Promise of mail ballots backfires
Sold as easier, but for many they made things worse
“Voting by mail is easy and accurate!” exclaimed Marion County’s website.
“An easy way to vote from the comfort of your own home,” said Florida Democrats.
But for thousands, it was not.
“I will never do it again,” said Charissa Powell, an Orange County voter and one of about 10,000 people across the state whose vote-by-mail ballot was rejected by county elections offices for mismatched signatures or other forms of “voter error,” according to University of Florida professor Daniel A. Smith.
“I was appalled,” Aisha Beltran Perez said of learning her vote was rejected.
“It’s not like it’s the first time I’ve ever submitted a ballot. My signature hasn’t changed since I was 18.”
The furor over rejected ballots has led elections officials and analysts to question why Florida has such strict rules for voting by mail compared with other states – including some states where all voting is done by mail – and to call for the Legislature to take up the issue before the next election in 2020.
“What’s going to come out of the recount is politicians and candidates have a better understanding of what the laws are,” said Orange County Supervisor of Elections Bill Cowles. “And
maybe they’ll start doing that before the election.”
“The bottom line is, we need to review all the timelines in Florida,” Cowles said. A different timetable
California has 32 days after the election to complete its count, and it isn’t alone. In Washington state, where elections are entirely voteby-mail, voters have 21 days after the election to rectify any signature issues with ballots.
A two-person “envelope team” in King County, Washington, examines each signature, elections office spokeswoman Kafia Hosh said, and if it doesn’t match the one on file the ballot goes to a two-person “signature team” trained by state police in signature verification. If they’re unable to match it, they send out a form directly to the voter and follow up with phone calls and emails.
In Florida, meanwhile, many voters found out about the rejections too late to do anything about it. The deadline to “cure” ballots, 5 p.m. on Nov. 5, came one day before the deadline for elections offices to even receive the ballots in the first place, at 7 p.m. on Nov. 6.
In several states, ballots only have to be postmarked by election day. In Florida, ballots had to be received by elections offices by the time polls closed, leaving many ballots up to the whims of the Post Office – “and the postal service is not what it used to be,” Cowles added.
Smith said the 10,000 reports of “voter error” as of Nov. 12 was largely signature mismatches but could also include late-arriving ballots, as counties used different standards in reporting. Another 10,000 were rejected for not having any signature.
He gave a hypothetical example of two twins, “each putting their absentee ballot into the mailbox with correct postage [the week] before Election Day. One piece of mail makes it to Seminole County three days later, the other doesn’t get there by election day. … One sister’s out of luck. How is that fair?”
Old and young
An ACLU study on voteby-mail ballots Smith conducted earlier this year found vote-by-mail-ballots had a much higher rejection rate than votes cast in-person at voting sites.
The study 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.”
Older people are also more likely to have issues with signatures, Hosh said. Either through signatures changing over time or through health and mobility issues. Osceola County even takes age into effect when determining whether to accept signatures or not.
An elderly woman with severe disabilities and difficulty signing her name had her ballot rejected, according to Orange County Democrats, and then had to go through the arduous process of curing her ballot – twice.
That was thanks to a court order a week after Election Day that gave voters more time to cure ballots, but which ultimately resulted in even more confusion. ‘We had a long argument’ As part of U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson’s multiple lawsuits during the recount, federal Judge Mark Walker ruled voters whose ballots were rejected due to signature mismatches now had until Saturday, Nov. 17 to cure them “in the same manner and with the same proof ” as before the original deadline.
But an appeals court ruling muddied the waters, stating the order only applied to voters informed about their rejections after Nov. 1, just 4 days before the original cutoff.
Elections offices and local parties, busy reaching out to voters and telling them to fill out the standard cure forms, suddenly found out — with one day to go — that the state Division of Elections issued a brand new form with those restrictions, implying only that form could be accepted.
“We had initially said, ‘Hey, the only form we have is this one [on our website]’, but then the Division sent the new one sometime Friday,” said Santa Rosa Supervisor of Elections Tappie Villane, a Republican.
Different counties dealt with the new forms in totally different ways. Santa Rosa only accepted the new form, with about 10 voters curing their ballots before the new deadline.
But Orange and Osceola counties, after “we had a long argument about it,” decided to accept both forms, Democratic Osceola supervisor Mary Jane Arrington said – though just two voters ended up sending them in Osceola and about 61 in Orange.
Elections offices can’t even use the new signatures on cure forms to update the ones they have on file, Cowles said — so all those people who just sent in forms will now have to go in and update their signatures yet again.
Adding to the confusion, the Florida Department of State asked federal prosecutors to investigate whether the state Democratic
Party altered the deadline on cure forms they sent to their voters – which would have only hurt Democratic voters if they sent them in after the real deadline.
‘Take a deep breath’
Despite the tumult, Republican Supervisor of Elections Mike Ertel disagreed with Cowles that Florida’s timelines should be changed.
“I think the better thing is proper planning on everyone’s part,” Ertel said. “Voters know if they don’t want to chance it putting it in the mail, they can hand-deliver it to any early voting site in their county.”
Plus, he said, “voters had 24 hours a day to [mail] in ballots on Oct. 7, Oct. 8, Oct. 9 – all the way up to election day.”
“The counting has to end at some point,” Ertel said.
Smith, though, said the idea all voters have to complete ballots weeks in advance to make sure they count “is really privileging certain folks over others.”
Many voters can only vote at the end of Election Day, he said, and if they’re in line at 7 p.m. they still get to vote. Late vote-by-mail ballots “shouldn’t be treated any differently than others,” Smith said.
“In California, they’re still counting ballots!” Smith said. “Maybe in some way there’s something reassuring about that. It lessens the expectation that results have to happen on [Election Day]… Maybe it will allow us to take a deep breath, step back, and allow ballots to be counted.”