A race to get polls ready
Election officials scrambling to keep up with changes, make voting a smooth, safe process
Add New York’s election administrators to the long list of professionals who will not look back on 2020 fondly.
While they ’ve managed to stave off a feared shortage of poll workers, local elections boards still face a daunting set of tasks: managing an unprecedented number of absentee ballots, keeping up with recently enacted voter protections and assuaging voters’ fears of disenfranchisement.
Staff have worked around the clock for weeks to handle the onslaught of new measures and executive orders that have been issued to make voting safe and easy for New Yorkers as early voting commences and Election Day looms. Some of those changes include providing drop boxes for absentee ballots at every polling site, alerting absentee voters to any issues with their ballots, and waiving the re
quirement for voters to sign absentee ballot applications. Early polling and Election Day sites had to be reconfigured to allow for social distancing and other COVID -19 protections.
Dutchess County Board of Elections Commissioner Erik J. Haight, a Republican, said the changes have been challenging for election officials, political parties and individual campaigns.
“Any time you change the rules in the middle of the game, it’s going to cause confusion and strife,” Haight said. “The electorate is bound to get confused by all these executive orders that the governor is handing down to us without any funding at all.”
Federal funds allocated to elections boards for the primary election in June through the CARES Act pandemicrelief package are largely exhausted, said Doug Kellner, the state Board of Elections’ Democratic co-chair.
“The governor has provided some funds for security and technical issues, and of course last year the state provided substantial funds so the counties could buy new equipment in order to implement early voting,” Kellner said, “but there is no new money for the general election
coming from the state.”
A New Yorker’s experience voting can vary greatly depending on where a ballot is cast. Postal issues that plagued the primary election were concentrated downstate in more populous communities, a problem that few election officials reported outside of those regions.
In Hamilton County, the least populous county in New York with fewer than 5,000 residents, there are 4,255 active registered voters, according to state Board of Elections voter registration numbers as of February.
Hamilton County Board of Elections officials may see about 700 returned absentee ballots, but it will be their team of four who verify and count each returned ballot, said Cathleen E. Rogers, the Democratic elections commissioner.
Marie C. Buanno, Rogers’ Republican counterpart, said that the board lost the services of many residents who typically serve as poll workers on Election Day, but that the state’s online portal, along with the county political parties, helped the board secure enough volunteers to assist.
“We were concerned, but through both our party committees we’ve been able to find new workers and get them established,” Buanno said. “We aren’t really
concerned about turnout at the polls because we have an abnormal amount of absentees coming in. We’re not expecting the polls to be as busy, but we have enough staff that we feel will cover everything.”
Counties that have leftover CARES Act funding have used those dollars to hire temporary staff to count absentee ballots and oversee the polls.
Dutchess County received about $350,000 in funding, and elections commissioners said the remaining funds will help pay the 30 temporary staff members hired to help with processing absentee ballot applications. The county reported receiving more than 27,000 absentee ballot applications as of Oct. 5, with over 5,000 ballots returned so far.
“The plan has worked so well that we are almost in real time. When an application comes in, within 24 hours an absentee ballot is in the mail for that voter,” Haight said. “That’s not an accident, that we are on top of things: We had a good plan, we implemented it and we had to be creative with our budget, but we’re funding it.”
The state Board of Elections has regular conference calls with local elections boards to iron out issues, which local administrators say has been helpful, as has the online portal that allows New Yorkers to apply to be poll workers.
Thousands of absentee ballots were thrown out during June’s primary election because of technical issues such as missing signatures or postmarks, and some elections boards have already experienced mailing and printing issues for absentee ballots for the general election.
The new provisions aim to address those issues, but election administrators say the remedies will be time-consuming and labor-intensive, especially verifying and counting absentee ballots. For example, voters no longer have to sign absentee ballot applications, a step that was used as an early indicator of verification for some boards.
“That creates a new burden for us in the respect that we have to verify signatures on the absentee ballot envelope itself, rather than being able to do it earlier on in the process,” said Rachel Bledi, Republican elections commissioner for the Albany County Board of Elections. “Not that we didn’t do it after, but it just served as an earlier means of ballot security.”
The online portal automatically looks up a voter’s registration information and copies that information into the absentee ballot application, which Kellner said eliminates several processing steps for local boards.
And then there are the drop boxes — a mandate handed down by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in September that requires election officials to have the receptacles at every polling site. The problem, election officials discovered, is that only a few companies manufacture the boxes and there was a limited time in which to secure them.
“I think there was a lack of thinking ahead on how we’re going to get drop boxes,” said Elizabeth Soto, Democratic elections commissioner for Dutchess County Board of Elections.
Voters are also on edge over ballot security and whether their vote will be counted amid President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to stoke fears that mail-in voting will lead to widespread voter fraud — a charge that is unsupported by evidence.
Trump has implied on multiple occasions he would challenge absentee ballots if they provide former Vice President Joe Biden with a margin of victory in the presidential election. That kind of rhetoric prompted Dutchess County resident Dan Shapley to vote early, in person.
“I want my ballot counted on Election Day,” he said. “I’m afraid of any scenario that would leave the winner uncertain until absentee ballots are counted.”
Perry Grossman, a voting rights attorney for the New York Civil Liberties Union, offered advice for voters fearing the security of the upcoming election: “Be patient and be confident that your vote is going to get counted,” he said. “New York elections are still going through a big change, and that means that there will be hiccups along the way.”
The Empire State only recently enacted early voting — an option that state elections officials say only 2 percent of its voting population has taken advantage of — as well as additional election reforms that will take some time to perfect.
Elections officials are encouraging voters to vote early and in person, if possible, as it is the best way to ensure your vote is counted while avoiding overcrowding at the polls. For those who have health concerns that might prevent them from going to the polls, officials encourage voters to request absentee ballots early to ensure they ’re returned to local elections boards ahead of Nov. 3.
“For those who can vote in person on Election Day, especially in areas that have not historically had long lines, we want people to realize that is a viable option,” Kellner said. “Poll sites will be practicing good social-distancing procedures so that voting is no more risky than going to the grocery store.
“I’m very confident that we’re not going to see a repeat of the problems we had with New York City in the (June) primary,” he added. “That still doesn’t solve all problems with absentee voting, so people need to apply early, fill out their ballot and get it in the mail early.”