1-in-5 mail-in ballots tossed out in tight Congressional primary race
Similar issues have popped up across the country as mail-in ballot access has been expanded
There’s been a massive push for the expansion of mail-in ballots this year with officials arguing it’s a safer way to vote in the midst of the COVID-19 panic.
But massively and quickly expanding a voting option typically only available to a few thousand people has overwhelmed voting systems across the country.
In NY-12, one-in-five mail-in ballots were tossed out. ONE-IN-FIVE. It’s a massive mass.
From the Queens Daily Eagle:
One-in-five mail-in ballots have been tossed out in New York’s 12th Congressional District, which includes Western Queens, Northwest Brooklyn and the East Side of Manhattan, according to Board of Elections documents reported by The Intercept.
The absentee ballots are crucial in the contest, where Maloney, who has served in Congress since 1993, led Patel by 648 votes after the machine tally following the June 23 Democratic primary. Roughly 65,000 NY-12 voters cast their ballots by mail, The New York Times reported.
Maloney received 41.7 percent of the in-person votes compared to Patel’s 40.1 percent. Two other candidates, Lauren Ashcraft and Pete Harrison, received about 18 percent of the overall vote total. In Queens, Patel received 540 more votes than Maloney.
On Thursday, the four candidates called on the BOE to count every absentee ballot that was invalidated because the U.S. Postal Service did not postmark the envelope or because the BOE received the ballots after June 30.
“Put bluntly: A missing postmark, over which voters had no control, should not disenfranchise those voters,” the candidates wrote.
“We stand together in asking Governor Cuomo to update his executive order to permit the Board of Elections to accept all absentee ballots received without a postmark,” they added.
Patel went even further, suing the Board of Elections in federal court to demand that all ballots mailed and received before June 30 be counted, even if the ballot does not have a postmark.
65,000 mail-in ballots in New York's 12th district race. One-in-five thrown out. Leader's margin is 648 votes. Lots of lawsuits. Now why is it we should not be worried about voting by mail for the presidential election? From @QueensEagle https://t.co/Cm7ulC3bwn
— Byron York (@ByronYork) July 19, 2020
And that’s just one primary race in New York. The rest of the country is seeing similar problems, as NBC reports:
The flood of additional mail ballots in the primaries has also revealed another problem that could have enormous consequences for November: a sharp increase in ballot rejections. Ballots can be tossed for voter errors like not signing in all the right places, having a signature that doesn’t exactly match one’s voter registration signature, or reaching election officials too late.
In California alone, a state that allowed all eligible voters to cast a ballot by mail prior to the pandemic and is accustomed to processing millions of those ballots, more than 102,000 ballots were rejected in its March 3 primary, up from 69,000 in the state’s 2016 primary.
That number includes some mail ballots that were surrendered by voters who chose to vote in person instead, but the majority of them — some 70,000 ballots — simply arrived too late, according to datafirst 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 a mismatch by officials.
In Wisconsin’s 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 mail ballots rejected in the 2016 presidential primary.Another 79,000 late ballots were only counted in this year’s primary after a court order demanded the state count ballots postmarked on time but delayed by the mail.
“I’m quite worried that there’s going to be many voters disenfranchised for inadvertent noncompliance with absentee ballot rules,” said Rick Hasen, a professor and an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine.
That’s because many voters have never voted by mail, and “in part because some states don’t have a lot of experience processing these ballots,” he said.
Studies also show that minority voters are more likely to have their ballots rejected than white voters.
In Florida’s March 17 primary, election officials tossed 18,500 ballots — roughly 1.3 percent of all those cast — according to a recent analysis. Ohio rejected more than 20,000 ballots — 1.2 percent of the mail ballots cast — in its April 28 primary, according to state election results.
Complete chaos. Not exactly reassuring heading into the general elections.
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Comments
If TPTB are so terrified, then set up the voting booths in grocery stores where everyone is used to waiting in line and they clean the carts all the time. That has gotten to be efficient. Hold the voting from say, Saturday to Tuesday and to avoid a crush, you could assign by last name i.e. A-D on Saturday, etc. There are ways. But I am NOT comfortable with the mail option.
Same here. No vote by mail.
Interesting ideas. There are plenty of options.
Ok,how ’bout this. You you go to the polling place where you normally vote walk in and vote. If you don’t want to do that stay your happy ass at home. Democrat voters must bring twenty five methods of ID… anyway…simple….
Uh, no. If the liberal PTB can allow “protests” that number in the thousands of people without a problem they can allow in person voting at polling stations with no additional accommodations beyond the basic precautions that need to be taken.
Hold them in new york bars, as long as they don’t just order alcohol because that’s going to be a certainty that one will get the sicken chicken flu. But, if you order the 14 pcs of french fries or some other cuomo work around you’re safe from the sicken chicken flu.
I got a mail in request but am not turning it in. I’ll vote in person. I’ve seen my mail lying in the street too many times.
Yeah. I once found a stock certificate in the snow behind my mailbox.
Yet voter ID is off the table
Well, duh. If you have to prove you’re entitled to vote, who’s going to vote Democrat?
Voter ID only proves you’re the person you claim to be; it doesn’t prove that person is entitled to vote. Voter ID is a good idea anyway, but don’t be under the illusion that it will fix the problem.
Dems are busily turning elections into a game of Calvinball.
Voter ID isn’t off the table yet. Expect a Real ID requirement for voting in federal elections to come down in Sept. Rationale will be O’Bama’s designation of elections. Cheers –
studies show that minorities hardest hit. Is there anything in life that that group allegedly doesn’t fail at worse than whites?
What happened to “Count Every Vote”?
This is by design. Confuse and obfuscate then turn every election over to the courts.
If one can take risk mitigation measures and safely shop for groceries one can do the same at a physical polling station. Those with elevated risk factors can apply for an absentee ballot in the normal process.
It is mid July. Any legal issues in lack of early voting at polling stations or issuance of absentee ballot for Rona risk can be addressed by the individual state legislatures and signed by governor well before we get close to election day.
Texas has a pretty good model for the rest to follow.
The insistence on mass mail out of ballots that have not been requested by individuals is a recipe for disaster. No way that process leads to clean vote. Nor will the votes be counted and certified by the various Secretary of States in time to be counted for electoral college seating.
There is no Rona exception in the U.S. constitution. If the d and blue states insist on shooting themselves in the foot and risk their states slate of electors not being seated then they can live with it.
If folks riot in the streets then they are handing PDJT the invocation of the Insurrection Act on a silver platter. The d and blue states do not want to go there.
Once forced to invoke the Insurrection Act the only way out short of civil war is to:
1. Remove governor and state legislators/state office holders
2. Appoint Governor for the duration of the crisis
3. Mass arrests and prosecution of rioters
4. Crisis over when no rioters stop
5. Rioters defined as anyone ‘protesting without a permit’; since no permits will be issued…..
Please don’t go there d and blue state politicians. This is the only outcome for intentionally and maliciously creating a crisis.
Unless you are physically unable – by illness, military service, and such – get up and go to your polling place. Have your ID with you.
If you say it’s important, prove it. Treat it like it’s important. If you won’t bother, don’t expect us to take you seriously.
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If a ballot doesn’t have a postmark, it could have easily been stuffed in the pile.
I see these people are “all in” for the big fraud in November
Here, in Ohio, we have early voting, weeks before election day. It’s been said not to cast early votes as the Dems/Progs will know how many votes they need to swing the election. This used to sound too conspiratorial and far fetched. Lately, not so much.
Where I live, early votes aren’t even opened to tabulate until Election Day voting has ended.
That’s what they tell you, that they aren’t opened. If I was going to be in the US on the months leading up to election day and the day itself I would go volunteer to be a poll worker. And when I saw something suspicious I would yell to kingdom come.
A missing postmark would indicate to me that the ballot had never been through the postal system.
Except that that’s not true. It is extremely common for the post office not to postmark pre-paid mail. And that is a huge problem for votes. This year the USPS promised that all envelopes marked as containing ballots would be postmarked, but it didn’t happen. Many people personally brought their ballots to the post office and insisted on having them postmarked, only to have the post office workers refuse.
This is also always an issue with military ballots, since military mail is often not postmarked.
Hanging chads anyone – Bad mail is in the eye of the beholder.
How do I distinguish a good ballot from a stuffed one then?
If mail in voting is as big in November as it has been in these Spring primaries; our nation is in for a world of shit. There will be no way to conclusively prove who won which state, district or even which county. Every single vote will come down to a battle in the courts. There will be violence. There will be blood. Which of course is a feature, not a bug.