City’s first vote-by-mail election is set to begin
Annapolis’ path to change started before pandemic, but has drawn criticism
This week, Annapolis will open a new chapter in its nearly 400-year history by holding a municipal election conducted mostly by mail.
It is a change that has drawn wide praise from election officials, candidates and voting rights advocates who see it as an opportunity to safely increase access to the ballot during the coronavirus pandemic, especially as the far more infectious delta variant has taken hold and renewed concerns about the safety of in-person voting.
The change has also drawn criticism from some who say it was implemented without proper public input or approval and could be a source of voter fraud. Some have gone as far as filing a lawsuit to block the plan, asking two courts to consider the question of whether voting by mail violates City Code.
Neither court — first, the Anne Arundel County Circuit Court and later the Maryland Court of Appeals — obliged.
The city was permitted to move forward with its new election system, which kicks off Monday as 5,811 ballots start landing in the mailboxes of registered Democratic voters in Annapolis’s 3rd, 4th and 8th wards.
Voters will have about three weeks before the Sept. 21 primary election to fill out the ballot and return it to one of eight drop boxes dotted throughout the city; or, if they’re comfortable, show up to their ward’s voting precinct and cast their vote in person. Then sometime in October, around 26,000 ballots will be mailed to all registered voters regardless of party ahead of the Nov. 2 general election. Again, in-person voting will be an option.
But how did we get here? How did Annapolis, a city of about 40,000 people, decide to change its election system for the 2021 elections? And what could it mean for future elections?
The process began in 2018, two counties over.
The City Council of Rockville, the seat of Montgomery County, voted unanimously to become the first city in Maryland to conduct its municipal elections by mail.
A year later, the city held its elections. After years of lagging participation, the 2019 election saw voter turnout nearly double from around about 16% to 31%. The city’s elections board published a report on the new system a few months later.
By all accounts, 2019 was a “smashing success,” driven by a substantial effort to clean up the city’s voter registration database and extensive outreach to voters through mailers, community meetings and a social media campaign, said Robert Kurnick, chair of the Rockville elections board.
In early 2020, Rockville invited other municipalities to attend forums about the election.
Among those who did was Eileen Leahy, a member of the Annapolis Board of Supervisors of Elections. Leahy, a Democrat, brought what she learned back to her colleagues, fellow Democrat Briayna Cuffie and Cliff Myers, the Republican chair.
Annapolis, which like Rockville holds its elections in off years, typically has low turnout. In 2017, about 25% of voters headed to the polls in the primary, and about 35% voted in the general election, to elect Democratic Mayor Gavin Buckley.
“I was just curious” about the Rockville election, said Leahy, who has since replaced Myers as chair. “I think I was most impressed by the overall positive response from constituents. People liked it.”
The COVID-19 effect
The coronavirus reached Anne Arundel County in mid-March 2020, shutting down the city and briefly pausing the election board’s monthly meetings. In May, when meetings restarted virtually, Leahy gave a presentation on Rockville’s vote-by-mail system.
A vote-by-mail system costs about the same and helps drive up turnout, Leahy told her colleagues. She pointed to Maryland’s presidential elections in June and November of that year as two possible test cases for voting by mail.
“We’ll have two (elections) under our belt,” she said. “We’re actually in a good place that people in the city of Annapolis will have already done it a couple of times.”
Maryland’s presidential primary resulted in a boost in voter turnout. However, citing long lines, poor planning and other issues, Gov. Larry Hogan called for a ballot application system to be used for Maryland’s general election instead. It too saw participation increase and no credible reports of fraud were made about either election.
“We like to think we offered a model for other jurisdictions to follow. In conducting the 2020 elections, the State of Maryland followed some of our practices because so many people voted by mail in that election,” Kurnick said. “The key is really voter education and outreach so that they understand what’s going on and why.”
While there is precedent for vote-bymail systems in other parts of the country — Oregon has been holding statewide voteby-mail elections since the mid-1990s — the pandemic spurred jurisdictions to quickly find solutions that would encourage participation and avoid crowded polling places.
That process has been met by disagreements that split over party lines, said Dan Nataf, director of the Center for the Study of Local Issues at Anne Arundel Community College.
On one hand, Republicans generally say they are comfortable with mailing ballots so long as there are requirements like voter ID laws, or at the very least a ballot application, Nataf said. On the other, Democrats tend to approve of mailing ballots directly.
“The challenge is to try to create a secure system,” he said. “There is no doubt the system has to provide non-fraudulent ballots. It has to be designed well.”
Annapolis makes a change
Shortly after the general election in December, Leahy and Cuffie approved a motion to change the city’s election procedure to include mailing ballot applications to all registered voters, mirroring the procedure done in the November election.
At the time, all three members agreed they were “not willing at this juncture” to mail ballots directly to voters without an application. Myers said he was “unequivocally opposed” to mailing ballots directly and thought they should “keep in our back pockets” the option to use ballot applications. He voted no on the motion because he thought there was still time to decide, he said.
The vote followed months of discussion, including work sessions with City Council members, who had questions about costs and inclusivity but seemed receptive to the idea of a vote-by-mail election.
In July, they approved a resolution, R-3520, which authorized the board to administer the elections and “provide for the option of voting by mail” through a contract with the Anne Arundel County Board of Elections.
Throughout early 2021 the board continued to plan the elections with the Anne Arundel County Board of Elections. As the pandemic raged, the board began to consider whether they should change the election system again.
Holding a safe election became the board’s primary goal, Leahy said.
Around March, county board chair Joe Torre advised the board that the ballot application system they had approved may not be feasible because of the relatively short 42-day period between the primary and general elections.
Nationwide mail delivery issues plaguing the U.S. Postal Service also factored into their decision-making, Leahy said.
“We told them, if you are going to do vote by mail, you can’t do applications, you don’t have enough time,” Torre said in June.
Finally, at a May 20 meeting, Leahy and Cuffie approved a plan to mail ballots directly to voters.
Myers, who was late to the meeting because of a personal emergency, later said he was still opposed to the change and would have voted no.
Backlash
Outrage from some corners of the city soon followed the board’s decision.
In June, Steven Strawn, the Republican mayoral candidate who has led the city GOP since 2017, wrote a letter to the editor in The Capital calling the move “a radical change to the election process,” and later saying that it opened up the electoral process to fraud.
Similar claims were made by former President Donald Trump and his supporters after he was defeated by President Joe Biden in November in an election that greatly expanded mail voting. No fraud claims have been proven in court despite numerous legal challenges.
In Rockville, Kurnick said he couldn’t recall a single complaint of misconduct or fraud in 2019.
“People had questions about the security of the process. We assured them at all meetings, the process was secure and transparent and that no part is done in secret,” he said. “At every step, there are checks and double-checks to make sure that there was no fraud.”
Some have questioned why the public wasn’t given a chance to weigh in. For about eight months in 2019, Rockville oversaw an aggressive public outreach campaign to educate voters.
That wasn’t possible because of the pandemic, Leahy said, adding that they did what they could given the circumstances, including discussing the issue at public work sessions and reaching out to the city central committees of parties for feedback. All elections board meetings are public and voters are encouraged to submit testimony.
In retrospect, “we would have liked to do more” outreach, Leahy said.
The lawsuit
In late June, the elections board approved a plan to pay for postage for mailed ballots, a change from City Code that requires voters to foot the bill. Leahy said it was difficult to know how much exactly the postage would cost because it depends on how many are mailed out and returned.
Overall, $343,000 is budgeted for election costs in the 2022 fiscal year.
At the June 28 City Council meeting, Alderman Fred Paone, R-Ward 2, questioned why the council didn’t have more say in changes to the election system.
Paone had been approached by two Republicans, Herb McMillan, a county executive candidate, and George Gallagher, who’s running for Ward 6 City Council seat. They requested the alderman say something at the meeting because they opposed the board’s plans.
Paone and other council members convened a work session with Leahy and Torre in mid-July, asking for assurances that there wouldn’t be fraud in the election. Leahy and Torre told members that while there is “no guarantee” of 100% accurate ballots, the county uses an electronic logging system to catch people who try to vote twice.
Unlike Rockville, the city does not currently have the technology to do ballot signature verification. If a signature is missing, the ballot won’t be counted. Voters will be given the chance to sign their ballot, Torre said, a process called curing.
The county elections board has also made efforts to update its voter registration database with bi-monthly death notifications from the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and mailers sent directly to voters asking them to update their information.
On July 22, McMillan and Gallagher filed a lawsuit in Circuit Court, claiming the elections board had “gone rogue” and “exceeded its authority” in its plans to mail ballots and pay for their postage. Both actions violated City Code, according to the lawsuit, which named Leahy, the county elections board president Brenda Yarema and other city officials as defendants.
Later, the pair said they filed at that time because they viewed the July work session as the final opportunity for the City Council to take action to reverse the election board’s plans.
However, work sessions, which are typically reserved for discussion of relevant legislation or city issues, rarely if ever, feature legislative action. Neither Paone or any other council member introduced legislation related to the city election system at the time.
After a three-hour hearing in early August, Judge Glenn L. Klavans dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice writing in his opinion that McMillan and Gallagher had waited too long to file the suit.
In Maryland, there is a tight window for reporting alleged election violations, which must be filed within 10 days of a suspected violation. Because the Republican candidates had known about the election changes as late as June 25, but didn’t file a complaint for nearly a month, they had waited too long, Klavans wrote.
McMillan and Gallagher said they were disappointed that Klavans hadn’t addressed their legal arguments.
They appealed the case to the Maryland Court of Appeals in mid-August. A week later on Aug. 19, the appeals court denied their appeal, writing that it was not “desirable or in the public interest.”
‘I hope it goes well’
About two weeks after the appeals court ruling, the primary ballots — printed and stuffed into envelopes at a mail house in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania — will start reaching city voters at their homes.
Around 18,815 voters will receive a letter explaining that City Code only requires ballots to be cast in contested elections. If one of those voters goes to a polling place on primary election day, a poll worker will be there to explain the rules, Leahy said.
Though no ballots have yet been cast, Leahy said any increase in voter participation will be enough to deem the election a success.
Nataf, the political science professor, sees Annapolis as setting an example of voting by mail and other voter access efforts like drive-thru voting and drop boxes, being here to stay well after the pandemic subsides.
The pandemic “changed the framework of what it meant to facilitate voting,” he said. “Now the expectation is that you’re going to keep every method that you’ve created during the COVID period, and retain it.”
Meanwhile, two counties away in Rockville, Kurnick said he will be watching the Annapolis election closely.
“I hope it goes well,” he said. “So that other places will follow their example and our example.”