On Tuesday, I filled out my second ballot in the 2020 presidential election, and in the coming days, up to 100,000 New Yorkers will be joining me.
No, this is not a large-scale incident of voter fraud. It was the result of a vendor error which saw ballots sent to the wrong people last week. The issue panicked New Yorkers worried about whether their vote would count, and provided ammunition for Donald Trump’s fight against mail-in voting.
“Big Fraud, Unfixable!” the president said.
But the unfixable incident has apparently been fixed, providing a lesson on the role of human error in elections and how that can be addressed. And this year, with an unprecedented number of Americans voting by mail, and Congress leaving the election severely underfunded, differentiating between election hiccups and chaos is crucial.
Perry Grossman, voting rights project attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), put it bluntly. “Vendor errors happen,” Grossman said. “We’re 30, 40 days out from the election now. There’s time to get this fixed. My preference would be: everybody should fucking relax.”
Grossman said he could spend hours explaining how to improve elections in New York, but the issue at hand was identified and resolved promptly, thanks to a set of existing quality controls.
Roughly 24 hours after the issue was made public, the city announced it would be sending out new ballot packages that would supersede the original ballots if both were sent in. In New York, absentee voters can also vote in person as late as election day. The in-person vote will be the only one that is counted even if they have already mailed in a ballot.
“If you have to or just want to vote by mail, don’t worry, you’re going to get a new ballot package, feel confident that if you fill it out, return it early, you’re going to be A-OK,” Grossman said.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
