The Board of Elections (BOE) started counting the highly contested absentee and mail-in ballots today.
As of July 7, the BOE had a total of 210,504 distributed ballots and 113,702 voted ballots returned from both parties in Brooklyn.
Some people had no problems voting, while absentee ballots barely made it into other voter’s hands before the deadline of the primary election on June 23. A combination of human and clerical errors, COVID-19 derailment, and confusion over the mail-in process has delayed the official count and severely hampered what is undoubtedly a fraught election season.
A string of ballots were not postmarked properly by the postal service, technically rendering them invalid.
“The COVID-19 pandemic and the federal government’s inadequate funding of the U.S. Postal Service – which led to the Post Office not being able to efficiently mark the quantity of ballots received in a timely manner – created chaos. Thousands of absentee ballots were not postmarked and are therefore legally invalid,” said Kings County Democratic Party Leader and Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte (D-Flatbush, Ditmas Park) about absentee ballot returns with no postmark dates from the post office.
The State Board of Elections is only accepting non-postmarked ballots received by June 24, the day after primary election day, said Bichotte.
In addition to postal problems, at least two different poll sites in Brooklyn reported people applying for absentee ballots, receiving them, and then still bringing the ballots into the physical polling place on election day.
“Protocol was not clear on how to receive them, but of course. I’ve been doing this for 21 years in three states so I’ve always told people, even before they increased awareness about absentee ballots, that if you didn’t mail it off and you’re in my poll site, just vote. It’s the easiest way to guarantee your vote counts,” said Brian Chidester, AD Poll Site Coordinator at P.S 17 in Williamsburg.
Chidester said that out of the several absentee ballots that people brought with them, he had to include a few in the envelopes that usually hold the poll worker’s absentee ballots, but can’t know for sure if they were counted. He encouraged the rest to just vote while they were there.
Caroline Fidel, an AD Poll Site Coordinator in Greenpoint, said, infuriatingly, dozens of people dropped off absentee ballots in-person to her site, and other than being majorly short-staffed this year, that was the issue they encountered.
