Fix troubling mail-in ballot rejection rate
If you’re planning to vote by mail, don’t forget a very important detail.
Sign the outer envelope.
Forget to do that and your vote might be forgotten, too.
Lots of voters have made that error. In Florida during the 2016 election, the rejection rate for mail-in ballots was 10 times higher than ballots cast at an early-voting location or on Election Day at local precincts.
Almost 28,000 of the 2.7 million mail-in ballots were nullified — mostly because they lacked a signature, or the signature didn’t match the voter’s handwriting on file.
That’s appalling. Especially in arguably the nation’s most crucial election swing state. Every effort should be made to ensure that every vote counts.
But mail-in ballots from black and Hispanic voters were more than 2½ times as likely to be rejected than ballots cast by white voters. Rejection rates differed by age, as well. Although people under age 30 made up only
9.2 percent of all voteby-mail voters, they accounted for 30.8 percent of all the rejected votes.
These jarring facts emerged from a study by Daniel A. Smith, chairman of the University of Florida’s political science department, on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Among the professor’s troubling findings: the rate of rejected absentee ballots varied greatly from county to county. Two counties (Glades and Bay) rejected no mail-in ballots in 2016; Orange County rejected almost 4 percent.
Palm Beach County election officials in 2016 tossed out 1 percent of mail-in ballots, a slightly smaller percentage than in 2012.
Smith was unable to say exactly what’s behind the discrepancies, but ACLU of Florida Executive Director Howard Simon hit the nail on the head by saying, “We need more uniform standards.”
“Whether your vote counts or not should not depend on your ZIP code,” Simon told reporters. “It should not depend on the county that you live in.”
The irony is that political campaigns do all they can to encourage mail-in voting, especially when contacting those categorized as likely voters for their side. The parties pitch mail-in balloting as the surest way to lock in early votes for their candidates and a convenient alternative to long lines at the polls.
And more and more Floridians are taking the option. Two years ago, 29 percent of Florida ballots cast in the presidential election were cast by mail, and the rate is expected to be higher this year.
Yet these statistics indicate that, far from being a lock, voting by mail is the least-assured way to cast a ballot.
This isn’t a newly discovered problem. In 2016, responding to a lawsuit filed by the Democratic Party, U.S. District Judge Mark Walker issued an order requiring the state to direct counties to give mail-in voters a chance to fix missing or ill-matched signatures. He called the state’s existing system for validating mail-in ballots “a crazy quilt of conflicting and diverging procedures,” marked by a “complete lack of uniformity.”
Since then, the Legislature approved changes allowing a voter whose signature on a mail-in ballot is a mismatch for the one on file to fill out an affidavit to “cure” the error.
But more needs to be done. As the ACLU points out, it’s still up to local officials to decide how to contact voters whose signatures have been rejected. Smith’s study recommends, among other things, greater statewide uniformity in the design of mail ballots and the return envelope; and in the procedures used to process, validate and cure mailed-in ballots.
Nor is this the only problem with mail-in or absentee, ballots that lawmakers ought to remedy. As The Post Editorial Board has said, gaping holes in state law have made it possible for candidates go doorto-door, allegedly stepping into people’s homes and helping them fill out their mail-in ballot request forms or ballots. The tactic helped them generate tremendous turnout in votes by mail.
But the priority before us now is November’s midterms. If you’re voting by mail, track your mail-in ballot on the Supervisor of Elections website. If you see that the ballot has been rejected, demand to know why. You have until 5 p.m. the day before Election Day to file an affidavit to correct the problem and, if need be, update your signature on file.
And do not, repeat do not, forget: Before you send that ballot anywhere, sign that outer envelope.
Far from being a lock, voting by mail is the leastassured way to cast a ballot, a new study shows