Georgia chaos bodes ill for Election Day
The 16 statewide primary elections held during the pandemic reached a glaring nadir Tuesday as Georgia saw a full-scale meltdown of new voting systems compounded by the state’s rapid expansion of voting by mail.
But across the country, elections that have been held over the past two months reveal a wildly mixed picture, dominated by different states’ experiences with a huge increase in voting by mail.
Overall, turnout in the 15 states and Washington, D.C., which rapidly expanded voting by mail over the past few months, remained high, sometimes at near record levels, even as the Democratic presidential primary was all but wrapped.
The good news was millions were able to vote safely, without risking their health. The bad news was a host of infrastructure and logistical issues that could have cost thousands their opportunity to vote: ballots lost in the mail; some printed on the wrong paper, with the wrong date or the wrong language; others arriving weeks after they were requested or never arriving at all.
But the most definitive lesson for November may be what many have already begun to accept — that there’s an enormous chance many states, including key battlegrounds, will not finish counting on election night. The implications are worrisome in a bitterly divided nation facing what many consider the most consequential election in memory with the loudest voice belonging to an incumbent president who is prone to promoting falsehoods about the electoral system.
More than 48 hours after polls closed June 2, the biggest county in Indiana was still counting ballots.
Four days after its election, also
June 2, Philadelphia was still counting ballots.
“That’s just the way it is,” said Nick Custodio, a deputy commissioner of elections in Philadelphia.
Counting, counting, counting
In swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Georgia as well as less competitive states like Maryland and Indiana, the massive expansion of voting by mail left many counties still counting well beyond the normal election-night deadlines.
David Becker, director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said that every state would significantly expand voting by mail and that people would have to adjust their expectations on when to expect results on what’s likely to be the biggest vote total ever recorded.
“It’s much more important to get the count right than to get it fast,” Becker said.
Absent from any reported issues in the states, however, was the chief concern of President Donald Trump, who has been casting false aspersions about voting by mail and raising unfounded conspiracy theories. There were no reports or indications of widespread fraud in any of the primary elections.
Georgia was, in some way, an outlier, its voting largely upended by problems with new voting machinery. But the vast expansion of voting 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 voting by mail. That posed vivid warning signs, especially for Democrats, for November.
In Pennsylvania, at least 1.4 million people cast their ballots by mail, out of a total of roughly 2 million, though ballots were still being counted as of Wednesday, more than a week after the election. The state had some hiccups. For example, roughly 2,000 voters were sent the wrong party ballot in Montgomery County in suburban Philadelphia. But Pennsylvaniawas better prepared than other states, in large part because of a recently signed law that turned the state into a “no excuse” absentee-ballot system.
But that same law prevented election officials from beginning to tabulate results until the morning of Election Day, creating significant backlogs as large swaths of voters switched to vote by mail.
The state was able to set up an online ballot-request form that also had ballot tracking, meaning voters could check the status of their ballot. But the system didn’t always register a sent ballot, and the online application was only in English. Voters were also allowed to request a ballot up until a week before Election Day, giving election officials scant time to turn around a ballot.
Voters on short end of stick
“The deadlines in Pennsylvania are impossible to meet,” said Lee Soltysiak, chief clerk of Montgomery County. “And the voter was absolutely on the short end of that stick.”
In Maryland, which chose to mail ballots to all registered voters, outdated registration lists left many ballots returned as undeliverable because voters had moved.
Few cities faced more issues than Baltimore. Voters complained of a lack of information on changes to the election process, and they were among the last in the state to receive their ballots because of a vendor error. A ballot alignment error in a City Council district made the ballots uncountable.
And some voters who had ballots returned by the Post Office as undeliverable were recorded in polls books as having voted.
“If we have to conduct our elections by mail again there are a lot of glitches that clearly need to be addressed, and a lot more investment needs to be made in voter education,” said Joanne Antoine, executive director of Common Cause Maryland.
With the presidential election less than 150 days away and coronavirus cases still increasing, the warning signs for November were ominous.