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Claim: Penn. mailed ballots without secrecy envelope will get tossed. Fact check: True
Sep 24 2020
"The Caucus concludes that the only way to be certain that no fraud has taken place is to reject all naked ballots." — The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania Ruling, Page 48
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled last week that officials must throw out so-called "naked ballots" — mail-in ballots returned without the inner secrecy envelopes that separates voters' identities from how they vote. This is a change from how mail-in ballots have been counted in the past, including in this year's primary election, and could affect tens of thousands of general election ballots across the state.
Lisa Deeley, chairwoman of the Philadelphia City Commissioners, sent a letter to Republican legislators, whose party holds a majority in the Legislature, urging they eliminate the requirement for secrecy envelopes for mail-in votes to be counted. She wrote that the court ruling could "set Pennsylvania up to be the subject of significant post-election legal controversy, the likes of which we have not seen since Florida in 2000." Pennsylvania got rid of its requirement for an excuse to vote absentee last year, so this will be the first general election in which many residents likely will be voting by mail. President Trump narrowly won the battleground state in 2016 and former Vice President Joe Biden now holds a 9-point advantage among likely voters in the state, according to NBC/Marist poll conducted earlier this month.
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The ruling also extended the deadline for mail ballots to be submitted to up to three days after the election and will allow voters to submit mail ballots through drop boxes. Top Republican legislators filed a stay request to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to reverse the decision to extend the deadline and signaled they will be sending a request to the U.S. Supreme Court to review the legality of the extension.
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The elections office in King County, Wash., offers a video tour of its counting facility.
It's not too late to ensure transparent elections are not a pandemic victim
Sep 16 2020
Weiss is a consultant to a commercial printer and a member of the local Democratic Committee in suburban Philadelphia's Montgomery County.
<p>The coronavirus has changed just about everything in our day-to-day lives. How we vote is no exception. Mail-in voting will be used by more voters than ever. But where I live — in the most populous suburban county of one of the country's biggest presidential battlegrounds — the procedures are being kept secret for getting absentee ballots sent to voters, then securing and counting them when they're returned. </p><p>No-excuse mail-in voting is new to Pennsylvania this year and is being implemented on a county-by-county basis. But there appears to be little oversight or direction from the state elections office in Harrisburg regarding how each county is to implement the new law, provide for cyber-security and physical security, or validate electors and count ballots.</p><p>Between February and last week, elected state and county officials, and the Montgomery Board of Elections, were not responsive when asked about plans and procedures for handling the expected surge in mail-in ballots. Prior to the primary in June, the county cited the emergency conditions of the pandemic in saying it was not able to answer the public's right-to-know requests. After that, the county started postponing its promised answers, 30 days at a time. Even some basic information guaranteed by the state's election laws was not provided for the primary, despite five requests by certified mail to the Elections Board chairman, Ken Lawrence.</p><p><p style="text-align: center;" id="sufn"><a style="font-weight: bold;margin:40px auto;font-size:2rem" href="https://thefulcrum.us/st/newsletters">Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter </a></p></p><p>For a stark contrast, look to Seattle. While people answering the phone at the Montgomery County Voter Services office were referring all questions about mail-in ballots to an online open records request form, the similar office in King County offers a video tour of its counting facility — and, when telephoned, provided helpful information about equipment and staffing levels. Colorado, which like Washington has conducted all elections by mail for years, provides a trove of information on government websites.</p><p>The lack of such transparency in Pennsylvania is alarming for many reasons. The following questions and more go unanswered:</p><ul class="ee-ul"><li>What are the standards to approve an application for a mail-in ballot?</li><li>Who is handling the ballots? Are private mail shops being used to send ballots to voters? If so, what steps have been taken to prevent political interference in the process?</li><li>Are there any tracking procedures being used in conjunction with services available from the Postal Service?</li><li>How is material handling being done? Is the storage space secure? What happens if stored ballots get damaged before they're counted — if the roof leaks, for instance? </li><li>How are voter signatures being verified when ballots are returned? How are county employees trained to do this? Is software being used? What happens if there is a problem?</li><li>What happens when ballots are damaged by tabulating equipment? (We have all watched sheets of paper being "eaten" by a document feeder on a copier.) </li><li>What information will be given to poll watchers to help them ensure all ballots are counted, but only counted once?</li></ul><p>Based on my experience working with commercial printers and their full-service mail shops, an error rate between 1 percent and 2 percent would not be unreasonable for the first-time processing of a job similar to the size and complexity of the job Montgomery County is facing in November. (Just 4 percent of the 447,000 votes cast in the county in the last presidential contest were absentee; this time the share could easily top 50 percent.)</p><p>Smaller counties will likely have a lower error rate, because fewer ballots requires fewer formal procedures for an acceptable result. But in a competitive election, the error rate could still be far greater than the margin of victory.</p><p>Montgomery made many mistakes during the primary. Many ballots were not sent, as state law requires, within 48 hours of an application's receipt. The secretary of state's office found that 9.6 percent of those applications were rejected, the highest share among the state's 67 counties, while another 5 percent of county voters confronted other problems — including receiving ballots for the wrong party or wrong precinct.</p><p>Finally, there were no obvious quality checks in place for the processing of mailed ballots and virtually no training provided to the election workers responsible for processing the votes. </p><p>Had county officials been more transparent from the start, many of these problems could have been headed off. </p><p>Certainly, Pennsylvanians do not wish to be debating after the election the rules for counting ballots in what looks to be another super-close presidential race. (President Trump carried our 20 electoral votes by just seven-tenths of 1 point last time.)</p><p>County election boards and elected representatives should be providing detailed information now for public review about how ballots will be protected and processed. Anything short of complete transparency calls into question the mail-in vote — and whether voters using this process risk being disenfranchised by inadequate quality assurance procedures, shoddy vendors or poor worker training.</p><p>Last week, Montgomery County's chief operating officer, Lee Soltysiak, sought to provide assurances during an hour-long call. The election office has been reorganized into two divisions, one to handle voting on Nov. 3 and one to process mailed ballots. New equipment is being installed and space has been rented for ballot counting and storage. Standard operating procedures are being developed along with worker training for processing ballots. Enhanced security measures are to be implemented. A new vendor has been selected to send out the ballots.</p><p>And a public information campaign will be launched soon — although voters haven't been told this raft of heartening news yet. </p><p>Citizens who want fair elections cannot simply expect them to happen. They need to press their local governments for complete election transparency — and assurances about when to expect results will be reported. </p><p>Only making election transparency an important issue today will ensure fair and uncontested election results in seven weeks, regardless of the complications from Covid-19.</p>
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Unlike this Philadelphia voter, most Pennsylvanians mailed their primary ballots in June. About 20,000 were rejected.
Pa. offers fresh evidence rejected mail ballots can be decisive
Sep 15 2020
In what could be a sobering preview of the November election, about 20,000 absentee ballots returned for the Pennsylvania primary were not counted because they arrived too late or the envelopes weren't signed.
While a tiny share of the overall vote in June, the number has enormous potential significance for the presidential election. That's because, in 2016, Donald Trump carried the state and its 20 electoral votes by just twice that amount, 44,000 votes.
The rejection number, reported this week by election officials in Harrisburg, underscores how a close presidential outcome — and the arguments both candidates might make in challenging the results in tossup states — will be shaped by lawsuit decisions and legislative maneuvers in the next seven weeks over the once-arcane rules governing mailed votes.
<p>The numbers of votes cast remotely will balloon into the millions this fall, just in the battleground states alone, as people continue to avoid public places like voting stations because of the coronavirus pandemic. The switch comes against a backdrop of relentless and unfounded allegations from Trump that widespread mail voting will produce massive election fraud.</p><p><p style="text-align: center;" id="sufn"><a style="font-weight: bold;margin:40px auto;font-size:2rem" href="https://thefulcrum.us/st/newsletters">Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter </a></p></p><p>In addition, the ability of the Postal Service to properly handle the large number of mailed ballots has been called into question because of changes instituted by new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major Trump donor.</p>
<p>About 90 percent of the uncounted ballots in Pennsylvania were the result of missing the deadline for their arrival at the election offices. The state is one of 33, along with the District of Columbia, that require mailed ballots to arrive by Election Day.</p>
<p>That rule is unlikely to be changed by the Republican-majority General Assembly, which has been haggling with Democratic Gov. Tom Wolfe over what looks to become a very modest collection of last-minute election law changes — perhaps including new permission for local clerks to begin before Election Day the preparing of returned ballots for tabulating as soon as the polls close.</p>
<p>Much of the remaining rejected June ballots were tossed because signatures on the envelopes were missing or looked unlike the signature in the voter's file. On Monday state officials told election administrators in the 67 counties they may no longer reject a ballot solely because an election official believes the handwriting is off. That prompted the <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/directory/league-of-women-voters" target="_self">League of Women Voters</a> and the Urban League to drop a federal lawsuit challenging the signature rules.</p><p>The rejection rate in the Pennsylvania primary was relatively small, less than 1 percent of the 2.7 million ballots cast and just 1.3 percent of the 1.5 million votes submitted by mail.</p>
<p>Of the 33.4 million mail ballots cast in the 2016 general election, about 1 percent were tossed, according to the federal Election Assistance Commission.</p>
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