Activists: Honor ballots sent with wrong deadline
Some Spanish instructions give voters incorrect date
Voters, civil rights groups and elected officials gathered on a slightly chilly Thursday morning in the shadow of the Berks County Courthouse to call on the county government to honor the incorrect deadline it included on mail-in ballot materials sent to county voters.
The news conference, organized by Make the Road Pennsylvania and held in Spanish and English, focused on how Berks County election officials recently sent incorrect information about the mail-in ballot deadline to 17,000 Berks County voters. The event was attended by 15 people, including state Rep. Manny Guzman, D-Reading, and Danilo Burgos, D-Philadelphia.
The mail-in ballots, sent this month, included English instructions on one side. The Spanish instructions on the other side listed the deadline to return ballots to the county as “el 18 de Noviembre,” or Nov. 18. However, Election Day is Nov. 2, and the board of elections must receive mail-in ballots by 8 p.m. The date is correct in the English instructions.
Though the office of election services pledged to send new materials with the correct information, activists argue the damage has already been done and some may not get the corrected materials before Tuesday’s election. They’re calling on the Berks County Office of Election Services to extend the deadline for returning mail-in ballots to Nov. 18 so the deadline is in line with the error.
Neither the Berks County Office of Election Services nor the Pennsylvania Department of State has the power or authority to extend the deadline;
only the courts could order such an extension, according to the Department of State. The Department of State has tried to supplement the county’s efforts to inform people of the Nov. 2 deadline through targeted social media efforts and direct voter outreach.
Activists and elected officials also called on the elections office to disclose how the error was allowed to occur and ensure something like it never happens again.
At a Berks County commissioners meeting last week, Chair Christian Leinbach took responsibility for the error, explaining the instructions were based on a template from the May 18 primary. He said the month was changed for the general election, but the date wasn’t, according to the Reading Eagle.
“Let’s be clear here, this voter misinformation was a failure from Berks County. And the harm has already been done — 17,000 voters received false information about the election from their own government,” said Patty Torres, organizing director for Make the Road Pennsylvania, the state’s largest advocacy group for Latino communities.
Reading is 69% Hispanic, and while it is unclear how many Spanish speakers in the county received the mail-in ballot materials with the incorrect information, Torres and Guzman said any impact the false information caused needs to be taken seriously.
“It doesn’t matter how many folks were sent the incorrect information,” Guzman said, pointing out that races could be decided by just a handful of votes. “Even if one person was disenfranchised because they received the incorrect information — that’s one person too many.”
Yubelkis Tavarez, one of the people who received the incorrect instructions, said the mistake was unacceptable and the person in charge of the translation needs to be more careful. Tavarez said she was aware the information was incorrect at the time she received it, but it’s possible others have been misled and they deserve for their votes to count in the upcoming election.
“We cannot allow our vote to be suppressed and we all have the right to exercise it,” Tavarez said. “We need the people responsible for this that lead the department of elections for Berks County to change. Latinos are 69% of the residents of Reading, and we have the right to elect our municipal representatives like any other citizens.”
Those in attendance also called attention to the fact that this isn’t the first time the Berks County elections office has caused problems for Hispanic voters. In 2003, the federal government sued Berks County over discriminatory and hostile treatment toward Hispanics, Latinos and Spanish-speakers at polling locations, which the government contended violated the Voting Rights Act.
The lawsuit, United States v. Berks County, Pa., resulted in judges with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ordering a federal examiner be appointed to observe election procedures and a mediating party be appointed to govern the process of making the voting process in Berks County more accessible to Spanish-speakers. The court also ordered going forward the county had to print all election-related materials in English and Spanish.
Guzman said Hispanic and Latino people still face unreasonable hardships and disenfranchisement while trying to exercise their right to vote. He pointed to the 2020 election, when some polling locations in Reading had lines where people waited for three to five hours to vote.
“This is a long documented history of voter suppression, whether it is intentional or not,” Guzman said. “Disenfranchisement does not have to be intentional for it to be called disenfranchisement and after a certain point, after certain mistakes, after certain oversights that happen, one can only wonder ‘Is this intentional? Or is it not?’ “
On Election Day 2020, the judge of elections at the Christ Lutheran Church polling location in Reading blamed long lines on “Spanish people and all their names” instead of the fact that no election officials spoke Spanish, according to The Nation. Torres added Berks County has historically not provided enough English-Spanish interpreters at polling locations, which Make the Road Pennsylvania called out the county for on Election Day 2020.