How ‘legitimate’ will the public perception of an election be if you don’t even know if yours was counted?
Because there are already thousands of people whose votes in the primaries were thrown out. Whose were chucked? For what reason? Was there any partisanship involved?
How would we even know?
At least when you vote normally, you show up and you know your vote is in the system.
It took weeks for his absentee ballot to arrive — appearing in his mailbox just three days before the election on June 23. It came with two sets of instructions in very fine print. Neither set, Aickin said, told him to sign the envelope or had complete information about his options for returning the ballot. He saw the city’s Board of Elections account tweet confirming that he could drop it off at his local polling location.
Come Election Day, however, the Brooklyn poll worker to whom he handed his ballot seemed unsure.
“I walked away with very little confidence that my vote was going to be counted,” Aickin said in a phone interview. “And I don’t know if I’m ever going to find out if my vote was counted, because I handed it to someone who didn’t seem to know what to do with it.”
…The flood of additional mail ballots in the primaries has also revealed another problem that could have enormous consequences for November: a sharp increase in ballot rejections. Ballots can be tossed for voter errors like not signing in all the right places, having a signature that doesn’t exactly match one’s voter registration signature, or reaching election officials too late.
In California alone, a state that allowed all eligible voters to cast a ballot by mail prior to the pandemic and is accustomed to processing millions of those ballots, more than 102,000 ballots were rejected in its March 3 primary, up from 69,000 in the state’s 2016 primary.
That number includes some mail ballots that were surrendered by voters who chose to vote in person instead, but the majority of them — some 70,000 ballots — simply arrived too late, according to data first reported by The Associated Press and provided to NBC News by the California secretary of state’s office. Nearly 13,000 voters forgot to sign the ballot, while more than 14,000 signatures were declared a mismatch by officials.
Wisconsin meanwhile had a 1.8% rejection rate. If that number seems insignificant, just think about how many races are tight enough that they are separated by less than 1%.
With our already-charged political climate and the mutual distrust of each party, an Al Gore-style contested election could be dangerously explosive.
As yourself… why would the Democrats be so Hellbent on setting up such a conflict?
