USA TODAY International Edition
Fewer mail ballots rejected than predicted
Trump calls the drop in tossed votes suspicious
In Philadelphia, the feared avalanche of naked ballots arrived welldressed.
Election officials in October worried that up to 40,000 ballots would be rejected in the general election because they had not been put into a secrecy envelope before being mailed in a second envelope. So- called naked ballots are a common mistake that can invalidate votes.
But in Philadelphia County’s 2020 general election, the wave of rejections did not happen. High- profile lawsuits, saturation news coverage and a social media campaign featuring nearly nude
messages from actors Sarah Silverman and Sacha Baron Cohen – in his role as Borat – brought naked ballot rejections in Philadelphia County down to a paltry 3,061 as of late November.
Philadelphia’s final mail ballot rejection numbers are still being sorted out, along with other counties and states. It could be spring before the full number of rejected ballots is known.
However, early numbers in certain counties across the country show that local election officials, lawmakers and advocacy groups appear to have slammed the brakes on what could have been a national disaster: Instead of rising, the number of rejected mail ballots unexpectedly plummeted in several regions, including large counties key to statewide wins, such as Miami- Dade in Florida and Maricopa in Arizona.
If just 2% of mail ballots had been rejected in the Nov. 3 contest, roughly 1.3 million would have been discarded, a USA TODAY, Columbia Journalism Investigations and PBS series FRONTLINE investigation published in October found.
Instead, new mail ballot rules, extensive publicity over how to vote correctly
by mail and broadened opportunities to fix minor errors on a ballot before it was discarded worked to limit wide- scale rejections.
Not everyone sees the reduction of tossed ballots as a positive. President Donald Trump, as part of a sustained campaign to contest his 2020 election loss, has called the drop in rejections suspicious. “The rate of rejected Mail- In Ballots is 30X’s lower in Pennsylvania this year than it was in 2016,” Trump tweeted in November, suggesting the smaller number of rejected ballots was tied to fraud.
In fact, had Philadelphia’s naked- ballot campaign not worked, the number of Pennsylvania’s rejected ballots could have been 30 times higher than in 2016, a CJI analysis found.
Rejection numbers are expected to rise in Pennsylvania and in other states over the next few months as recounts and lawsuits wind down and give local election workers time to count ballots that arrived too late to be accepted.
Even so, there’s room for optimism, said Celina Stewart, chief counsel and senior director of advocacy and litigation at the League of Women Voters, which filed suits in multiple states over mail ballot rules. “I am thrilled that the rejection rates we have seen so far are fairly low,” Stewart said. “It could have gone another way, you know, and it has in the past.”
Trump isn’t alone in complaining about the reduction in rejected votes. Facing tight Georgia runoffs, Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue are suing in federal court, arguing that more mail ballots should have been scrapped in November. In several states, lawmakers are already pledging to restrict future mail voting.
An ice storm on top of it all
By the time an ice storm threatened Canadian County, Oklahoma, Election Board Secretary Wanda Arnold and her tiny staff of five had already been juggling 10,000 voter registration applications and 500 phone calls a day.
Then came the storm and a new set of worries.
“I was concerned about trees being down in the road, not having electricity, the state election board, electrical companies, little old ladies sitting in polling places with no lights and no heat with blankets wrapped around them,” Arnold said.
The late October storm didn’t derail Election Day. And Arnold wound up the vote count with a pleasant surprise: Despite more than double the number of mail ballots than in the 2016 presidential race, the rejection rate dipped.
There was every reason to believe the number of rejected mail votes in Canadian County and throughout the country would skyrocket. Even small errors such as signing on the wrong line can cost a voter their vote, and millions were voting by mail for the first time.
Spring and summer primary results
reinforced concerns. New York City’s rejection rate approached two out of every 10 ballots. In Florida, the primary rejection rate shot up 63% from 2016, hitting younger voters, Black voters, first- time voters and Hispanic voters hardest, a state report found.
That trend abruptly reversed in November. Massachusetts slashed its rejection rate for such technicalities as missing signatures by 74% compared with the last presidential election. Delaware’s rejections tumbled by 85%.
In Miami- Dade, Florida, rejections fell by 78% from 2016, and in Tulsa County, Oklahoma, they slid by 71%. In North Carolina, half a dozen largely minority counties that in 2016 posted unusually high rejection rates reported 2020 rejections were down sharply even as the number of mail ballots grew. Mail slowdowns in parts of Michigan didn’t affect the Detroit region, where the percentage of ballots discarded for being late dropped.
Why the numbers dropped
Having someone trot up on horseback to vote their mail ballot at a drivethru was not what Jim Condos had in mind when Vermont launched a blitz of mail ballot reforms. The secretary of state was pleased all the same. “We’ve always had a low rate, but this was really, really low,” Condos said of November’s rejections – an estimated one- half of 1%.
Drive- thru drop- off sites, voter drop boxes, prepaid postage and instruction sheets sent with each mail ballot combined to reduce the number of uncounted ballots there.
Maryland’s Board of Elections also allowed drop boxes, cutting the chances of rejections for late delivery. North Carolina’s Board of Elections redesigned
envelopes and instructions to avoid confusing blocks of hard- to- read type.
In court settlements, Virginia, Minnesota and Rhode Island agreed to waive requirements for a witness to the voter’s signature, three of 25 states where advocacy groups sued over mail ballot rules in a 90- day blitz starting in June. Roughly one of every three suits sought to create or expand a “cure” period, a time when voters are allowed to fix minor errors before their ballot is rejected.
The ability to cure small errors helps explain why widespread litigation over mismatched signatures did not immediately materialize. Comparing a voter’s signature on a ballot to their signature on official documents, such as voter registration, is one way to guard against election fraud.
However, matches are frequently based on a best guess by election workers and have regularly disenfranchised minorities.
This month, though, Georgia senators Loeffler and Perdue, along with state and federal Republican groups, are arguing in federal court that not enough ballots were thrown out this November for signature mismatches. The suit states that only 0.05% were discarded.
In fact, rejections for mismatched signatures were roughly double that number, according to preliminary Georgia voter data analyzed by Columbia Journalism Investigations. The pattern of smaller numbers and sharp decreases was repeated elsewhere.
One success is not a answer
The 2020 success is not the same as a solution to problems both new and old.
For one thing, election underfunding is chronic, said Allison Riggs, chief voting rights counsel for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. A House bill setting aside $ 3.6 billion for elections died in the Senate over the summer, just as election officials were gearing up to handle a tsunami of mail voting and burning through budgets to run an election in the middle of a pandemic.
As federal money dried up, a Chicago nonprofit group donated millions to local election offices. Running elections by donations, said Stanford Law School professor Nate Persily, was like “a bake sale for our democracy.”
Cash- strapped local election officials have even been hailed as heroes for pulling off a safe and largely smooth election. The Department of Homeland Security reported last month that it was “the most secure in American history.”
Already, though, efforts to roll back the measures that made mail voting successful this year are gathering steam.
Republican Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who recently said he would support a 2024 Trump presidential bid, is pushing for legislation that would create a national, unified standard for counting ballots, citing the need to protect against fraud and rebuild trust in elections.
Further, roughly two dozen states temporarily eased mail voting rules as a result of the pandemic, and those new policies may expire in 2021, according to data gathered by the National Conference of State Legislatures.
This year, more than 65 million people voted by mail in the November election, one reason why the hours- long polling place lines that marred spring primaries in Wisconsin and Georgia weren’t widely repeated in the general election.
However, the Michigan House Oversight Committee took testimony this month from Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and others advancing fraud accusations. The hearing’s array of claims was turned into a “Saturday Night Live” skit. But widespread fraud allegations, proven or not, typically pave the way for new restrictive voting laws, said Riggs, the Southern Coalition lawyer.