State elections officials acknowledged Tuesday that some of the issues associated with this year’s primary elections in June — like the surge in absentee ballots and delay in mail delivery — were either out of their control or weren’t compatible with the state’s current election system.
Those officials were among several that testified before state lawmakers during a digital hearing Tuesday on how the COVID-19 pandemic affected this year’s primary elections.
Hundreds of thousands of New York voters chose to vote by absentee in June, due to the pandemic, leading to long delays in election results and some ballots being thrown out.
Some voters, who applied to vote by absentee, also didn’t receive their ballots in time to return them on election day, which is when they had to either be delivered to a polling site or postmarked for delivery.
Peter Kosinski, one of the state’s elections commissioners, said the problems encountered in June were the result of the nature of the state’s current election system. New York’s elections procedures aren’t designed for a massive surge of mail-in ballots, he said.
“Our elections infrastructure in this state was built to have voters vote on voting machines,” Kosinski said.
In New York City, alone, 12 times as many voters requested to vote by absentee compared to past elections, according to Michael Ryan, executive director of the city Board of Elections. More than 400,000 ballots were received in New York City in total.
But, even if the state’s election system was set up to handle an influx of mail-in ballots, some factors are still out of the control of the state and local boards of elections, Kosinski said.
Chief among them is the operations of the U.S. Postal Service, which is responsible for both delivering a voter’s application for an absentee ballot, and then returning that ballot when the voter sends it back.
In some instances, ballots weren’t postmarked in New York during the June primary, which caused election officials to initially declare them invalid. A federal judge overruled that decision in early August.
Todd Valentine, a co-executive director of the state Board of Elections said they’ve followed up with the Postal Service to avoid a repeat situation in November, but that they haven’t heard back, definitively, on a plan.
The Postal Service was invited to testify on Tuesday, but declined the invitation, according to Senate Elections Chair Zellnor Myrie, D-Brooklyn.
“We have sent a follow up letter to the Postal Service so they can identify what they were doing to address this situation,” Valentine said. “We are trying to follow up with them.”
Robert Brehm, another co-executive director of the state Board of Elections, also testified that parts of the current election law make large swaths of absentee voting more challenging, largely due to a lack of resources for local boards of elections.
State election law currently allows voters to apply for an absentee ballot until the seventh day before an election. With a huge surge in those applications — and thousands coming in the last two weeks before this year’s primary — that was hard to turnaround in time.
“That to itself leads to the perception that voters have that if I mail it seven days before the election that I will get a ballot in time and that it will be counted,” Brehm said. “It doesn’t work.”
An idea was floated by a handful of lawmakers at the hearing Tuesday to establish a series of drop-boxes for ballots before election day. That way, absentee voters wouldn’t have to visit polling places but also wouldn’t be held to the limits of the Postal Service.
Douglas Kellner, another commissioner of the state Board of Elections, said the state already has an option for voters to drop off their absentee ballots. Those voters can deliver them to early polling places, or polling sites on election day.
“In effect, we already have a drop box program in that voters can deliver their absentee ballots to any early voting site, or any election day poll site as an alternative to using the mail,” Kellner said. “That’s another message that I would encourage us to emphasize to the media.”
