Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

100,000 New Yorkers receive flawed absentee ballots

100,000 New Yorkers receive flawed absentee ballots
Noam Galai/Getty Images

Nearly 100,000 New York City voters were mailed general election ballots with incorrect names and return addresses.

The defective absentee ballots were first reported on Monday, and the following day the New York City Board of Elections confirmed the problem affected 99,477 voters in Brooklyn who had requested one. New ballots with correct information will be printed and sent immediately to those voters.

With just 34 days until voting ends Nov. 3, this kind of critical error could sow confusion and distrust in an election already flooded with attacks — mostly prominently from President Trump — on mail voting.


In New York, absentee voters must place their completed ballot in a return, or "oath," envelope that includes the person's name, address and voter ID. After signing the oath envelope, the voter places it in a second envelope to be mailed back to election officials. But for those 100,000 voters in Brooklyn, the wrong identification information was printed on their oath envelopes.

The elections board blamed the error on the printing company, Phoenix Graphics, which had been contracted to print and mail ballots for Brooklyn and Queens — although the issue appears to be confined to Brooklyn. The company has been ordered to resend ballots with the correct information and a notice explaining the error.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Michael Ryan, executive director of the elections board, said in a meeting Tuesday afternoon that the board will "do everything that it needs to do administratively both in communication with the voters on the upfront on the re-mailing aspect and on the back end to ensure that all of the ballots received are appropriately processed and the votes that are tallied are properly credited to the voters who have participated in the process."

The board tweeted Tuesday night that voters who had received incorrect ballots should direct message, email or call the board.

In August, New York added fear of coronavirus infection as a valid excuse for voting absentee this fall, joining 11 other states that have temporarily extended mail voting eligibility to all voters. The board reported that 520,000 voters across the city had requested absentee ballots.

This is not the first election problem to arise in the Big Apple this year. In the June primary, when all voters were sent an absentee ballot application, election officials were inundated with mail ballots and results took more than a month to finalize.

Tens of thousands of primary ballots were also disqualified due to small errors, such as a missing signature or an improperly sealed envelope. New York officials have since made changes to give voters an opportunity to address these issues and "cure" their mailed ballots.

During the first presidential debate Tuesday night, Trump again argued against mail-in voting because it could delay election results. "We might not know for months because these ballots are going to be all over," he said.

The president also used the moment as an opportunity to assert another false claim that voting by mail leads to widespread fraud, pointing to Manhattan as an example due to the high rejection rate of mail ballots in the primary.

Read More

Members of Congress standing next to a poster about Project 2025

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Patty Murray look at their Project 2025 poster during a press conference on Sept. 12.

Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Project 2025 policies are on the Nov. 5 ballot

Corbin is professor emeritus of marketing at the University of Northern Iowa.

It’s becoming crystal clear, as we near the Nov. 5 presidential election, that voters need to seriously check out the radical government reformation policies contained within the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Here’s why.

The right-wing think tank has written not one, not two, but nine “Mandate for Leadership” documents for Republican presidential candidates, with its first playbook published in 1981. The Heritage Foundation spent $22 million —serious money — in 2023 to create Project 2025 for Donald Trump to implement.

Keep ReadingShow less
‘There is a diffused climate of threats and intimidation’: A conversation with Daniel Stid
Daniel Stid

‘There is a diffused climate of threats and intimidation’: A conversation with Daniel Stid

Berman is a distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, co-editor of Vital City, and co-author of "Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age." This is the ninth in a series of interviews titled "The Polarization Project."

The problem of polarization has been on Daniel Stid’s mind for a while.

Trained as a political scientist, Stid has spent time working in government (as a staffer for former Rep. Dick Armey), business (at Boston Consulting Group) and the nonprofit sector (at the Bridgespan Group). But Stid is perhaps best known for founding and leading the Hewlett Foundation’s U.S. democracy program. From 2013 to 2022, Stid helped give away $180 million in grants to combat polarization and shore up American democracy. Since leaving Hewlett, he has created a new organization, Lyceum Labs, and launched a blog, The Art of Association, where he writes frequently about civil society and American politics.

Keep ReadingShow less
screenshot of Steve Kornacki

You don't need to be Steve Kornacki to know which states (and counties) to watch on election night.

YouTube screenshot

How to win a bar bet on election night

Klug served in the House of Representatives from 1991 to 1999. He hosts the political podcast “Lost in the Middle: America’s Political Orphans.”

The odds are you don’t go to sleep at night and dream of precinct maps and tabulation deadlines like NBC’s breathless election guru Steve Kornacki. Watch him on election night and you will be dazzled and exhausted by his machine-gun-like sharing of statistics and crosstabs.

Keep ReadingShow less
The word "meritocracy" on a chalkboard
bowie15

The propaganda of 'meritocracy'

Degefe is a research associate in Duke University's Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity. Ince is an assistant sociology professor at the University of Washington.

Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah) recently launched the Merit Caucus to prevent diversity, equity, and inclusion from dominating education. Owens, chairman of the Education and Workplace subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development, argued that the left is waging a "war on meritocracy" and is threatening America’s excellence, all in the name of equity.

Such sentiment is clearly becoming more prevalent, as evidenced by the Supreme Court’s decision to effectively end race-conscious admission programs at colleges and universities and by Texas, Florida, Alabama and Utah banning the use of state dollars for DEI programs in public universities, effectively closing these offices.

Keep ReadingShow less