Nearly 100,000 New York City voters received defective absentee ballots, election officials acknowledged on Tuesday, a far-reaching error that raised doubts about the city’s ability to handle a pandemic-era presidential election with millions of mail-in ballots expected.
The problems were mostly confined to Brooklyn, where voters expressed outrage and confusion after seeing that their ballots had mismatched names and addresses on the outer and the return envelopes.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, who does not control the board, called its most recent failure “appalling.”
“I don’t know how many times we’re going to see the same thing happen at the Board of Elections and be surprised,” he said.
The faulty ballots come as President Donald Trump has made repeated baseless challenges to the accuracy and integrity of mail-in voting; on Monday evening, Trump had shared at least four news articles about the New York issues on Twitter.
The problems in New York are yet another blemish for the New York City Board of Elections, which is run by a board of Democrats and Republicans, and has a long history of mismanaging elections.
Michael Ryan, the board’s executive director, blamed the board’s vendor, Phoenix Graphics, a commercial printing company based in Rochester, New York, which was hired to mail out ballots in Brooklyn and Queens.
The foul-up was briefly addressed on Tuesday at a Board of Elections meeting, as Ryan, a Democrat, said the error was limited to “one print run.” He said the vendor would bear the cost of sending out new ballots to all potentially affected voters.
“It is essential that confidence be established in this process and that we make certain that all of the voters who potentially have a problem have a full and fair opportunity to remedy that problem,” Ryan said.
Officials also encouraged voters to e-mail or call a hotline if they received an erroneous ballot. But phone lines already appear to be jammed: Two voters who called on Monday reported being 65th and “80-something” in line.
Merrily Rosso, who lives in the Bushwick neighbourhood of Brooklyn, received an absentee ballot on Monday with a stranger’s name on it. She looked him up and discovered that he lived nearby. Concerned, she called the Brooklyn Board of Elections twice. The first time, they hung up. The second time, the phone just rang.
So she called the New York City Board of Elections. There were roughly 80 callers ahead of her. She hung up.
Rich Rotondo, a resident of the Cobble Hill neighbourhood of Brooklyn who works as a project manager for the city, said that he and his partner got ballots with the wrong information on them.
Curious if their neighbours were having a similar experience, they stopped someone who lives in their building and asked him to open his absentee ballot.
“And he opened it up and his was wrong,” Rotondo said. “Nobody has the right one.”
Michael Weiss, a musician who lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, said the ballot mailed to his partner had someone else’s name on it. He walked it over to the person listed on the ballot.
“She opened her mail to find another neighbour’s ballot in her envelope, which I took and hand delivered to him around the corner. Of course he also received someone else’s ballot in the mail,” Weiss said.
Phoenix Graphics, a family-owned firm that prides itself on its “ability to deliver a high-quality product on time and within budget,” has worked with the city Board of Elections since at least 2010, according to city records, including during the June primaries. The company’s $4.6-million no-bid contract – which the board awarded under an emergency procurement in June – lasts through the end of the year.
Sal DeBiase, the company’s president and chief executive, did not reply to multiple requests for comment.
Wrong ballots signed by voters will be invalid. Voters who unwittingly sign erroneous ballots will still be able to vote – via a second ballot, or in person, according to Sarah Steiner, an elections lawyer. She added that in-person votes cancel a voter’s absentee ballot.
“I’m worried because anything that confuses voters at this point or makes them leery of voting or suspicious of the process is damaging to democracy,” Steiner said.
Douglas Kellner, co-chair of the New York state Board of Elections, said he had received reports of the problems in the city, as well as far more isolated problems in Nassau County, where he is aware of only three affected ballots.
“The downside of introducing widespread absentee balloting is that, once the Boards of Elections start contracting out the process of mailing, then they lose quality control and direct supervision of what goes on,” Kellner, a Democrat, said in an interview. “This is a good example of the problem.”
Melissa DeRosa, the secretary to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, criticized the Board of Elections during a news conference on Tuesday: “To say that we’re troubled by this is the understatement of the year.”
The printing error comes on the heels of a June primary election that was riddled with problems in New York.
Overwhelmed by an avalanche of mail-in ballots – 40 per cent of voters sent absentee ballots compared with just 4 per cent in previous years – election officials spent more than a month counting ballots in some closely watched congressional races.
Tens of thousands of absentee ballots, especially in Brooklyn, were also disqualified because of technical issues like missing postmarks, a missing signature or an improperly sealed envelope.
State officials have taken some steps to address those problems before the November election, implementing changes to allow voters to fix errors with their ballots and expanding options for voters to physically drop off their absentee ballots at early polling sites and election offices.
Officials are also encouraging people to vote in person at early poll sites, which open statewide on Oct. 24 and are expected to have shorter lines than Election Day poll sites, to avoid overwhelming the Postal Service and election boards with mail-in ballots.
State election officials are expecting more than 5 million absentee ballots in the presidential election, or four times the number received in June, and some have already warned that results might not be known until early December.
“I’m disappointed to say the least,” said Matt Eylenberg, a resident of the Boerum Hill neighbourhood of Brooklyn who got the wrong ballot on Monday. “There’s so much stress around this election, as I’m very sure you are aware. They’re really testing the mettle of absentee voting, for sure, and it’s not a good start.”
Some voters have also expressed frustration about postage.
While the executive order that expanded mail-in voting for the June primaries required election boards to provide prepaid postage on ballot envelopes, there are no such requirements for the general election. This time around, voters in New York City must apply their own postage before mailing their ballots.
The ballot contains other errors, too. It instructs voters to “mark the oval to the left” of their choice, even though the ovals are actually above candidates’ names. There has also been some confusion surrounding a misleading label printed on mail-in ballots that reads: “OFFICIAL ABSENTEE MILITARY BALLOT.”
On Monday, the Board of Elections clarified that all absentee ballots, regardless of whether the voter was in the military, included that label, and that the ballot was correct.