Does Orange reject the most mail-in ballots in the state? It’s complicated

The Orange County Supervisor of Elections is disputing a new ACLU report that claimed the county had the highest rate of rejected vote-by-mail ballots in the entire state.

But the author of the report said he was only going by the numbers Orange County itself reported to the state – and said even by the numbers Orange wants him to use, it still rejects far more ballots than other large counties.

The report, authored by Daniel A. Smith, a professor of political science at the University of Florida, claimed that nearly 4 percent of Orange’s vote-by-mail ballots were rejected – a rate that almost doubles any other county counties with the second- and third-most rejected ballots, Calhoun and Miami-Dade.

The study, focused on ballots sent back by voters but rejected for various reasons including missing or mismatched signatures, concluded that vote-bymail-ballots have had a higher rejection rate than votes cast inperson at voting sites. It also concluded that “younger and racial and ethnic minority voters were much more likely to have their VBM ballots rejected … and less likely to have their VBM ballots cured when they are flagged for a signature problem.”

But Orange supervisor Bill Cowles said the study incorrectly counted “undeliverable” ballots, ballots that were never received by voters because they no longer lived at an address, in their tabulation of rejected Orange County ballots. Without those 7,558 ballots, Cowles said there were only 1,661 ballots rejected overall.

Smith, however, said it was Orange County itself that counted “undeliverable” ballots as rejected ballots in its report to the state in January 2017, the report Smith used for his study. He said the Orange elections office told the state a few months later it would stop counting ballots that way, “but they continue to [do] that.”

“There’s nothing I can do if the reported data [on rejected ballots] includes ballots returned as undeliverable,” Smith said. “I don’t know why they interpreted it that way. … The canvassing board never even saw [the ballots]. How can it reject something it never saw?”

Smith compared Orange County, with 1,661 rejected ballots out of 163,000 cast, to Pinellas County, which had 281 rejected ballots out of 253,000.

“Ok, you want to take that 1,661 number?” Smith asked. “It’s still five times higher than Pinellas County.”

He added he hoped the disputed numbers didn’t distract from the conclusions about mailin ballots by younger and minority voters being rejected at a higher rate statewide.