Some worried over voting by mail

Ann Mintz and Clifford Wagner have been struggling with indecision about the election for weeks. Their angst isn’t over whom to vote for — the Philadelphia couple are Democrats who support Joe Biden. It’s about how, precisely, they should cast their ballots.

They voted by mail without hesitation in the state’s June primary. But now there are new stresses. Will a slowdown at the U.S. Postal Service make ballots arrive too late? Will technical mishaps filling out ballots lead to the vote not getting counted? Or, in one even more complicated but possible scenario, would their mail votes be tallied later than inperson ballots, and will the inperson ballots be largely Republican, and will that allow Trump to prematurely declare victory on election night?

“The stakes are so high. We’re putting a lot of thought into it,” the 65-year-old Wagner said.

Many voters who decided early in the coronavirus pandemic to cast their votes by mail have been rethinking their options as Election Day approaches. Nervousness about whether and when their ballots will be counted is leading some voters to increasingly strategize and analyze a decision that was once a nobrainer. All the worry is spreading rapidly to election officials, who warn it might contribute to more chaos at the polls on Election Day.

If voters who requested absentee ballots change their minds and try to vote on Election Day, they may run afoul of a thicket of rules that vary from state to state. In many states, switching from absentee to inperson requires a series of steps to cancel the absentee ballot. Voters may be asked to cast provisional ballots that take longer to process. All these last-minute changes take more resources and more time and introduce the possibility for errors.