Three weeks to US presidential election, mail-in voting errors raise concerns

The election for the US president is scheduled for November 3. Although millions of voters have opted for mail-in voting in the past, the mode of casting votes has gained prominence in the 2020 election due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Just three weeks to the day, several cases of errors in mail-in-voting have been reported.

Tens of thousands of ballots in Ohio and New York had the wrong candidate or voter names. Votes were thrown in the trash in Pennsylvania and scores of lawsuits over the counts.

Ballots with the wrong candidates were sent to 50,000 residents of Columbus, Ohio.

“Out of control. A Rigged Election!!!” President Donald Trump tweeted about Ohio after the news broke out.

Also read: Behind in polls, Trump launches battleground state swing

During the primaries earlier this year, tens of thousands of people in New York and Wisconsin either did not get their mail ballots or received them too late to vote.

The postal service did not put postmarks on thousands of ballots to show they had been mailed on time.

Also, there have errors and delays in getting the ballots printed and mailed, cases of mishandled ballots like in Pennsylvania, and reports of people receiving more than one ballot.

What do the experts say?

“There’s going to be execution errors along the way,” said Kevin Kosar, a political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, AFP reported.

“The good news is, these mistakes are happening, but they are being caught early,” he said.

Amber McReynolds, chief executive of the National Vote At Home Institute, said a few cases have blown up in the press and social media, but “are not widespread.”

“It’s 2020 and everybody is highly sensitive,” she told AFP.

The Ohio and New York ballot problems were simple printing and envelop insertion errors that could have been avoided with better management.

“Is everything going to be perfect all the time? No. There never has been a perfect election,” McReynolds said.

“If we got two issues in two counties out of 8,000 jurisdictions, then the bigger story is it’s working effectively in the majority of places.”

McReynolds, former head of elections in Denver, Colorado who helped set up the state’s universal by-mail voting system, said everyone is focused this year on mailed ballots.

Is in-person voting superior?

This form of voting has its own problems, McReynolds argued, especially machine breakdowns and long lines, like those seen in Georgia on Monday, a particular issue given the Covid-19 pandemic.

“I believe that there are actually more problems in in-person voting,” she said.

Democrats and Republicans on mail-in-voting

According to surveys, Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to mail their ballot rather than vote in person. Hence the Republicans will be keen to limit the impact of mail-in voting.

In Pennsylvania, the  Republicans battled for a court ruling to throw out ballots if the voter uses the wrong envelope. In South Carolina, Republican attorneys won a ruling requiring envelopes for ballots to be signed by witnesses as well as the voter.

For this year, nearly 75 million mail-in ballots have been sent or requested so far this year, more than double the 33 million in 2016, according to the US Elections Project of the University of Florida.