Turnout has remained high as states have raced to allow voting by mail. But getting a full count on Election Day looks increasingly difficult.
The 16 statewide primary elections held during the pandemic reached a glaring nadir on Tuesday as Georgia saw a full-scale meltdown of new voting systems compounded by the state’s rapid expansion of vote-by-mail.
But around the country, elections that have been held over the past two months reveal a wildly mixed picture, dominated by different states’ experiences with a huge increase in voting by mail.
Over all, turnout in the 15 states and Washington, D.C., which rapidly expanded vote-by-mail over the past few months, remained high, sometimes at near record levels, even as the Democratic presidential primary was all but wrapped.
The good news was millions were able to vote safely, without risking their health. The bad news was a host of infrastructure and logistical issues that could have cost thousands their opportunity to vote: ballots lost in the mail; some printed on the wrong paper, with the wrong date or the wrong language; others arriving weeks after they were requested or never arriving at all.
But the most definitive lesson for November may be what many have already begun to accept — that there’s an enormous chance many states, including key battlegrounds, will not finish counting on election night. The implications are worrisome in a bitterly divided nation facing what many consider the most consequential election in memory with the loudest voice belonging to an incumbent president who is prone to promoting falsehoods about the electoral system.
More than 48 hours after polls closed on June 2, the biggest county in Indiana was still counting ballots.
Four days after its election, also on June 2, Philadelphia was still counting ballots.
“That’s just the way it is,” said Nick Custodio, a deputy commissioner of elections in Philadelphia.
In swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Georgia as well as less competitive states like Maryland and Indiana, the massive expansion of vote-by-mail left many counties still counting well beyond the normal election-night deadlines.
David J. Becker, director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said every state would significantly expand voting by mail, and that people would have to adjust their expectations on when to expect results on what’s likely to be the biggest vote total ever recorded.
“It’s much more important to get the count right, than to get it fast,” Mr. Becker said.
Absent from any reported issues in the states, however, was the chief concern of President Trump, who has been casting false aspersions about vote-by-mail and raising unfounded conspiracy theories. There were no reports or indications of widespread fraud in any of the primary elections.
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Georgia was, in some way, an outlier, its voting largely upended by problems with new voting machinery. But the vast expansion of vote-by-mail and absentee-ballot voting was not enough to offset the drastic reduction in polling locations in many states. In cities around the country, including Atlanta, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., voters waited in Election Day lines for hours, even as every city experienced exponential increases in vote-by-mail. That posed vivid warning signs, especially for Democrats, for November.
In Georgia, the elections director in the state’s largest county said that the pandemic forced officials to try to run two elections concurrently: a universal vote-by-mail system and the regular in-person election, plus early voting in person, without extra resources.
“You have states out there in the West that do ballot by mail professionally; their elections are almost exclusively by mail,” said Richard Barron, the elections director of Fulton County, which includes Atlanta. “What we were asked to do is do absentee by mail, and we still had to do our full complement of Election Day infrastructure.”
Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, boasted of meeting the record high demand in absentee ballots, sending out more than 1.5 million. But the state’s vast, rapid expansion of vote-by-mail was also plagued by confusion and complaints of missing ballots.
Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic candidate for governor, said that “the good idea to encourage people to use absentee ballots” quickly became “a disaster” because of both vendor issues and uneven resources for the most populous cities.
“So you have absentee ballots that never reached a number of voters, you have absentee ballots that were submitted but voters have no idea if they’re going to be counted,” said Ms. Abrams. Had the expansion of vote-by-mail been smoother, she said, it’s likely that the number of people who showed up to vote on Election Day could be reduced.
Experiences varied in different states.
In Pennsylvania, at least 1.4 million people cast their ballots by mail, out of a total of roughly 2 million, though ballots were still being counted as of Wednesday, more than a week after the election. The state had some hiccups. For example, roughly 2,000 voters were sent the wrong party ballot in Montgomery County in suburban Philadelphia. But Pennsylvania’s mail-in ballot system was better prepared than other states, in large part because of a recently signed law that turned the state into a “no excuse” absentee-ballot system. Even before the coronavirus outbreak struck, officials in Pennsylvania had been preparing for a surge in new mail-in ballots.
But that same law prevented election officials from beginning to tabulate results until the morning of Election Day, creating significant backlogs as large swaths of voters switched to vote by mail. In Philadelphia, small issues like having to flatten out ballots before they could be opened and counted turned into choke points.
Before Election Day, the state passed a law to try to alleviate some of those concerns, allowing states to start canvassing ballots at 7 a.m. on Election Day rather than 8 p.m., but the surge in ballots quickly overwhelmed many districts.
“I think we’ve seen that when you have this kind of volume, that’s not enough,” said Kathy Boockvar, the secretary of state of Pennsylvania. Ms. Boockvar said she hoped the Legislature would allow election officials to start processing absentee ballots weeks before Election Day.
The state was able to set up an online ballot-request form — an element many voting-rights experts say is key to expanding mail-in voting — that also had ballot tracking, meaning voters could check the status of their ballot, much like an Amazon package. But the system didn’t always register a sent ballot, and the online application was only in English. Voters were also allowed to request a ballot up until a week before Election Day, giving election officials scant time to turn around a ballot.
“The deadlines in Pennsylvania are impossible to meet,” said Lee Soltysiak, the chief clerk of Montgomery County. “And the voter was absolutely on the short end of that stick.”
In Maryland, which chose to mail ballots to all registered voters, outdated registration lists left many ballots returned as undeliverable because voters had moved. Baltimore had the highest return rate — 1 in 10 ballots, or about 20,000 total.
Few cities faced more issues with voting by mail than Baltimore. Voters across the city complained of a lack of information on changes to the election process, and they were among the last in the state to receive their ballots because of a vendor error. A ballot alignment error in a City Council district made the ballots uncountable by the scanner machines.
And for reasons as yet unexplained, some voters who had ballots returned by the Post Office as undeliverable were recorded in polls books as having voted and returned a complete ballot.
“If we have to conduct our elections by mail again there are a lot of glitches that clearly need to be addressed, and a lot more investment needs to be made in voter education,” said Joanne Antoine, the executive director of Common Cause Maryland.
In Washington, D.C., officials were similarly overwhelmed by the surge in voting, after receiving some 91,000 requests for absentee ballots, 15 times the normal volume. Many voters never received their ballots, and those who went to the few polling places that were open on Election Day — 20, compared with the usual 143 — waited as long as four hours to cast their ballots.
The city Board of Elections decided the day before the election to allow voters who had not gotten their ballots to vote via email, but it is not known how many took advantage of the offer. A spokeswoman for the city Board of Elections, Rachel Coll, declined to comment on the problems, saying the board would release a report analyzing the causes of the delays and undelivered ballots.
In Wisconsin, election officials are working to improve the transparency of the vote-by-mail process and help voters unsure of the status of their ballot. During the April 7 election, a flurry of last-second court challenges, including a last-minute ruling by the Supreme Court, most likely disenfranchised many voters in the state. Some mail-in ballots were found undelivered in crates at a Postal Service depot.
Now, the Wisconsin Elections Commission is working on adding bar codes as a tracking tool for future absentee ballots that will allow internal tracking information to be shared with the mailer and recipient.
With the presidential election less than 150 days away and coronavirus cases still increasing, the warning signs for November were ominous.
“I can’t fathom given all that’s going on in America right now that anybody would have the gall to stall out and not fix this,” said the Rev. Kobi Little, the president of the N.A.A.C.P. chapter in Baltimore. “America can’t say ‘we’re the champions of democracy,’ and then not deliver democracy.”
Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting from Washington.
