Mine was rejected because I didn't sign the back of the envelope, so I had to drive to the elections office in another town to give them my signature. Then it was counted.
August 22, 20205:00 AM ET
Heard on Weekend Edition Saturday
Pam Fessler at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C., March 19, 2019. (photo by Allison Shelley)
Elena Moore
An extraordinarily high number of ballots — more than 550,000 — have been rejected in this year's presidential primaries, according to a new analysis by NPR.
That's far more than the 318,728 ballots rejected in the 2016 general election and has raised alarms about what might happen in November when tens of millions of more voters are expected to cast their ballots by mail, many for the first time.
Election experts said first-time absentee voters are much more likely to make the kinds of mistakes that lead to rejected ballots. Studies also show that voters of color and young voters are more likely than others to have their ballots not count.
Most absentee or mail-in ballots are rejected because required signatures are missing or don't match the one on record, or because the ballot arrives too late.
"If something goes wrong with any of this, that's a problem writ large, but it's also going to be one that hits some populations of the United States a bit harder than others, potentially disenfranchises different groups of folks at higher rates," said Rob Griffin of the Democracy Fund, which is conducting a sweeping survey of the 2020 electorate with researchers at UCLA.
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Smith added that the rejection numbers are only part of the picture. He said they don't always take into account mail-in ballots that are initially accepted but then not counted because of other mistakes, such as a voter incorrectly choosing too many candidates or incorrectly circling a candidate's name instead of filling in the bubble next to it.
Such errors are usually caught at the polling place and can be corrected before voters casts their ballots. Most voting machines will also not allow people to overvote accidentally, or choose too many candidates in a given race.
"Those mistakes are avoided when you vote in person," Smith said. "You have seven, 10 people who can assist you in terms of making sure that you know about the ovals having to be filled out." As a result, only about one-hundredth of a percent of in-person ballots are rejected compared with about 1% of mail-in ballots.
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