More than three weeks after the New York primaries, election officials have not yet counted an untold number of mail-in absentee ballots, leaving numerous closely watched races unresolved, including two key Democratic congressional contests.
The absentee ballot count — greatly inflated this year after the state expanded the vote-by-mail option because of the coronavirus pandemic — has been painstakingly slow, and hard to track, with no running account of the vote totals available.
In some cases, the tiny number of ballots counted has bordered on the absurd: In the 12th Congressional District, where Representative Carolyn B. Maloney is fighting for her political life against her challenger, Suraj Patel, only 800 of some 65,000 absentee ballots had been tabulated as of Wednesday, according to Mr. Patel, though thousands had been disqualified.
Another young insurgent candidate, Ritchie Torres, held a commanding lead in his Democratic House primary race after a count of machine-cast ballots on Primary Night. Mr. Torres, a New York City councilman, was leading a pack of contenders in the 15th Congressional District in the Bronx.
On Friday, one race was finally called, as Jamaal Bowman, a middle-school teacher from Yonkers who had the support of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, was declared the winner in the 16th Congressional District, which straddles the city’s northern border. He defeated Representative Eliot L. Engel, a longtime congressman with ample establishment backing.
The delays in New York’s primaries raise huge concerns about how the state will handle the general election in November, and may offer a cautionary note for other states as they weigh whether to embrace, and how to implement, a vote-by-mail system because of the pandemic.
The primary reason for the delays is the sheer number of absentee ballots: In New York City, 403,203 ballots were mailed for the June primary; as a comparison, just 76,258 absentee and military ballots were counted in New York City in the 2008 general election, when Barack Obama was elected president.
But other factors also have played a part.
Election officials said they were left scrambling when Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo decided in late April to send absentee ballot applications to every registered voter; a May court decision that reinstituted a June presidential primary also complicated matters.
Officials said they were also hamstrung by outdated technology, including using toner-and-tray copiers, instead of computerized scanners, to handle requests from candidates for copies of absentee ballots; those copies are often used in legal challenges to try to restore disqualified ballots or challenge the legitimacy of others.
“The board has received an unprecedented volume of absentee ballots, and also an unprecedented number of requests for copies of those absentee ballots from various campaigns,” said Michael Ryan, the executive director of the New York City Board of Elections.
“While I appreciate the public’s desire to know the results, at the end of the process we must insure the integrity of the elections and the accuracy of the results,” he said.
For the June primary, the elections board did not hire additional staff, even as hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots were mailed out to voters.
“The staff that we have is the staff that we have,” Mr. Ryan said, who added that “you want people who are familiar with the process. This is ultimately too important a task to leave to untrained people.”
The process for counting absentee ballots is labor- and time-intensive: Before absentee ballots can begin to be counted, election officials have to sift through mounds of ballots to determine which are valid and which are not. The process is closed to the public, though campaigns are allowed to challenge these decisions.
Once the ballots are determined to be valid, Board of Elections staffers — one Democrat, one Republican — begin the actual counting, sitting side-by-side. Even here, there’s evidence of the impact of the coronavirus era: The tables are spaced out, and outfitted with clear partitions to protect the workers from the virus.
The workers open each ballot’s envelope and go through each ballot to determine whether, for example, a ballot has an extraneous marking that could disqualify it. They also hold up each ballot to the candidates or their representatives — known as watchers — who are intently monitoring the process from six feet away.
The ballots are then run through a machine that tallies the votes for each candidate.
Mr. Ryan said his workers are “working around the clock,” and have been doing so “throughout the Covid-19 emergency.”
Candidates and their campaigns have nonetheless been deeply frustrated by the slow pace, and increasingly concerned about what it portends for the general election in the fall.
“This is just a primary: Imagine November with the presidential race and all the Senate and House races,” said Rebecca Katz, a progressive political consultant who serves as an adviser to Mr. Bowman’s campaign. “What’s going to happen to our country?”
John Conklin, a spokesman for the New York State Board of Elections, said that the “astronomically high number of absentee ballots” overwhelmed a system built to handle far, far fewer.
“The system is built to process 3 to 5 percent of the election in absentee ballots, not 40 to 60 percent of the election,” Mr. Conklin said, adding its “not possible to change this process overnight.”
Moreover, Mr. Conklin said that the delays could be repeated in November, if “local boards are not given additional resources,” for hiring and overtime pay.
“You will see a similar extended counting period, if we see an equally high number of absentee ballots,” he said.
Voting-rights groups have also been alarmed by reports of thousands of disqualified ballots, raising the specter of widespread voter disenfranchisement.
Preliminary data obtained by The New York Times shows that about 20 percent of ballots have been invalidated in the Manhattan and Queens portions of the 12th District, for instance, and almost 30 percent in the Brooklyn portion of the district. Mr. Patel said he believed some ballots had been invalidated because voters dropped them off on June 23, the deadline to postmark ballots, but they weren’t postmarked until the following day by the Postal Service.
Data compiled by New Reformers, a Queens political organization, shows that election officials have invalidated at least 22,000 out of about 89,000 absentee ballots received in the borough, or about 25 percent, sometimes for minor issues like an envelope’s being sealed with tape or missing signatures on ballot envelopes.
“The state was not ready for this,” said Sochie Nnaemeka, the New York director of the Working Families Party, a progressive group which backed several challengers to Democratic incumbents. “There is rightfully fear that voter choice and voter participation will be eroded through this process.”
The balky pace of the 2020 primary count has given new urgency to supporters of a batch of voting-related bills being considered in Albany, including a bill that would allow any ballot received within seven days of Election Day to be considered valid, regardless of whether or not it had a postmark.
Another bill would allow election officials to contact voters whose ballot envelopes were incorrectly sealed — with tape, for instance, rather than saliva — and would allow those voters to make written testimony that they had, in fact, cast the ballot, thus allowing it to be counted.
Other states, such as Colorado, allow election officials to contact voters to “cure” small problems with ballots, such as signature inconsistencies, before their ballots are declared invalid.
“It gives a voter an opportunity to know their ballot is not going to be counted,” said Crisanta Duran, a Democrat and former speaker of the Colorado House of Representatives, who added that she felt encouraged that New York was at least trying to improve voter participation.
“Look, I think it’s wonderful that this meaningful step was taken, though it was unfortunately due to Covid,” she said. “But there are going to be growing pains.”
New York, which passed a series of voting changes in 2019 after a wave of progressive Democrats were swept into power in Albany, has long lagged behind many other states in electoral innovations.
More than two dozen states allow some form of vote-by-mail elections, and five states — including early adopters like Oregon and Washington — conduct all their elections by mail, something that officials say has increased both turnout and voter awareness. Other states have also indicated that they will act to address the election issues presented by the coronavirus in November: California, the nation’s most populous state, will send a general election ballot to every voter in accordance with an executive order issued in early May by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
But it is unclear whether New York will follow suit and allow all voters to vote absentee in November — especially after the snafus in the primary. On Thursday, Mr. Cuomo did not answer that question directly, but conceded that there were “additional complications” for local boards of elections “dealing with a greater administrative burden.”
“Did it slow the results? Yes,” the governor said, adding, “Life is alternatives and I don’t know that we had a better alternative. And I don’t know that we’re going to have a better alternative in November.”
At least one candidate on the November ballot said that he hoped things would be better.
“I am very worried,” said Mondaire Jones, the Democratic primary winner in the 17th Congressional District, north of the city, where the race was called on Tuesday, three weeks after Election Day.
“The volume of absentee ballots is going be exponentially larger,” he continued. “It means our boards of elections have to hire adequate number of staff. It means you have to have space and facilities for lawyers and volunteers to observe and make challenges. It means you can’t have boards of elections that send out the wrong polling address.”
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3 Weeks After Primary, N.Y. Officials Still Can’t Say Who Won Key Races - The New York Times
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