N.J. shifts to mostly mail voting
Postal Service warns Ohio, 45 other states that ballots might arrive too late
New Jersey voters will for the first time cast their ballots for president predominantly by mail in November.
Gov. Philip Murphy, a Democrat, announced Friday that the general election will be conducted using mostly mail-in ballots to ensure voters’ and poll workers’ safety during the pandemic.
The governor, citing the success of the state’s predominantly vote-by-mail primary election last month, said all 6.3 million New Jersey voters will be sent ballots to return either by mail or by depositing them in secure drop boxes.
‘‘It doesn’t matter what party you’re in — everybody gets a ballot,’’ Murphy said Friday morning on CNN.
In other developments:
• The Postal Service has warned Ohio, 45 other states and the District of Columbia that it cannot guarantee that all ballots cast by mail for the November election will arrive in time to be counted, The Washington Post reported Friday.
Officials in Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Utah and Virginia, as well as Ohio, confirmed to The Associated Press that they had received the Postal Service correspondence.
Pennsylvania’s warning came in a July 29 letter from Thomas J. Marshall, general counsel and executive vice president for the Postal Service, to Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, whose department oversees elections. That letter was made public for the first time late Thursday in a filing that the Pennsylvania Department of State submitted to the state Supreme Court in which it asked the court to order that mail ballots be counted as long as they are received up to three days after the Nov. 3 election.
• A federal judge appointed by Trump gave the president's campaign one day to turn over evidence to support its claims of widespread mail-in voting fraud or admit that it doesn't exist.
The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee sued Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar and local election boards on June 29 over their plan for mail-in balloting for the Nov. 3 elections. Trump’s team alleged that the plan “provides fraudsters an easy opportunity to engage in ballot harvesting, manipulate or destroy ballots, manufacture duplicitous votes, and sow chaos.”
U.S. District Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan in Pittsburgh asked the campaign on Thursday to put forward previous examples of such fraud.
• Trump has requested a mail-in ballot for Florida’s primary election, to be held Tuesday. Ballots were mailed Wednesday to both the president and first lady Melania Trump at the Mar-alago resort, which Trump lists as his legal address, according to online Palm Beach County elections records. Both voted by mail in the presidential preference primary in March, according to records.
• Facebook’s new ‘‘voter information hub’’ will provide prompts to users in states that allow mail-in ballots with reminders, and offer links about registration deadlines, ballot request deadlines and how to submit a ballot.
In New Jersey, the governor said the state will build on the lessons learned during the July 7 primary, the first broad test of voting by mail in the state. For example, the state will expand the number of secure locations for in-person delivery of ballots and add polling places where voters can complete provisional ballots on Election Day.
‘‘We’re going to have more presence of secure drop boxes,’’ Murphy said. ‘‘Make sure there is that physical invoting capacity.’’
New Jersey joins a growing number of states that have shifted to mail-in ballots to minimize the risks posed by the coronavirus. Voters in at least eight other states and Washington, D.C. — an estimated 38 million people — also are being mailed ballots to cast votes in November.
Trump has assailed the Postal Service in recent months, growing increasingly critical of mail-in voting and issuing repeated warnings about the possibility of election fraud.
On Thursday, he repeated an unfounded claim that the election could be rife with fraud if mail ballots were widely used. And he made clear that he opposed Democratic demands for additional funding for the post office to ensure it had the capacity to efficiently process an increased volume of mail.
The comments came amid growing scrutiny of the postmaster general, Louis Dejoy, a Republican donor. The issue has also become grist in fundraising appeals to Democrats.
In Iowa, which Trump won handily in 2016 but is more competitive this year, his campaign joined a lawsuit Wednesday against two Democraticleaning counties in an effort to invalidate tens of thousands of voters’ absentee-ballot applications. That followed legal maneuvers in Pennsylvania, where the campaign hopes to force changes to how the state collects and counts mail-in ballots. And in Nevada, Trump is challenging a law sending ballots to all active voters.
His efforts could face limits. The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday rebuffed Republicans who challenged an agreement in Rhode Island allowing residents to vote by mail through November’s general election without getting signatures from two witnesses or a notary.