mail ballots in the general election was about 1.4% and in the 2016 presidential election year it was 1%, according to a U.S. Election Assistance Commission study.
Signed, Sealed, Undelivered: Thousands Of Mail-In Ballots Rejected For Tardiness
Mail-in voting, which tens of millions of Americans are expected to use this November, is fraught with potential problems. Hundreds of thousands of ballots go uncounted each year because people make mistakes, such as forgetting to sign the form or sending it in too late.
An NPR analysis has found that in the primary elections held so far this year, at least 65,000 absentee or mail-in ballots have been rejected because they arrived past the deadline, often through no fault of the voter.
Need A Witness For Your Mail-In Ballot? New Pandemic Lawsuits Challenge Old Rules
With the widespread expansion of vote-by-mail this year in response to the pandemic, both major political parties and their allies are waging an intense legal battle to shape the rules around absentee and mail-in voting
The details matter a lot and could affect the outcome in November.
Dozens of lawsuits have been filed so far, with Democrats seeking to remove mail-in voting restrictions that they say are burdensome and unconstitutional, and Republicans trying to preserve laws they say protect against voter fraud.
Among the main targets are witness and signature requirements for absentee ballots — such as signing the envelope, or getting a witness or notary to sign it, or making sure the voter's signature is legible. Such requirements — which differ from state to state — can make all the difference in whether a ballot is counted or tossed aside.
While the numbers are relatively small — around 1% in most states — they could prove crucial in a close election, especially one in which many more voters are expected to cast absentee and mail-in ballots to avoid going to the polls during a pandemic.
Reports on Various States:
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/20/politics/absentee-voting-election-problems/index.html
• CNN spoke to registered voters in Georgia, Wisconsin and Washington DC, who said they followed the rules requested absentee ballots, and even sought assistance from local election officials, to no avail. "That was the most frustrating part, going through all those hoops, requesting the ballot and finally getting it straightened out ... and then for them to send the ballot to the wrong address," said Cathy Lawton, 58, of Barton, Wisconsin, a small town in a reliably Republican county.
• As Washington, DC's June 2 primary approached, Matthew Miller and Nima Sheth, married professors who live in the District, decided to vote absentee. Miller and Sheth are among tens of thousands of voters who didn't get their requested absentee ballots in recent primaries, including in the battleground states of Georgia and Wisconsin. With elderly, immunocompromised parents at home, plus a 1-year-old baby, it felt like the safest choice in the age of coronavirus. They submitted requests for absentee ballots on the last day of eligibility, a week before the primary. They got a confirmation email from the DC Board of Elections. But Miller's ballot never arrived, and Sheth's ballot was sent to the wrong address. Neither wound up voting. "It wasn't a risk we were willing to take, at least for the primary," Miller said, "Though November might be a different story. You just don't think something like this could happen in a country like America, where, if you follow the rules, you should be able to vote.”
• In Maryland, where all registered voters were automatically supposed to get ballots in the mail, about 160,000 ballots, roughly 5% of those sent out, weren't delivered, officials say.
• 14,000 voters in Wisconsin never got the absentee ballots they requested (if just 1% of absentee ballots aren't delivered to voters in key states this fall, that could tip the balance in a close presidential election and potentially trigger a constitutional crisis.)
• Many voters in Atlanta didn't get the ballots they requested, they either gave up, or voted in person, crowding the same polling sites that officials hoped would stay relatively empty because of heavy mail-in voting.
• Stacy Abrams received an absentee ballot with an unusable return envelope. Abrams had initially requested an absentee ballot in May, and said she decided to vote in-person on Election Day.
• In Maryland, about 5% of ballots weren't delivered
Georgia:
https://time.com/5853297/software-issues-georgia-mail-in-ballots/
• Faulty software or poorly calibrated vote-tabulation scanners used to count mailed-in ballots in this week’s chaotic Georgia primary may have prevented thousands of votes from being counted.
• Election panels in all four counties detected unregistered votes while examining ballot images flagged by the vote-tallying scanner’s software for anomalies.
• Panelists discovered at least 20 votes on scanned ballot images that the program had not recorded, said Jeanne Dufort, a Democrat on the panel. She said it appeared the votes did not register because ovals that were supposed to be filled in were instead checked or marked with X’s.
• The Dominion election system used on Tuesday is proprietary. Hursti said it has never been subjected to an independent security review. It was, however, denied certification by Texas, which cited “multiple hardware and software issues” identified by state-appointed examiners. They cited a complex installation process and one called the suite “fragile and error prone.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/us/politics/voting-by-mail-georgia.html
• The massive expansion of vote-by-mail left many counties still counting well beyond the normal election-night deadlines.
• The vast expansion of vote-by-mail and absentee-ballot voting was not enough to offset the drastic reduction in polling locations in many states. In cities around the country, including Atlanta, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., voters waited in Election Day lines for hours, even as every city experienced exponential increases in vote-by-mail. That posed vivid warning signs, especially for Democrats, for November.
• In Georgia, the elections director in the state’s largest county said that the pandemic forced officials to try to run two elections concurrently: a universal vote-by-mail system and the regular in-person election, plus early voting in person, without extra resources.
Texas:
• Confusion over how to fill out the mail-in ballot application in Travis County has led some voters to receive a ballot without any runoff candidate options, and officials are now telling them they must vote in person.
• Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir did not have an estimate of how many voters have found themselves in this predicament, but “I know it’s enough that everybody’s talking about it,” she said.
• The Travis County clerk’s office has received a record-breaking number of requests for mail-in ballots for a runoff election as many look for a safe way to vote in the midst of the pandemic.
• Several Bastrop County voters had their mail-in ballots returned to sender due to a processing error. The U.S. Postal Service reported that some ballots sent in by Bastrop County residents were either processed upside down or backwards, which caused a ballot’s return address to read as a delivery address.
Kentucky:
Louisville is Kentucky’s largest city, in Kentucky’s largest county, Jefferson County, which sprawls 54 miles wide and is home to some 616,000 registered voters. It is home to a large portion (46 percent) of all of Kentucky’s black residents. And on Tuesday, there will be one polling place for all of Jefferson County.
You read that correctly. One polling place, out by the fairgrounds and the airport — a considerable bus ride for many even from downtown — for 616,000 American voters.
Kentucky has worked hard, and in a bipartisan manner, to expand absentee and early voting. State officials have done many things carefully and correctly during this run-up; the Democratic governor, the Republican secretary of state, and many state residents have bristled over national media coverage and celebrity tweets suggesting voter suppression is afoot.
It’s terrific that Kentucky has expanded mail-in options, and those will work for many people. They will work for those who dialed into this race weeks ago. Those for whom the Democratic primary for Senate has not been top of mind? Head to the fairgrounds and get in line.
That’s disenfranchising. And it privileges certain voters — voters with cars, voters with more flexible jobs, voters with easy child care — over others. That’s wrong.
New Jersey:
• In the City Council election, 16,747 vote-by-mail ballots were received, but only 13,557 votes were counted. More than 3,190 votes, 19% of the total ballots cast, were disqualified by the board of elections.
• Over 800 ballots in Paterson were invalidated for appearing in mailboxes improperly bundled together—including one mailbox where hundreds of ballots were in a single packet. The bundles were turned over to law enforcement to investigate potential criminal activity related to the collection of the ballots.
• The board of elections disqualified another 2,300 ballots after concluding that the signatures on them did not match the signatures on voter records. (signature must be exactly as you signed it at dmv, if you can’t remember or it changed = disqualified!)
• Reporting by NBC further uncovered citizens of Paterson who are listed as having voted, but who told the news outlet they never received a ballot and did not vote.
• One woman, Ramona Javier, after being shown the list of people on her block who allegedly voted, told the outlet she knew of eight family members and neighbors who were wrongly listed. “We did not receive vote-by-mail ballots and thus we did not vote,” she said. “This is corruption. This is fraud.”
• There were multiple reports that large numbers of mail-in ballots were left on the lobby floors of apartment buildings and not delivered to residents’ individual mailboxes, further casting doubt on the integrity of the election.
• In that race, a video posted to Snapchat has surfaced that appears to show a man named Abu Razyen unlawfully handling a large stack of ballots he indicates are votes for Khalique. Khalique’s brother, Shelim, and Razyen have been charged by the state attorney general for crimes, including fraud in casting mail-in votes, tampering, and unauthorized possession of ballots.
• Nearly 900 votes that appear to have been mailed in bulk from three individual mailboxes, including more than 300 rubber-banded together form a mailbox in neighboring Haledon, have not yet been counted.
• According to the court filing, YaYa Luis Mendez, a campaign worker for Alex Mendez, “confessed to investigators working on behalf of the (New Jersey Attorney General’s) office to having stolen ballots out of mailboxes, both completed and uncompleted, on behalf of and at the direction of the Mendez campaign.”
Massachusetts:
https://commonwealthmagazine.org/politics/town-clerks-say-they-cant-handle-flood-of-mail-in-ballots/
Clerks say part of the problem is that processing absentee ballot requests is a time-consuming, labor intensive process. When a voter submits an application, their name and mailing address is manually entered into the state’s voter registration database. A set of mailing labels and bar codes are printed. Packets must be assembled, with a ballot, instructions, labels, and three envelopes — one to send the packet to the voter, then the ballot is placed inside two envelopes to be returned. “It’s a very time-consuming process that’s not at all automated unfortunately,” Dowd said.
When ballots are returned, they are kept in the envelope until Election Day, when they are fed into voting machines at each voter’s precinct, where results are tabulated after the polls close. “The basic process has not changed in 36 years I’ve been in the office,” said Easthampton clerk Barbara LaBombard.
LaBombard said she has just two people and two computers in her office. She was able to mail out 1,100 ballots for the special Senate election. But she fears what will happen in the fall when turnout is higher. “If we get 10 times as many ballots, I don’t know what we’re going to do,” she said.
Sandwich Town Clerk Taylor White said voting by mail is “really an antiquated process.” “Our system in Massachusetts is designed for voters to show up to the polls on Election Day,” White said.
Several clerks said the labor-intensive process increases the opportunity for human errors – for example, entering the wrong zip code or not noticing that two applications are attached to one email.
Why Is Voting By Mail (Suddenly) Controversial? Here's What You Need To Know
All four states that have not expanded mail-voting access are led by Republican governors, according to the Open Source Election Technology Institute report.
Texas, for instance, is one of the four states that hasn't expanded access to mail ballots in response to the pandemic, and Republicans there are engaged in high-profile court battles to keep it that way.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has said in statements that "fear of contracting COVID-19 does not amount to a sickness or physical condition as required by state law." He also said that his office would prosecute people for voter fraud if they use a mail-in ballot in a matter he said is improper.
America is woefully unprepared for mail-in voting. The result will be messy and divisive.
Republicans are correct that mail-in ballots are more susceptible to fraud than ballots cast in person. But the difference is negligible, and fraud rarely happens, as almost every state requires safeguards such as signature matching. Amber McReynolds, CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute, and Charles Stewart III, a professor at MIT, pored over a database of about 250 million mailed-in votes over the past 20 years, and found just over 1,200 cases of voter fraud. “We are talking about an occurrence that translates to about 0.00006 per cent of total votes cast,” they wrote in a study.
The other common right-wing refrain is so-called “vote harvesting,” whereby political operatives collect ballots from seniors and immigrants, personally delivering the ballots and coercing them to vote a certain way. Generally speaking, this simply doesn’t happen. One prominent example from 2019 was a Republican operative in North Carolina who was caught collecting incomplete ballots he would personally fill out. But he was caught precisely because his county’s mail-in numbers looked so skewed: obvious cases of fraud tend to attract attention.
Allen Straith has never voted by mail before. But when the 32-year-old customer service agent learned his wife was pregnant with their third child and realized COVID-19 would mean unsanitary voting booths and massive queues, Straith decided it would be better to play it safe, avoid the crowds and register for an absentee ballot.
It wasn’t easy. He searched online for the application, but couldn’t find it. He shrugged it off for a few weeks, until he noticed a Facebook post by the chair of a neighboring county’s Democratic group. The post warned that the deadline to register for an absentee ballot in Tennessee’s congressional election was fast approaching. Straith downloaded the application, assuming it was the same for November’s general election. It wasn’t—different application, different deadline.
Now, even with the right paperwork, Straith is still worried. Not about fraud, or whether his ballot will arrive on time, or even whether his vote will count—Jefferson County, where he lives, is so deep-red, they haven’t elected a Democrat since the Civil War era. Instead, Straith believes this year’s election will further divide the nation.
“In a normal year, if this wasn’t 2020 and Donald Trump wasn’t in the White House,” he says, “I wouldn’t be worried.” Straith remembers the run-up to the 2016 election, when Trump loudly set expectations for failure by proclaiming the elections would be rigged. This year, if Trump loses, Straith believes he’ll go back to that well, “starting an uproar” over the massive increase of people expected to vote by mail: “He’s gonna say, ‘That’s why it’s rigged.’ Because people mailed in votes.”