USA TODAY International Edition
1 million Americans could have votes tossed Nov. 3
Number of rejections could determine result
In a normal election year in any given state, hundreds or even thousands of absentee ballots get tossed for everything from late postmarks to open envelopes.
The 2020 presidential election will not be normal.
Absentee ballot rejections this November are projected to reach historic levels, risking widespread disenfranchisement of minority voters and the credibility of election results, a USA TODAY, Columbia Journalism Investigations and PBS “Frontline” investigation found.
At least 1.03 million absentee ballots could be tossed if half the nation votes by mail. Discarded votes jump to 1.55 million if 75% of the country votes absentee. In the latter scenario, more than 185,000 votes could be lost in Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – states key to capturing the White House.
These numbers are based on 2016 rejections, when fewer voters voted absentee. Record numbers will vote absentee for the first time in November, and people new to vote- by- mail are at greater risk of making mistakes. If errors push the rejection rate up just 2%, about 2.15 million votes would be cast aside – roughly the population of New Mexico.
Small percentages matter, said Michael Morley, an election law expert
and assistant professor at Florida State University’s College of Law. “Assume that everything goes perfectly 99.8% of the time,” Morley said. “Well, .02% of 70 million winds up being an awful lot of people.”
Asian Americans in California’s Santa Clara County, New York City voters in largely Black and Hispanic boroughs and Arizona voters in counties with the lowest household incomes were all more likely to have their absentee votes jettisoned in the past presidential election.
Any rejected ballot “is a travesty,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. “But there’s a secondary concern, which is the number of rejected ballots is large enough that it could affect the outcome of the election.”
Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania rejected about 60,000 votes in primaries this year, said Amherst College law professor Lawrence Douglas, a few thousand votes shy of Donald Trump’s margin of victory in those states in 2016. A similar result in November could trigger “a chaotic welter of lawsuits and clashing conspiracy theories,” Douglas said.
Discarded ballots don’t automatically give either party an edge. In certain states, the number of discarded ballots could match or top Trump’s margin of victory in 2016.
USA TODAY/ CJI projects 182,000 to 273,000 more votes could be tossed this year in counties won by Democrats during the 2016 presidential election than in counties won by the GOP.
The political groundwork has been laid to challenge vote- by- mail results. President Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose the election, citing his belief in widespread absentee ballot fraud.
Absentee ballot rejections are not a result of voter fraud, according to USA TODAY/ CJI, but the byproduct of 200 million eligible voters navigating an often confusing voting process.
Widespread rejection is not inevitable. Voters concerned over slow postal delivery may put their ballot in a dropbox or bring it to an election office, depending on state rules. New laws and court orders have led states to offer voters a chance to fix minor ballot errors. And elections officials want to help.
“It’s never a warm feeling to have to reject a ballot,” said Ingham County, Michigan, clerk Barb Byrum.
Absentee rejections are projected to flood battleground states. In Pennsylvania, Philadelphia County is projected to reject up to 14,682 absentee ballots this November. Last month, the state Supreme Court handed down a decision that could more than double that number, said Philadelphia City Commission chair Lisa Deeley. Voters put their ballot into a “privacy” envelope, then put that envelope into another envelope. If they use one envelope, their vote won’t be counted, said Deely, who asked state lawmakers to address the issue. “It’s just not fair to throw out a vote because of a technicality,” she said.
North Carolina expects no more than three in 10 will vote absentee, lowering rejected ballots to roughly 37,000 – below CJI projections but thousands higher than the 4,800 discarded ballots in the past presidential election. Should the rate grow, it could be “astronomical,” said Alissa Ellis, advocacy director of Democracy North Carolina.
If Wisconsin rejected votes at the same rate it did in 2016, 2,387 to 3,580 votes would be lost. But Wisconsin’s rate of rejection skyrocketed in its primary in April. More than 23,000 ballots went uncounted.
Georgia reported rejections plummeted to roughly 1% in the primary under rules making it easier for voters to address minor problems. Of 110,000 absentees cast for November, 40 have been rejected.
Louisiana, which adopted provisions to fix errors similar to Georgia’s, estimates about 20,000 of roughly 200,000 absentee ballots could be discarded, below the CJI projection of 32,000. “We hope your numbers are high,” said Tyler Brey, spokesman for the secretary of state. “We hope we can bring it down to zero.”
Greatest impact on minorities
For much of March, COVID- 19 confined the Rev. Greg Lewis to a hospital bed in Milwaukee. Lewis understands why Black voters like himself may head to the polls rather than vote absentee, despite the virus. “There’s mistrust of the system,” said Lewis, founder of getout- the- vote effort Souls to the Polls. “People don’t think their votes are going to get counted.”
USA TODAY/ CJI research found that in certain counties and states, voting absentee put communities of color at a disadvantage in 2016.
Combined, North Carolina counties with the largest percentage of Black residents rejected ballots at sharply higher rates than the rest of the state that year. In New York, an absentee ballot cast in heavily minority Bronx, Queens, Kings and New York counties was more than two times more likely to get rejected in 2016 compared with New York state as a whole. In Nevada counties with the largest percentage of Hispanic residents, an absentee vote was 2.2 times more likely to be rejected in 2016 than in counties that were less than 20% Hispanic. New Jersey, Louisiana, Georgia and Nevada all had higher rejection rates in majority- minority counties.
Living in wealthier counties could mean the difference between getting an absentee vote counted or discarded in certain states. As a group, voters in Pennsylvania counties where family income topped $ 50,000 were twice as likely to get their absentee ballot counted in 2016. In Wisconsin, voters in counties where household incomes topped $ 45,000 had double the chance of having ballots accepted. Nationally, counties where the poverty rate was less than 1% had a rejection rate of less than 1% in the past presidential election. The percentage of discarded absentee ballots tripled in counties where more than three of every 10 residents lived in poverty.
“It’s kind of a luxury to be able to put something in the mail. Some people may say, ‘ Oh, well, what do you mean, don’t you just put it in your mailbox and stick the red flag up?’ That’s assuming I have a mailbox,” said the Rev. Charles Williams, Midwestern regional director of the civil rights organization National Action Network.
A mismatched signature is not the most frequent reason for ballot rejection, but “it is rife with uncertainty and one where all sides are lawyering up,” said Gregory Miller, co- founder of the OSET Institute, whose TrustTheVote Project began focusing on absentee voting in January.
Comparing a voter’s signature on a ballot with the signature on official documents, such as voter registration, is one way to guard against fraud. It typically requires a ballot- by- ballot examination and a judgment call by election officials.
Stress, the type of pen used and age can all affect a signature.
William Gilligan, 83, has had two strokes. He’s a plaintiff in a Pennsylvania lawsuit challenging signature verification that says he “does not believe he could reliably sign his name the same way each time he does so.”
Minority voters have been hard hit by signature questions. In Florida, seven of every 10 absentee votes tossed for mismatched signatures in the past presidential contest were in heavily Hispanic counties. In 2017, a study of four California counties found that Asian Americans’ absentee votes were disproportionately discarded because of mismatched signatures. In a lawsuit in August, the Navajo Nation cited high rates of rejected votes based on signature mismatches.
Voters must know state’s rules
Colby, Wisconsin, Town Clerk Theoline Ludwig offers one- on- one voter assistance to roughly 340 voters. “Anybody who’s got an issue calls my home number, and if they really got an issue, they come to my house,” she said.
Absentee voting can often mean navigating a patchwork of requirements.
“There are all those little rules,” said Jan Combopiano, a member of the Executive Committee of the Brooklyn Voters Alliance: whether a witness is needed, whether the color of ink or the envelope is official. “We call it voter suppression by process.”
During the Milwaukee primary, people who most needed to isolate – the elderly and ill – were required to bring someone into their home to verify their ballot, said Neil Albrecht, outgoing executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission. “People would call us in tears because they were so concerned about having someone come into their house and sign their absentee ballot as a witness,” Albrecht told “Frontline.” They sent in ballots with no witness verification, many of which were not counted, he said.
Even elections officials scramble to keep up with absentee ballot rules, given lawsuits over everything from the number of dropboxes to ballot design. In a single day, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court extended mail deadlines, authorized dropboxes and ruled election boards did not have to tell voters their ballots had fixable problems.
“There are a lot of T’s to cross and I’s to dot,” said Anne Houghtaling, deputy director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s Thurgood Marshall Institute. “But if you believe in the fundamental promise of our democracy, of one man, one vote, then we need to do everything to ensure that people entitled to that vote, get it.”