Votebeat

Update: Supreme Court to decide fate of Trump administration’s proposed mail-ballot rules

2026-09-06T16:04:08+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Update, Sept. 6, 12:04 p.m.: The U.S. Justice Department has appealed the preliminary injunction against the Trump administration’s new mail-voting rules to the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court. This appeal replaces the previous appeal that had been pending before both courts.

The Supreme Court’s ruling on this appeal will determine whether the U.S. Postal Service’s proposed restrictions on mail ballots will go into effect for the November election. It’s unclear when the court will make a decision.

Update, Sept. 4, 5:54 p.m.: Judge Talwani issued a preliminary injunction preventing the U.S. Postal Service from making its new rules mandatory. The injunction replaced her earlier temporary restraining order, which would have expired after 14 days.

The Trump administration had previously appealed the temporary restraining order to the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court, neither of which has yet acted. Plaintiffs had previously argued that those appeals would be moot if Talwani replaced it with a preliminary injunction, but the government can appeal the new order.

Original post, Aug. 27, 11:27 p.m.: A federal judge on Thursday imposed a new freeze on President Donald Trump’s mail-ballot restrictions, the latest move in a back-and-forth legal battle playing out just weeks before the November elections.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani blocked the U.S. Postal Service from moving ahead with plans to regulate mail ballots for at least 14 days while she weighs a more permanent ban on the agency’s new rules.

The temporary restraining order comes just four days after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted Talwani’s previous injunction against the order on narrow procedural grounds. However, voting rights groups and a coalition of two dozen states and the District of Columbia kept pressing their case against the order, arguing that the president had no authority to try and regulate mail ballots.

In her 11-page decision, Talwani agreed and concluded that Trump’s proposals were an unconstitutional attempt to usurp powers from the states over elections.

“The court is unaware of, and no party has proffered, any delegation Congress has made that would permit the USPS to regulate election mail,” Talwani wrote.

Talwani set a hearing for Sept. 3 on the request for a permanent injunction. The Trump administration is likely to quickly appeal her order, a move that will probably propel the case back before the Supreme Court.

In court filings opposing the temporary restraining order, the Trump administration argued that the Postal Service plan was an effort by the federal government to help ensure elections were run smoothly and that the agency was acting within its legal authority.

The monthslong, multicourt legal battle over Trump’s executive order restricting mail voting is taking on increasing urgency as the November election nears. Election officials preparing to send out ballots are faced with a whipsaw of directives.

Trump’s order, issued in March, directed the U.S. Postal Service to set up a new system that would allow the agency to block delivery of mail ballots to voters not on a list presubmitted by state election officials.

It quickly prompted a slew of lawsuits. In June, Talwani found that some of the order’s key provisions were unconstitutional and blocked them from going into effect for this year’s elections.

The Trump administration appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, whose Aug. 24 ruling paved the way for the U.S. Postal Service to roll out the new restrictions. But the Supreme Court’s ruling dealt only with the question of whether the injunction was premature, with the justices themselves acknowledging it didn’t address the legality or constitutionality of the plan. That set off a new and increasingly complex round of legal wrangling.

Earlier in August, the U.S. Postal Service unveiled its proposal to implement the administration’s mail-ballot restrictions in a 95-page plan that created widespread confusion among election officials.

The Postal Service rules require states to use a new online federal government system to send it a list of all voters who should receive mail ballots. The Postal Service would refuse to send ballots to anyone not on the list. Ballot envelopes would also have to meet new design standards, including unique barcodes that have to be checked by the Postal Service.

The states challenging the rules warned that they would not have the time, money, or people needed to comply in the short time between now and November. Talwani agreed and wrote that the Trump administration’s filings “offer no reply to Plaintiff States’ assertion that compliance for the 2026 midterm elections will be impossible for many of them.”

Democratic leaders across the nation have vowed a fierce fight to ensure that all voters that want to vote by mail are able to do so.

“Over my dead body is that rule going to go into effect,” Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said earlier this week, before Talwani’s latest order. “We are going to fight this tooth and nail in the courts.”

Read more Votebeat coverage of Trump’s executive order on elections:

Trump issues second executive order on elections, giving U.S. Postal Service unprecedented control over mail voting, March 31, 2026
Trump administration sued by states over mail voting executive order, April 3, 2026
One line in Trump’s order would reshape how long states have to store election records, April 6, 2026
We still have questions about Trump’s new executive order on elections, April 6, 2026
USPS proposal to carry out Trump’s executive order could create new barriers to mail voting, May 29, 2026
Trump’s moves to erect voting hurdles face race against the clock, June 15, 2026
Federal judge blocks key pillars of Trump executive order restricting mail voting in 2026 election, June 25, 2026
Trump administration asks federal judge to quickly lift ban on planned mail voting restrictions, July 2, 2026
Trump is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to allow new mail ballot restrictions in the 2026 midterms, Aug. 3, 2026
Federal judge blocks Trump’s efforts to restrict mail-in voting nationwide, Aug. 11, 2026
Supreme Court lifts 1 of 2 blocks on Trump’s mail-voting executive order, Aug. 24, 2026
Election officials wrestle with uncertainty amid legal battles over Trump mail ballot restrictions, Aug. 26, 2026

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Trump’s mail voting restrictions would create logistical nightmare for midterm elections

2026-08-31T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

This news analysis was originally distributed in Votebeat’s free weekly newsletter. Sign up to get future editions, including the latest reporting from Votebeat bureaus and curated news from other publications, delivered to your inbox every Saturday.

It has been a dizzying week of legal challenges and rulings that have scrambled plans for the November election. The end result is… more uncertainty!

The legal drama spanned three different courts and created a legal tilt-a-whirl that ultimately ended up right where we started: a freeze on the Trump administration’s efforts to impose new restrictions on voting by mail and a likely Supreme Court showdown fast approaching.

The U.S. Supreme Court kicked things off on Monday with a narrow procedural ruling that gave the Trump administration hopes it could move ahead with its plans for the November election. New rules briefly went into effect midweek, but the ruling triggered a new round of legal maneuvering that led U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani to impose a new 14-day freeze on the plans while she considers a permanent ban on putting them in place for this election. The Trump administration has already appealed the temporary order.

The whiplash is creating headaches for election officials with the first mail ballots for the November election set to go out to voters in less than a week and more court action the only certainty.

Since the U.S. Postal Service this month unveiled its proposal to implement the administration’s mail ballot restrictions in a 95-page plan, election officials have been scratching their heads as they try to figure out whether, and how, they’ll have to follow the guidelines.

Tammy Patrick, the chief program officer at the Election Center, a national nonprofit association for election administrators, said there was no way that states would be able to successfully shift to the new system in time for the November election.

Patrick said the rules have created widespread confusion among elections officials who have to rush to meet what seems like an impossible timeline to comply with the regulations.

“The U.S. Postal Service has been a very collaborative partner in delivering democracy,” she said. “This rule is a dramatic shift in both how election officials conduct elections and how the Postal Service delivers democracy.”

The first challenge for election officials are rules that require them to follow new uniform mail ballot envelope design standards. The envelope going to the voter and the one the voter returns each have to have unique barcodes that link the mail to the person casting the ballot. The envelope designs first have to be reviewed by the Postal Service, something Patrick said seems logistically impossible to do before November’s election.

“We have more than 10,000 election jurisdictions and there are 40 mail design analysts at the Postal Service for the entire country,” she said. “They would not be able to accommodate everybody redesigning the envelopes.”

This change could potentially have the biggest impact on rural counties with small teams of elections officials that sometimes hand-write names and addresses on mail ballot envelopes. Finding a company that could quickly design and produce the new ballot envelopes at this late date seems implausible, Patrick said.

The first mail ballots are set to go out to North Carolina voters this Friday, and a host of other states will also begin sending them out in the coming weeks. And it’s unclear how the federal government would treat ballots that don’t comply with the new requirements but are sent out before the new system is up and running.

During the short window when the Trump plan was in place, North Carolina said that it rushed to comply by submitting its envelopes to the Postal Service for “review and approval.”

“Our office is confident that the county boards of elections plan to send out absentee ballots to North Carolina voters who have requested them for this election, starting September 4, as required by state law, will happen flawlessly and smoothly,” said Jason Tyson, director of external affairs for the North Carolina State Board of Elections.

The U.S. Postal Service did not respond to a request for comment on specific questions about how the new processes will work this year and pointed to an online FAQ that provides broad guidance about how the system is intended to work.

If and when election officials clear the envelope design hurdle, they would then have to compile a list of everyone who wants a mail ballot and help create a statewide list with detailed information — down to the barcode — for everyone eligible to vote by mail. The Postal Service says it will refuse to deliver a ballot to anyone who is not on the list.

Each state would have to submit its list to the Postal Service via a new online portal, and the rule says that would preferably be done 30 days ahead of the election, though that’s not a hard-and-fast deadline. The Postal Service has yet to unveil the new online portal.

Then, things get even more complicated. If a state sends out a large batch of mail ballots and one of them is sent to a voter who’s not on the list reviewed by the Postal Service, the Postal Service could reject all of the ballots in that batch, Patrick said. That could mean that one error might delay the processing of a huge number of ballots and create extra work for election officials. She emphasized that election offices in big counties routinely send out millions of ballots at a time. Election officials would have to check the rejected mail ballots and resend them once they address the problems.

On top of that, she said, the time it would take for the Postal Service to scan each barcode could overwhelm its staff as a flood of mail ballots come through the system.

“This is very, very difficult,” Patrick said. “All of this is untenable.”

The Trump executive order signed in March envisioned a much longer rollout period for the new system. But the legal challenges put the plans on hold until now, giving the Postal Service very little time to put the system into place. The Postal Service has expressed confidence that it can smoothly roll out the plans, but election officials are skeptical and wary.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Election officials wrestle with uncertainty amid legal battles over Trump mail ballot restrictions

2026-08-26T16:00:19+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Update, August 26, 1:27 p.m.: This story has been updated with the fact that, shortly after publication, a federal judge lifted an order that was blocking the U.S. Postal Service from putting new rules on mail ballots in place for the November election.

Monday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of President Donald Trump’s attempt to restrict mail ballots via executive order is procedural and narrow, but it’s fueling broad confusion and uncertainty as the November election grows inexorably closer.

On Wednesday, in response to the high court decision, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani removed the last legal block preventing the U.S. Postal Service from finalizing its proposed changes for the 2026 elections, even though she warned that the move could create “chaos” as the election closes in.

On Wednesday, a coalition of Democratic states at the forefront of the fight filed a new federal lawsuit against the Postal Service asking the court to block the changes, a move that will likely put them on a fast track back to the Supreme Court and leave election officials contending with messy legal rulings for some time to come.

“Across the country, states are already deep into preparations for the 2026 elections,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in announcing the lawsuit. “Now, at the last moment, the federal government is attempting to meddle in those preparations and potentially threaten countless Americans’ right to vote.”

In a separate case, voting rights groups and Democratic leaders on Tuesday also asked federal courts to block the changes from going into effect for this November’s election.

“The 2026 election has already begun, and this is sowing chaos,” said Paul Gronke, a political science professor at Reed College in Oregon and a founder of the Elections & Voting Information Center.

Meanwhile, as the fight rages over how the U.S. Postal Service will handle mail ballots, North Carolina is preparing to send the first ones out next week.

Jason Tyson, director of external affairs for the North Carolina State Board of Elections, said the state is still planning to send out its ballots as expected.

“At this time, with so much left unresolved, we cannot comment on hypotheticals about what may or may not happen with the USPS and the executive order in the courts, as the situation is uncertain,” he said. “If it becomes necessary, we will do our best to comply with any court decisions.”

Monday’s high court ruling added to a messy snarl of court cases over Trump’s March executive order that sought to allow the U.S. Postal Service to reject delivery of mail ballots to voters in states that don’t meet new federal requirements.

The justices, who split along ideological lines, ruled only on a narrow legal argument and stressed their decision didn’t speak to the merits of Trump’s plan. While the case was pending, the Postal Service last week moved to finalize the new rules, action that a federal judge ruled Tuesday had violated a court order.

The Postal Service rules require states to use a new online federal government system to send it a list of all voters that should receive mail ballots. The Postal Service would refuse to send ballots to anyone not on the list. The envelopes would have to meet new design standards, including unique barcodes that have to be checked by the Postal Service.

Is it too late for changes?

While the matter works its way through the courts, states across the nation have already designed, ordered, and paid for ballots that don’t necessarily comply with the new design guidelines (though North Carolina’s Tyson says theirs do).

North Carolina’s ballots start going out Sept. 4. Seven other states, including New York, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, can start sending out their ballots the following week.

“I don’t know of a single state where this could be adopted and rolled out quickly, and that I think is a real problem,” she said.

Trump supporters who have been cheering his push to assert more control over elections hailed the court ruling but expressed concern that time was running out to set up the system for the November election.

Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of the conservative, Texas-based anti-voter-fraud group True the Vote, said she supports the effort but acknowledged the Trump administration faces a daunting challenge in trying to set up the new system with fewer than 70 days to go before Election Day.

“It’s a tall hill to climb, but somebody’s got to do it,” she said.

Even if the courts block the Trump administration from moving ahead with the new plan for November, some voting rights advocates predicted that the president would still look for other ways to impose his policies.

Jared Davidson, an election law attorney at Protect Democracy, said that the Trump administration continues to face legal setbacks in its efforts to impose federal regulations on elections because the Constitution gives states primary responsibility for running elections.

“In the days and weeks ahead I think we can all expect that this administration will throw all kinds of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks,” said Davidson. “But the law could not be clearer that this is an effort to take control over elections by an executive where there is no authority to do that whatsoever.”

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Hundreds of thousands of Arizonans could be removed from the mail voting list in 2027

2026-08-26T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

Arizona could remove hundreds of thousands of voters from its automatic mail ballot list under the provisions of a state law coming to bear next year.

The 2027 removals will be the first under the law, signed in 2021 by former Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican. The statute requires county recorders to remove voters from the early voting list if they don’t cast their mail ballot in federal, state, or certain municipal elections for two consecutive cycles — a four-year period.

That means a voter who didn’t mail or drop off their early ballot in 2023, 2024, or 2025 could be at risk of being removed if they again don’t do so this year, even if they voted in person in one or more elections. But that clock restarts if they choose to cast a mail ballot this November.

The Arizona Secretary of State’s Office was unable to provide an estimate of how many voters statewide could be kicked off the list. Spokesperson Calli Jones said the office was working with INEXL Consulting, the developer behind the state’s voter registration database, to develop coding that would allow them to come up with a list of impacted voters, but did not expect the project to be complete before the general election.

A 2022 study from the Brennan Center for Justice found that about 340,000 Arizonans could have faced removal if the law were implemented at that time. That’s about 12% of the voters who were on the early voting list in 2021. The study also found that nonwhite voters were at higher risk of being removed.

There’s a difference between a voter being removed from Active Early Voting List, or AEVL, and having their registration canceled entirely. Those impacted by the new law will still be able to vote, and they can stay on the list by responding to notices sent by officials in advance of their removal.

Those who don’t take those steps and are ultimately removed from the state’s early voting list would no longer automatically receive a mail ballot for each election, although they still may request to rejoin the list, or make ad hoc asks for mail ballots in future elections.

But research suggests that similar laws in other states have caused voters to turn to other methods of voting, or to stop voting entirely.

For example, Texas’ Senate Bill 1, a sweeping voting law enacted in 2021 that made it harder for voters to apply to receive a mail ballot, changed voting patterns in the next election cycle, according to a report last year from the Brennan Center. In Arizona, where the vast majority of voters cast ballots by mail, those impacts could be amplified, potentially shifting more people to in-person voting and putting additional strain on election infrastructure.

“A policy like this is going to have those sorts of effects on voters, and it’s rooted in misinformation about the prevalence of mail voting fraud,” said Kevin Morris of the Brennan Center, adding that research and audits have consistently shown that voting fraud is extremely rare. “It is really troubling.”

Meanwhile, the law is also posing communications challenges for local election officials. Pima County Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly said it’s complicated to explain to voters that the law won’t remove them from the rolls.

“That is something that I think people are scared of,” said Cázares-Kelly, a Democrat, adding that some are referring to the early voting list removals as a “purge,” which is “creating more fear.”

How Arizona changed its early voting list

Arizona established its mail voting list — initially called the Permanent Early Voting List, or PEVL — in 2007.

As the name suggested, once on the list, voters generally stayed there unless they requested removal. Officials could also scratch them off if they moved, died, or their registration was moved to inactive status or canceled.

Then, Arizona Republicans began pushing for a plethora of election policy changes in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, which President Donald Trump falsely alleged was rigged. The law that changed PEVL to AEVL — Senate Bill 1485 — was introduced by former Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita of Scottsdale, who said it would help prevent fraud by reducing the number of mail ballots sent to people who had moved, died, or didn’t want them.

In Arizona, there are several other ways to ensure voter lists stay clean. Officials use information from the U.S. Postal Service, the Arizona Department of Health Services, and other agencies to flag voters who have moved or died, keeping the rolls up-to-date.

Still, Ducey, who signed the bill into law about an hour after the Arizona Senate passed it on a party-line vote, called it a matter of “election integrity.”

“Let’s be clear — despite all the deceptive and heated rhetoric being used by some partisan activists to lobby against this reform, not a single Arizona voter will lose their right to vote as a result of this new law,” he said in a video on May 11, 2021.

Meanwhile, Democrats described the law as a voter suppression tactic. Then-House Minority Leader Reginald Bolding of Phoenix called it “reprehensible” in a letter to the NFL, which he hoped would commit to pulling the 2023 Super Bowl from Arizona.

The move had been inspired by an incident in Georgia — after Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, signed a law that imposed several new voting restrictions, the MLB withdrew its All-Star Game from Atlanta.

What will happen to voters removed from the list?

Under the law, voters won’t be removed from the state’s early voting list without notice.

In odd-numbered years, county officials are required to send impacted voters a letter to inform them that they could be removed from the list. In 2027, that notice must be sent to voters on or before Jan. 15.

Officials can also opt to also try reaching voters by phone, text, and email, but are not required to do so. Cázares-Kelly said it was “the common understanding that everyone is going to send a notice to their voters,” but that she hadn’t determined whether her office would attempt any other outreach to individual voters impacted by the law.

“We’re focused on the upcoming election,” she said, adding that her staff were also creating “plain language resources” about the law to share broadly next year.

Once the mandated letters are sent, voters have 90 days to confirm in writing if they wish to remain on the list. To do so, they’ll also need to sign a form with their address and date of birth. If they don’t, they’ll be removed.

Still, Morris said there will almost certainly be voters who don’t notice that they’ve been removed from the mail voting list. Some may find out during the following election cycle, when their mail ballot doesn’t show up as usual. Others, he said, may not realize at all.

In Texas, officials were also required to send voters notice if their mail ballot application was rejected under SB 1. But Morris said those messages are “easy to miss in the mail.” His research found that many Texans didn’t reapply for a mail ballot in the general election that fall. He said those effects could be amplified in Arizona.

“The pool of voters that could be impacted by this is an order of magnitude larger than in some of the other states, where maybe only 10% of people are casting a ballot by mail,” Morris said.

He added that the law could ultimately have “downstream effects” at the polls.

“If all of these people suddenly aren’t getting the mail that they were expecting, they are going to start showing up at the vote centers,” Morris said, noting that could cause longer lines, voting materials shortages, and other complications that officials will have to handle moving forward.

Cázares-Kelly said she opposed the law as it made its way through the Arizona Legislature. But she said the version that resulted wasn’t “as terrible as most people think.” When asked if she would’ve opposed the law in its current form, she hesitated.

“I don’t know,” she said, adding that her “kneejerk reaction” was that she’d still be against it. As a voter, she said she’d want to receive her mail ballot “every time, whether or not I choose to use it by mail or if I vote in person.” A mail ballot, she said, also gives voters a chance to review contests in a simpler format than a sample ballot.

To give a fuller answer, Cázares-Kelly said she would need to see how many people the law could impact in Pima County and calculate its financial impact.

“We’re just going to have to wait and see what those numbers look like,” she said.

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

Over 1,300 ballots never made it to voters in Navajo County. That isn’t unusual.

2026-08-19T18:13:36+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

At least 50,000 mail ballots never made it to voters during Arizona’s July 21 primary election.

That number, based on information gathered by Votebeat from 11 of the state’s 15 counties, isn’t out of the ordinary. In fact, it appears roughly in line with that of prior major elections. About 71,000 mail ballots went undelivered statewide during the 2024 general election, according to data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission that represented all of the state’s counties.

Every year, some ballots that are mailed out to voters are returned to election officials because the voter’s address is incorrect or the voter has a forwarding address on file. (In Arizona, ballots legally can’t be forwarded.)

Their return does not necessarily mean those voters were disenfranchised, as they could have voted in person instead. But slowdowns in mail processing and President Donald Trump’s invections against mail voting put voters and advocates nationwide on edge about the U.S. Postal Service’s role in elections. Anxiety is especially acute in Arizona, where the vast majority of voters cast ballots by mail. That has put more attention on the state’s undeliverable ballots.

Those fears were on full display last month in Navajo County, a rural county in the northeast quadrant of the state where Recorder David Marshall said just before the primary that his office was experiencing “an issue” with the U.S. Postal Service.

“We have received over 900 returned ballots — over 900,” Marshall, a Republican who was recently appointed to his post, said in a public meeting on July 14. “Why? Don’t know.”

Later, the number of undelivered ballots in the county rose to more than 1,300 — a figure that continues to tick slightly upward as delayed returns from the Postal Service trickle in. The news quickly spread, drawing extensive media coverage and the attention of Trump himself.

This year, more ballots than usual statewide might have been undeliverable because voters were out of town. Some county recorders told Votebeat that they noticed a slightly higher number of ballots returned with postal codes indicating that the intended recipients were temporarily away. Most chalked that up to the state’s earlier-than-usual primary date. In February, state lawmakers shifted the primary from Aug. 4 to July 21.

But in the Navajo County case, data and records suggest nothing nefarious, or even all that unusual, was afoot.

What data and records show about undeliverable ballots in Navajo County

Votebeat found that Navajo County’s rate of undeliverable ballots was indeed higher than that of other jurisdictions across Arizona during this year’s primary. As of Aug. 12, county officials said 1,377 ballots went undelivered in the rural county, or about 3.9% of the total number of ballots mailed out. By contrast, across the other 10 counties where Votebeat was able to collect data, only 2.3% of ballots were returned undelivered.

But data from the EAC shows Navajo County’s undeliverable ballot rate isn’t unheard of historically in Arizona. During the 2024 general election, for instance, La Paz County saw about 4.4% of its mail ballots returned as undeliverable. In 2022, Coconino and Pinal each received thousands of undeliverable ballots from the Postal Service — about 5.5% and 3.8% of the total number of mail ballots sent to voters by officials, respectively. Statewide, undeliverable ballot rates rose as high as 4.7% in the 2016 general election.

Furthermore, undeliverable ballot rates can vary widely from year to year. Navajo County, for instance, has seen its rate fluctuate from as low as 0.6% to as high as 3.3% in recent general elections.

The data isn’t perfect. Some counties told Votebeat they counted undeliverable ballots in the primary election slightly differently than other counties. The EAC collects data on undeliverable ballots after each general election, but not for primary elections. And in some years, not all counties reported undeliverable ballot data to the EAC.

But records obtained by Votebeat also suggest that Navajo County’s high rate of returned ballots wasn’t because something went wrong with their delivery. Following Marshall’s remarks, county officials asked the Postal Service to examine a sampling of the undeliverable ballots. When the Postal Service did so, it found that nine of the 10 ballots submitted by the county had a valid reason for being returned. The remaining ballot required further investigation.

Officials appear to be backing away from undeliverable ballot fears

Federal, state, and local officials have been working to tease out whether there was an identifiable issue connected to the undelivered ballots in Navajo County — or if the number, while not ideal, came from processes operating as usual.

Initially, some officials — including Marshall in his remarks at the public meeting — appeared to suggest that something may have gone awry. But in recent weeks, the county’s tone has gradually shifted.

For instance, the Navajo County Recorder’s Office said in a July 24 statement that it was working with the Postal Service to “identify any issues that may have occurred during the mailing process.”

Later, on July 31, the office issued an updated statement. It said it had sent an expanded sample of 200 undeliverable ballot envelopes to the Postal Service for review. Of those, the Postal Service found that 66% were returned because the recipient had some type of change-of-address order on file. Others were marked undeliverable because they were addressed to vacant homes or closed postal boxes.

“Returns of ballots occurred in other Arizona counties, demonstrating that this is a routine part of election administration statewide,” the statement read.

Calli Jones, a spokesperson for the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office, told Votebeat on July 30 that her office was working to set up meetings with the Postal Service to “learn more about this situation on their end.” And on Aug. 14, Richie Taylor of the Arizona Attorney General’s Office said his office believed the undeliverable ballots were normal after looking into the matter.

“We’ve spoken to the recorder in Navajo County and they’ve verified that the rejection rate is in line with historical rejection rates, so we don’t believe there’s anything nefarious going on there,” Taylor told Votebeat.

Meanwhile, Cathy Purcell, a spokesperson for the Postal Service, told Votebeat on July 24 that mail carriers returned the ballots to the county “in accordance with proper protocol.”

Can Arizona reduce its undeliverable ballots?

Some number of undeliverable ballots may be normal and a sign that the system is working as intended. Still, undeliverable ballots are far from ideal, and officials in Navajo County say they will work to reduce them in the future.

In a statement, officials said they would begin taking more proactive steps to clean up the county’s voter rolls ahead of November. When ballots are returned as undeliverable, the Navajo County Recorder’s Office will begin sending affected voters a mailed notice that can be forwarded by the Postal Service to their current address, if available.

The office will also seek to email, call, and text voters if their contact information is available in their voter record.

“This additional step will provide multiple ways for voters to receive information, respond, and update their registration,” officials said on July 31.

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

Texas’ mail ballot ID requirements restored by federal appeals court

2026-08-13T21:30:32+00:00

This story was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday restored several pieces of a 2021 Texas election law that overhauled mail-in and assisted voting, overturning a lower court’s block on those provisions.

Five years ago, Texas passed Senate Bill 1, a wide-reaching election law that changed the way local officials administer elections and how some Texans vote, particularly aimed at initiatives Harris County implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic. The law was denounced by voter advocacy groups, civil rights organizations, and Democratic lawmakers, who broke quorum in an attempt to stifle the bill.

After several lawsuits over accessibility concerns created by the new law were consolidated into a single suit, a district judge in March 2025 struck down nine of its provisions. Those blocked provisions included requiring Texans to provide an identification number or Social Security number on mail-in ballot applications and have them match the state’s records. The judge also blocked provisions that create processes for curing defective ballots and require voters and those who assist them in filling out their ballot to sign an oath swearing they did not coerce the voter and disclose how they’re related.

The plaintiffs who sued argued the provisions were overly cumbersome and restrictive for voters with disabilities, and the district judge agreed, ruling they violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. Texas allows voters who are over the age of 65 and those with certain disabilities, among others, to vote by mail.

Wednesday’s 11-page ruling from the 5th Circuit reverses the district judge’s ruling in its entirety, finding that the plaintiffs lacked standing on most of their complaints. The written opinion strongly rebuked the lower courts’ decisions in the suit, noting that appellate judges have “reversed the district court on everything” through the suit’s five years of litigation.

“The bulk of the plaintiffs’ claims fail for lack of standing. One fails on the merits. But none justifies interference with the State Legislature’s efforts to prevent voter fraud and to protect election integrity,” Judge Andrew Oldham wrote in the opinion.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is a defendant in the suit, described the ruling as a “major victory” in a social media post.

The ruling also asserts that mail-in ballots have “long been established” as prone to fraud, and notes that the number of mail-in application or mail-in ballot rejections caused by identification numbers errors dropped from 11% to 2.7% after the law’s implementation. A 2022 study found that 1 in 7 voters who requested a mail ballot in the 2022 primary had their applications or ballots rejected in the wake of SB 1.

Federal judge blocks Trump’s efforts to restrict mail-in voting nationwide

2026-08-12T00:36:58+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Update, Aug. 12, 11:26 a.m.: This story has been updated to include comment from the Justice Department.

What happened?

A federal judge delivered another setback on Tuesday to President Donald Trump’s efforts to restrict mail-in voting during the 2026 midterms, blocking the U.S. Postal Service from taking steps to implement his election-related executive order from earlier this year.

It’s the second legal hold on the order, the first of which is currently pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. Tuesday’s ruling makes it even less likely that the executive order will be in effect for the November election.

What’s the dispute?

Trump issued an executive order in March that called on the Postal Service to create a new system to regulate who could vote by mail and directed states to create special lists of who could request absentee ballots.

The order immediately drew several lawsuits challenging the executive order as unconstitutional. The League of Women Voters and a cross-section of states filed lawsuits in early April. The Postal Service unveiled draft rules to carry out the order in May, but U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani blocked key pillars of the executive order in June as part of the case brought by the states.

At the time, Talwani issued an injunction specifically preventing the federal government from enforcing those provisions of the order against the 24 jurisdictions (23 states and the District of Columbia) that brought the lawsuit. The list includes most Democratic-led and swing states, including Arizona, California, Michigan, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

On Tuesday, Talwani issued an injunction in the separate lawsuit brought by the League of Women Voters and other nonpartisan voting groups — this one blocking the Postal Service from restricting absentee voting across the nation.

Talwani rejected the Trump administration’s argument that courts could not rule on the legality of the Postal Service process since the government has not yet set up the system.

“The court finds it prudent to review the EO now, where less than 90 days pending before the midterms and the millions of citizens who rely on mail voting require clarity as to how or whether they will vote in November,” Talwani wrote in her 27-page ruling.

“The EO—even in the absence of a final rule—is thus causing irreparable harm to Plaintiff Organizations’ members through the confusion it has engendered as to how they may vote in the fast-approaching midterm elections,” the judge wrote.

“This ruling reinforces the clear language of our Constitution: The president plays no role in our elections and he cannot turn the U.S. Postal Service into a tool for disenfranchising voters,” attorneys for the League of Women Voters said in a statement. “Millions of citizens rely on mail voting, and USPS has no authority to determine which of them should receive ballots.”

The White House also responded to the decision on Tuesday. “The entire Trump Administration will continue lawfully enacting the agenda President Trump was elected to enact – which includes the safety and security of American elections,” said spokesperson Lauren Bis.

What happens now?

The ruling throws another wrench in the Trump administration’s efforts to constrain absentee voting.

On July 27, Trump asked the U.S. Supreme Court to lift Talwani’s June injunction by arguing that the lawsuit brought by the collection of Democratic states was premature. The high court is expected to rule on that question any day now, but Tuesday’s decision lowers the stakes of that decision. Even if the Supreme Court lifts the previous injunction, the newer one will still prevent the Postal Service from implementing the executive order, at least for the time being.

The Trump administration could appeal Tuesday’s ruling, just as it did the June one. On Wednesday, the Justice Department said it was “reviewing all options” and did not say how it would respond. “We disagree with the court’s ruling,” the department said in a statement. “The Department remains confident that President Trump’s order to secure federal elections will ultimately be upheld.”

But an appeal would burn precious time. There is already less than two months left before voters start casting absentee ballots — a nearly impossible time frame for the government and elections officials to set up the new system. Appealing Tuesday’s decision to the Supreme Court could take weeks off that ticking clock.

Read more Votebeat coverage of the issue here:

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Trump is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to allow new mail ballot restrictions in the 2026 midterms

2026-08-03T11:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Elections are back before the U.S. Supreme Court: The Trump administration is asking the justices to quickly lift an order blocking its efforts to put new restrictions on mail-in voting for the fast-approaching midterm elections.

It’s unclear how the justices will rule, but the case focuses on a narrow question of whether or not the lower courts issued premature rulings rather than the broader questions about the legality of the executive order.

But no matter what the court decides this time, a series of practical and legal challenges make it increasingly unlikely that the federal government can impose new rules giving the U.S. Postal Service the power to block Americans from voting by mail in November’s elections.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the justice designated to handle emergency appeals from the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, ordered the plaintiff states to respond by Monday to the Trump administration’s filing, and a decision could come any time after that. But there are already fewer than 100 days left until the election, and the U.S. Postal Service itself said in July court filings that it is running out of time to carry out the changes the president is demanding in time for this election.

The heart of the matter is President Donald Trump’s March 2026 executive order, which attempts to restrict mail-in voting by requiring creation of a series of lists of people eligible to vote, including one it requires the U.S. Postal Service to secure from states listing all voters eligible to use mail ballots. The order attempts to give the postal service unprecedented new power to prevent delivery of mail ballots to anyone who is not on these lists.

States, nonprofit groups, and Democratic party committees quickly sued over the order, which they argued was unconstitutional because the president has no authority over elections. Federal courts have since issued conflicting orders on the question of whether blocking major provisions would be premature because government agencies hadn’t yet taken final action to carry out Trump’s orders.

A judge in federal court in Washington, D.C. declined to block the challenged provisions, but last month, in a case brought by states, a federal judge in Massachusetts prevented the Trump administration from moving ahead with the plans, putting the whole issue on hold. Separate appeals courts have now upheld both rulings, leaving the Massachusetts injunction in place for now, which is what prompted the Trump administration to file its emergency appeal last week with the Supreme Court.

Still, “I think everyone agrees that it’s not going to be implemented for 2026,” said Derek Muller, an elections specialist at the University of Notre Dame Law School. “The logistics are so horrific.”

To be clear, the issue the court is now being asked to decide isn’t about the legal merits of the executive order itself, or whether Trump has the authority to issue it. The Trump administration is arguing that the federal courts blocked the executive order prematurely because the government is still drafting the rules, which haven’t been finalized. Until the rules are final, the Trump administration argues, the states can’t prove that there is any harm that should be blocked by the courts, or that agencies won’t carry out the order in a way that complies with the law.

The Massachusetts court’s injunction “is especially indefensible because the agencies are still deliberating over how (if at all) to implement the Order, yet the district court preemptively decided that whatever the agencies may choose to do will necessarily be unlawful,” the Trump administration argued in its 116-page filing.

That’s essentially what the other panel of judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia concluded in a ruling Tuesday when it upheld a lower court’s decision not to block the executive order — though the plaintiffs in that case are nonprofit groups and party committees rather than states.

“The scope of the issues at play” before the Supreme Court “are really, really narrow,” said Danielle Lang, vice president for voting rights and rule of law at the Campaign Legal Center, one of the lawyers involved in bringing the Washington, D.C. case.

And like Muller, Lang said it appears unlikely that the government would have the time to push through the changes before November.

“The kinds of dramatic changes they are asking for in election administration are not the kinds of things that you get done in a few months’ time,” Lang said. “As a practical reality, I don’t think they can do this in any non-chaotic way.”

If the Supreme Court were to side with the Trump administration this time, an army of lawyers across the country is prepared to again ask the courts to step in as soon as the new rules are finalized.

Even the appeals court judges in Washington that agreed the legal challenges were premature also suggested that they had some qualms about the executive order.

“Plaintiffs have identified a number of serious questions concerning the lawfulness of proposed actions if implemented on the threshold of the upcoming federal election,” the court said in its ruling.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Amid USPS delays, Wisconsin officials tell voters to mail their ballots ASAP and voters sue for more options

2026-07-28T09:30:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Ahead of the 2026 midterms, Wisconsin elections officials are planning for the potential of mail ballot delivery delays by encouraging voters to mail back absentee ballots as soon as possible or return them some other way.

And on Friday, the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin sued the Wisconsin Elections Commission, arguing voters should be able to cast provisional ballots on Election Day if they don’t think their mail ballot will arrive on time.

Unlike many other states, which allow ballots to be counted if they arrive after Election Day as long as they’re postmarked by that day and arrive by a set cutoff time, Wisconsin requires mail ballots to arrive by 8 p.m. on Election Day to be counted.

Historically, the USPS and Wisconsin Elections Commission advised voters that mailing back a ballot a week ahead of Election Day would suffice. Now, the commission and municipal clerks are calling on voters to allow more time.

Milwaukee election chief Paulina Gutiérrez reported receiving only 20 mail ballots on Election Day in April’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election — a low number even for a small election — but more than 269 late ballots on the day after, which Gutiérrez said was a high number for an election of that size. Seeking to avoid such a high number of late-arriving ballots in the future, Gutiérrez told Votebeat that for the upcoming August election, the city opened its ballot drop boxes four weeks sooner than it would have in the past.

“We are encouraging voters to use our dropboxes or drop off their absentee ballot at [early in-person voting sites],” she said.

If they’re unable to do either, Gutiérrez said voters should mail back their ballots at least two weeks ahead of Election Day.

In Madison, which received more than 100 late ballots in April — also more than what’s typical — City Clerk Lydia McComas told Votebeat that drop boxes open three weeks ahead of the August election.

“We emphasize this is a convenient and far faster option than returning an absentee ballot via USPS,” she said.

Many election officials observe mail delays

These concerns are shared by election officials across the state.

In a recent survey, two-thirds of Wisconsin election officials said they observed problems with absentee ballot mail delivery in the April election. About one-third of officials said voters had complained to them about mail delays.

Nearly 40% said that mail performance in the election was somewhat or much worse than mail performance in past elections.

That experience isn’t universal. Vernon County Clerk Jerry Pedretti, who’s also clerk of the separate town and village of Genoa, told Votebeat that rural USPS workers recognize absentee ballots from the envelopes and make “every effort to make sure that they’re getting them delivered.”

Similarly, Buffalo County Clerk Lisa Schmitt said a couple of ballots arrived after Election Day in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election but problems weren’t major. That was likely a result of postmasters keeping the mail local rather than sending it out via Minnesota for processing, which she said is the typical procedure for non-election mail.

Nonetheless,commissioners at the Wisconsin Elections Commission are concerned about the delays. On MyVote, a website for voters to request ballots, the commission still includes the USPS recommendation for voters to return mail ballots at least seven days before Election Day. But in June, the commission’s new election manual and guidance to voters went further, suggesting at least 10 days before Election Day.

At a meeting in early July, commissioners discussed this updated guidance. “I’m concerned about us just saying 10 days is enough,” Democratic commissioner Mark Thomsen said at the meeting.

USPS spokesperson Desai Abdul-Razzaaq said that he is confident the Postal Service will perform well in the upcoming elections. While he said the USPS takes officials’ concerns from the April election seriously, he said “the overwhelming majority of Election Mail was processed and delivered within established service standards.”

Voters sue for ability to cast provisional ballots

Amid these delays, voters are challenging commission guidance prohibiting voters from casting in-person ballots on Election Day if they think their mail ballot might arrive too late to be counted.

The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin said the commission’s guidance violates the right to vote enshrined in the Wisconsin Constitution, and is calling on a Dane County Circuit Court judge to allow voters to cast provisional ballots if they think their ballots might arrive late.

Unlike standard in-person ballots, which generally go directly from the person casting them to a tabulator, provisional ballots are segregated and verified and counted later on, once election officials determine they are validly cast. The league is asking for mail voters to be able to cast provisional ballots, and only have them counted if their mail ballots don’t arrive on time.

State law says that a voter who mails or delivers an absentee ballot to a clerk isn’t permitted to vote in person in the same election on Election Day. But the league said the commission is too narrowly interpreting that law in its rule prohibiting voters from casting ballots if they suspect their ballot will arrive late.

“This rule risks denying Impacted Voters their right to vote — the right most preservative of all others,” the lawsuit states.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Why thousands of Michigan votes likely won’t be counted in this year’s primary

2026-07-23T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

This is an updated version of a story originally published Aug. 2, 2024.

Every other August in Michigan, thousands of votes are rejected because voters don’t understand or pay attention to the directions on their primary ballot.

The problem occurs when voters do something called crossover voting, where, either intentionally or by accident, they vote for candidates from different parties on the same ballot. In a general election, that would not be a problem. And in a presidential primary, it wouldn’t be possible.

But in the August primary elections — where candidates for federal- and state-level positions are selected — a crossover vote that doesn’t get caught by the voter means officials can’t count any of the votes on the partisan section of the ballot. And many voters, particularly if they vote absentee, will never know that their partisan votes didn’t count, if they don’t closely read instructions or don’t respond to an on-screen alert when their ballot gets flagged by the tabulator.

“I think that sometimes, it can be a source of confusion,” said Elizabeth Hundley, the Livingston County clerk.

It’s difficult to tell exactly how many crossover votes are cast in Michigan’s August primaries; the state doesn’t keep track of the number, and neither do many of the counties Votebeat surveyed. But the counties that do keep track suggest the number is significant, meaning there are likely thousands of Michiganders whose votes on the partisan section aren’t counted each election. (Votes in the other sections of the primary ballot — for nonpartisan candidates, proposals, or millages — are unaffected by the mistake and still get counted.)

In 2022 in Macomb County, for example, nearly 6,300 ballots — about 3.6% of the more than 175,000 ballots cast in the county’s August primary — saw their partisan votes rejected due to a crossover vote, officials said.

Washtenaw County doesn’t explicitly track rejections due to crossover votes, but Votebeat’s analysis of vote data from the county suggests the total was close to 1,400 votes in 2022, or roughly 1.5% of the 87,526 votes cast there. Even if that relatively low percentage is consistent statewide, Washtenaw County Clerk Lawrence Kestenbaum said, it would still mean thousands of votes across Michigan are being excluded from the count.

The rate of crossover voting is a significant improvement over the “punch-card days,” Kestenbaum said, when “something like 5% to 15% of primary ballots would not have partisan votes counted.” Punch-card ballots, which were largely phased out across the state by the early 2000s, didn’t enable voters to catch their mistakes in the way today’s electronic tabulators do.

That’s why the problem primarily affects absentee voters today, clerks say. If an in-person voter selects candidates from different parties, the tabulator will show a warning about the crossover,” explained Meredith Place, the Kalamazoo County clerk. The voter can then either spoil their ballot and get a new one, or else they can cast it as is. If they do so, their partisan votes won’t count, but their nonpartisan selections will.

Without those alerts, absentee voters are much less likely to become aware of the issue. And if they do notice, spoiling an absentee ballot is a more involved process.

In Michigan, nearly 2 million people have requested absentee ballots for August’s election, according to the state’s voting dashboard. More than 610,000 of those have already been returned as of Wednesday.

Ballot instructions don’t necessarily prevent crossover voting

It’s not that voters aren’t given instructions on how to mark their ballots correctly, clerks say. Those who vote in person, either early or on Election Day, will get instructions from poll workers to stay within a single party column. There are also instructions printed on the top of ballots that tell voters to choose only one party, and many polling places will have signage to further warn voters.

With mail ballots, there is an included instruction sheet that tells voters in capital letters: “YOU MAY VOTE IN ONE PARTY SECTION ONLY; YOU CANNOT ‘SPLIT YOUR TICKET.’ IF YOU VOTE IN MORE THAN ONE PARTY SECTION, YOUR PARTISAN BALLOT WILL BE REJECTED.”

But still, there are enough places for confusion that many voters miss the messaging altogether.

For one thing, the August ballot is not like the others. In Michigan’s presidential primary, voters have to request a specific party’s ballot, so there’s no risk of a crossover vote. In November’s general election, voters can vote straight-ticket or go back and forth as they please for each office.

But August — technically considered an open primary, because voters don’t have to declare a party — is ripe for problems, because voters may not be aware of the risk, especially if they’ve voted before and expect this ballot to be like the others.

“If we did the regular primary the way we do the presidential, this problem wouldn’t exist at all,” Kestenbaum said.

Another concern comes from the design of the ballot itself, which falls short of best practices in several ways, according to Whitney Quesenbery, director of the nonprofit Center for Civic Design, which helps promote best practices for ballots and other election tools across the country.

Among the issues Quesenbery flagged: The text on the ballot itself is small. The separate instruction sheet that comes with the mail ballot has language that’s set by state law but is potentially confusing, and the relevant warning comes after information on how to fill in a bubble, which could lead voters to ignore it altogether. The columns for separate parties don’t have a lot of visual space between them.

“This was all written into law by lawyers, not by the people who have to explain to people how things work,” Quesenbery said. “They don’t give enough attention to accurately explaining a complex system.”

Largely, clerks say they’re doing all they can to make sure voters are aware they can vote in only one column. Beyond that, there’s a level of what Hundley called “personal responsibility by voters” to make sure they read instructions.

Crossover voting may require a legislative fix

But some clerks are supportive of a change, because, as Hundley also said, an election administrator’s goal is to make sure “the will of the people is accurately reflected.”

Any significant changes would require changing state law. While legislators have discussed changing how certain offices are selected, pivoting from conventions to primaries, few have discussed altering the primaries themselves.

Rep. Penelope Tsernoglou, a Democrat from East Lansing who used to head the elections committee in the Michigan House, said she’s “always open” to proposals to try to address concerns people have about voting.

Before making any major moves, she said she would want more information on the scope of the problem. In the meantime, she said she thought more voter education might help.

“If people are really struggling with this, I’d want to look at it and consider what we can do,” Tsernoglou said. “I want to do all we can to make voting fair, accessible and easy for everyone.”

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Green Bay clerk’s office faces investigations after duplicate ballot errors in a second consecutive election

2026-07-15T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Green Bay and state officials over the last month have authorized separate investigations to better understand how city election officials accidentally sent voters duplicate absentee ballots in two consecutive elections this year, including for the upcoming August 11 primary.

This set of investigations marks an unprecedented level of scrutiny for Green Bay Clerk Celestine Jeffreys, who has repeatedly come under fire for election administration mistakes and was placed on leave by Mayor Eric Genrich on July 9.

Jeffreys, whose job is nonpartisan, has served as clerk since 2021, running elections in the state’s third largest city. City spokesperson Michael Bergman said in a statement that the latest errors in the clerk’s office “are unacceptable.”

On Monday, city elected officials and nearby residents weighed in at a public meeting.

“I would hope that when you go through this process, you really evaluate how things are done, because you may not have the right person in that job,” former Brown County Clerk Sandy Juno, a Republican, said at the Monday meeting.

Others raised concerns that Jeffreys’ suspension could hurt the city’s preparedness for the upcoming primary election.

“I worry that Celestine is now sitting at home when she’s not able to prepare for the August 11th election,” said Jane Benson, a Suamico resident and a longtime poll worker. “This is a really busy time for any clerk, and I feel like we’re hamstringing the city from having more reliable elections by sending her home.”

Investigations arose quickly after second error

Before the Wisconsin Supreme Court election in April, Jeffreys’ office issued 152 duplicate absentee ballots, an error that drew scrutiny and prompted the Wisconsin Republican Party to file an administrative complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission. Election officials at the time made an effort to explain to voters how the state’s system prevents double votes from being counted.

When it happened again, though, officials on all sides became more critical of the Green Bay clerk.

“I am really concerned that, first of all, it happened once,” Ann Jacobs, a Democratic appointee on the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said at the commission’s July 9 meeting, before commissioners voted to investigate the clerk’s office. “But then for the exact same error to happen a second time weeks later is unconscionable.”

Jeffreys, who didn’t respond to a request for comment, sought to explain the first error in an April response to the administrative complaint filed against her, describing it as the downstream result of a printing error.

Typically, after absentee ballot certificate labels — featuring voters’ names and addresses — are placed on absentee envelopes, Green Bay election officials put a copy of regular paper with the same label information in a folder to be retained for recordkeeping purposes, Logan Wood, an attorney for Jeffreys, said in a response to the complaint.

But in the April instance, Wood said, that sheet of paper wasn’t placed in a folder after the ballots were sent out — it’s unclear why. An election worker then mistakenly thought the batch of labels hadn’t been printed at all and made a duplicate copy, Wood said. The duplicate batch of labels was then affixed to envelopes and sent out to voters.

In late June, Jeffreys announced that election officials had again printed and mailed out duplicate ballots for the midterm primary election in August due to a certificate label printing error.

“I regret the printing error occurred,” she said in the June statement, without elaborating on how such an error happened again or how many duplicate ballots were sent out. She noted that affected voters will also receive instructions by mail on submitting only one ballot.

Jacobs said the errors can likely be attributed in part to city election officials using a tool other than WisVote, the state’s voter registration database and election management system, to print labels for absentee ballots. WisVote doesn’t allow officials to generate duplicate labels, she said, but other systems can lack that failsafe.

She said it would be helpful to know which system Jeffreys used, how workers exported the labels, who printed them, and why the duplication wasn’t caught.

“We can’t fix it if we don’t know how it happened, and I don’t think we can give proper direction to the clerk of Green Bay without knowing how this happened,” she said.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission probe, unanimously authorized at the July 9 meeting, seeks a response from the clerk’s office by July 31 explaining how the office accidentally sent duplicate absentee ballots to voters in two consecutive elections and how the city will ensure that only one ballot gets cast per voter.

The commission told the clerk’s office to come up with a plan by Aug. 14 to outline how the city plans to prevent another repeat error. The commission will separately investigate whether the city clerk’s office violated any laws. Meanwhile, city officials announced on July 9 that they’re also conducting an internal review into the mistakes.

It’s unclear if or when Jeffreys will return to her post. Bergman, the city spokesperson, said the city won’t comment on the matter until the city and state finish investigating the errors. Green Bay Deputy Clerk Stacy Menke is running elections in the meantime.

Jeffreys previously came under fire for assorted complaints

The sending of duplicate ballots isn’t the first election administration issue that Jeffreys has faced in Green Bay since transitioning in 2021 from being the mayor’s chief of staff to the clerk.

In late 2023, the Wisconsin Elections Commission stated that Jeffreys’ office’s policy of letting a third party return ballots for somebody who is “sick” but not disabled likely violated state law.

In 2024, Jeffreys admitted that, for several elections in a row, she had not followed the state’s legal requirement to deactivate the voter registrations of Election Day registrants after postcards sent by clerks to their stated mailing addresses were returned as undeliverable. Lindsay Mather, an attorney representing Jeffreys at the time, said the city clerk had also not been referring those voters to the district attorney, as required.

“The failure to do so was inadvertent and due to a lack of awareness of the statutory requirements, and not the result of any willful violation of state law,” Mather said.

Juno, the former Brown County clerk, said at the commission’s July 9 meeting that when somebody makes as many errors as Jeffreys has, that person doesn’t have the skills to be a good clerk.

But Sam Liebert, a former municipal clerk who served in nonpartisan roles, said that while accountability is important, highly publicized investigations could further increase clerk turnover in Wisconsin and dissuade other people from becoming clerks. He said the commission shouldn’t create an expectation for clerks to be perfect 100% of the time.

“Frivolous lawsuits and politically charged attacks over human error do not strengthen the systems that ensure our freedoms to vote,” he said. “They undermine confidence in these very systems that successfully prevented any improper votes from being counted.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Trump administration asks federal judge to quickly lift ban on planned mail voting restrictions

2026-07-02T17:29:31+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

The Trump administration is asking a federal judge to quickly lift her recent ruling against major provisions of a presidential executive order on elections, arguing in an appeal that the court’s action will effectively prevent the government from putting new voting restrictions in place before the November election.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani halted President Donald Trump’s efforts to create centralized lists of adult citizens and give the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented authority over who can vote by mail. Her 37-page ruling concluded that the president did not have the constitutional authority to regulate state elections, as his March executive order tried to do.

The executive order directed the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration to create a nationwide list of verified U.S. citizens over 18, and thus presumably eligible to vote in federal elections. It also called on the U.S. Postal Service to create a system to handle and accept mail-in ballots only from voters on preapproved lists.

Talwani’s order prevents the federal government from enforcing those provisions of the order against the 24 jurisdictions (23 states and the District of Columbia) whose attorneys general and governors brought the lawsuit in federal court in Massachusetts. The list includes most Democratic-led and swing states, including Arizona, California, Michigan, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

This week, the Trump administration appealed Talwani’s ruling to the First Circuit Court of Appeals and said it is still proceeding with its efforts to set up the new system for the rest of the states. But it warned that the judge’s order will make it impossible for the U.S. Postal Service to create a bifurcated system for the November election, even if the administration ultimately prevails on appeal. Government attorneys asked Talwani to lift her ban by Monday.

The request for a quick decision suggests that the Trump administration may be trying to speed things up so the case reaches the U.S. Supreme Court as soon as possible.

“Operationally, it would not be possible for us to put a two-tiered system in place where one set of rules apply to the ballot mail of the Plaintiff States, and another applies to the remaining states,” Steven Monteith, the Postal Service’s chief customer and marketing officer and executive vice president, said in a court filing. “Doing so would cause operational confusion and significantly increase the complexity and efficiency of implementing any final rule.”

But the Trump administration’s nationwide efforts to use the Postal Service to regulate who gets ballots also hit a separate legal roadblock this week when another federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that the executive order violates a years-old agreement requiring the federal government to ensure voters who request mail-in ballots get them in time to ensure they can be counted.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan concluded that the Trump administration’s plans to send ballots only to voters on preapproved lists breached a 2021 agreement between the Postal Service and the NAACP meant to ensure that the agency prioritized ballot delivery. In contrast to Talwani’s ruling, Sullivan’s decision applies nationwide.

“These proposed rules directly undermine commitments that the Postal Service made to ensure mail-in ballots are delivered and counted,” said Anthony Ashton, senior associate general counsel for the NAACP, in a statement.

The U.S. Postal Service and Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Supreme Court allows states to accept mail ballots after Election Day, rejecting Republican challenge to voting access

2026-06-29T16:38:52+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that states can count mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, as long as they are properly postmarked — a key victory for voting rights advocates and another setback to President Donald Trump’s efforts to crack down on absentee voting.

In an uncommon 5-4 ruling, the justices found that nothing in federal law prevents states from enacting grace periods for absentee ballots to be received, as long as they are actually cast and mailed by Election Day. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia currently have such grace periods.

The case, Watson v. Republican National Committee, centered on a Mississippi law that allowed ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted as long as they arrived up to five business days later. The national and state Republican parties challenged the law in 2024, arguing that, because Election Day is set by federal law, states should not be about to count ballots received after it.

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A federal judge initially upheld Mississippi’s law, but an appeals court sided with the Republicans who challenged the ballot rules. Mississippi then brought its case to the Supreme Court in March.

The high court eventually sided with Mississippi. “The electorate’s choice is made when voting is complete, not when ballots are received,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the majority opinion. “The election-day statutes say nothing about ballot receipt, and we cannot add to the words Congress chose.”

The ruling crossed ideological lines, with conservatives Barrett and Chief Justice John Roberts joining liberal Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor in the majority.

The status-quo ruling was good news for those who worried that eliminating the absentee-ballot grace period would disenfranchise voters. A Votebeat analysis of data from 11 of the 15 jurisdictions with grace periods found that more than 745,000 absentee ballots arrived after Election Day in 2024, representing no more than roughly 3 percent of the total vote in any state.

“The Court’s decision is a direct message to all voters who rely on mail ballots, including military and overseas voters, rural voters, seniors, and people with disabilities: Your voices matter equally to voters who can easily access a polling place,” said Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan voting security group. “This ruling ensures that a postal delay outside of any voter’s control does not erase a lawfully cast ballot and supports election officials’ ability to capture the will of voters.”

Carolina Lopez, executive director of the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions, said she was pleasantly surprised by the court ruling. She said the decision would come as a relief to election administrators who weren’t sure when the absentee ballot receipt deadlines would be in their states.

“For election offices, this clarity matters,” she said.

Republicans, however, criticized the ruling. “Democrats are inviting chaos at the ballot box by allowing elections to drag on for days and weeks after voters cast their ballots,” Joe Gruters, chairman of the RNC, said in a statement. “Republicans are not going to be deterred by this decision, and the RNC will keep fighting to have elections end on Election Day as Americans want.”

In a post on social media, Trump called the ruling a “tremendous loss” and said it should be a catalyst for Congress to pass his long-stalled election overhaul, the SAVE America Act.

“There is only one reason to oppose — CHEATING!” Trump wrote. Studies show that mail voting fraud is exceedingly rare, accounting for only 0.000043% of total mail ballots cast, on average, in the 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 general elections.

Trump has long criticized mail-in ballots, blaming them for delayed election results and arguing unsuccessfully in court that they cost him the 2020 presidential election.

“We should know the result of the election on Nov. 3, the evening of Nov. 3,” Trump said on the campaign trail in 2020. “That’s the way it’s been and that’s the way it should be.”

As post-Election Day vote tallies in key states that year showed a swing toward Democrat Joe Biden, Trump called for a halt to counting ballots. The late swing reflected timing, not fraud: Studies show misinformation made Republicans more wary of mail voting in 2020, so later-counted mail ballots skewed Democratic.

“STOP THE COUNT!” Trump wrote on social media two days after Election Day. “ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!”

Last year, Trump issued an executive order that gave the federal government power to withhold federal funding to states that allowed ballots to be counted if they arrived after Election Day. Several states sued over the order, and federal courts have largely blocked it from taking effect.

On Monday, conservative Justice Samuel Alito embraced Trump’s arguments in his dissent. Alito argued that the ruling “creates a serious risk of further undermining public confidence in our elections and our system of self-government.”

In the wake of the ruling, Mississippi’s Republican attorney general urged the state legislature to eliminate the state’s grace period anyway.

“I am hopeful that the Mississippi Legislature will take this opportunity to amend the law and require absentee ballots be received on the same day ballots are cast at the polling place,” said Attorney General Lynn Fitch. “President Trump is right to prioritize improving public trust in our elections.”

During two hours of oral arguments in March, some conservative Supreme Court justices pressed the lawyers about whether late-arriving ballots could create the perception of voter fraud. At the time, Alito asked whether “confidence in outcomes can be seriously undermined if the apparent outcome of the election on the day after the polls close is radically flipped by the acceptance later of a big stash of ballots that flip the election.”

“We don’t have Election Day anymore,” Alito said. “We have election month, or we have election months.”

The more liberal justices questioned the impact that nullifying Mississippi’s law could have on voting by Americans and soldiers living overseas.

“You believe that absentee voting by the military and overseas voters, the… federal laws under which states have proceeded with respect to those votes are illegal?” asked Sotomayor.

Dion Nissenbaum is a senior national reporter for Votebeat and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Federal judge blocks key pillars of Trump executive order restricting mail voting in 2026 election

2026-06-25T15:14:37+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Update, June 25, 2:05 p.m.: This story has been updated to include comments responding to the ruling.

A federal judge on Thursday blocked key pillars of President Donald Trump’s efforts to overhaul the 2026 elections, declaring unconstitutional his attempts to create centralized lists of adult citizens and giving the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented authority over who can vote by mail.

The 37-page ruling by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani concluded that the president did not have the constitutional authority to regulate state elections as he tried to do in a March executive order.

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Talwani’s decision came one day after the head of the Postal Service said the agency would refuse to deliver mail-in ballots to voters that were not on lists approved by the federal government, making explicit what the agency’s proposed new rules had previously implied.

In her ruling, Talwani said that the federal government could not use the postal system to regulate who gets ballots.

“No law enacted by Congress delegates authority to control mail-in voting to USPS,” Talwani wrote.

Talwani issued an injunction specifically preventing the federal government from enforcing those provisions of the order against the 24 jurisdictions (23 states and the District of Columbia) whose attorneys general and governors brought the lawsuit. The list includes most Democratic-led and swing states, including Arizona, California, Michigan, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

However, the injunction applies only to this year’s elections. Talwani granted the Trump administration’s motion to dismiss the plaintiffs’ legal challenges to the executive order as not yet ripe when it comes to future elections.

The White House implied that it would appeal the ruling. In a statement, Abigail Jackson, a spokeswoman, said the administration is “confident that we will ultimately prevail.” The U.S. Postal Service didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Some Democratic secretaries of state who brought the case hailed the ruling as a major victory for voters.

“Trump will not be able to use the Postal Service to control which voters receive a mail ballot, and cannot use the DOJ to intimidate election officials into following his unlawful order,” said Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold. “The Constitution is clear: States run elections, not Trump. This is a major victory for American democracy.”

The ruling is the latest in a series of judicial rebukes to Trump’s efforts to impose federal control over American elections, something that the Constitution leaves to Congress and the states.

The executive order is the second election-related one issued by Trump. The first one, issued in March 2025, sought to require prospective voters to prove their citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections and impose restrictions on states accepting mail-in ballots after Election Day. Federal courts have so far blocked major portions of the first executive order, including the effort to require documented proof of citizenship when registering to vote.

During the hearing in the case over the second order, in early June, Talwani expressed concerns about the executive order.

“What’s the harm if I say no one can use this list for the November election?” Talwani asked.

The Trump administration has cast the president’s efforts as an attempt to compel federal agencies to enforce existing laws barring noncitizens from voting in elections.

Trump has consistently targeted America’s electoral system and, without evidence, accused Democrats across the nation of “rigging” elections.

The president has repeatedly claimed that he was cheated out of the presidency in 2020 when he lost to Democrat Joe Biden, even though federal judges, state elections officials, and independent investigations have repeatedly debunked those allegations.

Before Thursday’s ruling, the Trump administration had been forging ahead with implementing the executive order.

A different federal judge declined in late May to block major parts of the executive order, arguing that the issue was premature because the U.S. Postal Service had yet to take any steps to set up the new system. The following day, the Postal Service unveiled its proposed rules, which would give the agency the power to block delivery of mail-in ballots to Americans across the nation unless they were on a verified list of voters.

And in early June, the Trump administration said that it was taking steps to create a new nationwide mechanism aimed at verifying voter citizenship, per the executive order.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Republican legislators put measure to change voting procedures on November ballot

2026-06-13T16:57:48+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

In a contentious late-night vote, the Republican-controlled Arizona Legislature on Friday placed a measure on the November ballot that, if passed by voters, would significantly alter voting in the state.

The measure, HCR 2001, would make various changes to voting procedures, most notably requiring all voters, even those who vote by mail, to provide “valid government-issued proof of identity.” If voters approve the measure, it would take effect in 2028.

State lawmakers voted along party lines to pass the referral, also known as the Fast, Accurate, Secure, Transparent Election Results Act. In Arizona, legislators can refer measures to the ballot with a simple majority vote in both chambers, bypassing Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs’ veto pen.

State law already mandates that voters casting ballots in person show photo ID or two non-photo documents bearing their name and address, such as a utility bill. But the vast majority of the state’s voters cast ballots by mail. State law currently does not require these voters to provide ID, although they do have to provide identification upon registering to vote and sign their ballot envelopes when voting. Those signatures are then compared against their signatures on file to safeguard against voter fraud.

It’s unclear exactly how mail voters might prove their identity should the measure pass in November. State Rep. Alex Kolodin, a Scottsdale Republican who sponsored the legislation in the Arizona House and is running for secretary of state, told members of the Senate Judiciary and Election Committee in March that there were “many potential options,” including a system by which county recorders would issue each voter a unique identification number and require them to write the last four digits of it on their ballot envelope.

He suggested state lawmakers should revisit the topic next year if voters approve the measure.

The measure is part of a national movement by Republicans to restrict voting by mail. Earlier this week, the GOP-controlled Ohio legislature passed a similar photo ID requirement for mail voters, sending it to Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine for his signature. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump issued an executive order in March giving the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented oversight over mail voting. That order has been challenged in court, and it remains to be seen if it will be implemented for the 2026 election.

“For years, the people of Arizona have been calling out for real election reform,” Kolodin said in March, adding that tightening voter ID requirements was also a priority of the Trump administration. “This measure gives them the opportunity to take it into their own hands.”

Voter ID measure aims to speed up vote-counting

Among the other changes the measure would make is the one that inspired its acronym, the FAST Election Results Act.

It would require counties to give voters who drop off their mail ballot at a polling place on Election Day the option to have their ballot counted on site, rather than transported back to a central location for tabulation. That could speed up the reporting of election results without “even a minor inconvenience” to voters, per Kolodin.

A similar law, passed in 2024, just took effect this year. That law gives mail voters the option to show ID when dropping off their ballot, eliminating the need to check their signature later.

But unlike state lawmakers’ proposal, that law does not require counties to physically count those ballots at voting sites. Most counties currently transport all ballots back to a central election office after voting ends to tabulate them.

Jen Marson, executive director of the Arizona Association of Counties, said in March that the measure would pose huge financial and logistical challenges for those counties. At the time, the measure would have taken effect immediately after passage, giving counties little to no time to adjust.

The version of the measure that ultimately passed, however, is not effective until 2028 and includes a provision requiring the state to fund new equipment and other costs associated with its implementation.

Marson did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Friday.

The legislation would also prohibit noncitizens from contributing money to influence state elections and prohibit any candidates from knowingly accepting such contributions. Additionally, it contains a provision asserting that the state’s elections “shall be decided solely by the votes of eligible citizen voters.”

Some other provisions of the measure are already in state and federal law, including that only U.S. citizens are eligible to register to vote. Still, Republicans said on the floor that the legislation addressed many concerns their constituents have about the integrity of the state’s elections, despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud or a rigged vote.

“These reforms are necessary,” Rep. Neal Carter, a Republican from San Tan Valley, said on Friday. “They really are.”

But Democrats in both chambers viewed it differently. On Friday, they repeatedly described it as an attack on mail voting, which is wildly popular in Arizona.

“The intention of this is to eliminate early voting,” said Sen. Analise Ortiz, a Democrat from Phoenix. “We shouldn’t be tiptoeing around the impact of this, because what it means is that senior citizens, rural voters, tribal voters, people with disabilities, people who work multiple jobs and can’t wait in long lines, are going to lose their access to vote by mail. That is shameful.”

Voting-rights advocates propose counterinitiative

The measure may not be the only voting-related question on the November ballot.

A group called Protect the Vote Arizona is collecting signatures to qualify a different ballot initiative that would counteract the Republican-supported one.

That measure, the Free, Fair and Secure Elections Act, would enshrine a fundamental right to vote in person at countywide polling places or by early ballot in the state constitution.

It would further prescribe that voters who sign up to get a ballot by mail keep getting one until they move, die, or opt out — canceling out a state law scheduled to take effect next year that would remove voters from the early voting list if they haven’t voted using a mail ballot in more than two years. And it would codify the state’s current rules around voter ID in the state constitution to prevent new mandates from being placed on mail voters.

In Arizona, if two measures with conflicting provisions both pass, whichever one receives more votes takes effect.

It’s unclear exactly who is funding the group behind the initiative. Protect the Vote Arizona’s officers have a history of working with left-leaning politicians and causes. But Stacy Pearson of Lumen Strategies, which is helping manage the campaign, said the effort was “grassroots.”

“We didn’t start with big funders telling us what to do,” Pearson said. “We started with, there’s an opportunity here in Arizona to protect what works.”

The organization had not received any donations as of March 31, according to a campaign finance report. It will file its next report on July 15.

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

Here’s why California’s election results take time

2026-06-08T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

President Donald Trump, a Republican, quickly took to social media after California’s primary on Tuesday to accuse Democrats in late-night posts of trying to steal the election, pointing to the state’s long timeline for counting votes and large share of mail-in ballots. He asserted that the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles was investigating. On Friday, Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor for Los Angeles, said he is overseeing “multiple election fraud investigations” in California.

“We will follow the evidence wherever it leads and prosecute any violations of federal election law to the fullest extent,” he wrote on X. “My office will not look the other way. We will investigate and prosecute. Every legal vote deserves to be counted. Every illegal vote cancels one out.” For their part, multiple California officials said — again — that the state’s long counting time doesn’t mean anything is wrong.

Why does it take so long for California to count votes and declare winners? The question has dogged the Golden State for years and drawn additional scrutiny because of a partisan divide in voting methods. Republicans have long lamented that their candidates lead in early results and watch their advantage vanish as mail-in ballots are counted in the days and weeks after Election Day. But while Republicans claim this is evidence of fraud, it actually reflects the fact that Republicans are more likely to vote in person and Democrats more likely to vote by mail — meaning more Democratic votes get counted later in the process.

By Friday afternoon, California voters still didn’t know which candidates for governor and Los Angeles mayor would be on the November ballot.

California is one of eight states that sends mail-in ballots to all registered voters. And a majority of California voters — nearly 90% in last year’s special election — use them. The Catch-22 is that it takes elections officials a lot longer to verify mail-in ballots than it takes to confirm in-person voting, creating long delays while they make sure there is no fraud.

And in California, a large number of voters drop off their mail-in ballots on or right before election day, creating a huge bottleneck of ballots that have to go through a signature check and other steps to make sure the vote can be counted.

Kim Alexander, founder and president of the California Voter Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group, refers to it as the “pig in the python” problem.

“The truth is we are taking extra steps to ensure the voting process is accessible and the vote count is accurate and reliable, and that’s why it takes a long time,” said Alexander.

Delays are compounded by state laws that allow elections officials to accept ballots postmarked by Election Day that arrive up to seven days later, and a lengthy process that requires counties to inform voters if there are problems with their mail-in ballots — such as missing signatures — that they usually have several weeks to fix.

Jesse Salinas, the voter registrar, assessor, and clerk-recorder of California’s Yolo County who serves as president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials, said there is a tradeoff between speed and security.

“If you want speed, not as many people’s votes are going to be counted that could legitimately be counted,” he said. “So this tension exists between accessibility and speed.”

California leaders admit there is a problem. “We wish the votes were counted faster, too,” Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, wrote on social media.

Two decades ago, California used to count 80% of its ballots within the first two days after an election, according to a California Voter Foundation analysis. That fell to 50% in 2022. The state has gone some ways toward reversing the decline, with the figure rising to 66% in November 2024.

More resources could speed things up

One unique factor for California is its size. California is home to 23 million registered voters, far more than any other state. (Texas comes closest, with about 18.7 million registered voters.)

Last year, Newsom signed a law that requires California counties to count most votes within 13 days of the election. This is the first election where we will see whether that speeds things up. Counties can ask for an extension, and they still have up to 30 days to certify the results, so the law only goes so far.

Local election officials and voter advocates say another major issue is funding, and the state doesn’t provide counties with the money they need to speed up counting.

“If I have more space, more equipment, and more staffing, things could be done quicker,” Salinas said.

Voting rights advocates like Alexander worry that the long vote counts, and the persistent criticism coming from the White House and others, are taking a toll on American confidence in the electoral system. One recent study found that Americans’ trust in elections fell from about 67% to 60% when people heard about unexplained delays in results. Another study found that voter trust that votes will be accurately counted in the upcoming election fell from 77% in 2024 to 60% this year.

“I do see voter confidence eroding and the long vote count doesn’t help restore it,” said Alexander. “Even people who aren’t buying into those myths and disinformation, people who trust the process, ask why we have to wait so long for the vote count. It allows lies to spread and conspiracy theories to grow, and we need to minimize the opportunity for nefarious actors to cast doubt on the reliability of our results.”

Mindy Romero, director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy in California, challenged the narrative that California has a problem and suggested that people should look at the issue from a different perspective.

“We don’t have a vote counting problem. We have a lot of votes,” she said.

Along with more money for counties and expanded voter education efforts, Romero suggested steps to shorten the California timeline for certifying results.

“Anything structurally will be considered voter suppression by voters,” she said, “and you have to think about weighing the size of the problem that you’re trying to fix.”

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

New study finds that ballot curing helps more mail ballots get counted

2026-06-03T19:07:53+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Mail voters who are informed and have opportunities to fix ballot errors ahead of elections are much more likely to have their votes counted, a new study of the 2024 election in Pennsylvania has found.

The study, from the University of Pennsylvania, provides hard evidence to back up the arguments that county officials have used for years to justify such “notice and cure” policies for defective mail ballots.

“Vote curing policies help balance the tension between promoting both access and integrity in mail balloting,” the study’s authors wrote. “In short, vote curing can reduce the number of eligible voters whose deficient mail ballots become ‘lost votes.’”

Mail ballots can be rejected for a variety of reasons, including lacking a signature on the outer envelope or lacking the inner secrecy envelope. In some elections, ballots have also been rejected for lacking a date on the outer envelope, although this requirement is currently being litigated in state and federal court.

Pennsylvania counties have a wide array of methods for letting voters fix these errors. Some ask voters to fix the errors in person at the county election office — for example, by adding a missing signature — while others automatically return deficient ballots to voters, or cancel deficient ballots and reissue new ones. Other counties only allow voters to correct the error by casting a provisional ballot at their polling place on Election Day.

The study examined how many voters corrected their deficient mail ballots across counties that use these different methods and found that voters were 25 percentage points more likely to have their vote counted if they were told of a disqualifying error before Election Day, and 10 points more likely to have their vote counted if they had an opportunity to correct that error before Election Day, rather than just on Election Day.

The study also found that when deficient ballots were automatically returned or replaced, allowing voters to make a correction by mail, voters were 25 points more likely to have their vote counted.

Jim Allen, the election director of Delaware County, one of the counties that automatically replaces deficient ballots, said this method roughly doubled the rate at which voters were able to cure their ballots.

“Also, it reduced traffic at our Voter Service Center and reduced provisional ballots,” he said via email.

Likewise, counties have a variety of methods for notifying voters of deficiencies with their mail ballots, including calls, emails, and publishing lists online. The study measured if a voter was notified by looking at when their ballot was recorded as deficient in the state public ballot tracking system, where voters or political parties could see the issue and which also automatically emails voters if there is an error with their ballot.

But providing an email is optional when applying for a mail ballot. According to data from the just-concluded 2026 primary election, roughly 20% of mail ballot requestors didn’t provide an email address. For those voters, what happens next depends on what county they live in. Some may not be notified at all that their ballot may be rejected.

The mail ballot application says the email “may be used to contact you about important information” but not expressly that it could be used to notify voters of errors with their mail ballots that may disqualify their vote.

Michael Morse, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the study’s coauthors, said that more explicit language on the application could lead to more voters providing their email address and, therefore, getting notified if their ballot is at risk of rejection. He also suggested that the state could use email addresses they may have for the voter in other databases, such as the state’s voter rolls.

The Pennsylvania Department of State said in a statement that it encourages voters to fill out the email section, and that it was reviewing the study and “is always open to considering ways to improve communication with voters.”

The study also highlights the equal protection principle, which could be the next frontier in legal fights over Pennsylvania’s mail ballot curing rules.

In a case from the 2000 election, Bush v. Gore, the U.S. Supreme Court found that Florida’s recount of that year’s presidential election violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause because counties were using inconsistent standards to decide which ballots counted.

Pennsylvania’s system, in which voters across the street from each other might have vastly different opportunities to cure their ballots based on what county they live in, could also test this principle. The argument has been made in cases before, Morse noted, but hasn’t yet been fully litigated in Pennsylvania.

Morse said when and how the equal protection principle applies in the context of election administration is unclear, since the decentralized nature of elections means there will always be variation across counties, and they can’t all violate the principle.

“That fight really hasn’t developed much … [because] it hasn’t mattered yet to the Pennsylvania outcome,” he said. “The only reason it was going to come up in 2024 is if the number of deficient mail ballots was within the margin of victory, and it wasn’t.”

The equal protection question may not have had much of a bearing on Pennsylvania’s curing policies yet, but in other states it has. A recent decision in a case in North Carolina found that the state’s cure process violated the equal protection principle for some voters.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Maricopa County election fight boils over as recorder threatens felony charges over ‘unauthorized’ drop boxes

2026-05-21T15:45:39+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

A messy and longstanding feud between Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap and the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors over control of the key swing county’s elections has spilled over into a new arena.

On Wednesday, Heap sent a letter to the board asserting his office’s authority over ballot drop boxes and warning that election workers who handle ballots deposited in “unauthorized” receptacles could face criminal penalties.

The letter, written by Heap’s attorney, arrived hours before county supervisors were set to take up a routine vote on drop box locations for the July 21 primary. It set the stage for a lengthy and fiery meeting that put the divisions between the county’s mostly GOP officials on full display.

The spiraling saga is amplifying questions about how effectively top county officials will be able to administer this year’s midterm election.

Supervisors called Heap’s latest letter “shocking,” “appalling,” and “outrageous.” They criticized Heap for not appearing at the meeting, which they said they’d asked him to attend — albeit on short notice.

Democratic Supervisor Steve Gallardo repeatedly said that he believed Heap, a Republican, was purposefully setting up this year’s elections to “fail” and called him “a coward.” Meanwhile, Supervisors Tom Galvin and Kate Brophy McGee sparred with fellow Republican Mark Stewart, the only supervisor who criticized the board’s handling of the situation.

After the meeting, the recorder’s office fired back with a statement, accusing the board of “attempting to seize control over ballot drop boxes” and calling supervisors’ remarks “political theater.” The office also insisted that it had not discussed the proposed drop box locations with the board’s elections department and did not know about them until the planned vote appeared on a public agenda.

But Elections Director Scott Jarrett said he has been meeting for months with recorder’s office staff for routine “menu of service” meetings in preparation for upcoming elections. He said he brought up drop box locations during those discussions.

Ultimately, the board unanimously approved a slate of voting locations — including the drop box sites — for the primary election.

This latest dispute is just the most recent in a larger fight between Heap and the board over election administration in the state’s most populous county. Heap contends that the board usurped much of his power in a deal it struck with his predecessor months before he took office. He has refused to abide by that agreement, which maps out how his office and county supervisors split election responsibilities, and sued the board last year when negotiations over a new agreement turned contentious.

In April, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney handed Heap a legal win in the case, ordering the supervisors to return control of several election-related functions and information technology staffers to the recorder’s office. The board of supervisors has since appealed that decision.

Both sides are publicly acknowledging concerns about their ability to administer this year’s elections as the primary creeps closer. Heap’s statement said the board’s appeal “creates serious legal and operational concerns, particularly this close to major elections.” Brophy McGee and GOP Supervisor Debbie Lesko wrote in a letter to him Wednesday that the county “cannot proceed through the remainder of an important election year with the status quo.”

“The current level of confusion and conflict is not sustainable and does not serve the interests of county staff, election workers, or the public,” they wrote.

Supervisors historically choose drop box locations

County supervisors have long set ballot drop box locations under a provision of the state’s election rulebook that directly authorizes them to do so.

It reads: “All ballot drop-off locations and drop-boxes shall be approved by the Board of Supervisors (or designee).”

But Heap is now arguing that only he can designate such sites — and that the rulebook, which carries the force of law but can’t contradict statutes, is wrong.

In his letter to the board, Heap’s attorney, James Rogers, cited a state law that references the recorder’s ability to establish “early voting locations.” The following sentence of that statute, ARS 16-542, further specifies that such locations “shall require each elector to present identification … before receiving a ballot.” That would appear to suggest that the locations referenced in the law are ones where voters can cast a ballot in person, as that’s when they are required to show ID. Nonetheless, Rogers wrote in his letter that he believed the statute assigned drop boxes “exclusively to the recorder.”

“A ballot drop box is, under any reasonable interpretation of the plain meaning of the statutory text, an ‘early voting location,’ as it is a physical site where voters may deliver their voted early ballots during the early voting period,” he said.

Another statute, ARS 16-411, states that boards of supervisors can “designate one or more sites for voters to deposit marked ballots until 7:00 p.m. on the day of the election.” Rogers said he interprets that law as suggesting that the board has the ability to do so only on Election Day, not during early voting.

“These statutory provisions carefully circumscribe the board’s authority to maintain drop boxes: Only on Election Day and only at voting centers and polling places,” Rogers wrote, later adding that supervisors “cannot simply assume powers” that aren’t specifically prescribed to them in writing. “No statute grants the board authority to establish drop boxes during the early voting period.”

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney’s recent decision in the legal battle between the board and the recorder’s office didn’t specifically assign drop boxes to either entity.

His order noted that Heap held authority over “voter registration, voter list maintenance, the distribution and signature verification of early ballots, and in-person early voting.” The board, he wrote, was in charge of “drawing precinct boundaries, selecting Election Day voting locations, preparing ballots, supplying polling locations, hiring poll workers, tabulating ballots, and canvassing.” His conclusions were based in part on the statutes that Rogers cited.

Heap’s attorney threatens charges for ‘ballot harvesting’

Rogers’ letter further alleges that supervisors could be opening themselves and their workers up to felony charges by maintaining control over drop box locations.

He pointed to ARS 16-1005, which prohibits a person or entity from collecting ballots by “misrepresenting itself as an election official or as an official ballot repository.”

“Any person or entity involved in establishing or operating such unauthorized drop boxes is committing a class 5 felony,” Rogers wrote, adding that bipartisan teams of workers who collect ballots from drop boxes could be charged with “criminal ballot harvesting.”

Supervisors broadly condemned that threat. Galvin said anyone attempting to “put handcuffs” on workers would have to go through the board first.

“The four of us will be the first ones to step in front of them and say, ‘Take us,’” Galvin said, referencing all of his colleagues except Stewart.

He added that Heap — who was elected to his seat with support from activists who questioned the integrity of the county’s elections — was fanning the flames of voter fraud conspiracies.

“We are stuck in this hamster wheel of the 2020 election,” Galvin said. “That is the basis of it — over and over and over again — and someone has to call out the recorder and say, ‘Cut it out.’”

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

Here’s how Pennsylvania’s primary has been going so far

2026-05-15T19:10:37+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Just days remain before Pennsylvania’s May 19 primary, when voters will select nominees for state and federal elections this November.

The governorship, congressional seats, and control of the state House and Senate are all on the ballot.

Some counties have already experienced issues with mail ballots, potentially affecting voters’ ability to easily cast them. Others are looking to Tuesday’s election as a chance to learn how they can make operations run more smoothly.

Here’s what’s happened so far.

Some counties stumble on mail ballots

In almost every election, at least one county encounters some administrative issue that impacts voters. Whether it was Chester County leaving thousands of voters out of its poll books last November or the Department of State sending the wrong voter file to Fayette County in 2025, human error almost inevitably causes a hiccup somewhere.

This year is no exception: Several counties have had issues already with their mail ballots.

The highest-profile case so far involves ballots being sent to an outdated list of voters in Lehigh County, where there is a competitive primary for the Democratic nomination for the 7th Congressional District.

The county mistakenly used a voter file from last year to send out this year’s mail ballots. While many of last year’s mail voters had also requested mailed ballots this year, which minimized the impact, the mixup still meant more than 4,000 voters either got a ballot they didn’t request or failed to receive one they were expecting. The county responded by issuing new ballots to affected voters, canceling invalid ballots, and contacting voters to explain their voting options.

Lehigh County isn’t alone. In Butler County, near Pittsburgh, roughly 50 mail ballot return envelopes were printed without the county election office’s return address, making it more difficult for voters to return them. In York County, the county’s mail ballot vendor mistakenly sent 237 voters ballots for the wrong district. In those counties, election officials are working with USPS to deliver the ballots or reissuing correct ballots, respectively.

Earlier this year, Votebeat and Spotlight PA also reported that Chester County sent out mail ballot applications with voters’ first and last names reversed, though the county and state said the applications were still valid to use.

Counties looking to make improvements

Luzerne County is switching to hand-marked paper ballots and away from the touch-screen ballot-marking devices it has used since 2020. The county experienced issues with its previous voting machine vendor — such as misspellings on ballots and test ballots being left in unofficial results — and in 2025 decided to make the switch. At the time, the election director said the switch would give the county more in-house control over designing and testing ballots.

Chester County, which has had multiple issues in the last year, is bringing in an outside consultant to assess the county’s election operations. A spokesperson for the county confirmed that The Elections Group, a consulting firm, will be onsite after the election “to meet with staff and observe post-election activities.”

“Our goal is to use their input to support the implementation of our Voter Services Action Plan,” county spokesperson Andrew Kreider said via email, referring to the plan developed to address issues in the election department.

The state was also planning a test — this one for internet-connected e-pollbooks — but postponed the experiment until at least next year because of unresolved technical questions and low county participation in the pilot program. Election directors say the devices, already widely used in the state without internet connections, can help quickly address Election Day issues and monitor turnout.

What election officials are thinking about

With no marquee race at the top of the ticket this primary election as both gubernatorial candidates are uncontested, election officials are expecting low turnout — and potentially a smoother Election Day.

During the 2022 midterm, the Republican primary races for the U.S. Senate and governor were contested, providing a draw for voters.

“This one I think is going to be a lot like last year’s primary,” said Thad Hall, the Mercer County elections director. “I think my county and a lot of counties are going to be lucky to get 25% turnout.”

Weather is his biggest concern right now, Hall said, as it is for many elections. Election Day could see temperatures in the 90s, with the chance for storms in parts of the state. Those factors can both depress turnout as well as present logistical challenges, such as if power goes out at a polling place.

Dauphin County Election Director Chris Spackman said right now he is working on getting the county’s pollbooks finalized and putting together the materials his poll workers will need on Election Day.

There are always things election officials can’t predict that could pop up, he said, such as if a judge of elections gets sick and they need a last minute replacement.

“I don’t like to predict turnout because I want 100 percent,” he said. “But realistically looking at historical numbers in gubernatorial primaries, the turnout is going to be lower than the general election.”

But ideally, Spackman said, it will be a day of high turnout and wide margins.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Pennsylvania’s mail ballot dating rules have been in flux for years. Here’s what you need to know.

2026-05-08T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

As some Pennsylvania voters prepare to vote by mail in this month’s primary election, they could be forgiven for not knowing what they need to do with the date line on their ballot envelope.

Court rulings have flip-flopped on the requirement several times since Act 77, the law that implemented no-excuse mail voting, went into effect in 2020. For some elections since then, counties had to reject mail ballots that lacked a proper date; for others, they didn’t.

The rule has resulted in thousands of otherwise qualified ballots being rejected and left many voters confused about what they need to do to have their votes counted.

Here’s what voters need to know for the May 19 primary.

What do I need to do with the date line for this election?

Don’t write your birthday. Don’t write the day you registered to vote.

Fill out the current date in the date line just below the signature space, which also needs to be filled out.

During elections when counties were required to reject ballots for missing or improper dates, writing birthdays was among the most common mistakes voters made.

In 2023, the Pennsylvania Department of State made changes to the ballot return envelope to reduce the number of ballots rejected for date issues. The department prefilled the year portion of the date line, which did indeed lead to fewer errors.

Will my ballot be rejected if it has an improper date?

Currently, counties cannot reject mail ballots for lacking a proper date. The Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court ruled in 2024 that it was unconstitutional for counties to reject ballots for missing or improper dates. Last year, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also upheld a separate ruling that said the requirement to date the return envelope violated voters’ First Amendment rights.

That could change, however, as both the state case and federal case are being appealed. Election officials still recommend that voters date their return envelope.

Why does the envelope need a date in the first place?

Simply put, because the law says it does.

When lawmakers passed Act 77 in 2019, it said voters must “date and sign the declaration” on the return envelope. The declaration affirms that the voter is qualified to vote and that they have not cast another ballot.

The language was carried over from the state’s existing law governing absentee voting, which was written before counties used technology to track ballots and voters.

Why has this been so contentious?

Some voting-rights advocates, such as Common Cause, the NAACP, and the ACLU, believe the dating requirement does not serve any legitimate purpose and has disenfranchised otherwise eligible voters.

They argue that the state’s ballot tracking system records when counties send a ballot out and when they receive it back, meaning the date isn’t needed to determine if the voter cast the ballot within the time allowed for the election. Proponents of keeping the date argue the written date could serve as a backup check if the tracking system fails, but election officials also timestamp ballot envelopes when they are received back from the voter, which can serve as a backup as well.

Another argument for keeping the date is that it could help in detecting voter fraud, such as if someone requests a ballot, dies, and another person casts the ballot. This happened in Lancaster County in 2022, but opponents of the date requirement point out that, even if the date line had not been filled out in that case, there were other factors that would have detected the fraud.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

New voting requirements? Troops at the polls? We asked 37 election experts what could disrupt the 2026 elections.

2026-04-17T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

There are always unanswered questions heading into any election. But usually those questions are more along the lines of “who’s going to win?” and less “will the federal government interfere with the election?”

But here in 2026, President Donald Trump’s broadsides against the legitimacy of U.S. elections and efforts to overhaul election laws have generated lots of uncertainty — and anxiety — about whether this will be a normal election year. Election officials and voters alike are left to wonder whether there will be new requirements for voters, physical interventions at the polls, or attempts to overturn results after the fact.

Despite seemingly endless speculation, no one knows for sure how likely any of these things is. But to get the most well-informed assessments, we turned to the people who spend the most time thinking about elections.

We asked 37 experts in the field of election administration — academics, lawyers, former election officials, etc. — to answer 26 questions about the likelihood of various scenarios coming to pass in the 2026 midterms.

Their answers reflect a general sense of cautious optimism about the most dire scenarios — such as an election getting overturned — and skepticism that the federal government will successfully change voting rules. But they also still believe the election will face serious challenges, including federal agents potentially showing up at polling places.

Election experts say new federal laws are unlikely, but split on state laws and court intervention

Since retaking office in 2025, Trump has pushed aggressively for the federal government to set more rules around how elections are run, promoting legislation that would require registering voters to prove their citizenship with documentation and issuing two election-related executive orders. (The first executive order has largely been blocked in court, though the administration has appealed. The second is currently under litigation, and the conventional wisdom is that it will be halted as well.)

However, experts were skeptical that these measures would ever take effect. Thirty-four of our 37 respondents said it was unlikely that the federal government would successfully require new registrants to prove their citizenship for the midterms, and 32 said it was unlikely that the federal government would successfully require all voters to show an ID or restrict the use of no-excuse absentee or mail ballots. (They provided their answers before Trump issued his second executive order, which sought to regulate mail voting through the U.S. Postal Service.)

Likewise, virtually all respondents thought it was unlikely that the federal government would restrict the hours or locations of in-person voting or limit or eliminate the use of voting machines to tally ballots in the midterms.

However, experts were more open to the possibility that some of these policies could take effect in individual states. Although none thought it was likely that a significant number of states would limit or eliminate the use of voting machines, about a quarter of respondents thought it was at least somewhat likely that a significant number of states would restrict the use of no-excuse absentee or mail ballots in the midterms. About one-third thought it was at least somewhat likely that a significant number of states would strengthen their voter ID requirements or restrict the hours or locations of in-person voting.

Even more respondents, 15 of the 37, thought it was at least somewhat likely that a significant number of states would pass proof-of-citizenship requirements before the election — perhaps unsurprisingly, given that such laws were working their way through several state legislatures at the time. Those laws have since passed in Florida, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Utah, although Florida’s does not take effect until 2027 and Mississippi’s is limited in scope.

Overall, though, most experts didn’t expect states to significantly change their election laws this year. Derek Muller, an election law professor at the University of Notre Dame, pointed out that many states have part-time legislatures that won’t be in session between now and the election. “I expect new legislation in the months ahead that might affect the 2026 election to be negligible,” Muller said.

If there are going to be major election-law changes before the midterms, experts expect them to come from the third branch of government: the judiciary. Seventeen experts said it was at least somewhat likely that pre-election court rulings would significantly alter election rules shortly before the midterms, although 19 still said that was unlikely.

In follow-up interviews, those who thought this was likely said that they were keeping an eye both on currently pending cases — such as a U.S. Supreme Court case that could require all mail ballots to arrive by Election Day — and those that have not yet been filed. That said, a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year will probably encourage litigants to bring any cases challenging election rules well before the election, making last-minute rule changes less likely.

Experts expect federal agents to disrupt the 2026 election

For many election officials and voting advocates, the nightmare scenario for the 2026 midterms is if federal agents, such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, attempt to disrupt voting or the counting of ballots. It’s already illegal for armed troops to visit voting locations, and the Trump administration has repeatedly said that it will not send ICE agents to polling places this year. However, new Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin has declined to absolutely rule it out, and a majority of the experts we surveyed expected something like this to happen.

Twenty-seven of the 37 respondents said it was at least somewhat likely that the federal government would deploy some form of military or law enforcement at or near polling places in the midterms. A slight majority said it was likely that Trump would ask the National Guard or federal agents to seize voting equipment during the election, and over three-quarters said it was likely that Trump would ask them to seize voting equipment after the election. (It’s worth noting that respondents gave these answers just a few weeks after the FBI raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, and Trump said that he regretted not asking the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election.)

Multiple respondents told Votebeat that the seizure of voting equipment was more likely after the election because the election results will be known at that time. “Before the election, no one will know where seizing equipment or ballots could shift pivotal races,” said Christopher Mann, the research director at the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “After the election, a bad actor will have a better picture of where seizing voting equipment or ballots can shift the overall outcome.”

Twenty-eight experts said it was at least somewhat likely that there would be physical threats to voters or polling places in the midterms, including 11 who said it was very likely. (They were perhaps recalling 2024, when a string of bomb threats forced some polling places to close temporarily, though election officials were able to minimize disruptions to voting.) However, experts were divided on whether these threats would deter people from voting. Twenty-one experts said it was unlikely that a significant number of voters would decide not to vote because of threats or physical intimidation, while 16 said that was likely.

Notably, experts were not very confident about their predictions about armed intervention in the midterms. Some also pointed out that, even if it’s likely that Trump might order federal agents to interfere in the election, that doesn’t mean they will succeed. “Election officials, courts, and other state and local officials are going to stop any attempt to seize voting equipment or ballots,” Mann predicted.

And some experts emphasized that even if there are incidents at specific polling places, they expect the election overall to run smoothly. “I’m an optimist, which probably led to many of my answers,” admitted Jeff Greenburg, a retired election official in Pennsylvania and a senior adviser at the Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia-based government watchdog group. But Greenburg said he doesn’t expect that physical threats to voting “will significantly impact elections nationwide. I have faith and trust in our election officials, as well as the rule of law, and believe in the end every vote cast will be counted.”

Losers may claim fraud, but it’s unlikely an election gets overturned

Election experts of all stripes are confident that U.S. elections are secure. All 37 respondents said it was unlikely that a significant number of ineligible voters would cast ballots in the midterms, including 35 who said it was not at all likely. Experts also unanimously said that it was unlikely that voter fraud would influence the outcome of a 2026 congressional race.

However, that isn’t expected to stop candidates from questioning the election results. Almost three-quarters of experts thought it was at least somewhat likely that a significant number of losing candidates would claim fraud influenced the outcome of the election. All 37 thought it was likely that at least one congressional or statewide election would be legally challenged, with 30 calling it very likely.

At the same time, though, most experts don’t expect those challenges to succeed. Thirty-one of the 37 respondents thought it was unlikely that any congressional or statewide elections would be successfully overturned.

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

We still have questions about Trump’s new executive order on elections

2026-04-06T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

When reviewing President Donald Trump’s executive order on mail voting on Tuesday evening, election lawyer Aaron Blacksberg noticed something odd.

The order provides for the creation of not one, not two, but three separate lists:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security must use various federal databases to compile a list of citizens over age 18 residing in each state and send it to the chief election official in that state.
States are invited to send the U.S. Postal Service a list of eligible voters to whom the state intends to provide a mail-in or absentee ballot.
The U.S. Postal Service must provide each state with a list of people “who are enrolled with the USPS” to get their ballots delivered by the Postal Service in that state. The Postal Service would not be allowed to deliver any ballots from people not on this list.

But Blacksberg, the federal policy counsel for the Institute for Responsive Government, noticed that the order doesn’t specifically say what, if anything, these three lists have to do with one another.

“This executive order doesn’t make clear how the administration will even do what they say they’re doing, which is limiting mail-in voting based on who they say are citizens and eligible voters,” Blacksberg said.

Blacksberg’s guess is that the U.S. Postal Service will take List 2 (the list of mail voters provided by the states) and cross-reference it with List 1 (the list of adult citizens, though the order says Homeland Security is providing that to states, not USPS) to generate List 3 (the list of people allowed to vote by mail).

But the order doesn’t actually specify any of that.

Blacksberg noted that the order directs the U.S. Postal Service to propose rules by May 30 governing the process of creating List 3, so we may get more clarity then. But as of right now, the first two lists aren’t explicitly required to be used for anything at all. They just … exist.

Of course, many experts and state officials say the president doesn’t have the authority to mandate the steps outlined in the executive order anyway, and multiple federal lawsuits challenging it have already been filed. But the Case of the Three Lists is only one of several mysteries about how the order would actually work, should courts allow it to go into effect.

The White House also released a fact sheet on Tuesday that aimed to summarize the order and make it easier to understand — but it ended up muddling at least one key provision instead.

As mentioned, the executive order decrees that the Postal Service “shall not transmit mail-in or absentee ballots from any individual” (emphasis ours) who isn’t on List 3. But the fact sheet says, “The Order requires the USPS to transmit ballots only to individuals” on List 3. Those, of course, are different things.

Presumably the language in the executive order, not the fact sheet, is what’s operative. But the error in the fact sheet raises questions about what the White House thinks its own order does.

One thing that’s clearer in the order is how Homeland Security should assemble the list of citizens over 18 residing in each state. It calls for the list to be “derived from Federal citizenship and naturalization records, [Social Security Administration] records, SAVE data, and other relevant Federal databases.” SAVE is a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services database the Trump administration overhauled last year and has been urging election officials to use to verify voter citizenship.

But that specificity doesn’t mean the process will be straightforward. “It’s not a feasible thing to do with any accuracy for every citizen in the country over 18,” said John Davisson, deputy director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit that advocates on privacy rights.

He said that while, in theory, multiple federal databases could be combined to verify residency, in practice there is “no reliable way” to integrate systems that weren’t designed to communicate with one another, or for this purpose.

Doing so would almost certainly result in incomplete or inaccurate results, Davisson said. In addition, the order notes the need to comply with all applicable federal laws, including the Privacy Act. That law, Davisson said, places strict limits on the government’s ability to acquire and use personal data, but how those restrictions would apply here is unclear, since the agencies’ plans for compiling the lists will depend on rulemaking that has not yet been developed.

Votebeat this week sent the White House a list of questions about the executive order and how it would work, including to ask how the different lists it calls for would interact with each other and about the differences between the language in the order and the White House fact sheet.

A White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, responded with a general statement saying, in part, “Election integrity has always been a top priority for President Trump.”

But Jackson did not respond to any of our specific questions.

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

One line in Trump’s order would reshape how long states have to store election records

2026-04-06T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Deep inside the executive order on mail voting President Donald Trump signed March 31 is a technical-sounding line: “States and localities should preserve, for a 5-year period, all records and materials — excluding ballots cast — evidencing voter participation in any Federal election (e.g., ballot envelopes, regardless of carrier).”

But the line is a bigger deal than it sounds like, should the executive order go into force (it’s currently facing four federal lawsuits asserting the president exceeded his authority with it).

Right now, federal law requires such records to be kept for 22 months. The order more than doubles that requirement, and does so without specifically defining what counts as evidence of “voter participation in any Federal election.”

That puts state and local election administrators in a familiar bind: trying to comply with a sweeping directive without clear boundaries, and without any obvious plan for how to store what could be a massive increase in materials. County budgets and state laws — and the realities of available physical and digital storage — weren’t built with this kind of expansion in mind.

The order’s use of the word “should” is telling, said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former DOJ voting rights attorney. Taken as a whole, he argued, the order is broadly unconstitutional. And in this specific instance, its language appears to acknowledge a key limitation: the president cannot compel local jurisdictions to retain more election records than federal law requires.

The 22-month retention period in existing law was deliberately chosen, he said — long enough for investigators to pursue credible evidence, but finite, so election administrators can prepare for the next federal cycle.

“You can’t have every election that’s ever been held be stored constantly forever,” Becker said. “Paper takes up room, and voting machines have to be reprogrammed for the next election.”

The sentence in the order explicitly exempts cast ballots from the five-year retention period, though it isn’t clear why. The White House did not respond to a request to explain that. Still, the order would include storage of a wide range of materials that show a voter cast a ballot and how that ballot was processed. In practice, that could include envelopes with voter information and signatures, poll books and electronic check-in records, absentee ballot logs that show when ballots were sent and returned, provisional ballot envelopes and affidavits, and more.

Overwhelming numbers of boxes, bytes, and mandates

The scale of election record storage is already substantial. Across a federal election cycle, jurisdictions manage thousands of sealed boxes of ballots, envelopes, and related materials that must be securely stored and organized for potential audits. That amount of paper takes up a lot of space. In Fulton County, Georgia, for example, the FBI seized roughly 700 boxes of election materials related to the 2020 election from a single jurisdiction. That was just a subset of what Fulton County stores, and an even smaller subset of what the state stores. Across Georgia, thousands of boxes full of hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper from across every election held in the past 22 months are stacked and waiting. That helps illustrate the type of storage space that would be required to comply with this provision.

Available evidence suggests storage space is already a constraint, particularly for under-resourced jurisdictions. Many rural counties have few secure storage facilities that could accommodate this influx of paper, and some counties struggle even more to retain digital files.

Tammy Patrick is the chief program officer at the Elections Center, a resource hub and training center for local election officials. She told Votebeat this week that many elections offices “don’t have a designated computer.” In some smaller counties, election work is part time and resources are shared with other less-than-full-time offices. Ultimately, the capacity of various elections offices to expand their physical and digital storage demands will differ widely by jurisdiction.

In some cases, digital storage limits have already affected operations, like in Bexar County, Texas, where accumulated election data strained system capacity and delayed primary results earlier this month. Election offices also already handle thousands of physical records that must be kept in secure, often climate-controlled environments. Texas officials have warned that paper-based systems create “new challenges for storing and securing materials.” Those needs have grown as more and more counties returned to the use of paper ballots and other physical records. Groups like the Bipartisan Policy Center have for years noted that “many election offices are under-resourced, with limited storage capacity.” The system mandating this election-records Tetris is built on a relatively short list of federal laws. Under the Civil Rights Act of 1960, states must preserve “all records and papers” related to federal elections, including ballots and ballot envelopes, for 22 months. Separately, the National Voter Registration Act requires states to keep voter registration and list maintenance records for at least two years. Together, these laws set a mandatory baseline that already gives the federal government access to a wide range of election materials.

State laws build on that baseline in uneven and disparate ways. Many mirror the 22-month rule for ballots and ballot envelopes but extend retention for other records, particularly those documenting voter participation. For example, California keeps ballots and vote-by-mail envelopes for 22 months but retains voter participation records, such as rosters showing who voted, for up to five years. Texas uses detailed records schedules that require multi-year retention for materials like poll lists, voter registration files, and administrative records, sometimes allowing electronic storage.

The executive order layers another requirement on top of all of that.

The order also directs the attorney general and federal agencies to “take all lawful steps to deter and address noncompliance with Federal law,” including to prioritize enforcement of statutes covering non-citizen voting, voter registration fraud, and a range of other voting-related crimes.

Becker said the rhetoric is part of a familiar pattern — “a drumbeat that we hear from this administration that prosecutions are coming.” Trump has echoed that message repeatedly, including in remarks at the World Economic Forum in January.

Read in that context, the five-year retention provision appears designed to preserve records that could be relevant to future investigations. Ballot envelopes and related participation records can contain voter-identifying information, signatures, tracking information, and other data showing whether and how a ballot was issued, returned, and processed.

Still, Becker said he’s telling election officials not to worry.

“The executive order can say whatever it wants to. It can say that the AG can investigate people and have them do a little dance. Ultimately, what the attorney general does — what the DOJ does — is investigate violations of federal law,” he said. “It’s hard to investigate criminal wrongdoing when none has taken place.”

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica atjhuseman@votebeat.org.

Trump administration sued by states over mail voting executive order

2026-04-03T20:11:05+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

A coalition of Democratic officials from 23 states, including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and the attorneys general of California, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Washington, are suing the federal government over President Donald Trump’s new executive order to regulate mail voting.

The lawsuit, which is being filed in Massachusetts, says the order violates the U.S. Constitution by usurping the states’ power to administer their own elections. The Constitution delegates states the primary authority to run elections, subject to rules set by Congress, but gives the president no role.

“The U.S. Constitution makes clear that elections are to be run by the states, and here in Pennsylvania, we believe that the administration of elections should be nonpartisan,” Shapiro said in a statement.

Trump has long claimed, without evidence, that mail voting is rife with fraud and has sought to curtail it. On Tuesday, he signed an executive order that directs the U.S. Postal Service not to deliver mail ballots from any voter not on a pre-approved list of voters who will receive mail ballots and requires each authorized mail voter’s envelope to have a unique barcode.

The order also directs the Department of Homeland Security to create a list of adult citizens residing in each state and provide that list to states 60 days before a federal election.

The order isn’t Trump’s first attempt to push into how states run elections. Last March, he issued an executive order that, among other things, tried to require proof of citizenship when registering to vote. States sued over that order on similar legal grounds, and courts have so far blocked most of that order’s major provisions.

This week’s lawsuit named Trump, the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Social Security Administration, the U.S. Postal Service, and several federal officials as defendants.

“The President’s latest attempt to interfere with the States’ administration of their elections is as unprecedented as it is unconstitutional,” the lawsuit said. “Neither the Constitution nor any act of Congress confers upon the President the authority to mandate sweeping changes to States’ electoral systems or procedures.”

The lawsuit is at least the fourth that has been filed against the executive order since Trump signed it late Tuesday. Two separate coalitions of voting-rights advocacy groups sued Thursday, with one filing a lawsuit in federal court in Massachusetts and the other in Washington, D.C. Democratic Party groups filed the first lawsuit in Washington, D.C., Wednesday.

“Only Democrat politicians and operatives would be upset about lawful efforts to secure American elections and ensure only eligible American citizens are casting ballots,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said. “President Trump campaigned on securing our elections and the American people sent him back to the White House to get the job done.”

Shapiro, along with Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, a Republican, had immediately decried the order when it was signed on Tuesday and signaled legal action was forthcoming.

Shapiro joined the lawsuit in his capacity as governor, rather than on behalf of the state. Suing on behalf of a state is a responsibility that generally falls to the attorney general, and Pennsylvania’s current attorney general Republican Dave Sunday.

The attorneys general who joined the suit represent Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin, as well as the District of Columbia.

The new lawsuit is only the latest judiciary clash between the Trump administration and the states over election issues. The U.S. Department of Justice has sued 30 states, including Pennsylvania, plus the District of Columbia over their refusal to turn over complete versions of their voter rolls. The Pennsylvania Department of State argues turning over the data would be illegal because it contains private information.

Pennsylvania’s motion to dismiss that case is currently pending.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Votebeat editor-in-chief Carrie Levine contributed.

Arizona officials prep for new mail-ballot dropoff procedures that aims to speed up counting

2026-04-02T21:04:55+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

Alexandra Flahive approached the “polling place” with a mail ballot in hand.

But upon entering, she opted not to drop it off and have the signature on its envelope checked, as hundreds of thousands of Arizonans typically do on Election Day. Instead, she waited in line, checked in on an electronic pollbook, and presented a voter ID.

Then, she handed the ballot to a poll worker, who stamped it with a message in bright-red ink: “ID verified.” At the end of another line, a worker slashed open the ballot envelope. Flahive removed the ballot, feeding it into a vote-counting machine.

Thus, her vote was cast. Or, at least, it would have been, if this had been a real election.

Flahive, communications and outreach manager at the Maricopa County Elections Department, was one of a few hundred people helping the county conduct a test run of this year’s election, which will feature a brand-new voting option.

Arizona voters can now show ID when dropping off mail ballots, avoiding signature verification

In Arizona, voters have long had the option of dropping off their mail ballots at polling places. Under state law, voters must show identification to cast ballots in person, but those dropping off ballots are allowed to skip that step — as well as any associated lines at the polls.

Instead, they just have to sign the envelope that contains their ballot and place it in a secure box at the polling site. Trained staff later compare that signature to signatures the voter has on file before counting their vote.

That process, called signature verification, is a key safeguard against fraud. But it also takes time — and as the state has morphed into a key electoral battleground, there has been increasing consternation with how long it takes to count so-called “late early” ballots dropped off in the final hours of voting.

In 2024, state lawmakers passed legislation requiring election officials to offer a new option. Like Flahive, voters in the upcoming midterm election will have the option to wait in line and show a driver’s license, passport, or similar form of identification, instead of dropping their ballot off to go through signature verification. This option would allow their votes to be processed sooner and counted more quickly.

The mock election, held at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center in Phoenix, represented one of the first tests of that new process. Officials from several other counties — including Coconino, Pima, Pinal, and La Paz — traveled to watch it in action.

It appeared to run relatively smoothly. About 300 mock voters moved through the simulation in an hour and a half — less than the two hours that officials had designated for the exercise.

Jennifer Liewer, the deputy elections director of Maricopa County, said the simulation represented a high-turnout scenario at one of the county’s vote centers on Election Day, with “pretty much every possible issue that we could think of occurring.”

“It was really about stress-testing the system,” she said, adding that officials also use the mock election to “look at the little things” that could save voters time and improve their experience at the polls. “We want to try to figure out what could go wrong, so we kind of threw everything possible at the poll workers and at the system to see where there were breaking points.”

She rattled off some of officials’ main takeaways. They’re exploring the best pathways for voters who come to drop off their ballots to move throughout polling places, an effort to minimize crowds and lines. For now, they’re anticipating adding three extra poll workers to each site to assist voters utilizing the new option. And, while training those staffers, officials intend to focus heavily on different things that could go wrong with the new process.

“We’re going to be tabulating ballots that people have brought from home, and we feel like we’re going to see a higher likelihood of torn ballots or erroneous marks or overvoting,” Liewer said. “So, we’re just really focusing on ensuring that those tabulation clerks are extremely comfortable and knowledgeable with how the tabulators operate.”

But one key question remains unanswered. In the simulation, one out of every three voters used the new process to cast their mail ballot. It’s unclear how many will choose to do so in the state’s upcoming primary and general elections — and, as a result, how much the new process will actually speed up the count.

Tammy Patrick, a former election official in Maricopa County and chief programs officer at the Election Center, said some likely will choose to participate, even though it adds another step for them at the polls. Voters, she said, are increasingly being told that “they shouldn’t trust the system” and that their vote could be “negated or rejected.”

“The question is, would it increase the number of ballots counted and included in that first initial count on election night?” Patrick said. She theorized that the new process might lead to a slight increase in that number, but that still would likely represent a “small” percentage of total voters.

“In most cases, providing voters with more options is a good idea,” she said. “But the question remains, to what extent and to what expense.”

Lines may deter voters from using the new process

One factor likely to influence how many voters participate in the new process is how long lines are at the polls.

Liewer said there are rarely lines during the primary, but they sometimes occur during the general election. In Maricopa County, the state’s most populous, she said lines typically max out at 30 to 40 minutes long.

But most counties are bracing for a lengthy ballot in the November election as state lawmakers consider sending dozens of proposals to voters for approval. That could mean that voters see slightly longer waiting times this year — particularly on Election Day.

This year, voters who opt to ID-verify their mail ballot will be in the same lines as other voters in most counties. Liewer said Maricopa County will offer only one line for all voters at its polling sites. Elections Director Eslir Musta of Coconino County, located about 100 miles north of Phoenix, said he plans to do the same.

Officials said the decision largely comes down to logistics. Most voting sites don’t have room to accommodate two lines. Additionally, officials worry that separate queues would confuse voters. Plus, it would require completely separate pollbook stations and make it harder for poll workers to report accurate wait times.

Alexandra Flahive, communications and outreach manager at the Maricopa County Elections Department, works during a mock election on Wed., April 1, 2026 in Phoenix, Arizona. Officials aimed to test out a new process that would require voters to show ID to have their mail ballots counted sooner, avoiding signature verification. It is intended to speed up election results.

“We have limitations with our staff and equipment,” Liewer said.

But as usual, voters dropping off mail ballots for signature verification will be able to skip the line at the polls. That raises questions about how many will be willing to wait to get their IDs verified.

“We want to be realistic with people,” Liewer said. “We’re prepared for you, but we don’t know how many will take advantage of it.”

Change means new costs for local election officials

One thing is clear: The new voting option stands to cost counties a significant chunk of change.

In Maricopa County, the price tag is expected to come to at least $1.07 million — a number that encompasses the cost of new tabulators and new full-time staffers to manage additional machines and poll workers.

That figure doesn’t include the expense of adding three poll workers at each voting site, which officials said is still being calculated as they prepare to present a budget for the upcoming midterm election to county leaders.

The total cost of the change will likely be lower in other counties.

Maricopa County uses on-site tabulation on Election Day, meaning that voters insert their ballots into counting machines located at each polling site. That required it to purchase 550 new tabulators to use specifically for mail ballots at the polls — two per site, in case one breaks down.

Most other counties use a central count model in which ballots are placed into secure boxes and transported back to election offices for counting after the polls close.

“It’s a slightly different process — more simple, and not as involved with all these moving parts,” said Musta, of Coconino County.

Still, he said counties will need to segregate ID-verified mail ballots into a separate container and add new poll workers to help voters through the process.

“There’s a lot of new information for poll workers and a lot of training,” he added.

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

Trump issues second executive order on elections, giving U.S. Postal Service unprecedented control over mail voting

2026-04-01T00:43:36+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

This story has been updated.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday issued a second executive order on elections, this one giving the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented oversight over who is voting by mail, a move experts and state election officials said will quickly draw legal challenges.

The order, titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections,” says that states can send the U.S. Postal Service a list of voters “to whom the State intends to provide a mail-in or absentee ballot” 60 days before any federal election, and directs the Postal Service to create “unique ballot envelope identifiers, such as bar codes” for those voters.

The Postal Service would only be authorized to deliver ballots from people on an approved list, which states would be allowed “to routinely supplement and provide suggested modifications or amendments” to.

Separately, the executive order also directs the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to work with the Social Security Administration and use other federal databases to create a list of all adult citizens residing in each state and send it to the state’s chief election official, though it noted that voters would still be required to register to vote in accordance with state law.

While signing the executive order Tuesday evening, Trump told reporters at the White House that the order was about ensuring voter integrity. “We want to have honest voting in our country, because if you don’t have honest voting, you can’t have, really, a nation.”

Experts say executive order is legally and logistically dubious

Experts said the order will be immediately challenged and that, practically speaking, even if it weren’t, it would be difficult to implement before the November election.

“The president has no power to direct the creation of any of these lists or to restrict the delivery of mail ballots to any given list,” said Danielle Lang, vice president for voting rights at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, which represented plaintiffs suing over Trump’s first executive order on elections.

Trump issued that order just over a year ago. Among other things, it attempted to require registering voters to provide documented proof of citizenship and prohibit the counting of mail ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive afterward. However, federal courts have repeatedly ruled the president lacks the authority to rewrite election law and have so far blocked the order’s major provisions.

Lang said those court rulings “provide a clear roadmap” for challenges to this one.

Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution gives states and Congress the power to make laws governing elections, not the president. Despite that, the White House has promised for months that a second executive order on elections was forthcoming, sparking widespread speculation about what it would include. The order Trump issued Tuesday was less sweeping than some had expected.

Rick Hasen — a professor of election law at the University of California Los Angeles — said the executive order is “pretty mild, given what could have been, but it’s still unconstitutional and not something that could really be implemented in time.”

Asked whether the U.S. Postal Service and Department of Homeland Security could realistically implement the changes in time for the November election, Hasen was blunt: “No way.” He added that if the administration attempted to move forward anyway, “courts would stop it.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. Postal Service, Jeffery Adams, reached by phone, did not immediately respond to questions about whether the agency would, or could, comply with the executive order. “We’re reviewing the executive order right now,” he said.

Even in the absence of immediate court intervention, Hasen warned the effort “is going to conflict with all kinds of state laws that provide for a late sending of mail-in ballots to newly eligible voters and to voters who simply put in a late request.”

More fundamentally, Hasen emphasized that the proposal misunderstands the constitutional structure of election administration. “The fundamental point is that the Constitution doesn’t give DHS any power over elections,” he said. “The power to run state elections rests with the states. The power to run federal elections rests with the states,” except where Congress chooses to act — and, he noted, “the president is not Congress.”

Small changes, big consequences for ballot design

To facilitate much of the tracking envisioned in Trump’s new order, it mandates that all mail ballots use official election envelopes with Postal Service intelligent mail barcodes, whose design would have to be approved by the Postal Service.

Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer at The Election Center, a nonprofit association of election officials, noted the order draws on a ballot-tracking barcode system she helped develop with the Postal Service. She said barcodes and official election mail logos are legitimate best practices — but that the executive order misapplies them without providing funding or a path to implementation.

The system was designed to help the Postal Service identify and prioritize ballots, not to serve as a universal mandate — and many local election offices lack the capacity to implement it, she said.

Patrick also said the proposal conflicts with state laws and voting timelines. “The vast majority of states” allow absentee ballot requests much closer to Election Day, in some cases as late as the “Monday before Tuesday elections,” meaning the changes could disenfranchise voters, including “conceivably tens of thousands” who move shortly before an election.

Patrick said ballot envelope design is “way more complicated than one would ever believe it to be.” Even small changes — like folding ballots for machine processing — can affect how they’re tabulated. She noted that resources to implement barcodes and automation vary widely across jurisdictions, and many states have strict legal requirements limiting changes.

“More than a third of our election offices don’t have a full-time employee. Some of our election offices don’t have a designated computer,” she said. Given those constraints, she believes it will be impossible for many offices to comply.

State election officials express alarm about the order

State election officials agreed that the order would upend the way they do their jobs and, were it to go into effect, would be extremely challenging to implement. Multiple state officials, including those in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Minnesota, Oregon, and Wisconsin, also signaled that they plan to sue.

Wisconsin Elections Commission chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, said she was most concerned by the requirement that states provide the Postal Service with a list of mail voters at least 60 days before an election, noting that Wisconsin law allows voters to request mail ballots far closer to Election Day. Jacobs said she was not reassured by the fact that the executive order allows states to suggest additions to the list. “What if the federal government says no? What happens to those voters?”

The executive order also holds that states violating it would forfeit their federal funding. It’s not clear if the order threatens to withhold just federal money designated for elections, or further federal funds beyond that. Jacobs said Wisconsin wasn’t counting on getting additional federal funds for elections but that it would be “rather extreme” for the state to lose additional federal funding.

The executive order also appears to authorize the U.S. attorney general to prosecute election officials who send ballots to ineligible voters, even unknowingly. Jacobs called that measure a “great way to make sure nobody wants to work in elections.”

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, called the executive order “a disgusting overreach from the federal government.” He said it would upend the state’s voting, which is predominantly conducted by mail, and pledged to fight it in court.

“This move is nothing more than a push to weaponize the sensitive personal information of voters in this country, an effort my office will continue to fight unrelentingly,” he said in a statement.

Arizona’s mailed ballots also already have tracking barcodes on the outer envelope. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, said the state’s existing vote-by-mail system has “been used safely and securely for decades” and accused Trump of “trying to control who gets to vote.”

“We will use every legal tool available to defend Arizona’s elections, Arizona’s voters, and Arizona’s constitutional right to run its own elections,” she said.

In Colorado, a state where nearly everyone votes by mail, Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, said elections officials are “already in conversations with our attorneys general.”

“We look forward to this unconstitutional overreach being stopped by the judiciary,” she said.

Other officials similarly expressed confidence that the order would not stand up in court.

“It’s just an empty threat,” said Scott McDonell, the clerk of Dane County, Wisconsin, adding that his attorneys had told him not to even worry about it.

“The courts will strike it down faster than a cheetah on meth,” he said.

Trump is still pushing other election law changes

Trump has tried passing his election agenda through legislative means, but so far he hasn’t had much success. Two bills that would require documented proof of citizenship to register to vote, the SAVE Act and the SAVE America Act, have passed the House but stalled in the Senate, where the filibuster rule effectively means legislation needs 60 votes to pass. The president has repeatedly called on Republican senators to eliminate the filibuster and pass the legislation, which he has said is his top priority, but they’ve so far been reluctant to do so.

Republicans have had a bit more luck changing election law in GOP-led states, multiple of which have passed proof-of-citizenship requirements and moved mail-ballot receipt deadlines up to Election Day.

But Trump, who has long railed against mail voting, has repeatedly signaled that piecemeal action would not be enough. He has previously posted on social media that he would “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and said in February that “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

The executive order does not address other items from Trump’s elections wish list, but at the signing ceremony, Trump hinted he may not be done trying to change election policies. “We’d like to have voter ID, we’d like to have proof of citizenship,” he said. “That’ll be another subject for another time. We’re working on that.”

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

What to know about Supreme Court oral arguments in late-arriving mail ballots case

2026-03-23T20:33:48+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

The Supreme Court justices peppered lawyers with probing questions Monday during oral arguments over whether states should be able to decide whether to count mail ballots postmarked by Election Day but received afterwards.

The case before the court arises from state and national Republicans’ challenge of a Mississippi law that allows ballots postmarked by Election Day up to be counted as long as they arrive five business days later. The justices must rule on whether Election Day is the deadline for voters to cast their ballots, or whether federal law instead requires ballots to be received by elections officials by that date.

Much of the argument turns on whether federal statutes defining Election Day as “the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November” means that’s the deadline for election officials to to receive voters’ ballots, rather than allowing ballots that were mailed by that date.

Some of the conservative justices asked questions meant to probe the limits and implications of what states could permit.

Justice Samuel Alito said the state’s position raises “some difficult line-drawing problems.” He and others also raised questions about whether the justices should consider concerns that late-arriving ballots could shift the outcome of an election and create a perception of fraud.

The liberal justices, though, said the question is whether Congress has specifically preempted states from allowing post-Election Day grace periods, noting that the text of the federal statutes gives them little to go on. And many of the justices also asked how it’s possible to construe the law as prohibiting states from counting ballots received after Election Day but not, for example, prohibiting early voting, which the Republicans’ lawyers said they do not seek to challenge and believe differs.

If the court were to rule that ballots must be received by Election Day, it could force an abrupt shift for this year’s closely watched midterm elections, potentially confusing voters and affecting whether hundreds of thousands of mail-ballot votes are counted. Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked lawyer Paul Clement, representing Republicans, whether a June ruling would be so close to the November elections as to create problems, and Clement said it would not, since mail ballots would not yet have been sent out.

Currently, 14 states and the District of Columbia allow grace periods for late-arriving mail ballots, as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. A Votebeat analysis of data from the 2024 election found that at least 750,000 ballots eligible to be counted arrived after Election Day that year. Groups representing military and overseas voters have warned they could be disproportionately affected, and election experts have also said tightening the receipt deadlines could disenfranchise voters affected by slow postal service through no fault of their own.

It’s difficult to predict the effects of changing the deadline, and there’s little data on the partisan breakdown of the late-arriving ballots. Voters from both parties use mail ballots, though in 2024, Democrats reported doing so more often than Republicans. If the receipt deadline were to change, at least some voters would likely cast their ballots early enough to meet the earlier cutoff.

Clement said the federal statutes apply only to federal general elections, not primaries or other elections, so a ruling in their favor would leave open the possibility that states would allow grace periods for late-arriving mail ballots in other elections.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly railed against the counting of late-arriving ballots and pushed for strict new limitations on mail ballots in federal elections. He and other Republicans have said such ballots are a vehicle for fraud. Numerous academic studies have found no increased risk when compared to other types of voting.

In an executive order a year ago, Trump ordered the U.S. Justice Department to “take all necessary action” against states that count ballots received after Election Day, and said federal funding should be conditioned on states agreeing not to do so. At least 15 states sued over those provisions, and federal courts have so far largely blocked them from going into effect.

The case, Watson v. Republican National Committee, began in 2024, when the national and state Republican parties and other plaintiffs sued Mississippi. The plaintiffs claimed Mississippi’s statute didn’t comply with federal law. A federal judge sided with the state, but the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled for the plaintiffs, prompting Mississippi to appeal to the Supreme Court.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

How many voters could be affected by earlier mail ballot deadlines? We ran the numbers.

2026-02-11T18:24:24+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

President Donald Trump’s sweeping attempts to overhaul the way U.S. elections are run have mostly run into dead ends in the courts. But his administration and allies have successfully tightened rules around at least one of his biggest pet peeves: the counting of mail ballots that are received after Election Day.

Since the 2024 election, four states — all Republican-controlled — have changed their election laws so that they no longer accept mail ballots that arrive after Election Day. And while 14 states and Washington, D.C., still do so as long as those ballots are postmarked by Election Day, more of those ballots could be rejected in future elections due to recent changes to U.S. Postal Service procedures. To top it all off, a pending U.S. Supreme Court case could make it illegal for any jurisdiction to count ballots that arrive after Election Day, period.

Taken together, these changes have the potential to impact, and even disenfranchise, thousands of voters. At the same time, the share of voters whose ballots may be affected constitute only a small fraction of the overall electorate, according to a Votebeat review of data on mail ballots arriving after Election Day.

Votebeat contacted the 19 jurisdictions where voters in the 2024 general election could return their ballots after Election Day and still have them counted. Across the 13 that provided information, more than 750,000 ballots were received after Election Day, representing 0.1-3.1% of the total turnout in those states.

However, voting patterns in 2026 may not look the same as they did in 2024. Voter-education efforts are already underway in some states to urge mail-ballot voters to return their ballots earlier in the future, likely shrinking the number of voters who could be harmed by these changes.

4 red states have already changed their mail ballot deadlines

In the 2024 election, several states allowed mail ballots to arrive after Election Day as long as they were postmarked by then. But in 2025, in line with Trump’s executive order, four of those states — Kansas, North Dakota, Ohio, and Utah — reversed course and enacted laws making Election Day the deadline for ballots to be received. Other states are considering similar changes. A bill to eliminate the grace period recently passed the state House in West Virginia.

All four states that changed their laws are fully controlled by the GOP. Republicans control both legislative chambers and the governorship in North Dakota, Ohio, and Utah, and they have supermajorities in both chambers in Kansas, allowing them to override Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto.

Despite Democratic objections to these changes, the number of voters affected should be very low. Data is not available on the number of ballots that arrived after Election Day 2024 in North Dakota and Utah, but in Ohio and Kansas, relatively few voters took advantage of this grace period.

In Ohio, just 7,579 mail ballots were received after Election Day and counted, representing just 0.1% of the state’s total votes cast that year. An additional 1,944 mail ballots were received after Election Day but didn’t count, either because they arrived too late after Election Day or for some other reason.

In Kansas, only 2,110 ballots were received and accepted after Election Day, or 0.2% of the total vote. An additional 603 ballots arrived too late to count, and 104 ballots that arrived after Election Day were also rejected because they lacked any postmark whatsoever.

As low as they are, these numbers could decrease even further in future elections. Election officials are already working to inform voters in these states of the new deadline, which will hopefully lead to them returning their ballots earlier. For instance, officials in Wyandotte County, Kansas, told a local news outlet they would be telling voters about the new rules via postcard. In Utah, election officials are advising voters to make use of dropboxes if they are worried their ballot will not be delivered in time via the mail.

But the changes are causing issues in at least one state. Local election officials in Ohio are warning that that state’s new deadline could put additional strain on election offices and require that they hire more workers to process ballots.

Postmark delays could affect mail ballots

Even with the above changes, there are still 15 jurisdictions, representing 43% of 2024 voters, that allow mail ballots to arrive “late” — as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. But late last year, the U.S. Postal Service caused a stir when it issued new guidance declaring that mail might not be postmarked on the same day it is dropped off.

In other words, even if a voter mails their ballot on Election Day, it may not be postmarked until the next day — which would lead to its rejection.

The Postal Service clarified that the new guidance “does not change any existing postal operations or postmarking practices”; it has long been the case that mail is postmarked only once it reaches a processing facility, not necessarily on the day that it’s dropped off at a mailbox or post office. However, the Postal Service did say these lags have become more common following 2025 changes to its collection procedures.

It’s difficult to say how many ballots will be affected by these changes in 2026. Votebeat doesn’t have data on how many ballots were dropped off in 2024 on Election Day itself, and it’s unclear how many more of those ballots might receive delayed postmarks than in 2024. But the number of ballots that arrived after Election Day but were still counted in 2024 can serve as a reasonable ceiling for the number of ballots at risk.

In some places, that number was very small, according to data from state and local officials. For instance, in Mississippi, 1,140 ballots arrived after Election Day that were postmarked on time and accepted. That was just 0.1% of the total votes cast in the state that year. In Washington, D.C., that number was 1,062 ballots, or 0.3% of the total votes cast. In Oregon, it was approximately 13,000 ballots, or 0.6% of the total vote. In West Virginia, it was a tiny 449 ballots, or 0.1% of the total vote.

Barring major changes to voters’ ballot-delivery habits in 2026, the postmark changes should have only minuscule effects on elections in these places.

In other states, these numbers are higher, but they’re still relatively small. In Illinois, 106,521 ballots arrived after Election Day that were postmarked on time and accepted, or 1.9% of the total votes cast in the state. In California, 373,116 ballots arrived after Election Day with valid postmarks (although some of those were rejected for other reasons, like a bad signature), or 2.3% of the state’s total vote. Washington had the highest share of its ballots arrive after Election Day properly postmarked: 3.0%, or approximately 120,000 ballots.

So if voters in these states return their mail ballots in 2026 on the same schedule as they did in 2024, around 2-3% of their voters are at risk of being disenfranchised due to the new postmark rules. But that doesn’t mean they will definitely be disenfranchised. Some of these ballots were certainly mailed before Election Day, meaning they would still likely be postmarked on time even if not the day they were dropped off. And, of course, even some of the ballots mailed on Election Day may still be postmarked on time, given that the new policy doesn’t preclude ballots from being postmarked on the day they are mailed.

There’s one more big caveat: Voters in 2026 probably won’t return their mail ballots on the same schedule as they did in 2024. Many of them will likely hear about the new postmark guidance and decide to return their ballots earlier, use a ballot drop box or bring them to a post office and request a manual postmark (which remains an option for voters afraid of processing delays).

States have also started educating voters about the changes. For instance, Oregon updated its guidance in October to tell voters to mail their ballots a week ahead of time, or else to use a drop box. Many states that do not accept ballots after Election Day, such as Pennsylvania, engage in voter-education campaigns each cycle to make sure voters return their ballots on time

(There’s one other possibility here too. Because the new postmark guidance isn’t actually a change in how post offices operate, it’s possible that many of the ballots that will be rejected as a result of it have already been going uncounted due to late postmarks. Thankfully, this does not appear to be a major issue based on the limited public data available from 2024. Only a few states keep track of how many mail ballots are rejected because of invalid postmarks, but in Alaska, Oregon, and Washington, those numbers were just 0.04%, 0.22%, and 0.12% of the electorate, respectively.)

The Supreme Court could require ballots to arrive on Election Day

Finally, it’s also possible that the 15 remaining jurisdictions that accept mail ballots after Election Day will be forced to join Kansas, North Dakota, Ohio, and Utah in discarding the practice by the 2026 midterms. The U.S. Supreme Court is currently considering a challenge to Mississippi’s law allowing properly postmarked ballots to be counted if they are received within five business days of Election Day.

Opponents of the state law, which include the Republican National Committee, argue that allowing the ballots to be counted conflicts with federal law, which says that federal elections are to be held the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, and that counting ballots that arrive after this date risks “chaos and suspicions of impropriety.”

Mississippi argues an “election” is the “conclusive choice” of voters, and voters make that choice by Election Day, even if election officials don’t receive the paper evidence of that choice until a few days later.

Arguments in the case are expected on March 23, with a ruling by early July.

If the U.S. Supreme Court rules against Mississippi, it could ban the counting of all ballots received after Election Day nationwide as well, regardless of postmark date. As detailed above, that would still impact only a small percentage of ballots — between 0.1% and 3%, depending on the state. But it would, on average, be more than in Kansas and Ohio, as well as more than would be affected by the new postmark guidance alone.

Officials in the 15 jurisdictions that could be affected are concerned about how voters would adapt.

“Such a ruling would impact our [military and overseas] voters, who have had that additional mailing time for decades, and our Legislature would need to choose how to reconcile that with our absentee ballot laws,” said Debra O’Malley, director of communications for the secretary of the commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Spokespeople for both the Illinois State Board of Elections and Washington secretary of state’s office said their respective states were monitoring the case. A ruling that bans the acceptance of ballots that arrive after Election Day would likely require election officials to undertake a large-scale voter reeducation campaign in the states where the practice is still allowed.

“We’re aware of that potential but at this point there’s not a concrete plan for adapting to the ruling,” Matt Dietrich, the Illinois spokesman, wrote in an email. “But we’re certainly prepared to help our election authorities and voters adapt should the ruling affect General Election mail deadlines.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Mail ballot application error adds to Chester County’s woes

2026-02-06T21:12:46+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

A Pennsylvania county election office that was already facing criticism for a 2025 election snafu and an alleged hostile work environment is dealing with another error.

Roughly 145,000 mail ballot applications sent out in Chester County this week for the 2026 elections were printed with the first and last names of voters reversed, according to the county. However, the applications can still be used as they are, the county and state said.

The error comes three months after the county misprinted its pollbooks for the 2025 municipal election and two months after The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote an article tying the county’s high staff turnover to what critics described as the election director’s heavy-handed management style.

On Monday, the county sent out mail-in ballot applications to voters on its annual mail voter list, sometimes referred to as the permanent list. The list comprises voters who, when applying for a mail ballot the prior year, indicated they wished to be sent an application the following year. Counties around the state mail out those applications around this time each winter.

Chester County officials said they became aware of the reversed names on Wednesday afternoon, but they didn’t post a notice about it on the county website until Friday morning, after the county was contacted by Votebeat and Spotlight PA.

“The County has confirmed with the Pennsylvania Department of State that voters can still complete and submit their applications to Voter Services, either online or using the paper applications, and they will be processed correctly,” spokesperson Andrew Kreider said via email.

Kreider added that the error occurred “during the printing process used by the County’s printing vendor.”

Matt Heckel, a spokesperson for the Department of State, confirmed the applications are still valid. He also said no other county reported similar issues with the vendor Chester County uses.

Thad Hall, election director for western Pennsylvania’s Mercer County, said the data for the applications comes from a spreadsheet from the Department of State. His office sends out its applications itself, but in the past it has also used a vendor.

Hall said counties typically send a letter informing voters they are on the annual list and telling them they can apply again for mail ballots; on the back of that letter is the application. His process involves using a template letter and performing a mail merge to populate that letter with voters’ names and addresses from the spreadsheet. Before sending out the materials to voters, he checks that they were generated properly, and when he used a vendor for this task, the vendor would send him a sample to check for accuracy.

Chester County’s election director, Karen Barsoum, confirmed that the vendor performed the merge and that a sample was sent back to the county for an accuracy check. Barsoum declined to say which employee or division of the office performed the check.

She said the accuracy check was more focused on confirming that the proper information, such as voter ID number or address, was connected to the right voter rather than whether the names were in the correct order.

Hall, the Mercer County director, said at this year’s conference of county election officials, organizers are planning to host panel discussions on leadership, delegation, and having effective vendor interactions.

“We will be doing panels that address these specific issues that have come up twice in Chester County,” he said. “We want to give people the tools to avoid these election pitfalls.”

The mail ballot application mishap comes on the heels of a contentious county meeting Tuesday night at which residents expressed their frustration over the county’s two other recent controversies.

During the November 2025 election, human error resulted in pollbooks getting printed without third-party and independent voters, forcing thousands of people to vote provisionally. (Virtually all of those people’s ballots were eventually counted.) Investigators determined that human error was compounded by the fact that the county did not have adequate processes in place to detect and prevent such problems.

Although the investigation did not conclude that Barsoum management style contributed to the county’s turnover, some commenters at the meeting called for Barsoum to be fired, arguing that her poor leadership had led to the department’s issues. A local blogger and radio station have also called for her ouster.

Following that meeting, county officials declined to comment on Barsoum’s future employment status, and Barsoum told Votebeat and Spotlight PA she had no intention of resigning.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

What you need to know before voting in Texas’ March 3 primary elections

2026-01-28T11:00:00+00:00

Texans will have more of a say over who their state elected officials will be during the 2026 primaries.

Texas Republican and Democratic voters will pick which candidate they want to represent their interests and their party on the ballot for the November general election. In a state where Republicans dominate state government and where many legislative and congressional districts often are drawn to favor them, the primaries are often very significant. Yet, only a fraction of citizens in Texas vote in primary elections.

There are more than 18 statewide elected officials up for election, along with Texas’ members of Congress, state lawmakers, district-based judges, and local elected officials. With the new congressional maps redrawn to boost the number of Texas Republicans in Congress, some Texans will have to vote in new congressional districts.

Here’s what you need to know about primaries and the voting process. Stay tuned for more guides about candidates in the following weeks. In the meantime, you can use this tool to see how state lawmakers — some of whom are up for election this year — voted on major bills in the past legislative session.

What to do if you still don't have your Texas voter registration card

What’s on the ballot?

Here’s a quick glance at the federal, state, and local elected offices that are up for election this year, according to the Texas Secretary of State.

Federal

1 U.S. senator (John Cornyn’s seat)
All U.S. representatives under new congressional maps after they were redrawn in 2025

State (statewide races)

Texas governor
Lieutenant governor
Attorney general
Comptroller of public accounts
Commissioner of General Land Office
Commissioner of agriculture
One Railroad Commission member (Jim Wright’s seat)
Four members of the Texas Supreme Court
Three members of the Court of Criminal Appeals
Three members of the 15th Court of Appeals

State (regional district-based races)

Eight members of the State Board of Education
Sixteen state senators for districts
All 150 state representatives
Several chief justices of Courts of Appeals
Various regional Courts of Appeals judges

Depending on where you live, lower-level judges and local county offices could also appear on the ballot, including:

County judges
County Courts at Law
Justices of the peace
District clerks
County clerks
County treasurer
County surveyors
County commissioners (precincts 2 and 4)
Various district judges, including on criminal and family courts.

See all the 2026 primary candidates here.

What about third party and independent candidates?

The Libertarian and Green parties have their own nomination process at conventions that typically take place later in the spring. The Libertarian Party of Texas’ state convention is scheduled for April 10-12. The Green Party of Texas has said its county and district conventions will take place in March, followed by a state convention on April 11.

Independent candidates, such as Mike Collier, who announced he is again running for lieutenant governor but not within the Democratic Party, will appear on the ballot in the November general election.

What dates do I need to know?

Feb. 2 is the last day to register to vote and to submit an address change for the midterm election.

You can report an address or name change online. You should do this if you’ve moved since the last time you voted, especially if you have moved to a different county or political subdivision or have legally taken a different name.

How do I check if I’m registered to vote?

You can check to see if you’re registered and verify your information through the Texas Secretary of State’s website.

You’ll need one of the following three combinations to log in:

Your Texas driver’s license number and date of birth.
Your first and last names, date of birth and county you reside in.
Your date of birth and Voter Unique Identifier, which appears on your voter registration certificate.

Read more about voter registration requirements further down in this story.

Feb. 20 is the last day to apply to vote by mail.

When do I need to drop off or mail an application to vote by mail?

Applications for mail ballots must be received by the early voting clerk in your county — not postmarked — by Feb. 20. Applications can also be submitted by fax or email, but the county must receive a hard copy within four business days. They can also be dropped off in person.

You can download an application here or request one be mailed to you here.

If you’re looking to vote by mail, give yourself as much leeway as possible. You’ll need to budget for the time it will take your county to get your ballot to you in the mail after you apply.

What is the deadline to mail my completed ballot?

The deadline for mail-in ballots to be returned to the county is Election Day, March 3. If a ballot is postmarked by 7 p.m. locally on Election Day, it’ll be counted if the county receives it by 5 p.m. on March 4. The U.S. Postal Service recommends mailing your ballot at least one week before the deadline, if not sooner.

Absentee ballots can also be delivered in person to the county elections office with a valid form of ID while polls are open on Election Day.

Completed ballots from military or overseas voters are accepted if they’re received by March 9. (Military and overseas voters can go through a different ballot request and return process.)

Read more about vote-by-mail requirements in this section.

Early voting in person runs from Feb. 17-27. If you can’t vote inside of a polling place because of an illness or disability, curbside voting may be available to you. Read more about what qualifies as a disability and about curbside voting options here.

Who is eligible to vote early?

Anyone registered to vote may vote early, but it must be done in person unless you qualify to vote by mail.

Where am I allowed to vote early?

Voters can cast ballots at any polling location in the county where they are registered to vote. Check your county elections office’s website for early-voting locations.

Election Day is March 3.

Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Election Day.

Are polling locations the same on Election Day as they are during early voting?

Not always. Check where polling locations are open in your area before you head to cast your ballot. In some counties, Election Day voting may be restricted to locations in your designated precinct. Other counties allow voters to cast their ballots at any polling place on Election Day.

Read more about voting options for those who can’t vote in person in this section.

What dates do I need to know for the primary runoff election?

Runoff elections will take place on May 26. The deadline to register to vote in the runoff election is April 27. The deadline for counties to receive applications to vote by mail is May 15. Early voting will occur from May 18-22.

Who can register to vote in Texas?

U.S. citizens in Texas can register to vote if they are 18 or older or if they will be 18 by Election Day.

Citizens in the state cannot register to vote if they have been convicted of a felony and are still serving a sentence, including parole or probation, or if they have been deemed mentally incapacitated in court. Here are more specifics on eligibility.

Eligible people experiencing homelessness can vote, as long as they provide on their registration an address and description for where they are residing, such as a shelter or a street intersection. If needed, their mailing address can be different, but a P.O. Box address is usually not considered a residence address in Texas.

Students studying in Texas who are from other states can also choose to register to vote in the state with their dorm or Texas address.

How do I register to vote?

You must complete and submit a paper voter registration application by Feb. 2.

You can find this at county voter registrars’ offices and some post offices, government offices, and high schools. You can also print out the online application and mail it to the voter registrar in your county. Download your application here. You can also request a postage-paid application through the mail, but this will take some time to receive.

Applications must be postmarked by Feb. 2. You can request the postmark at your local post office.

If you’re worried about the registration deadline, you can also complete or deliver an application in person to your county’s elections administrator. Find yours here. You can also register through organizations that have volunteer registrars like the League of Women Voters, which often hold voter registration events.

Additionally, you can register to vote through the Texas Department of Public Safety while renewing your driver’s license. You may be able to register to vote online if you’re also allowed to renew your license online. This is the only form of online registration in the state.

After you register to vote, you will receive a voter registration certificate within 30 days. It’ll contain your voter information, including the Voter Unique Identifier number needed to update your voter registration online. If the certificate has incorrect information, you’ll need to note corrections and send it to your local voter registrar as soon as possible.

The voter registration certificate can also be used as a secondary form of ID when you vote if you don’t have one of the seven state-approved photo IDs. More information on that here.

Do you have to reregister to vote?

Once you register to vote, you generally remain registered, but there are various reasons why you may want to verify your registration status. For example, you need to update your registration after a name or address change. You can make those updates online here.

What does it mean if my voter registration is ‘in suspense’?

If a county receives a nondeliverable notice after sending a voter registration certificate or suspects an address change, a voter is placed on a “suspense list” and asked to confirm their address. Voters on the suspense list can update or confirm their address before the voter registration deadline to ensure their ability to vote. Voters marked as “in suspense” can also fill out a Statement of Residence when voting by mail or at the polls if they still live in the same county where they registered. (See the next question for options for voters who have moved to a different county.)

If no action is taken by a suspended voter, they are removed from the voter rolls after about four years, according to the Texas Secretary of State’s office.

Federal law prevents the state from removing registered voters within 90 days of a federal election unless the voter has died, been convicted of a felony, or been declared mentally incapacitated.

If you’re concerned about your voter registration, you can verify it online here.

What if I moved after the voter registration deadline?

You must reside in a Texas county by the voter registration deadline to vote in the upcoming election unless you qualify for absentee voting. You can read more about absentee and mail-in voting here.

You can vote at your previous polling location if you moved within the same county or political subdivision. Or you can vote at your new polling location on a ballot limited to the elections you would qualify to vote in at both polling locations, such as federal and statewide races. Limited ballots are available only during early voting at a “main early voting polling place,” which is usually the office of the election administrator or county clerk who runs elections in your county. The main early voting polling place should be noted in a county’s list of early voting locations.

What if I run into issues with my voter registration?

If you have questions or concerns about your registration, you can find your county’s voter registration contact here.

Inside polling locations, there are typically “resolution desks” where poll workers can address registration issues.

You can also find frequently asked questions from the Secretary of State’s office at votetexas.gov.

How do I know if I’m eligible to vote by mail?

This option is fairly limited in Texas. You’re allowed to vote by mail only if at least one of the following applies:

You will be 65 or older by Election Day.
You will not be in your county for the entire voting period, including early voting.
You cite a sickness or disability that prevents you from voting in person without needing personal assistance or without the likelihood of injuring your health.
You’re expected to give birth within three weeks before or after Election Day.
You are confined in jail but otherwise eligible (i.e., not convicted of a felony).

College students who are registered at a residence in Texas, such as a parent’s home, but are studying out of state can apply for absentee ballots.

If you are voting absentee and want to see what will appear on your ballot, you can get a sample ballot from your county. In most cases, sample ballots can be found on your county’s election website.

What identification do I need to vote by mail?

Texas rules for voting by mail require voters to provide an ID number on both their application for a ballot and the carrier envelope used to return a completed ballot. This must be one the following ID numbers:

A driver’s license number
A state ID number
The last four digits of their Social Security number
Texas election ID certificate number (this is a photo ID issued by DPS and is different from the number found on your voter registration certificate)

If you don’t have any of these, you can also check a box indicating you haven’t been issued this identification.

This identification rule was added by the Texas Legislature in 2021. Some voters have had their ballots or applications rejected because they didn’t provide an ID number or the number they provided did not match the one the state had for them.

If you don’t have a license number on file or are unsure about which ID number you provided, the secretary of state has previously suggested contacting your local voter registrar to ask about how to add one of the required numbers to your voter registration record.

Other voting advocates have suggested voters include both their driver’s license or state ID number and the last four digits of their Social Security number, if they have both, to avoid issues.

What counts as a disability to qualify to vote by mail?

The Texas election code’s definition for disability is broader than other federal definitions. A voter is eligible to vote by mail if they have a “sickness or physical condition” that prevents them from voting in person without the likelihood of “needing personal assistance or of injuring the voter’s health.”

What kind of postage do I need to return my mail-in ballot?

Some counties may pay postage for you. Local elections offices should have the specifics once ballots are finalized. That said, if you don’t have enough postage, your ballot is not supposed to be returned to you. Instead, the Postal Service said its practice is to deliver the ballot and bill your election administrator.

What if there’s an issue with my mail-in ballot?

Texas will allow voters to correct their mail-in ballots if the ballots are at risk of being rejected for a technical error, including missing information or signatures. This also applies to issues with the applications for those ballots. County officials are responsible for alerting voters if there is a defect with their application or ballot.

Voters can use a new online ballot tracker to check the status of both their application to vote by mail and their ballot. The tracker can be used to make corrections and is available here. The deadline to correct mail-in ballot applications is Feb. 20. The deadline to correct the envelope of a mail-in ballot is March 9. Corrections may also be submitted by mail – if election officials determine there’s enough time to do so – or in person at a county’s early voting clerk’s office.

How does primary voting work?

During primary elections, you’ll be selecting candidates from the same party. At the polls, you’ll choose whether you want to vote in the Republican or Democratic primary. Some counties will host what’s known as a joint primary, which means everyone checks in at the same desk and uses the same voting machines. In other counties, there will be separate check-in stations and lines for either party.

How can I find which polling places are near me?

By Feb. 11, county election offices should post on their websites information on polling locations for Election Day and during the early-voting period. The Secretary of State’s website will also have information on polling locations closer to the start of voting. However, polling locations may change, so be sure to check your county’s election website before going to vote.

What form of ID do I need to bring?

You’ll need one of seven types of valid photo ID to vote in Texas:

A state driver’s license (issued by the Texas Department of Public Safety)
A Texas election identification certificate (issued by DPS)
A Texas personal identification card (issued by DPS)
A Texas license to carry a handgun (issued by DPS)
A U.S. military ID card with a personal photo
A U.S. citizenship certificate with a personal photo
A U.S. passport

Check out this story for more details.

What if I don’t have a valid photo ID?

Voters can still cast votes if they sign a form swearing that they have a “reasonable impediment” from obtaining a proper photo ID. Those voters will also have to present one of the following types of supporting identification documents:

A valid voter registration certificate
A certified birth certificate
A court-admissable document that confirms your birth and establishes your identity (which may include a foreign birth document)
A current utility bill, bank statement, government check, paycheck, or other document that shows the voter’s name and address. This can be the original document or a copy, except for government documents that contains a voter’s photo, which must be the original.

If you have a valid photo ID but forgot it, you can cast a provisional ballot but will have to visit the local voter registrar’s office by March 9 to present an acceptable ID or documentation in order for the ballot to be counted. A registered voter without a valid photo ID or any of the supporting documents can also cast a provisional ballot.

Are there rules at the polls?

Cellphones, cameras, computers, and other devices that can record sound or images cannot be used within 100 feet of voting stations (where ballots are marked). There are usually traffic cones or signs indicating this. Campaigning, including wearing clothing or other items that publicize candidates, political parties, or measures on the ballot, is also banned beyond this point.

A new law also bans the use of wireless communication devices, like cellphones, in the same room where voting is taking place. Voters are allowed to use written notes to cast their ballot at the discretion of election officers, who determine if the material counts as campaigning.

Firearms, including handguns, are also prohibited at polling places, according to Texas law.

What are my rights as a voter?

If a registered voter’s name does not appear on the list of voters because of an administrative issue, they have the right to cast a provisional ballot.

Voters are entitled to get written instructions about how to cast a ballot or to ask a polling place officer or worker (they can not ask who or what to vote for).

If a voter makes a mistake while marking their ballot, they have a right to use up to two additional ballots to make corrections.

Voters generally have the right to cast their ballots in secret and should not be subject to intimidation.

Voters with disabilities or limited English proficiency can also get interpretation, assistance or other accommodations to vote.

A state law passed in 2023 also allows voters with disabilities or mobility problems to skip the line at their polling location and requires each polling location to have a designated parking spot for curbside voting.

Texas law says voters have the right to vote during work hours without being penalized or losing pay, but this may not apply if a worker has two hours before or after their shift is done to vote.

On Election Day, voters have the right to cast their ballot as long as they’re in line by 7 p.m.

At the polls, voters can talk to election officers or poll workers if they run into issues.

The Secretary of State’s office has a helpline at 1-800-252-VOTE (8683) where state attorneys are available to assist voters and election officials with questions.

A coalition of voting rights groups runs voter protection hotlines in several languages. Disability Rights Texas also offers a helpline for people with disabilities.

What if I was planning to vote in person but can no longer do so?

If you didn’t apply to vote by mail but are unable to go to a polling place, consider requesting an emergency early voting ballot or using curbside voting. Contact your county elections office for more details.

Emergency ballot: These ballots can be requested if you become sick or disabled close to an election and are unable to go to a polling place on Election Day. To qualify, you must designate a representative to submit an application in person on your behalf and have a certified doctor’s note. The application must be received by your county’s early voting clerk before 5 p.m. on Election Day.

Your ballot must be returned by the same designated representative before 7 p.m. on Election Day to be counted. Read more about the process here.

Emergency ballots are also available, through a different process, for individuals who cannot vote on Election Day due to the death of a close family member. Read more about that process and requirements here.

Curbside voting: You can contact your county elections office to determine if you’re eligible for curbside voting, which must be made available at every polling place for voters with disabilities who are unable to enter a polling location. A new law requires curbside voters to fill out a form attesting that they are physically unable to enter a voting location.

How do I know if my provisional ballot was counted?

If you voted with a provisional ballot because of an administrative issue or photo ID problem, you should receive a notice by mail saying whether your ballot was counted in the local canvass, which is the final tally of votes. These notices must be mailed by March 23, according to the state’s election law calendar.

What about regular ballots?

Counties keep track of when people have voted but a voter’s choices are anonymous once ballots are submitted and added to the official count of votes. To ensure vote counts are accurate, counties test election equipment multiple times, including in a public test conducted before an election.

What voter data is public?

Voting history is public. This includes primary election history, meaning the primary you voted in may be disclosed in the rosters of voters that counties are required to post. Your ballot choices are not public.

Disclosure: The Texas Secretary of State has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers disputes Madison’s argument that absentee voting is a privilege

2026-01-26T20:01:40+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers criticized an argument by Madison and its former city clerk that they shouldn’t be held liable for losing 193 absentee ballots because absentee voting is a “privilege,” writing in a court filing that accepting such an argument would “lead to absurd results.”

The argument is key to the city’s defense against a lawsuit that seeks monetary damages on behalf of the 193 Madison residents whose votes in the November 2024 election weren’t counted. It was first presented by the former clerk, Maribeth Witzel-Behl, citing a provision of state law, and then adopted by the city.

If courts accept the argument that absentee voting is a privilege and not a right, the Democratic governor said in a friend-of-the-court brief, election officials would be free to treat absentee ballots in ways that diminish people’s right to vote. For example, he wrote, they would be under no obligation to send voters replacement ballots if ballots they left in a drop box were damaged, and clerks could effectively disqualify ballots from politically disfavored precincts by intentionally not signing their initials on the ballot envelopes.

Experts say that for a governor to intervene in such a local matter is rare and underscores how seriously Evers views the potential implications. In an earlier communication with the court, the governor said the argument from the city and Witzel-Behl “ignores longstanding state constitutional protections.”

Barry Burden, a political science professor at UW-Madison, said Democrats are likely conflicted by the case, seeking to prevent election administration failures like those in Madison while also resisting arguments that could weaken protections for absentee voting in Wisconsin.

“They’re in a weird place to be criticizing absentee balloting in Madison, one of the most Democratic cities in the state,” he said, adding that he thinks the governor “is speaking for the Democratic Party in getting involved in this case” to convey that it is an “isolated incident,” and that the party does not share the position that “absentee voting should be treated any differently in terms of the protections that are given to voters than people who vote in person.’”

In his filing Friday, the governor noted that about 45% of ballots in the 2024 presidential election were absentee.

“The constitutional right to vote,” Evers wrote, “would mean little if close to half of all voters in Wisconsin were deprived of it because they chose to legally cast an absentee ballot.”

Witzel-Behl, former clerk, stands by the ‘privilege’ defense

The lawsuit against Madison officials is a novel type of case in seeking monetary damages over the loss of voting rights. A liberal law firm called Law Forward filed the case against the city and the clerk’s office, along with Witzel-Behl and Deputy Clerk Jim Verbick in their personal capacities, alleging that through a series of errors that led to 193 absentee ballots getting lost in the November 2024 election, election workers disenfranchised the voters and violated their constitutional rights.

As part of their defense, attorneys for Witzel-Behl argued in a court filing that by choosing to vote absentee, the 193 voters “exercised a privilege rather than a constitutional right,” and that she therefore couldn’t be held financially liable for the lost ballots. Madison later joined that argument.

Law Forward rejected the argument in a response filed in late December, calling it a “shocking proposition.”

Attorneys for the city and the former clerk submitted their own briefs last week.

Attorneys for Witzel-Behl reiterated their argument that absentee voting is a privilege and not a constitutional right, adding that “an error in the handling or delivery of an absentee ballot is not the constitutional equivalent of barring the door to the voting booth.”

While absentee ballots should normally be counted, they argued, not counting them because of an unintentional error isn’t a constitutional violation that they should be financially liable for.

Rather than following court precedent, they said, the plaintiffs seek to create a “new, foundationless doctrine allowing monetary damages for the mishandling of an absentee ballot.”

Other defendants zero in on novel monetary claim

In a separate brief, Verbick, the deputy clerk, said he “does not, of course, dispute that Plaintiffs have a right to vote” but rather alleges that there’s no path for the plaintiffs to seek monetary damages for the city’s error.

The city, in another brief, similarly said that no court case cited by Law Forward allows plaintiffs to seek damages for ballots that are unintentionally mishandled.

Allowing such claims, outside attorneys for the city warned, would push courts into “dangerous, untested waters.”

“As other courts have cautioned,” they said, “exposing local election officials to financial liability for unintentional disenfranchisement would thrust courts into the minutia of any given election, a role for which courts are unsuited.”

In a separate statement, the city said it believes that all forms of voting, including absentee voting, should be “encouraged, promoted and protected.” But it argued against attaching a dollar amount to a mishandled vote.

Doing so, it said, “would end up regularly costing cities, towns and municipalities hundreds, thousands — or in this case millions — of dollars that could otherwise be spent improving voter access and elections processes.”

Absentee voting has changed substantially since law’s enactment

The law cited by Witzel-Behl’s attorneys labeling absentee voting a privilege — one that may require more regulation than in-person voting — dates back to 1985. It was enacted after judges in a series of Wisconsin court cases called for more liberal interpretation of absentee voting rules. While it has previously been used to invalidate absentee ballots on which voters did not follow procedure, it has so far not been used in support of a locality failing to properly count votes.

“Absentee voting has changed so radically in the 40 years since the law was written,” Burden said. “It was used by a very small number of voters, it was more difficult to use, there were more witness requirements at the time, and clerks were not really as amenable to absentee voting as they are today.”

Today, absentee voting is an expected and routine part of elections.

“So to treat it as kind of a special class with different rules or rights, maybe in the 1980s that made more sense,” Burden said. “But now it’s as important as any other kind of voting and so it seems more peculiar, I think, to treat it in some different way.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Postal Service changes mean Texas voters shouldn’t wait to mail voter registrations and ballots

2026-01-21T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Texans seeking to register to vote or cast a ballot by mail may not want to wait until the last minute, thanks to new guidance from the U.S. Postal Service.

The USPS last month advised that it may not postmark a piece of mail on the same day that it takes possession of it. Postmarks are applied once mail reaches a processing facility, it said, which may not be the same day it’s dropped in a mailbox, for example.

The new policy means that even if a voter drops their mail ballot in a box by Election Day, it could be rejected if it’s not postmarked on that day. A voter registration application also could miss being postmarked by the Feb. 2 deadline.

That means it’s important to mail voter registration applications and mail ballots early, or bring election mail to a post office and request a manual postmark.

In Texas, there’s no way to register to vote online. The state requires voters to submit a voter registration application to county voter registrars in person or by mail. Mailed applications must be postmarked by Feb. 2 in order for a voter to be eligible to cast a ballot in next month’s primary election.

Mail ballots must be postmarked by Election Day and received by 5 p.m. on the following day in order to be counted.

Here’s what you need to know about the deadlines and procedures for registering and voting by mail:

When is the Texas voter registration deadline for the primary?

In order for a voter to be eligible to vote in the March 3 primary election, their voter registration application must be submitted to the county voter registrar or postmarked by Feb. 2.

Voters can register to vote at any time prior to the deadline. You can print out this form, sign it, and submit it.

What is the Texas mail-in ballot application deadline?

If you qualify to vote by mail, you must first fill out and submit a mail ballot application. For the coming March primary, all mail ballot applications must be received by the end of business on Feb. 20. That time of day varies by county.

What’s the deadline to mail in my ballot?

Election officials can tally mail-in ballots that are postmarked before 7 p.m. on March 3, which is Election Day, and received by 5 p.m. on March 4.

Can I drop it off in person instead?

Yes, but only on Election Day, when voters are permitted to drop off their mail ballot in person at the elections office. Voters are allowed to deliver only their own ballot, and must bring a photo ID. Mail-in ballots cannot be dropped off in person during the two weeks of early voting or any other time prior to Election Day.

What if I live abroad or I am a member of the military overseas?

The deadline to receive ballots from overseas voters is Monday, March 9. The carrier envelope must have a postmark showing it was in the mail by 7 p.m. on March 3 (Election Day).

For military voters who mailed ballots domestically or from overseas and who submitted a Federal Post Card Application, the deadline is also March 9. The carrier envelope does not need to have any postmark.

Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with The Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

New federal ruling is latest defeat to Trump administration’s election agenda

2026-01-13T20:10:57+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

A federal judge on Friday became the third one to block key provisions of President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at revising election rules nationwide, ruling that the Constitution gives states and Congress —not the president— the authority to exercise power over elections.

The administration signaled it is likely to appeal the decision, the latest blow to Trump’s agenda on elections.

His March executive order sought to require proof of citizenship on the federal voter registration form, mostly ban the use of machine-readable codes when tallying ballots, and prohibit the counting of ballots postmarked Election Day but received afterwards.

The administration has appealed two earlier rulings in other cases against the executive order. The cases could ultimately reach the U.S. Supreme Court, but election law experts told Votebeat the president faces long odds.

The White House has said the president is planning a second executive order on elections, though it’s unclear what will be in it, and federal court rulings so far show the approach has limitations.

“The court is very clear that the Constitution gives no authority to the president to do any of these things, and that federal law doesn’t either,” said Derek Clinger, a senior staff attorney with the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative.

The president has also pushed for congressional action to change federal election laws, though federal legislation so far has stalled. He’s called on state lawmakers to advance his policy goals and some states, including Ohio, have repealed grace periods for mail ballots postmarked by Election Day but not received until afterwards.

In rulings in the two related elections executive order cases last year, federal judges struck down provisions of the order requiring those who registered to vote using the federal voter registration form to provide documentary proof of citizenship and requiring federal voter registration agencies to “assess” the citizenship of individuals who receive public assistance before providing them a voter registration form.

“It keeps getting worse for him,” David Becker, an election lawyer who worked in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and now leads the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research, said about Trump. “The more courts look at this executive order, the more they come to the conclusion that the president vastly exceeded his constitutional authority.”

Court ruling meant to ‘restore the proper balance of power’

In his Friday ruling, U.S. District Judge John Chun sided with the states of Oregon and Washington in his ruling against provisions of Trump’s order. He ruled against aspects of the order that require documented proof of citizenship on a federal voter form, call on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to revise certification guidelines to prohibit certain voting machines, and stop absentee ballots arriving after Election Day from being tallied, even if they are postmarked by Election Day.

He also struck down provisions of the executive order tying federal election funding to complying with the proof-of-citizenship provisions and the one banning ballots arriving after Election Day from being processed.

Chun, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden, cited a long history of federal authorities — courts, politicians, and the Founding Fathers — recognizing the potential dangers in giving the president unilateral presidential powers of elections.

The intent of his decision, he said, was to “restore the proper balance of power among the Executive Branch, the states, and Congress envisioned by the Framers.”

Chun specified that his rulings blocking provisions denying election funding and banning ballots arriving after Election Day would apply only to Oregon and Washington, states that primarily rely on mail voting and which brought the lawsuit. But he barred the U.S. EAC from altering the federal voter registration form to require proof of citizenship and altering the agency’s Voluntary Voting System Guidelines to exclude machines that tally ballots using barcodes or quick-response codes.

The Department of Justice didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Executive order fails in court but inspires some action elsewhere

There are just two available constitutional paths for people in the federal government to change election policy in the states, Becker said: an act of Congress or persuading a state Legislature to change state election law.

Outside of some Republican-majority states banning mail-voting grace periods, he added, Trump’s desire to change state-level voting policy has been largely ineffective — states have hardly changed their practices.

Clinger said that the executive order is having a more tangible impact within the federal government.

For example, he said, the order instructed the U.S. Department of Justice to prioritize violations of election laws. The agency has filed 23 lawsuits so far against states unwilling to provide unredacted voter data to the government, which the Justice Department said it needs to make sure federal election laws are properly followed, and many of those lawsuits cited Trump’s executive order.

“Even if the executive order isn’t accomplishing its goals, it does come off as marching orders to the rest of the federal government to pursue related goals,” he said.

Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Marymount University who advised President Joe Biden’s administration on democracy and voting rights, said Trump’s election agenda boils down to “project power that he doesn’t have,” in hopes that the public will lose confidence in election results “even if the rules don’t change one bit.”

Levitt said doesn’t think the public will buy the hype, mostly because Trump and his allies don’t appear to have an actual plan for advancing their agenda. As he has in the past, he likened it to a South Park episode in which gnomes steal underpants as part of a three-step scheme — except they can’t explain the step between collecting the underpants and turning a profit.

A strategy missing the middle, Levitt said, “encapsulates quite a bit of the Trump administration’s approach to elections.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Postmarks, interference, physical threats: Election officials brace for the 2026 elections

2026-01-12T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

Election officials from around the country gathered at a conference in Virginia this week, giving us — and one another — a chance to hear what they’re thinking and worrying about as they plan for the midterm elections this year.

One of their most pressing concerns: the mail.

Updated guidance from the U.S. Postal Service about how it processes mail and when postmarks are applied has sparked widespread concern in recent weeks about whether more mail ballots will be at risk of ultimately not being counted.

Fourteen states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands count mail ballots received within a certain period after Election Day, as long as they’re postmarked by Election Day. In a notice in the Federal Register that took effect Dec. 24, the Postal Service announced that it may not postmark a piece of mail on the same day that it takes possession of it, which could affect ballots dropped in mailboxes on Election Day, for instance.

Speaking at the conference, which was organized by the Election Center, a nonprofit association of election officials, U.S. Postmaster General David Steiner acknowledged the new regulation had sparked “a lot of confusion,” and said it was meant to clarify existing postmarking practices.

Adjustments to the Postal Service’s transportation operations mean that some mail won’t arrive at a processing facility on the same day it’s mailed, according to an agency fact sheet. That means postmarks applied at the processing facility may not match the date the mail was given to a letter carrier or dropped off, the agency said, which is what’s raising concerns about whether some ballots mailed by the deadline could still not get counted.

Earlier in his career, Steiner was a tax accountant, he told the gathering, “and anyone that ever practiced tax accounting knows that there’s only one way to make sure that that tax return that has to be postmarked by April 15 is actually postmarked on April 15”: lining up at the post office and requesting a manual postmark.

Steiner urged the election officials in attendance to inform voters that they can request manual postmarks at post offices with a date that reflects when the ballot was mailed. He promised that the agency would continue to take steps to prioritize the timely delivery of election mail, but said voters need to mail ballots at least a week before the receipt deadline. “We want to make sure that every ballot is delivered, and mailing early is a big part of that,” he said.

Election officials in recent years have repeatedly voiced frustrations with mail delays and urged voters to cast their ballots earlier, so the current questions aren’t entirely new.

But they’re occurring now against a backdrop of rising concern over the federal government’s role in elections, and especially President Donald Trump’s repeated attacks on mail ballots. Trump has suggested he might attempt to curb their use through an executive order.

If Trump, or any president, issues such an executive order, “have you gamed out what you’ll do?” Judd Choate, Colorado’s state elections director, asked a panel of postal officials following Steiner’s address. Colorado is one of several states where people vote primarily by mail.

Panelist Adrienne Marshall acknowledged she was asked the same question at a different event over the summer.

“Of course, by the Constitution … we are required to deliver the nation’s mail,” she noted.

Marshall said that, without her legal team there, she was “not sure” how exactly her agency would respond to a theoretical executive order, but said she believes any executive order on mail ballots would likely be aimed more at election officials than the Postal Service.

The Colorado Department of State said it’s prepared for various scenarios that might affect the 2026 election cycle, but a spokesman wouldn’t comment on specifics.

Another session at the conference aimed to prepare election officials for potential election interference, covering a range of scenarios from how to handle Justice Department and congressional observers to the implications of placing polling sites or ballot drop boxes on federal property.

At a session with an FBI representative, election officials raised questions about the threats against them and election workers, a constant refrain since the 2020 presidential election.

And at a session with two members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, Vice Chair Thomas Hicks, a Democrat, told election officials to take every opportunity to educate members of Congress about election needs. He noted that two long-serving members of Congress who were instrumental in passing the landmark Help America Vote Act of 2002 — Rep. Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, and Sen. Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican — are retiring after this year, leaving what he described as “a huge, huge void, and that’s a bipartisan void.”

Election officials’ list of worries, in other words, remains long.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Madison’s defense in missing-ballot case: Absentee voting is a ‘privilege,’ not a right

2026-01-08T21:06:12+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

The city of Madison, Wisconsin, and its former clerk are arguing in court that they can’t be sued for failing to count 193 absentee ballots in the 2024 presidential election, in part because a Wisconsin law calls absentee voting a privilege, not a constitutional right.

That legal argument raises questions about how much protection absentee voters have against the risk of disenfranchisement — and could reignite a recent debate over whether the law calling absentee voting a privilege is itself unconstitutional.

That law, which appears to be uncommon outside of Wisconsin, has been cited repeatedly in recent years in attempts to impose more requirements and restrictions on absentee voting, and, at times, disqualify absentee ballots on which the voters have made errors. It does not appear to have been invoked to absolve election officials for errors in handling correctly cast ballots.

Nonetheless, the law has become central to the defense presented by Madison and its former clerk, Maribeth Witzel-Behl, in a novel lawsuit seeking monetary damages on behalf of the voters whose ballots went missing.

The suit, filed by the law firm Law Forward, names the city and the clerk’s office as defendants, along with Witzel-Behl and Deputy Clerk Jim Verbick in their personal capacities, and cites a series of errors after the 2024 election that led to the ballots not being counted in alleging that they violated voters’ constitutional rights.

In defending against that claim, attorneys for Witzel-Behl argued in a court filing that by choosing to vote absentee, the 193 disenfranchised voters “exercised a privilege rather than a constitutional right.”

Witzel-Behl’s filing argues that the 193 disenfranchised voters did, in fact, exercise their right to vote, but chose to vote absentee and therefore place the ballots into an administrative system that “can result in errors.”

“The fact that Plaintiffs’ ballots were not counted is unfortunate,” the filing states. “But it is the result of human error, not malice. And that human error was not a violation of the Plaintiffs’ constitutional right to vote.”

Matthew W. O’Neill, an attorney representing Witzel-Behl, declined to comment.

The city’s attorneys have now adopted the same argument, filings show.

Asked about the city’s legal defense, Madison’s current clerk, Lydia McComas didn’t address the argument directly but told Votebeat that the city is committed to counting all eligible votes “regardless of how they are cast.”

Phil Keisling, a former Oregon secretary of state, said he wasn’t aware of other states with similar laws. He said he found the city’s argument wrong and offensive.

“The right to vote, if there is a state constitutional right to vote, should have nothing to do with the form that a voter chooses,” he said.

Law passed to clarify absentee voting requirements

The law that Madison cites in its legal defense was enacted in 1985, long before absentee voting became widespread. The stricter language about the regulation of absentee voting came after judges in a series of Wisconsin court cases called for more liberal interpretation of those regulations.

The law states that while voting is a constitutional right, “voting by absentee ballot is a privilege exercised wholly outside the traditional safeguards of the polling place.” A subsequent provision states that absentee ballots that do not follow required procedures “may not be counted.”

The law appears similar to a 1969 U.S. Supreme Court decision that drew a distinction between the right to vote and the right to receive absentee ballots. That decision has since been interpreted — and misinterpreted — in a “number of ways by a number of people wanting to trim back mail voting,” said Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Marymount University.

After the Wisconsin law was enacted, the state election board clarified the Legislature’s position that failing to comply with procedures for absentee ballot applications and voting would result in ballots not being counted. The board did not suggest the law could be used to excuse municipalities that improperly discard legally cast ballots.

Absentee voting has long been available in Wisconsin but surged in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and has been extensively litigated since then.

The law calling absentee voting a privilege was central to a lawsuit that resulted in a 2022 statewide ban on ballot drop boxes; another lawsuit to prohibit voters from being able to spoil ballots and vote a new one; and President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election outcome in Wisconsin.

A later lawsuit led to the reinstatement of drop boxes in 2024. In that case, plaintiffs argued that the law “unconstitutionally degrades the voting rights of all absentee voters by increasing the risk of disenfranchisement.” The court, then led by liberal justices, declined to overturn the statute but disagreed with an earlier interpretation that absentee voting requires heightened skepticism.

Experts say Madison’s defense misinterprets the law

Rick Hasen, a professor at UCLA Law School and expert on election law, said he didn’t think the law itself was problematic, adding that states have various laws controlling absentee voting. The U.S. Constitution, he noted, doesn’t require any state to offer absentee voting.

But “once the state gives someone the opportunity to vote by mail,” he said, “then they can’t — as a matter of federal constitutional law — deprive that person of their vote because they chose a method that the state didn’t have to offer.”

The city and Witzel-Behl’s use of the law in this instance “seems to be wrong,” said Hasen.

Attorneys for Law Forward in a court filing called Witzel-Behl’s argument a “shocking proposition.”

“There is no right to vote if our votes are not counted,” Law Forward staff attorney Scott Thompson told Votebeat. “And this is the only case I’m aware of where a municipal government has argued otherwise.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

How the U.S. Postal Service’s new guidance on postmarks could affect mail voters

2026-01-07T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Mail voters in 18 jurisdictions may need to take extra care to ensure that their ballots aren’t rejected under new guidance from the U.S. Postal Service about how it processes mail.

In a notice in the Federal Register that took effect Dec. 24, the Postal Service announced that it may not postmark a piece of mail on the same day that it takes possession of it. The change could affect thousands of people who vote by mail in places that allow mail ballots to be counted if they are received after Election Day but postmarked by Election Day.

Those policies are in effect in 14 states — Alaska, California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia — along with the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The new guidance means that, even if a voter delivers their ballot to the Postal Service by Election Day, it may nevertheless be rejected if it is not postmarked that day.

However, voters in these places who mail their ballots on Election Day can still try to ensure that their ballots will count by bringing it to a post office and requesting a manual postmark indicating when it was dropped off.

States move to educate voters

States are already taking steps to educate voters so they aren’t disenfranchised. For instance, Oregon updated its guidance in November to tell voters to mail their ballots a week ahead of time, or else to use a drop box.

“I’m deeply concerned that USPS is doubling down on making it harder for Oregonians, especially rural Oregonians, to vote,” Secretary of State Tobias Reed said. “We’re already taking action, providing updated guidance to make sure every legal vote gets counted, and we’ll continue to sound the alarm: This is a threat to Oregonians’ right to hold government accountable.”

In response to criticism, the Postal Service clarified that the new rule “does not change any existing postal operations or postmarking practices” but rather codifies how postmarks have long been applied. The announcement said that mail is postmarked once it reaches a processing facility, which may not be the same day that it’s dropped off at a mailbox or post office. It noted, however, that these lags have become more common since the implementation of the Regional Transportation Optimization initiative in 2025. Under that initiative, mail that is dropped off more than 50 miles away from a regional hub is collected the next day rather than the same day.

“As explained in the Proposed Rule, postmarks applied at originating processing facilities have never provided a perfectly reliable indicator of the date on which the Postal Service first accepted possession of a mailpiece, and this fact will become more common under RTO,” the Postal Service wrote in the Federal Register. “Therefore, to the extent that customers currently have this view of the postmark, it does not reflect the realities of postal operations.”

The Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy research organization, found that under USPS’ new Regional Processing and Distribution Center network, nearly 50% of post offices are more than 100 miles from their processing center, meaning the mail dropped off at those post office is subject to getting postmarked at least one day late.

According to the Brookings report, some of the 14 states that accept properly postmarked ballots after Election Day, such as California, carry a low risk of postmark delays, but in more rural states such as Mississippi and West Virginia, more than 95% of ZIP codes are at a high risk of postmark delays.

Trump opposes accepting ballots after Election Day

President Donald Trump has long railed against mail voting for what he sees as its susceptibility to fraud. In August, he said in a social media post that he would “lead a movement” to get rid of it.

And he’s taken particular issue with the practice of allowing mail ballots to be received after Election Day. In March 2025, he issued an executive order that asserted in part that federal law prohibited ballots from being counted if they arrived after Election Day. While the president does not have authority over how elections are run, several states changed their statutes following that executive order. The Republican National Committee is also arguing in a case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court that accepting mail ballots after Election Day violates federal law.

Jennifer Morrell, CEO of The Elections Group and a former election official, agreed that the new rule is just a clarification of current practices and said that, to an extent, election officials have always had to contend with postmark issues or late-arriving mail.

She noted that postmark issues can affect not only ballots, but also other election-related mail, such as voter registration applications. For instance, Tennessee allows voters to register so long as the postmark on their mailed application shows it was sent by the deadline.

“I think the main thing for election officials is going to be where do we get the resources, where do we get the expertise, to do more voter outreach and communication,” she said. “How are we going to inform voters of what they need to do so that their registration form arrives on time, so that their mail ballot arrives on time, so that their ballot can be counted? To me, that’s the bigger question.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Arizona’s Maricopa County reports higher rate of ballot rejections for mismatched signatures

2025-11-20T23:03:43+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap said his office rejected 5,903 mailed-in ballots in the Nov. 4 election over mismatched signatures — or roughly 838 for every 100,000 ballots cast, more than double the rate of the 2024 general election.

Heap, a Republican who took office in January after campaigning on a platform of election integrity, said he put new practices in place to verify signatures on mail-in ballots that sped up the process, made it more secure, and will boost public trust in elections.

But Heap’s report on Wednesday, which came during the canvass of the countywide jurisdictional election, troubled three of the five members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, who questioned him about the results.

Board Chairman Tom Galvin, a Republican, emphasized the disparity in rejection rates between this year’s election and the 2024 presidential election, when officials rejected 7,220 ballots for bad signatures, or about 396 for every 100,000 cast.

“If you increase the number of signatures being rejected, do you think that increases the trust in elections?” Galvin asked Heap during the canvass.

He said he’s concerned that if the rejection rate continues to climb, candidates in the 2026 election may file suit to demand that rejected ballots be counted.

Heap said he’s trying to increase trust through bipartisan verification, transparency and multiple security checks.

Arizona’s signature verification process

In Arizona, voters who mail in their ballots sign an affidavit on the envelope, and it is the job of county recorders to verify the signatures by comparing them with sample signatures on file.

Arizona law requires counties to notify voters when they flag an inconsistent or missing signature, and the law gives voters until three days after Election Day for jurisdictional elections to call, text, or visit county offices to confirm that the signature belongs to them, a process called curing. If the voter does not cure the ballot by the deadline, it is rejected.

A 2024 Votebeat investigation in partnership with the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting found that the number of ballots rejected for questionable signatures in Maricopa County tripled between the 2020 presidential election and the 2022 midterms under Heap’s predecessor, Republican Stephen Richer.

Richer implemented a stricter signature verification process in response to false claims of voter fraud and pressure from his own party.

The investigation found that flaws in the county’s signature verification process could lead to disenfranchisement that disproportionately affected voters who are younger, newly registered, or unaffiliated with a political party. Voters whose signatures change with age and voters with disabilities also tended to be flagged for questionable signatures.

Arizona has had elections decided by a few hundred votes in recent years, so even a small number of rejected ballots could affect the outcome.

Heap says his approach sped up reviews

The Nov. 4 election included 30 jurisdictions and 48 contests and one countywide election to decide a tax increase for a public-health district. All 2.7 million registered voters in the county received a ballot in the mail.

Maricopa County's new signature verification process starts with bipartisan teams that examine a signature simultaneously.

Heap and his staff said the fact that it was all done by mail may have contributed to the high rejection rate, because it brought out voters who haven’t voted by mail in several cycles or even decades and who have only one signature on file to compare.

“I think it’s the nature of this type of election compared to a regular election,” Heap said.

Heap, who was a critic of how Maricopa County administered its elections before he took office, said his new signature verification process starts with bipartisan teams that examine a signature simultaneously. A questionable signature will go to a supervisor to determine if it needs to go to a third level of examination.

Under the previous administration, he said, one person reviewed a batch of 250 to 500 ballots and then rechecked their work before sending questionable signatures to a supervisor to determine if the ballot needed to be cured.

He said that process took far too long, especially when the county was buried with “late early” ballots, or ballots that voters on the Early Voting List would drop off on Election Day at a designated site rather than sending in the mail.

Heap said at the canvass that his office was able to get through the late-early ballots in 8.5 hours, compared with 48 hours in last year’s primary. Jennifer Liewer, a deputy elections director for Maricopa County, later told Votebeat that it took the county a day to handle the 2024 primary ballots.

“In the end, signatures either match or they don’t,” Heap said.

Tension between Heap and supervisors

Heap shares election duties with the Board of Supervisors, and they’re locked in a fierce legal battle over the division of election responsibilities. The county recorder handles campaign finance, voter registration, and early voting.

Supervisor Kate Brophy McGee, a Republican, said at the canvass that she would like to know more about the rejected ballots, such as which parts of the county they are from, to identify whether there was a problem that led to so many rejected ballots.

“It’s my belief that people don’t fill out their ballots and sign it — whether it’s on a steering wheel, their lap or whatever — with the idea of mailing it in and not having it be counted,” Brophy McGee said.

Galvin said Thursday that he understands Heap’s intent and that the supervisors’ board has no authority to force him to handle the process differently, but he said the recorder should consider the feedback.

“The increased rate was staring us in the face,” Galvin said. “How could we ignore it?”

Batch of ballots misplaced

County staff also briefed supervisors on a batch of ballots that were misplaced and found on the last day voters could cure them.

Elections Director Scott Jarrett, who works for the supervisors board, said election workers at a Glendale voting location took two sealed bins containing 2,288 ballots, in their envelopes, and placed them in a dropbox to wheel them to a truck for transport to an elections warehouse.

The driver did not tell anyone at the elections warehouse that the bins were in the box, and they weren’t discovered until a few hours before the cure deadline on Nov. 7. Liewer later told Votebeat it was eight hours before.

Jarrett said the chain of custody on the ballots was intact.

Workers with the Recorder’s Office worked frantically to process the ballots and deal with the ones that needed to be cured. Staff contacted the voters whose signatures were questionable every three hours, said Ray Valenzuela, who is in charge of early voting for the Recorder’s Office.

All but 16 of the ballots were cured and counted. Jarrett said the county is now looking into real-time tracking.

Correction, Nov. 20: An earlier version of this story misstated the time limit under state law for Arizona voters to cure their ballots. It is three days after Election Day for jurisdictional elections, and five days for federal elections. This story has also been updated to include comments from Jennifer Liewer, a Maricopa County deputy elections director, and clarify that both Heap and Liewer were referring to the 2024 primary ballots.

Contact Votebeat at az.tips@votebeat.org.

Arizona early-voter list would be abolished under proposed ballot measure

2025-11-18T23:18:48+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

A Republican state lawmaker who is also running for secretary of state has introduced a proposed ballot measure that would overhaul early voting in Arizona by eliminating the early-voter list, shortening the time to cast early ballots, and requiring proof of citizenship to receive an early ballot.

State Rep. Alex Kolodin, who as a lawmaker and a former lawyer for the Arizona Republican Party has pushed to abolish the state’s early-voter list, said in a press release that he’s pushing legislation to put the measure on the ballot because “Arizonans are tired of excuses and chaos on Election Day.”

Kolodin said in a statement that his proposal would improve identification standards and ensure timely election results. He did not respond immediately to requests for comment.

Some provisions of his proposed measure are already in state law, including a poll closing time of 7 p.m. on Election Day and a voter ID requirement.

But others would eliminate a fixture of Arizona elections, the Active Early Voter List, which allows voters to sign up to receive a mail ballot automatically for each election they’re eligible for. Under Kolodin’s proposal, only voters who have provided proof of citizenship would get an early ballot, and they would have to ask for one every two years.

The early-voting list was already due for changes under a law passed in 2021. Starting in 2027, a voter will be removed from the list if they don’t cast their mail ballot for two consecutive general election cycles — a four-year period. That includes statewide general and primary elections, as well as local candidate elections.

Requiring requests every two years, as Kolodin proposes, “is a highly unpopular idea,” said Alex Gulotta, the Arizona director for nonprofit voting advocacy group All Voting is Local. “It’s counter to the way the people of Arizona have executed their right to vote, and if they put it on the ballot, voters are going to vote against it.”

Former Secretary of State Ken Bennett, a Republican, also questioned whether, under the proposal, voters would have to ask for a mail-in ballot just once every two years, or whether they would have to make separate requests for the primary and the general election.

“That would be a nightmare,” Bennett said. “I don’t know if they thought through that wording, but they better be careful.”

The proof-of-citizenship requirement could also raise a legal question.

Arizona voters in 2004 passed Proposition 200, which requires documentary proof of citizenship to vote.

In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Arizona could not require proof of citizenship for voters who register with a federal voter registration form that the state is required to accept, because the federal form did not require such proof. But the justices allowed the state to keep the requirement in place for voters who register with a state form, to vote in state and local elections. Voters who register using the federal form must be permitted to vote in elections for president and for Congress.

Bennett was in office when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2013, and he made the decision to split Arizona’s voter rolls, creating a list of federal-only voters.

Earlier this year, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voided many provisions of a 2022 Arizona law that added a proof-of-citizenship requirement for federal form applicants to vote by mail, as well as requiring proof of citizenship to vote in presidential elections.

Bennett said he sees other problems with Kolodin’s legislation.

For example, the legislation also proposes ending early voting no later than 7 p.m. on the Friday before Election Day. Bennett said that language should be adjusted to make sure not to invalidate any mail ballots that are returned to elections officials over the weekend or on Monday and Tuesday.

The legislation is a concurrent resolution, meaning it doesn’t require the governor’s approval and goes directly to voters on the November 2026 ballot if the Legislature approves it.

State Sen. Shawnna Bolick, a Phoenix Republican, introduced a mirror resolution in her chamber. Introducing duplicate legislation in each chamber allows it to move on a fast track. Bolick did not respond to a request through the Senate spokesperson for an interview.

Contact Votebeat at az.tips@votebeat.org.

Republican voters drive increase in mail ballot requests in Pennsylvania

2025-10-27T19:30:07+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

With one day left for Pennsylvanians to request a ballot to vote by mail, state data shows voters of both parties are turning to that method in record numbers — and Republicans have seen a particularly strong rise.

According to data from the Pennsylvania Department of State, as of Monday, more than 1.1 million voters had requested a mail ballot.

That’s up 17% from the 2021 municipal election, the most comparable recent election, and up 9% from 2023, when higher-profile local races such as district attorney and county commissioner were on the ballot.

The increases could be a sign that voters are more interested in the judicial retention races on this year’s ballots than they have been in other races in recent municipal elections.

The last day to request a ballot is Tuesday, Oct. 28.

“The numbers struck me,” said Chris Borick, a professor of political science at Muhlenberg College in Allentown. “Having that type of activity at this point does suggest that voters are a bit more engaged this time around.”

Republican voters appear to be driving the trend. While Democrats still make up the majority of mail ballot requests, 66%, Republicans now make up a greater share than they did four years ago. The number of mail ballots requested by GOP voters has risen to roughly 277,000 from 205,000 in 2021, a 35% increase. The Democrats’ total, by comparison, is up just 9%

As of Monday, voters of both parties had returned roughly 52.5% of their ballots.

This is despite Republican leaders sending mixed messages to voters on the safety of mail voting.

President Donald Trump has derided mail voting as susceptible to fraud and said in an August social media post that he would “lead a movement” to get rid of it. But local and state Republicans have been encouraging people to vote by mail.

Just last week, Rep. Dan Meuser, a Republican once considered a top contender for governor, promoted the option in a social media post shared by the state party.

“Things change for a lot of us, so if you can vote early, vote early,” he said. “Send your mail ballot in.”

While the Republican interest in mail voting has been growing steadily in recent election cycles, the increase for this year’s typically low-turnout municipal election may have to do with the year’s highest-profile race: a judicial retention election that will decide whether several appellate judges initially elected as Democrats get to stay on the bench for 10 more years.

Republicans have been urging voters to vote “No” on three state Supreme Court justices, and two lower court justices. They hope a no vote will open up the possibility of flipping the ideological majority of the state Supreme Court court during the 2027 municipal election. Millions of dollars have already been spent in the race on a type of election that historically received little attention.

The state Supreme Court plays a crucial role in elections, settling high-profile legal disputes. Republicans are citing some of those recent rulings as a reason to vote no.

Borick, the Muhlenberg professor, said so far, he is seeing signs that the retention races are driving greater interest in this election, compared with previous municipal elections. However, he said the numbers of mail ballot requests aren’t a definitive indicator.

The ultimate question, which can’t be answered until Election Day, is whether they represent an actual increase in turnout or just voters who typically go to the polls shifting to voting by mail, he said.

“I’m confident that the Republican efforts to reach out to the voters and make them more comfortable with mail ballots has shown some results,” he said. “Now, again, will those be some different voters? I think Republicans are optimistic it will maybe get on the margins, some folks that wouldn’t have shown up…and therefore add to their totals.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

What Pennsylvania voters need to know ahead of November’s election

2025-10-23T16:42:25+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Pennsylvanians will head to the polls next month to vote in some distinctive contests.

The highest profile race this year is for three state Supreme Court justices hoping to remain on the bench. Also on the ballot, representing the smallest possible constituency, are candidates seeking to be precinct-level election workers.

And if you haven’t voted by mail since the 2024 presidential election, there are some changes that could affect you.

Here is what you need to know ahead of the Nov. 4 municipal election:

What are judicial retention elections?

In Pennsylvania, judges and justices on the state’s appellate courts are elected for 10-year terms. As their terms come to an end, jurists run for retention, which means another 10-year term.

When they first run for office, judges run in the primary and declare a political party. But when they run for retention, they’re not running against any other candidate, and no party affiliation appears next to their name on the ballot.

Voters will be asked to simply vote “yes” or “no” on whether the judges and justices should serve another term.

Yes-or-no retention races are the most common way state Supreme Court judges run for additional terms, but Pennsylvania’s combination of initially partisan elections followed by nonpartisan retention races is less common.

Retention campaigns in Pennsylvania are almost always successful. Only one state appellate judge, Supreme Court Justice Russell Nigro, has ever lost a retention race.

If a judge loses a retention vote, the governor, Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, would appoint a replacement to fill in until the next municipal election in 2027. The appointment is subject to confirmation by the GOP-controlled state Senate.

Who are the judges up for retention?

Five statewide appellate court judges are up for retention this year, including three state Supreme Court justices.

Commonwealth Court Judge Michael Wojcik is running for another term, as is Superior Court Judge Alice Dubow, although that court does not handle election law issues.

On the state Supreme Court, Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty, and David Wecht will be on the ballot.

All five initially ran as Democrats, and the Pennsylvania Bar Association has recommended all five for retention.

Republicans are vigorously campaigning against retaining the judges, especially the state Supreme Court justices, and have repeatedly highlighted their rulings on election law cases. The justices have ruled on everything from gerrymandered congressional maps to rules surrounding mail voting. A key case on mail ballots is currently pending before them, and more election law cases are sure to arise during the 2026 midterm elections.

What are the races for election judge and inspector?

Voters will see a race on their November ballot that is uniquely Pennsylvanian: an election to choose their poll workers, the people who run their voting precincts.

Pennsylvanians have been voting on poll workers since at least 1799.

Some New England states have elected town officials who oversee polling places as part of their job. But according to a report from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, Pennsylvania is the only state that directly elects officials whose sole responsibility is overseeing elections at the precinct level.

On the ballot are two races for three positions total. Voters will select one candidate for judge of elections and one for inspector of elections.

During the primary, Democratic and Republican voters in each precinct are supposed to nominate one candidate for judge, and each party nominates one candidate for inspector. In the fall, the election judge candidate with the most votes assumes the position. Of the two inspector candidates, the one who gets the most votes becomes the majority inspector, and the second-place candidate becomes the minority one.

The candidate spaces are often blank on the November ballot, since many races go without candidates in the primary. Poll workers are often elected with just a few write-in votes in the November election. If no one is elected, county officials will appoint poll workers.

How will mail voting be different this year?

Since the 2024 presidential election, there have been two important court rulings on mail voting.

First, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in August that it is unconstitutional for Pennsylvania counties to reject mail ballots on the grounds that the return envelopes are undated or misdated. Counties have rejected ballots in the past for these reasons, and legal fights over the issue have gone on for years.

However, the issue is not yet settled. The case could still be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and another case on the same issue is currently pending before the state Supreme Court. Election officials recommend always signing and dating your mail ballot return envelope, regardless of what recent court rulings say.

Last month, the state Supreme Court ruled that if counties know a mail ballot has a disqualifying error, such as lacking a signature on the return envelope, they have to notify voters before rejecting the ballots. These notifications will typically be sent to the email address the voter used when applying for a mail ballot.

The last day to request a mail ballot is Oct. 28

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Dearborn, Michigan, had to reprint thousands of ballots because of an error. Who pays for that?

2025-10-17T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

Taxpayers will be on the hook for reprint costs after Dearborn, Michigan, printed and mailed out thousands of ballots that listed an incorrect candidate. But it’s unclear whether paying the bill will be the responsibility of the city or Wayne County.

City officials estimate that Dearborn printed about 10,000 ballots that incorrectly listed Mohammed Shegara as a candidate for City Council even though he dropped out of the race in April. Roughly 9,000 of those went out to voters, City Clerk George Darany told Votebeat.

To reprint and resend corrected ballots cost about $3,600, Darany said. The postage part of that, 21.3 cents per ballot, came out of the city’s account already, but no one has been billed yet for the reprint part, which is about 15 cents a ballot.

Darany said the error involved officials in both the city and county clerk’s offices — the county is responsible for designing the ballot — so the city may ask the county to shoulder part of the cost. County officials, for their part, say the cost should fall squarely on Dearborn.

When his office submitted the lists of candidates to the county in the spring, Darany said, officials noted multiple times that Shegara had dropped out of the race by the city’s deadline.

“Unfortunately, when we received the proof ballot (from the county), his name was still on it,” Darany said. His staff found and pointed out other errors, he said, but “we didn’t notice that person’s name.” (Shegara told the Detroit Free Press that he was confused when he saw his name on the ballot.)

Several people in the Dearborn Clerk’s office review the ballot, including the deputy clerk and the elections supervisor, but Darany is the final signoff.

While Wayne County officials designed the ballot, they said Dearborn should pay for the reprint, particularly as the ballot contains only local races: Dearborn’s mayor is up for reelection, as is Darany. The entire City Council is also on the ballot, alongside a proposal to expand the council and divide the city into wards for council representation.

“In this case, the Dearborn City Clerk and the Dearborn City Election Commission failed to correct the error on the ballot proof prior to approval,” Dorian Tyus, spokesperson for Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett, wrote in an email Wednesday.

The city clerk’s office and the city’s election commission “will be responsible for the cost of reprinting the ballots in this case,” Tyus wrote.

Genya Coulter, election systems analyst at the Open Source Election Technology Institute, said such issues with ballots are more common than people realize, particularly in places like Michigan where so many communities run their own elections.

In Owosso last summer, a misplaced decimal point meant a heading in a millage question was different from the question itself. No one caught the error until a few weeks before the election, “despite multiple rounds of proofreading,” City Clerk Amy Kohagen said at the time. (In an interview with Votebeat, she recalled the time years ago when a county ballot had the word “public” misspelled as “pubic.”) Reprints have also been required after candidates were incorrectly left off the ballot or after incorrect color coding meant voters got the wrong ballot for their precinct.

Coulter said Dearborn officials did the right thing after discovering the error by publicizing the problem early and immediately implementing a solution

That quick acknowledgement meant that only a small number of residents — about 5% of absentee voters — had actually returned the incorrect ballots before the problem was noticed, Darany said. Voters should have their new ballots, marked with a bright green sticker, in their hands already.

If voters return both ballots, the original ballot will be spoiled and the correct one will be processed. For voters who return the initial ballot but not the corrected one, poll workers will have to copy their choices onto a corrected ballot and process that one. Only one ballot will ultimately be counted for each voter.

That’s already a familiar procedure for the city, Darany said. Last year, the city had to process about 350 ballots that way because overseas and military voters’ ballots “come back on a form,” and the choices have to be copied onto a ballot for counting, he said.

This year, he expects that even with the error, that number of ballots that need to be copied over will be the same or lower. The city will have extra people on standby to help.

As for the cost, Darany figures the city is still ahead of the game.

“One thing people don’t know is that we were planning at the end of the November to give the City Council a report letting them know how much we saved this year on elections because we did some consolidations, which means fewer workers, fewer tabulators to test and so on,” Darany said. “We were prepared to give the council a letter saying we had saved $27,000 this year amid our effort to make our elections more efficient. Now it just might be $27,000 minus that $3,600.”

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Duplicate mail ballots are issued to dozens of Pennsylvania voters

2025-10-09T14:38:30+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

A handful of Pennsylvania counties mistakenly issued duplicate mail ballots to a few of their voters in recent weeks.

Why that happened is unclear — state and county officials gave different explanations — but they cautioned that the error would have not resulted in anyone being able to have their vote counted twice.

State and county officials said they have found that a total of 68 potential duplicate mail ballots were mistakenly issued. In some of these cases, they said, the ballots may not have reached voters, as the mistake may have been caught after a second ballot label was generated but before a duplicate ballot was actually mailed to the voter.

In Luzerne County, in northeast Pennsylvania, 31 voters received duplicate mail ballots, WVIA reported Tuesday. State officials initially said that the problem was isolated to that one county, but acknowledged a small number of other counties experienced similar issues — although potentially for different reasons — after inquiries from Votebeat and Spotlight PA.

Using publicly available information on mail ballot requests, Votebeat and Spotlight PA identified a few other counties that appeared to have issued duplicate ballots. Election officials in Dauphin, Montgomery, and Carbon counties confirmed that some voters in their counties had been issued or received duplicate mail ballots as well.

Emily Cook, election director for Luzerne County, told WVIA that the cause was an unknown problem with the state election management system, known as SURE.

But Jonathan Marks, deputy secretary of the commonwealth, said the duplicate labels were created in a variety of ways, and at least some stemmed from user error as counties tried to fix an issue with the first mail ballot. SURE’s user interface has shortcomings, he acknowledged, and resolving one issue can create another if counties don’t use the ideal method. Marks said the state is looking at how to improve it.

The Department of State said counties sometimes print duplicate labels for other reasons, such as damage to the original label. “A duplicate label’s existence does not automatically mean an error has occurred,” the department said in a statement.

Both county and state officials stressed that the duplicate ballots have been canceled, and could not be cast or counted. In addition, each ballot return envelope has a unique barcode associated with the voter. When a county receives a ballot back, the code is scanned into the SURE system and it marks the voter as having voted. If a second barcode tied to the same voter were to be scanned, the system would reject the ballot.

After learning of the duplicate mail ballots in Luzerne, state election officials audited the SURE system to check for any additional duplicates, and found 37 potential cases across seven other counties.

In Dauphin County, which includes Harrisburg, Election Director Chris Spackman said the county was informed by the department on Tuesday that “a routine internal review of the SURE system” had discovered a single duplicate ballot sent to a Dauphin voter. Spackman added that his deputy was informed by a contractor who helps the department manage the SURE system that the error was the contractor’s, but he knew no other details.

Megan Alt, a spokesperson for Montgomery County, west of Philadelphia, said the county had notified the state Wednesday morning of a potential duplicate, and workers subsequently discovered three other voters who had received duplicate ballots “as a result of files received from the state’s system.”

Carbon County’s election director, Jennifer Ketchledge, confirmed that her county issued 20 duplicate labels for mail voters. She said the department reached out to her Tuesday and informed her, and the county canceled the additional ballots.

“I have no clue” why it happened, she said, adding that the state was looking into it.

Even if two mailing labels for ballots are generated for the same voter, Ketchledge said the vendor that handles the county’s mail ballot printing and shipping would catch it before the duplicate ballot was actually sent.

Cook, the Luzerne election director, did not respond to a request for comment, but county officials told other news outlets the SURE system shouldn’t allow such errors to happen.

“Assuming that the state’s excuse is accurate, how broken is the SURE system if it cannot safeguard against a county inadvertently sending two labels for the same voter?” Luzerne County Manager Romilda Crocamo told The Citizens’ Voice Wednesday.

“There is nothing sure about the SURE system,” Crocamo added. “The upgrades to SURE system can’t happen soon enough.”

The state said the SURE system’s primary safeguard “is a mechanism that prevents recording more than one ballot per voter in a single election.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Counties must notify voters if their mail ballot was rejected, Pennsylvania Supreme Court rules

2025-09-29T13:52:53+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Voters must be notified if election officials are going to reject their mail ballots because of an error such as an incorrect date or missing signature on the return envelope, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled Friday.

In a 4-3 decision, the court ruled that Washington County erred in not notifying 2024 presidential primary voters that their mail ballots would be rejected, leaving them unaware their votes would go uncounted.

“We must interpret the Election Code and its statutory procedures in a way that ‘favors the fundamental right to vote and enfranchises, rather than disenfranchises, the electorate,’ Justice Kevin Dougherty said, writing for the majority. “Reading the Code as allowing county boards to withhold readily available information from voters does not serve that goal.”

The decision, in combination with another ruling last year from the high court, means that voters across the state will have at least some rights to be notified and have some recourse if their mail ballots are at risk of being rejected because of mistakes.

Before the 2024 primary, the Republican majority on Washington County’s board of elections opted not to notify voters of mistakes with their mail ballots that would cause their votes to be disqualified, such as a missing date or signature, or being returned without a secrecy envelope. That left voters with no way to know about those errors or fix them to ensure their vote could be counted.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court had previously ruled that state law doesn’t require counties to give voters a chance to fix errors with their ballots, but it also doesn’t prohibit the practice either. As a result, many counties adopted such a process to tell voters of their mistakes and give them another chance, referred to as “notice and cure.”

More than half of counties do this, according to a Votebeat and Spotlight PA analysis.

During the primary, Washington County gave voters no warning if their ballot had an error that would result in it being rejected, even though it acknowledged receiving them. When Washington County received a mail ballot back from a voter, it used only generic codes in the state’s ballot tracking system to indicate the ballot had been received, rather than more specific codes that could indicate whether there is a problem that prevents the ballot from being counted. These codes generate distinct emails to voters, and the more specific codes would have generated emails that informed voters their ballots were at risk of rejection.

Ultimately, Washington County rejected 259 mail ballots during the primary for issues with a signature or date on the outer envelope, or for being returned without an inner secrecy envelope. That was roughly 2.2% of mail ballots returned to the county.

Statewide, roughly 8,500 ballots in the 2024 primary, or 1.22% of those returned, were rejected for one or more of those errors, according to an analysis of Pennsylvania Department of State data.

Some counties, including Allegheny, send the defective ballot back to the voter with instructions on how to fix the error, as well as a new return envelope. That method enabled voters there to fix nearly 62% of the defective mail ballots in the spring primary. Chester County tells voters to come into the elections office with ID and fix it in person. Delaware County cancels the defective ballot and issues a new one.

The ACLU and Public Interest Law Center sued Washington County — on behalf of seven voters, the local NAACP branch, and the Center for Coalfield Justice — arguing that by not informing the voters that their ballots were at risk of rejection, the Washington County had violated the voters’ constitutional due process rights and denied them the opportunity to challenge the decision or cast provisional ballots.

Washington County Court of Common Pleas Judge Brandon Neuman agreed with the organizations, writing that under the state Election Code, voters have a right to challenge the decision by a county board of elections to reject their ballot, and to cast a provisional ballot. If they don’t know their ballot was rejected, he wrote, they can’t exercise those rights.

He ordered the county to change its process for what codes it uses when receiving ballots, so voters better understand that their ballot is at risk of rejection.

Washington County appealed the decision to Commonwealth Court, joined by state and national Republican groups that had intervened in the case. Last September, Commonwealth Court upheld the lower court ruling 2-1 that the county had to provide notice so that the voters’ due process rights could be maintained.

Shortly before the 2024 presidential election, the state Supreme Court also ruled that if a county rejects a voter’s mail ballot, they must count a valid provisional ballot if the voter casts one on Election Day.

In combination, the two rulings mean some version of “notice and cure” should exist in most counties in the state.

Michael Morse, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who is researching the effect of different “notice and cure” policies, said the court’s ruling was “promising but limited.” He noted that the court’s opinion applies only to counties that choose to segregate mail ballots to identify defects ahead of Election Day.

The case was one of the last remaining major pieces of litigation stemming from Act 77, the 2020 law that enacted no-excuse mail-in voting in Pennsylvania.

Another case pending before the state Supreme Court, which has yet to be decided on, deals with whether ballots should be rejected if voters fail to write a date on the ballot return envelope.

Correction, Oct. 2, 11 a.m.: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the scope of the court’s recent ruling. Some counties may not have a de facto “notice and cure” policy as a result of the two court rulings if they don’t segregate mail ballots to identify errors ahead of Election Day.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Fight over Pennsylvania’s mail-ballot date requirement approaches the endgame

2025-09-22T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

When Pennsylvania’s highest court gathered in Philadelphia on Sept. 10 to hear arguments on whether voters must write the date on their mail ballot return envelopes, a lawyer for Republican groups told justices that eliminating the requirement could prompt a flood of election law challenges.

It’s probably a little late to worry about that.

Election litigation hit unprecedented heights across the country during the 2024 election cycle, according to an expert who tracks it, a sign that courts are increasingly being asked to settle partisan battles over election administration.

And Pennsylvania’s mail ballot dating requirement could very well be the most litigated of all.

Lawmakers adopted the requirement that voters sign and date the outside mail ballot envelope as part of a larger election law, Act 77, in 2019. The legal disputes center on whether the requirement can be enforced and whether it serves any practical purpose.

Since Act 77 was enacted, courts have made at least nine different rulings that have switched the way counties must deal with undated or misdated mail ballots, and the rules voters must follow. The back-and-forth decisions have flummoxed voters, frustrated election administrators, and kept taxpayers perpetually on the hook for litigation bills.

“The deluge of cases and the deluge of decisions, it gets confusing,” said Andrew McGinley, vice president of external affairs at the Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia-based government watchdog group.

At separate points in separate cases brought under differing legal rationales, state appellate courts have said undated ballots should be counted, and said the requirement couldn’t be enforced. Federal courts have said it violated federal law, only to have those decisions vacated on appeal. The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to take up the issue in one case, while invalidating rulings in another.

It’s all over a requirement which both judges and election officials have said serves no functional purpose in running elections. But election experts and attorneys hope the saga is nearing an end as the state Supreme Court hears one ongoing case, and a parallel proceeding makes its way toward the U.S. Supreme Court.

Conflicting court decisions have roiled elections

As the court cases have dragged on, state and local election officials have redesigned Pennsylvania’s mail ballot envelope and educated voters about the dating requirement. Those steps have helped reduce the percentage of mail ballots rejected for lacking a proper date — as well as missing signatures or secrecy envelopes — by more than half, from 1.31% in the 2022 general election to just 0.57% during last year’s higher-turnout presidential election.

But that hasn’t settled the legal dispute.

Opponents of the ballot dating requirement say courts must strike it down to avoid allowing the state to impose hurdles on voters without good cause. Those backing the requirement say it does have a purpose, such as detecting fraud or as the record of last resort to document when the ballot was cast.

Since the requirement passed, thousands of voters have had their ballots set aside and their votes rejected because they forgot to write that date, even though they were otherwise eligible.

On at least three occasions, decisions have dropped just before or after voters cast their ballots, changing the rules during an election.

“Obviously it’s not helpful for us to have this lack of clarity on what the law is going to be for every election,” said Thad Hall, elections director for Mercer County. “In many cases when they’ve switched the court decision, it has come down right before we’re canvassing, right when we’re canvassing, and it makes it difficult for us in how we handle things.”

In late November 2023, a federal district court in western Pennsylvania ruled that the requirement violated a provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which says a voter’s ballot cannot be rejected for reasons that are immaterial to the voter’s eligibility. That ruling came right when counties were in the middle of finalizing their vote totals.

Some counties included improperly dated ballots in their count for that election, some didn’t, and the decision reshaped the outcome of at least one local race.

In the eight elections since 2020 where an order to not count the ballots has been in effect, tens of thousands ballots have been rejected for lacking a date, according to Votebeat and Spotlight PA analysis, data from lawsuits, and figures from the Pennsylvania Department of State. A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of State said a complete figure for ballots rejected in the five years the law has been in effect is unavailable due to how data was tracked in the earlier years of no-excuse mail voting.

At least some of that is because the back-and-forth has confused voters, the current case before the state Supreme Court suggests.

One of the plaintiffs in that case, Susan Kinniry, forgot to date her return envelope for a September 2024 special election. She received an email saying her ballot would not be counted, but didn’t attempt to fix the error, because three days after she got the email, the state’s Commonwealth Court ruled that rejecting ballots for lacking a date violated the state’s constitution.

By that standard, Kinniry’s ballot would have been counted. But then, just before the election, the state Supreme Court stayed the Commonwealth Court’s ruling, meaning it ultimately didn’t count after all.

What purpose does the date on a ballot envelope serve?

Kinniry and the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, which represented her alongside The Public Interest Law Center, argue that disqualifying the ballot for lacking a date violates the “free and equal elections” clause of the state constitution. That clause says that “no power, civil or military, shall at any time interfere to prevent the free exercise of the right of suffrage.”

The ACLU, along with lawyers for the state Democratic Party and the city of Philadelphia, say the requirement violates the clause because it burdens the voter without furthering a compelling government interest. They say, as they have in other cases and as the federal courts have determined in previous rulings, that the voter’s handwritten date plays no role in election administration.

That’s because when a mail ballot is sent from a county or its vendor to a voter, the barcode on the envelope is scanned and the date on which it was sent is recorded in the state’s election management system, known as SURE. The date is also recorded when a ballot is returned to the county, and workers physically stamp the envelope with a return date. The handwritten date plays no role in determining whether the ballot was received in time to be counted.

Lawyers representing Republican Party groups and the state’s attorney general, arguing in favor of keeping the requirement, said the date can serve other purposes, including as a backstop if the SURE system fails.

But Ben Fabens-Lassen, a lawyer for Philadelphia’s Board of Commissioners, said in that “unlikely instance,” there is “simply no way” election officials would use the handwritten date, since they have the physical stamp as a backup.

John Gore, the lawyer representing Republican Party committees in both the federal and state cases, also said the date could help officials prove fraud. He pointed to a fraud case from Lancaster County where a woman returned her deceased mother’s mail ballot and wrote a date on it that was after the woman had died. That helped prosecutors show the ballot had been cast fraudulently, Gore argued.

But Daniel Volchok, who represented the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, countered that the date was just one of six elements detectives had used in that case to make that determination, and removing it wouldn’t have changed anything.

Justices were clearly wrestling with the same questions when they heard the case earlier this month.

“If there is no purpose in a requirement, I struggle with how an election can be ‘free’ if there is a trick,” Chief Justice Debra Todd said. Justice Christine Donohue said it was “uniquely without purpose.”

On the other hand, Justice Kevin Brobson suggested the date shows when voters signed the attestation on the return envelope, showing exactly when they attested that certain facts are true.

A rising tide of litigation

Rick Hasen, a professor at UCLA Law School who tracks election litigation, says the two-year federal election cycle of 2023-24 saw more election lawsuits than any other period since the beginning of his database, in 1996.

“Political operatives recognized that in very close elections, the rules of the game matter a lot,” he said.

Hasen said while it’s rare that litigating over technical issues in election law can change the outcome of a race, it’s not impossible.

For example, in 2008, Al Franken, a Democrat, initially lost a bid for a Minnesota U.S. Senate seat to incumbent Republican Norm Coleman by a few hundred votes. But the close margin triggered a legally required recount, during which attorneys for Franken argued that some absentee ballots had been improperly rejected and should be counted. Franken ultimately won.

Hasen said there have always been cases like that — post-election disputes in close races over which ballots to count — but part of what sets the current moment apart is that we are now also seeing pre-election disputes over what ballots should be counted.

Derek Muller, an election law professor at Notre Dame Law School, has pointed to another contributing factor: a 2014 federal campaign finance change allowed fundraising specifically for election litigation. Hasen said the change created an incentive to pursue more cases, “because otherwise you’re kind of leaving money on the table.”

Even against that backdrop, Hasen said the amount of litigation over Pennsylvania’s mail ballot dating requirement stands out. Factors that could be fueling it, he said, include the commonwealth’s status as a swing state, a perception that less restrictive mail ballot rules help Democrats and hurt Republicans, and a general sense that it’s unfair to reject a ballot that election officials know was received on time and would otherwise be counted.

“If Pennsylvania were not so polarized, or if one party controlled the legislature and the governor’s office, then you could well see a legislative fix for this problem,” he said.

Is the end near?

Either the case currently before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, or another one pending in the federal courts could theoretically settle the question for good.

Adam Bonin, a Philadelphia-based Democratic election lawyer, is representing a voter from central Pennsylvania, Bette Eakin, who argued that rejecting mail ballots for issues with the date on the outer envelope violates voters’ First Amendment rights, since voting is considered an expression of free speech.

A federal district court judge agreed with that argument in March, and a panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld it in August.

The Republican National Committee is asking the full bench of 3rd Circuit judges to rehear the case. At the state Supreme Court hearing, Gore suggested the 3rd Circuit’s ruling could ultimately be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

And if the state Supreme Court rules for the ACLU, Republicans could in theory appeal that to the U.S. Supreme Court, too, if they believe the state court overstepped.

But other than that, “there’s not too many steps left,” Bonin said.

“I’ve got to believe, after three to four years of litigating this same issue in different iterations, we’re finally going to get to a place where this disenfranchisement trap goes away,” said Stephen Loney, the ACLU’s senior supervising attorney who argued the case on Sept. 10

Of course, even if the courts finally manage to end the back-and-forth on the dating requirement, there are plenty of other election cases still pending in Pennsylvania.

“There’s still outstanding issues about ‘notice and cure,’ pre-canvassing, all these pieces,” noted McGinley, of the Committee of Seventy, “and that requires the legislature to act to clarify a lot of these different issues that have come up as a result of Act 77.”

And still more court cases are certain to follow.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Clarification, Sept. 23: This article was updated to reflect that The Public Interest Law Center is co-counsel alongside the ACLU in the state Supreme Court case.

Pennsylvania counties can’t reject mail ballots over missing date, federal appeals court rules

2025-08-26T21:45:53+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

What happened?

It is unconstitutional for Pennsylvania counties to reject mail ballots on the grounds that the envelopes are undated or misdated, a three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday in a long-running legal battle over the state’s mail ballot dating requirement.

The judges found the dating requirement to be a minimal burden on voters, but said there was not a sufficient state interest to justify enforcing it. “Weighing the burden that practice imposes on Pennsylvanians’ constitutional right to vote against the State’s interest in the practice, the balance of the scales leads us to hold that it does not comply with our Constitution,” the judges concluded unanimously, upholding a decision earlier this year from a federal district court judge.

What’s the dispute?

As Votebeat has previously reported, Act 77, the 2019 law that created no-excuse mail voting in Pennsylvania, says a person must sign and date the mail ballot return envelope for their vote to be counted, but election officials have said this date is not used for determining whether the ballot was received by Election Day.

Since then, some Pennsylvania counties have rejected thousands of ballots because the envelopes lacked a proper date, and counties have had varying policies about whether to notify voters and give them a chance to correct the error.

The validity of the dating requirement has been disputed for years, with state and federal courts going back and forth.

Who are the plaintiffs and what are they seeking?

An Erie County voter whose ballot was rejected in 2022 joined with Democratic Party groups and advocacy groups, including the American Federation of Teachers, Common Cause Pennsylvania, and the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania, to challenge the enforcement of the dating requirement across Pennsylvania.

The Republican National Committee, the state Republican Party, and the Republican Party’s U.S. House campaign arm filed the latest appeal to defend the state’s dating requirement.

What happens now?

The ruling could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Read more Votebeat coverage of the legal fight over Pennsylvania mail ballots:

Pennsylvania can’t reject improperly dated ballots, federal court rules, March 31, 2025
Pennsylvania Supreme Court to hear latest case over undated mail ballots Jan. 17, 2025
Pennsylvania Supreme Court stops 3 counties from counting undated, incorrectly dated ballots, Nov. 18, 2024
Philadelphia must count undated and misdated mail ballots from September election, Pa. court rules, Oct. 30, 2024,
Pennsylvania Supreme Court restores date requirement for mail ballots, voiding lower-court ruling, Sept. 13, 2024
Mail ballots can’t be rejected over improper date on envelope, Pennsylvania court rules, Aug. 30, 2024
Pennsylvania’s rule on dating mail ballots faces new challenge in state court, May 29, 2024

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Trump’s latest pivot and the endless battle over mail ballots

2025-08-25T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

President Donald Trump has long criticized the integrity of mail ballots. But leading up to the 2024 election, Republicans spent millions of dollars encouraging supporters to vote early, including by mail, hoping to bank votes ahead of Election Day. Even Trump encouraged his supporters to use them.

“ABSENTEE VOTING, EARLY VOTING, AND ELECTION DAY VOTING ARE ALL GOOD OPTIONS,” Trump, then the Republican nominee, posted on social media in April 2024.

That embrace didn’t last. In a new social media post this week that was full of false claims about elections — and signaled solidarity on the topic with Russian President Vladimir Putin — Trump promised to “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS,” among other things, and wrote that an executive order “to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections” is coming.

Trump is only the latest to swing between support and skepticism of mail voting, a method that has divided the parties for decades.

Mail voting has been in use in American elections since the Civil War, though even then, as now, there were differences in how states administered it. Today, all states allow some form of it, and 28 states allow voters to cast ballots by mail for any reason. Eight states, including Republican-dominated Utah, as well as Washington D.C. allow all elections to be conducted entirely by mail.

A bipartisan 2005 report from a commission headed by former President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, a Republican, concluded that absentee ballots were the greatest potential source of fraud, a finding often cited by critics of the method.

Voter fraud happens, but experts agree that it’s exceedingly rare and leaves a long paper trail. Election officials have multiple safeguards designed to catch any attempt.

Since 2008, an MIT Election Lab project called the Survey of the Performance of American Elections conducted after every federal election has asked voters whether they support running all elections by mail. Republican support was typically flat, while growing numbers of Democrats and independents supported the idea. Then, in 2020, when the pandemic supercharged mail ballot use, Democratic support spiked, while Republican support declined.

The partisan gap shrank considerably in 2024, the survey found, even as mail ballot use dropped from pandemic-fueled heights. But it’s still a bigger gap than it was before the pandemic. The survey also found Republicans are more likely than Democrats to believe that voter fraud, including absentee ballot fraud, happens frequently.

Public opinion, of course, shifts. As Votebeat has reported, Republicans in 1991 made Arizona one of the first states in the country to allow voting by mail with no excuse, and the option has been wildly popular. But by 2022, against the backdrop of Trump’s claims about mail-in ballots, Republicans in the state were trying (so far unsuccessfully) to eliminate the option.

Even Carter and the Carter Center urged states to expand mail voting in 2020 during the pandemic, stressing the commission’s earlier conclusion that fraud was rare when safeguards were in place.

It isn’t clear what steps Trump will take to attempt to limit use of mail ballots. Under the Constitution, states have authority over the “time, place and manner of elections.” Congress also has some authority. Any attempt by Trump to eliminate mail voting by fiat would be quickly challenged in the courts, and legal experts stress it would be unlikely to succeed. Federal judges have already blocked key provisions of an executive order on elections Trump issued in March, citing his lack of authority over elections.

Comments from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt this week signaled a legislative effort could be in the works.

“The White House continues to work on this, and when Congress comes back to Washington I’m sure there will be many discussions with our friends on Capitol Hill, and also our friends in state legislatures across the country, to ensure that we’re protecting the integrity of the vote for the American people,” she said.

Ultimately, the fight isn’t just in the courts — it’s in public perception. And there, the verdict is far from settled.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Fact-checking Trump’s latest claims about mail ballots and voting machines

2025-08-18T22:23:19+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

President Donald Trump returned to social media Monday with another barrage of unsubstantiated statements about the integrity of elections, following a meeting in which Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly claimed that U.S. elections were “rigged” because of mail‑in voting.

Seizing on that assertion — despite there being no credible evidence to support it — Trump promised on Truth Social to “lead a movement” to phase out mail‑in ballots and voting machines, and promote “watermark paper.” He suggested he would implement these changes with an executive order ahead of the 2026 midterms.

The post contains many other false, misleading, or unsubstantiated statements about the use of mail ballots, including claims Trump and his allies have made before — even as more Republican officials have tried to encourage voting by mail.

His claims notwithstanding, courts have repeatedly rejected allegations of widespread fraud tied to mail ballots, and many democracies around the world use them. And under the Constitution, he has no explicit authority over the “time, place and manner” of elections. Experts say that an executive order like the one Trump describes in his post would be immediately challenged in court and unlikely to take effect.

Beyond that, any major change to voting by mail before the 2026 midterms would be a logistical nightmare for election administrators, and it would disproportionately affect voters who rely on it most, including overseas service members, veterans, and people with disabilities.,

Here’s a fact check of some of the key claims in his post.

What Trump said:

“States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them.”

Fact:

Trump’s claim that states are “merely an agent” of the federal government in elections is false, and contrary to decades of Republican orthodoxy on this point.

The Constitution gives power to Congress and the states — not the president — to the states to regulate the time, manner, and place of elections.

Meanwhile, Republicans for decades have framed states’ rights as a fundamental principle. This stretches back to Barry Goldwater in the 1960s, through Ronald Reagan’s emphasis on “federalism,” and into recent decades where GOP leaders have framed decentralization of power as protection against “big government.”

Voting has been a primary example for that very point.

For example, after the contentious 2000 presidential election, Republicans fiercely defended Florida’s right to set its own recount rules. GOP leaders and state attorneys general argued in the Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder (2013) that federal oversight of state election laws was unconstitutional. Over the last decade, Republicans in Congress have opposed Democratic efforts to pass federal voting-rights legislation like the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, arguing they represented “federal takeovers” of elections. Then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in 2019 called the legislation “a one-size-fits-all partisan rewrite by one side here in Washington.”

In 2020, when Democrats proposed federal requirements to expand mail voting due to COVID-19, Republicans fought them off. And when Trump floated the idea of delaying the November election, Republican senators like McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio reminded him that Congress and the states control election timing and procedures.

What Trump said:

“We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED”

Fact:

Many democracies use mail voting, including Germany, Switzerland, Canada, and Australia. Some use it more extensively than the U.S. No country has “given it up” because of widespread fraud. Fraud is rare in countries that use vote by mail, as it is here.

Germany has been using vote by mail since the 1950s; in its 2021 federal election, about half of German voters cast their ballots through the mail. In Switzerland, nearly all voters receive their ballots by mail, and more than 70% of voters return them in the same way. The United Kingdom allows any voters to request a mailed ballot, and about 20% of voters take advantage of the policy. The vast majority of European countries allow at least some form of mail voting, especially for citizens living abroad or for those with disabilities.

What Trump said:

Voting machines are “Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial” and “cost Ten Times more than accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper, which is faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election.”

Fact:

Paper ballots still have to be counted — either by hand (which is slow and error-prone) or by machine. That’s why nearly every state that uses paper ballots still relies on scanners to tally them quickly and accurately.

Existing federal law also requires the use of at least one voting machine in every single precinct in the country, for use by voters who have disabilities that make casting a paper ballot difficult. Trump cannot invalidate federal law through an executive order, so voting machines aren’t going anywhere.

Watermarks are not a standard or proven safeguard, though some states do have them (or something like them). The places that use them still use machines to count these ballots.

What Trump said:

“Democrats are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM. ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING, and everybody, IN PARTICULAR THE DEMOCRATS, KNOWS THIS.”

Fact:

There is no evidence that one party “cheats” with mail ballots. Voting by mail is used by Republicans and Democrats alike, and in jurisdictions led by Republicans and Democrats. In fact, Republican voters are often more likely to use mail voting, especially in states like Arizona and Florida, where Republicans championed the practice until recently. In fact, there’s no evidence that vote by mail benefits either party over the other — multiple academic studies have reached this conclusion.

What Trump said:

“ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING.”

Fact:

Mail‑in voting has consistently been shown to operate extremely securely due to robust safeguards. In states like Pennsylvania, counties that offer ballot curing — the ability to correct errors like missing signatures — report significantly lower rejection rates, demonstrating that the system isn’t rigged, but rather is responsive and adaptable.

Votebeat’s coverage highlights what research studies have shown repeatedly: Instances of fraud in mail-in voting remain exceedingly rare. Even when ballots get rejected, that’s typically due to procedural mistakes — not attempts at manipulation or deceit. Election administrators across the country work under strict, bipartisan protocols, including signature checks and secure handling procedures, to protect integrity. Courts and election officials routinely affirm the reliability of mail ballots when these protocols are followed. In both routine practice and under close scrutiny, mail-in voting stands out as both secure and trustworthy.

What Trump said:

“I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS…by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections.”

Fact:

Courts have ruled that Trump does not have the authority to unilaterally change federal election rules, as they consider several lawsuits challenging his March executive order.

In halting some provisions of that executive order, for example, a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote in April that “our Constitution entrusts Congress and the States — not the President — with the authority to regulate federal elections.” That ruling blocked Trump’s direction to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to take steps to require voters to prove citizenship when registering to vote.

A federal judge in Massachusetts later blocked the same provision of the order, writing that Trump exceeded his authority. That judge also blocked parts of the order telling the U.S. Justice Department to enforce a ballot receipt deadline of Election Day.

Nothing stops Trump from leading an informal movement, however. He’s arguably been doing that for years already, and while it has had some impact on policy, voters haven’t really changed their habits much.

Jen Fifield contributed reporting.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

After 2020’s mail-ballot blip, many Americans are embracing in-person voting again

2025-07-21T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

After years of speculation about the “death” of in-person voting, the latest national data shows a bit of a rebound: Americans are returning to the polls in person.

According to a new MIT report titled “How We Voted in 2024” — released exclusively to Votebeat — more than 7 in 10 voters showed up to a polling place to vote, either early or on Election Day. And while voting habits are still shifting after the pandemic, some clear patterns are emerging.

Voting by mail, which surged to 43% of ballots cast in 2020, dropped to 29% in 2024. That’s still above the 21% seen in 2016 and 13% in 2012, suggesting that voting from home remains more popular than it once was. At the same time, in-person voting made a comeback. In 2020, just 31% of voters cast their ballots on Election Day, down from at least 60% in previous presidential election years. In 2024, the figure rebounded to 40%. Early in-person voting also continued its slow rise, reaching 31% last year.

Together, these trends show that while some pandemic-era habits are sticking, many voters are returning to the polling place — either early or on Election Day, said Charles Stewart, a political scientist who heads the MIT Election Lab and wrote the report.

Other things are leveling out as well. The partisan divide on vote by mail is narrowing, Stewart said. “Election administration continues to be very salient to Republicans,” he said, while Democrats have “kind of gone back to their business.”

What’s driving the shift to in-person voting?

The drop in mail voting was largely driven by Democrats reverting to in-person voting. In 2020, 60% of Democrats voted by mail; in 2024, that number dropped to 37%. Republicans remained less enthusiastic about mail voting, with 24% using the method in 2024, down from 32% in 2020.

Stewart said the shift likely stems from Republican messaging. GOP leaders resisted expanding early and mail voting during the pandemic, but that’s changing. The ultimate goal is voter turnout, and GOP consultants and strategists were “worried about being hamstrung by Democrats” when it came to getting voters to the polls, he explained. While Donald Trump remains skeptical of mail voting, Stewart said, many Republican political consultants actually favor early voting because it lets them “focus on the voters who actually need to be delivered to the polling place on Election Day.”

Also notable: even though more people resumed voting in person, fewer voters had to endure long wait times. Only 11% of Election Day voters waited more than 30 minutes, down from 14% in 2020. Early voters fared even better, with just 15% experiencing such wait times.

Stewart has been studying lines and wait times for years, and said he was worried that as states began to offer fewer polling locations, problems with long wait times might grow. That the opposite happened suggests to Stewart that fewer people are voting on Election Day than in many past elections, and that states have reduced the number of polling places accordingly. States like Georgia and South Carolina that once had infamously long lines apparently no longer do.

New hubs for voting

Public schools, once the archetypal backdrop for Election Day news photos, are falling out of favor as polling places. In 2024, just 22% of Election Day voters cast their ballots at a school, down from 28% in 2020. Community centers are now the most common polling places, used by 32% of Election Day voters and 26% of early voters.

That shift has been happening over many years, driven in part by security concerns and access challenges at schools, particularly after COVID, and increased attention to school safety. The trend could make it harder to find enough polling sites in some places that don’t have other large, accessible community spaces.

A quiet comeback

The return to in-person voting has not led to chaos at the polls. On the contrary, voters largely reported positive experiences:

98% had no issues with registration or equipment.
83% said their polling place was “very well-run.”
86% of Election Day voters observed no disruptions.

That’s not to say everything went perfectly. Some voters did report confusion finding polling places, and there were more incidents of improper photo-taking inside polling locations. But overall, voters seemed to like what they saw when they got there.

As we head toward the 2026 midterm elections, these trends are worth watching. The in-person voting infrastructure, strained and overhauled in 2020, is now being called back into service. And if the 2024 data is any guide, voters may be just fine with that.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Pennsylvania redesigns envelopes for provisional ballots to cut down on rejections

2025-07-14T18:29:37+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Pennsylvania election officials on Monday announced a redesigned provisional-ballot envelope that they hope will lead to fewer ballots being rejected for technical errors.

“Improvements to envelope design might seem like a small thing, but it has a huge impact on the ability for Pennsylvanians across the commonwealth to have their votes counted,” said Seth Bluestein, a Republican city commissioner for Philadelphia, which worked with the Department of State on the new design.

Philadelphia plans to use the new design in its November municipal elections. The state also consulted election officials from Berks, Greene, Butler, and Mercer counties.

Provisional ballots are meant to be a fail-safe for voters at the polls, to be used when there are questions about eligibility or whether someone has already voted. Each one is placed in a separate envelope, giving election officials a chance to verify that the ballot should be counted before it is added to the tally.

But such ballots can be rejected for technical reasons, such as a missing voter signature on the envelope. The envelope redesign is meant to make that less likely, and follows a similar redesign of the return envelopes for mail ballots.

That redesign in 2023 contributed to a 57% drop in mail-ballot rejections last year, said Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, and he’s hoping for similar results from the provisional-ballot envelope redesign.

With the mail-ballot envelopes, Schmidt was able to require that counties use the new design. But for the provisional-ballot envelopes, for now, it’s up to counties to choose whether to adopt the new design. Schmidt said that as an incentive, the department is offering counties financial assistance to buy the new envelopes.

The new design makes it clearer where voters and poll workers must sign the envelope. It more clearly delineates which section is to be filled out by the voter or poll workers, officials said, and it provides clearer instructions at which stage of the provisional voting process each section is to be filled out.

There are several reasons why a voter might need to use a provisional ballot. For example, a first-time in-person voter who lacks identification, or a voter who isn’t registered when they think they are, may have to use a provisional ballot. Absentee and mail voters who lose their ballots and show up to vote in person will also be assigned a provisional ballot.

Since no-excuse mail voting was introduced in 2020, use of provisional ballots has ballooned. That’s likely because when a voter is recorded as having asked for a mail ballot, but then shows up to vote in person without turning that mail ballot in, they must vote provisionally, so election officials can ensure that the person hasn’t already voted.

About 26,000 provisional ballots were cast in the 2016 presidential election, before the state had no-excuse mail voting, according to data tracked by the Pennsylvania Department of State. In the 2024 election, that number nearly quadrupled to almost 100,000.

Along with that increase, a greater share of ballots are being rejected for technical errors on the exterior envelope, where voters sign an affidavit, Votebeat and Spotlight PA reported in April. Pennsylvania election officials said this is likely due to a combination of factors — including inadequate poll worker training and general unfamiliarity with a process that was once rarely used.

In the 2024 general election, nearly 5% of provisional ballots, or more than 4,800, were rejected for affidavit envelope errors, up from fewer than 1% in 2016.

Bluestein said such errors represented the second-highest category of ballot rejections in the 2024 general election, behind voters not being registered.

Like mail ballots, provisional ballots require voters to handwrite information on the exterior envelope. Mail ballots can be rejected if voters don’t date and sign the envelope.

Provisional ballot envelopes have even more requirements that could trip up an eligible voter. Voters have to sign the outer affidavit envelope in two separate places and write their address. Two poll workers have to sign and date the envelope, too, and check a box with the reason the voter used a provisional ballot.

Thad Hall, election director in Mercer County who consulted on the redesign, said he thinks the new envelope is much more intuitively designed and will reduce rejections.

“The old form was designed by lawyers and it doesn’t flow well,” Hall said. “The newer one flows a lot better.”

Hall said some counties may opt to deplete their current stock of envelopes or wait until next year to adopt the new design, so they don’t have to reprint poll worker instruction manuals for November. But he expects most counties will eventually adopt it.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Madison clerk violated laws in 2024 ballot snafu, state report alleges

2025-07-09T21:38:57+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Former Madison Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl violated multiple state laws when her office failed to count nearly 200 absentee ballots in the 2024 presidential election, according to a draft report released Wednesday by the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

The commission cited a lack of leadership in the clerk’s office, referring both to Witzel-Behl and the deputy clerk who assumed control during her vacation shortly after the election.

Witzel-Behl, who was put on leave by the city after the error and then resigned, broke state law by failing to supervise absentee ballot handling, neglecting post-election processes, and by not training poll workers to check the bags used to transport ballots, the commission concluded.

“There is no evidence that the City Clerk took any steps to investigate the uncounted ballots once they were brought to her attention,” the commission wrote. “The evidence demonstrates that the City Clerk began her vacation on November 13 and then had little to do with the supervision of her office until almost a month later.”

The draft report follows a months-long investigation into the 193 ballots that went missing on Election Day. The ballots were found over the next several weeks — some of them before final certification of results — but were never counted. Commission Chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, jointly led the investigation alongside Republican commissioner and former Chair Don Millis.

For months, Madison election officials have been saying that the ballots that went uncounted were delivered to two polling sites but weren’t unopened. But the commission found no evidence the ballot bags were ever delivered. A chief inspector at one site testified he was confident there was no unopened bag in the supply cart sent to his ward.

The errors have already prompted significant changes in Madison’s election processes. Officials have overhauled ballot tracking procedures, which Madison and Dane County leaders say should prevent a repeat of the 2024 mistake.

Still, the commission emphasized “it is essential that the public understands what has occurred, so that municipalities throughout the state can review their own processes and make certain that they too do not find themselves in this very unfortunate situation.”

The commission’s sharp criticism extended beyond Witzel-Behl, noting that “the staff of the City Clerk’s office failed to take any action regarding those ballots.”

Deputy Clerk Jim Verbick said that his post-election involvement was “minimal” and that he didn’t think it was his job to do anything about the missing ballots, the commission’s findings state.

“However, he did not attempt to speak to the City Clerk about the matter,” the review continues. “There was nobody who took responsibility for these ballots. It was always someone else’s job.”

Madison Interim Clerk Mike Haas said in a statement that the city is reviewing WEC’s report and that he hopes that it can provide lessons that prevent similar errors in the future. He did not respond to a request for further comment.

Former clerk violated laws, gave contradictory statements

The report focused on lapses in training by the clerk’s office. For example, it said, Witzel-Behl stored absentee ballots in green courier bags, but didn’t mention that in poll worker training, and the bags weren’t labeled as carrying absentee ballots. She also failed to train poll workers that absentee ballots could also be stored in red security carts, which the commission said contributed to the ballots going uncounted. That lack of training broke state law, the commission stated.

The commission also found that Witzel-Behl violated a law requiring her to supervise absentee ballot handling. In her deposition, she “could not answer basic questions about absentee ballot handling procedures in her office.”

The commission’s report highlights contradictions between Witzel-Behl’s actions in office and deposition testimony. Although she claimed not to know about the uncounted ballots until December, the commission said she messaged an election worker in late November with instructions on how to handle the first batch of uncounted ballots.

Upon learning of the missing ballots in November, the commission said Witzel-Behl should have alerted the city attorney, County Board of Canvassers, and the commission, and immediately investigated her office’s procedures — but she didn’t.

The commission also alleged she violated laws by printing pollbooks too early, failing to oversee poll workers, and inadequately preparing for the city’s review of election results.

Draft findings include several orders for Madison to comply with

The report lists draft recommendations that the commissioners will vote on at their July 17 meeting. These include requiring the Madison Clerk’s Office to create a plan detailing which employee oversees which task; printing pollbooks no earlier than the Thursday before each election; clearly labeling and tracking the bags carrying absentee ballots; checking all ballot bags and drop boxes before the city finalizes election results; and explaining how it’s going to comply with each of the orders.

Witzel-Behl’s office printed pollbooks for the two affected wards on Oct. 23 — nearly two weeks before Election Day — despite state guidance to print them as close to the election as possible.

Had they been printed later, absentee voters whose ballots had already been returned would have been marked automatically, alerting poll workers that those ballots were in hand but not yet counted.

But printing pollbooks no earlier than the Thursday before an election could be challenging, said Claire Woodall, who was formerly Milwaukee’s top election official. Cities like Madison and Milwaukee must print tens of thousands of pollbook pages, often using private printers, and distribute them to chief inspectors.

“It seems like you’re rushing a process” with the Thursday requirement, Woodall said. “The last thing you want is for voters to show up at 7 a.m. and discover you don’t have the correct pollbook.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

New study shows lasting effects of Texas’ ID requirements to vote by mail

2025-05-28T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Some county election officials across Texas say the number of people voting by mail has dropped since 2020, but they’re not sure why.

New research suggests that the recent overhaul of state election laws could explain some of the drop.

A study from the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School looked at Texas voters whose mail ballots or applications to vote by mail were rejected in the 2022 primary, after the state enacted new identification requirements for mail ballots, among other changes. Many of those voters, the study found, appear to have switched to other voting methods or, in some cases, stopped voting.

The study found that 30,000 voters in that primary — or 1 out of 7 voters who started the process to vote by mail — had either their application or ballot rejected, and that “roughly 90% of these individuals did not find another way to participate in the 2022 primary.”

The authors said their findings show the potentially lasting effects of restrictive voting policies on even the most engaged voters.

About 85% of voters whose applications or ballots were rejected had voted in general elections in 2016, 2018, and 2020, said co-author Kevin Morris, a senior research fellow and voting policy scholar with the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program.

“This is a group of people that are super highly engaged in the political process,” Morris told Votebeat. “They have a long history and habit of voting, so to see these effects among them is a big deal.”

The peer-reviewed study, co-authored with political scientists from Barnard College and Tennessee State University, is set to be published later this year in the Journal of Politics and was shared with Votebeat.

After Senate Bill 1, more rejections, less participation

Texas has long had strict limits on voting by mail, allowing it only for certain groups of people, including voters age 65 and up and people with disabilities. Voters who are eligible must apply to use mail ballots each year. If their application is accepted for a primary election, they’ll automatically get a mail ballot for that year’s general election as well. If the application is rejected, they have to reapply.

In 2021, state lawmakers tightened the restrictions as part of an election law overhaul called Senate Bill 1. The legislation required voters to write their driver’s license or personal identification number, or the last four digits of their Social Security number, on the mail ballot application or mail ballot envelope — whichever number they originally used to register. If the ID number was missing or didn’t match the number on file, the application or ballot could be rejected.

The March 2022 primary, the first statewide election after the legislation took effect, saw a dramatic increase in rejection rates: 12,000 absentee ballot applications and more than 24,000 mail ballots were rejected, amounting to a 12% rejection rate statewide, far higher than in previous years. In the 2020 presidential election, by comparison, the rejection rate was 1%.

Mail-voting applications and ballots of Asian, Latino, and Black Texans were rejected at much higher rates than those of white voters after the ID requirement was added, according to an earlier study by the Brennan Center.

For the more recent study, researchers obtained individual-level data on mail-voting ballot applications and mail ballots in the 2022 Texas primary from litigation documents and public-records requests to the Texas Secretary of State. They looked at the demographics and the voting history of the roughly 215,000 Texans who requested a mail ballot for that primary, and drilled down to the 30,000 voters who had either their application or ballot rejected.

More than 3,000 voters whose mail-voting applications were rejected voted in person instead in the 2022 primary.

Out of the more than 18,000 voters whose mail ballots were rejected, only 344 voted in person. The others did not ultimately vote in the primary.

The study said the rejections increased what it called the “cost of voting,” because voters had to “try to sort out why their mail ballot did not arrive, re-apply for an absentee ballot, and seek out details about where to vote in-person.”

“I can’t speak to any law other than SB 1,” Morris said, “but this does provide some evidence that the effect of being disenfranchised does make people even less likely to vote into the future.”

County officials observe the impact of new restrictions

Before the passage of SB 1, mail voters were not required to provide identification numbers, and although they still had to apply each year, election officials were allowed to send them reminders to resubmit their applications. The new law made such unsolicited reminders illegal.

In some counties, election officials said they’ve personally observed how the law’s requirements have affected voter participation and the way people vote.

Lisa Hayes, the elections administrator in Guadalupe County east of San Antonio, said that participation in mail voting rose in 2020, when the state allowed voters to hand-deliver their mail-in ballot during the early voting period because of the pandemic. During that year’s presidential election, Guadalupe County sent out more than 8,000 mail-in ballots to qualifying voters, and 90% were returned.

Since the new requirements passed in 2021, fewer people are voting by mail, Hayes said, and she’s seen voters become more frustrated.

For the November 2022 general election, the county sent out 3,354 mail-in ballots to voters. The return rate for that election was 81%. The return rate for the November 2024 presidential election went up slightly up to 84%, she said.

SB 1 included a provision that allows voters to correct errors on their application. Hayes said that in the period leading up to an election, her office is constantly answering calls from frustrated voters whose applications need to be corrected and resubmitted.

If the voter’s mail-voting application is missing one of the two required ID numbers, a signature, or the explanation of why they qualify to vote by mail, the elections office mails the voter a notice and a new application so they can correct it. Hayes said if voters correct one issue but fail to fix another, they must start the process over.

“Unfortunately, the voters have to jump through so many hoops to get into that corrective-action loop, that they just get frustrated and they give up,” Hayes said. In some cases, voters will send in two or three corrected applications before they get approved. Others opt to vote in person instead.

“These are the voters we’re supposed to be trying to help,” she said. “They need the help. They need to vote by mail. It’s not just a convenience for them, it’s a need. So of course they’re frustrated.”

Diana Leggett, 83, volunteers helping people who live at assisted-living facilities and nursing homes in Cooke and Grayson counties in North Texas. In 2022, she focused on helping seniors to navigate the new mail ballot rules.

“When you’re 90 years old, you’ve voted all your life, but you sure as heck don’t remember what you put down the first time you registered to vote,” Leggett said, referring to the requirement that ID numbers match what’s on file. “Some don’t have a driver’s license anymore or don’t know the number.”

When residents had their mail ballot applications rejected, she said, they often didn’t try again.

To keep voters from becoming frustrated, election officials have had to find ways to ensure voters are aware of the requirements to vote by mail.

Kaleb Breaux, election administrator for Collin County in North Texas, said his staff recalls the 2022 primary as a “rough mail ballot election.”

The county had over 7,000 mail-in ballots, and over 700 were rejected due to the new ID requirements, he said. To help voters, he said, his office began to insert instructions with the applications and the ballots “to help draw voters’ attention” to the sections with the new requirements. And it helped.

In the November general election, Breaux said, the county rejected just 85 ballots for ID requirement issues.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Why Maricopa County recorder sought to send ballots to rural voters who didn’t ask for one

2025-05-21T18:38:56+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

When Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap proposed sending mail ballots for a July election to a group of voters who hadn’t requested them, the suggestion seemed to come out of nowhere.

Heap’s plan especially shocked his fellow Republicans, including the county supervisors, who have been clashing with him over election policy and who quickly voted to try to block it. GOP Chairwoman Gina Swoboda told Heap in a letter that his plan would be ill-advised and illegal.

But Heap has defended his plan as a way to avoid disenfranchising rural voters who would otherwise have to drive unreasonably long distances to vote in person.

And there’s some history that helps explain why Heap, who is aligned with the GOP’s arch-conservative Freedom Caucus and who campaigned on a platform of “election integrity,” would suggest such a move.

Some rural voters would face ‘significant drive times’

The July 15 special primary election is being held to replace U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva, a Democrat who represented Arizona’s 7th Congressional District until he died in March. At a May 5 supervisors meeting, Heap said that for this election — the first he’s overseeing as recorder — he planned to mail ballots to a small number of rural voters who have not requested them.

About 60,000 of Maricopa County’s voters live in that congressional district, in communities including Avondale, Gila Bend, and areas in between. The majority will have a polling place within a mile or so of their house on Election Day.

But a few dozen voters in the rural southern part of the county live miles away from any city, and face a much longer trip to the nearest polling place. County staff said they needed to find a site for a polling place that fell within the bounds of the congressional district — so as not to confuse nearby voters who live outside the district into thinking that they could vote in this election — and the closest option is about 30 miles away from where these voters live.

That leaves these voters with “significant drive times” for this summer’s election, Sam Stone, Heap’s chief of staff, said at the meeting.

So Heap’s plan was to mail ballots to the 34 voters in this rural area, in the Bullard and Mobile precincts, who aren’t already on the early-voting list.

Past recorder sent unsolicited ballots to rural voters

Stone also told supervisors that the county has in past elections sent out ballots to a small number of rural voters who didn’t request them. And that’s true.

Votebeat confirmed with Helen Purcell, a Republican who was the Maricopa County recorder for decades until 2016, that she used to do this on rare occasions. But there were some important differences in the circumstances, and that was before the enactment of a state law prohibiting it.

Purcell said in a phone interview that this was back when the county restricted voters to casting ballots at their precinct location. Now, Maricopa County voters can vote or drop off a ballot at any polling site in the county.

In cases where there was nowhere within the precinct to have a polling place, and the closest option to co-locate a precinct was far away, Purcell said, she would send the voters a mail ballot. She offered an example of voters who live in Sunflower, which is 30 miles northeast of Fountain Hills.

After Purcell left office, her successor, Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who is now secretary of state, moved to send out ballots to Democratic voters for the party’s 2020 presidential preference election, citing the COVID-19 pandemic. Then-state Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, sued, and a court blocked Fontes’ plan, saying that state law didn’t explicitly authorize Fontes to do so.

Mailings were banned, without a solution for rural voters

In 2021, after the battle with Fontes, the Republican-dominated Legislature and Republican Gov. Doug Ducey enacted a law that more explicitly says that recorders and election officials cannot mail ballots to voters who do not request one.

So when Heap proposed his plan on May 5, the supervisors immediately questioned its legality, and they voted to exclude the proposal from the overall election plan they approved that day. (It’s unclear whether the supervisors actually had the authority to block Heap’s plan.)

Shortly afterward, County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, also a Republican, sent Heap a letter confirming that the plan would have been illegal.

Heap posted a long statement on social media explaining his position. He said that without his plan, the supervisors would “disenfranchise dozens of rural Maricopa County voters” by leaving them with no reasonable access to a polling location.

“For decades the Board has never raised an objection to this approach; however, they now use it to gaslight the public in a juvenile attempt to score cheap political points and create chaos,” Heap wrote.

He said his office would soon notify the rural voters that there won’t be a polling location near their precinct, and advise them that they can receive a ballot in the mail if they request it.

While most of the county supervisors seemed concerned about Heap’s initial plan, the lone Democrat on the board, Steve Gallardo, said he supported expanded voting options and was worried about rural voters’ access to the ballot box in the future. Officials need to come up with a plan to support such voters, he said.

“This is not going to be the last time we come across that situation,” Gallardo said.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Texas charges 6 in Frio County with violating law against ‘vote harvesting’

2025-05-07T21:45:38+00:00

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced charges Wednesday against six people — including five public officials — in what his office described as a “vote harvesting scheme” in Frio County, a part of his yearslong election integrity investigation.

The six people indicted were Frio County Judge Rochelle Camacho; a former county election administrator; two Pearsall City Council members; one Pearsall school board member; and one other person. Five of the six were arrested on May 2; Camacho will be processed later, according to a release from Paxton’s office.

“The people of Texas deserve fair and honest elections, not backroom deals and political insiders rigging the system,” Paxton wrote in a statement. “Elected officials who think they can cheat to stay in power will be held accountable. No one is above the law.”

Additional details on the indictment were not immediately available. Audrey Gossett Louis, the district attorney for the region, said in a statement: “Violating the privacy or voting rights of our elderly or disabled community members will be met with zero tolerance.”

Ballot collection, or “harvesting,” a term used by many in the Republican Party, refers to the process of designating someone else to return a voter’s ballot. It’s allowed under federal law, but some states have restrictions, such as not allowing the person collecting the ballots to be compensated, or not allowing them to collect more than a certain number of ballots, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Paxton brought the charges under Texas’ Senate Bill 1, passed in 2021, which makes it a third-degree felony for a person to knowingly provide or offer “vote harvesting services” — or the collection of ballots — in exchange for compensation, unless the person is employed as a caregiver for a voter who is eligible to vote by mail. Those voters include Texans who are 65 or older on Election Day or who are unable to vote in person due to illness or who will be away from their county throughout the election. Under the law, organizers of voter outreach efforts and volunteers could spend up to 10 years in prison and be fined up to $10,000 for violating the law.

And while a federal court ruling from September challenging the constitutionality of the law halted the state’s ability to investigate those cases, Paxton appealed that decision, which gave the state leeway to continue. The case remains under appeal.

The limits on voter assistance in SB 1 are one of several pieces of the law. Some expand access — such as a provision that increases early voting hours in smaller, mostly Republican counties. But mostly, the law restricts how and when voters cast ballots. It specifically targets voting initiatives used by diverse, predominantly Democratic Harris County, the state’s most populous, by banning overnight early voting hours and drive-thru voting, which were popular among voters of color in 2020.

The Texas Tribune attempted to contact several of the defendants with available contact information Wednesday, but none responded.

Former Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa described past investigations conducted under the law as politically motivated, and designed to intimidate voters. He said Republicans investigate alleged election fraud only in Latino and Democratic strongholds like the Rio Grande Valley.

Frio County has a population of about 18,000 and is southwest of San Antonio.

Democratic attorneys general sue Trump over elections executive order

2025-04-03T22:58:16+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Democratic attorneys general in 19 states are together suing Trump over his sweeping executive order on elections, saying that it is an illegal attempt to usurp state control of elections that “would cause imminent and irreparable harm” if the courts don’t intervene.

The March 25 order, which Trump wrote would protect the integrity of elections, would require people to prove their citizenship when registering to vote. It would also set a national mail ballot receipt deadline of Election Day, require the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to rewrite voting machine certification standards, withhold federal funds from states that don’t use compliant machines, and require states to share their voter rolls with federal agencies.

The order “sows confusion and sets the stage for chaos in Plaintiff States’ election systems, together with the threat of disenfranchisement,” the states wrote in the complaint, which was filed in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts on Thursday. The attorneys general emphasized that Congress has never required proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections and that states have the authority to dictate the deadline for mail ballots.

They also say that Trump cannot force states to require proof of voter citizenship, and threatening to withhold funding for not complying with provisions in the order violates the U.S. Constitution’s principles of federalism and separation of powers, and adds requirements on the money that weren’t imposed by Congress.

The attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin are named plaintiffs. All are Democrats. The litigation was led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford.

In a news release about the lawsuit, Bonta called the executive order a “blatantly illegal power grab and an attempt to disenfranchise voters.”

“Neither the Constitution nor Congress authorize the President’s attempted voting restrictions,” Bonta said in the release. “We will not be bullied by him. We will fight like hell in court to stop him.”

At a news conference announcing the lawsuit Thursday, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said the executive order is unacceptable and unconstitutional.

“I will not allow our Legislature’s lawmaking ability to be trodden on by a wannabe king,” Mayes said.

Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said at the news conference that the executive order weakens election security.

“It is the very nature of our decentralized elections of our country that is a strength against foreign interference,” Fontes said, adding, “I don’t want Elon Musk and his crew of incompetence taking those voter rolls away from our office.”

Because Arizona law already requires proof of citizenship to vote in state and local elections, the state is not joining the challenge to that provision.

The state officials’ lawsuit comes on the heels of three others challenging the order, which is titled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.” Earlier this week, Democrats and civil rights organizations filed three separate lawsuits in federal court in Washington, D.C., which have been consolidated before Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.

Two of them were filed by arrays of nonprofit groups, including the League of United Latin American Citizens, the League of Women Voters, the NAACP, and others. Another was filed on behalf of Democratic national party committees and leadership.

The lawsuits all challenge the idea that Trump can order the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to change the federal voter registration form to require documents proving citizenship. Right now, the form requires voters to attest to their citizenship under penalty of perjury, but does not require documents to prove it.

It could cost some states millions to replace their voting machines to comply with the new rules.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Pennsylvania can’t reject improperly dated ballots, federal court rules

2025-03-31T22:39:27+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

What happened?

Pennsylvania counties can’t reject a voter’s mail ballot solely because they forgot to put the date on the return envelope or put a wrong date on it, a federal judge wrote Monday in a ruling that likely applies to the upcoming primary. The ruling is the latest — and likely not the last — in a long-running legal battle over enforcing the date requirement that has bounced around state and federal courts.

U.S. District Judge Susan Baxter of the Western District of Pennsylvania ruled Monday that rejecting mail ballots for issues with the date on the outer envelope violates voters’ First Amendment rights, since voting is considered an expression of free speech.

Misdated mail ballots are ones where a voter writes a date on the envelope that is outside of the range between when the county can first send the ballot and the day of the election.

What’s the dispute?

Act 77, the 2019 law that created no-excuse mail voting in Pennsylvania, says a person must sign and date the mail ballot return envelope for their vote to be counted, but election officials have said this date is not used for determining whether the ballot was received by Election Day.

Since then, Pennsylvania counties have rejected thousands of ballots because the envelopes lacked a proper date. The validity of the dating requirement has been disputed for years, with courts going back and forth. This case argued that rejecting ballots for lacking a proper date created a burden on the voter which was not justified by a compelling state interest, an argument Baxter relied on in her ruling.

Baxter, a Trump appointee, said that while dating the envelope was only a “minimal” burden, she determined that the government hadn’t asserted any legitimate reason why it should be imposed on voters. While the Republican National Committee argued it could be used to detect fraud, Baxter noted the only case it cited as evidence was detected through other means.

Another case on the issue is pending in Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Voters represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and the Public Interest Law Center argue the dating requirement violates the Free and Equal Elections Clause of the state constitution, which bars any interference with “the free exercise of the right of suffrage.”

Who are the plaintiffs?

Bette Eakin is a voter from Erie County whose 2022 general election mail ballot was rejected for lacking a date. She, along with national Democratic Party groups and the campaign of U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, sued all 67 counties in the state for rejecting improperly dated ballots. Republican groups intervened to defend the requirement.

What happens now?

The Pennsylvania Department of State and the court did not immediately say if this standard applies to the upcoming May 20 municipal primary, although a lawyer representing Eakin said it should apply. Republican groups that intervened in the case could appeal the decision to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. A representative for the Republican National Committee and the Republican Party of Pennsylvania did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether they would appeal.

Read more of Votebeat’s recent coverage of challenges to the dating requirement:

Pennsylvania Supreme Court to hear latest case over undated mail ballots Jan. 17, 2025
Pennsylvania Supreme Court stops 3 counties from counting undated, incorrectly dated ballots, Nov. 18, 2024
Philadelphia must count undated and misdated mail ballots from September election, Pa. court rules, Oct. 30, 2024,
Pennsylvania Supreme Court restores date requirement for mail ballots, voiding lower-court ruling, Sept. 13, 2024
Mail ballots can’t be rejected over improper date on envelope, Pennsylvania court rules, Aug. 30, 2024
Pennsylvania’s rule on dating mail ballots faces new challenge in state court, May 29, 2024

Trump orders an overhaul of how elections are run, inviting a likely legal challenge

2025-03-26T02:37:05+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

President Donald Trump issued a sweeping executive order Tuesday that would dramatically change the administration of U.S. elections, including requiring people to prove their citizenship when registering to vote, but experts and voting rights advocates said they expect the order to face quick legal challenges.

The order, titled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” also would change the certification standards for voting systems, potentially forcing states to rapidly replace millions of dollars in voting equipment, and it would prohibit the counting of ballots postmarked by Election Day but received afterwards, which 18 states and Washington, D.C., currently permit.

Voting rights advocates and legal experts said the bulk of the executive order will certainly be challenged in court, as the Constitution grants authority over elections to states and to Congress, not the president. Should it take effect, they say, millions of voters could be disenfranchised.

Danielle Lang, senior director of voting rights at the Campaign Legal Center, said: “There are many moving parts here, but the short answer is that none of this is within the province of the president, and I would expect that he’ll be met with legal challenges.”

Rick Hasen, a professor at UCLA Law School and expert on election law, told Votebeat he expects litigation over the issue to be filed immediately.

Hasen said the order assumes that the White House has more power over independent agencies — in this case the U.S. Election Assistance Commission — than was previously understood. “It was thought to be that he has no power over the Election Assistance Commission,” he said. “This would be quite the sea change.”

While much of the order may ultimately be unenforceable, he said, it offers insight into Trump’s election priorities: “It’s a messaging document even if it’s not successful.”

Trump and his allies have made repeated claims of voter fraud, especially involving the 2020 election, and suggested that it is widespread enough to affect the outcome of elections, even though audits, recounts, and the courts have consistently found no evidence of significant problems. While signing the executive order Tuesday, Trump said that “this country is so sick because of the elections, the fake elections, and the bad elections, and we’re going to straighten it out one way or the other.” He also promised his administration would take “other steps” on elections in the coming weeks.

Trump’s executive order directs federal agencies in some instances to withhold federal funds from states that are unwilling to comply, or share information with federal agencies as laid out in his order. It’s unclear how effective a cudgel that will be. States have long complained that Congress allocates little money for elections, and much of it has long since been spent. In its most recent spending legislation, Congress allocated $15 million in grants that must be divided among the 50 states and U.S. territories.

“I would love for there to be more of a pool of money at jeopardy here,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in California, who was a civil-rights official in the U.S. Justice Department and a former adviser on voting rights to the Biden administration.

“‘Would you like me to take away a penny?’ That’s what he’s essentially saying to states,” he added wryly.

Many officials were still assessing the ramifications of the executive order Tuesday, though it drew quick praise from Trump’s supporters and some Republican secretaries of state, including Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who lauded the citizenship documentation requirement. Some provisions, such as directing the Justice Department to prioritize enforcement of laws against voting by noncitizens, fall within a more traditional view of presidential power.

But some Democratic secretaries of state said they were considering asking the courts to intervene. In Michigan, the Secretary of State’s Office did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday afternoon, but Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson wrote a post about the order from her personal social media account and tagged state Attorney General Dana Nessel.

“If the election denier-in-chief tries to interfere with any citizen’s right to vote, we’ll see him in court,” wrote Benson, who is running for governor. Nessel’s office said it was reviewing the order.

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said that he and state Attorney General Kris Mayes are already discussing whether to sue over what he described as “an attempt to federalize elections.” He also called the order “a massive unfunded mandate.”

Fontes said he believes the intent of the order is to make it look as though something improper occurred in the conduct of the election, so you can justify “canceling the election later.”

“It’s very methodical, and very, very dangerous,” he said in an interview with Votebeat Tuesday. “You have to pay attention not to what the executive order says, but what the end game may be. I believe the end game may be that Donald Trump wants to stay in office in perpetuity.”

Push for proof-of-citizenship laws accelerates

Trump and other Republicans have long been calling for requiring proof of citizenship when people register to vote, which they have portrayed as a necessary check against the threat of voting by noncitizens.

Noncitizen voting is already illegal and carries harsh legal penalties — including prison time and loss of residency status — and audits and investigations have found it to be extremely rare. People who register must already attest to their citizenship under penalty of perjury.

Nonetheless, Republicans have accelerated their push for federal and state-level legislation to require proof of citizenship for new registrants, and in some cases, already-registered voters.

As early as next week, the GOP-controlled U.S. House could consider a bill, known as the SAVE Act, to require documented proof of citizenship. Multiple states have passed such legislation, and others, including Michigan and Texas, are considering it. Arizona already requires documentation of citizenship to vote in state and local elections, but after a legal fight that went to the U.S. Supreme Court years ago, must permit voters without such proof to vote in federal elections.

Congress has considered imposing this type of requirement before, but so far, it hasn’t adopted it.

Trump’s executive order would circumvent Congress to require documented proof of citizenship by ordering the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to update a national mail voter registration form that most states are required to accept under the National Voter Registration Act.

Levitt said courts might be reluctant to let the president give the EAC such powers while Congress is considering legislating similar actions under its own authority.

And there are other considerations. Six states are exempt from the NVRA, including Wisconsin, where, in 2023 a conservative Waukesha County judge blocked election officials from using the federal form.

“Under the Constitution, states are, in fact, tasked with the administration of elections,” said Ann Jacobs, the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s Democratic chair. “So you’d have a conflict between a federal law and a state judge.”

In addition, voting rights advocates have said millions of Americans do not have ready access to documentation that would meet the requirements, or the ability to show it to election officials in person. In Michigan, for example, many local clerks work only part-time, which means it can be hard for a voter to go in person to show documentary proof of citizenship.

“This would impact Michigan’s rural voters tremendously,” said Barb Byrum, the clerk in Ingham County, Michigan.

Byrum said she thought such a requirement could be the end of online voter registration. And automatic registration, which Michigan residents use when they get a drivers license or state ID, “appears to be essentially nullified,” said Michael Siegrist, the clerk in Canton Township, Michigan, a Detroit suburb.

This could increase the workload for local election officials, which has already grown in recent years because of what Siegrist called a “gross misunderstanding of how secure our voter rolls are.”

“What I find most concerning about all of it is that there are some points where it’s a regurgitation of election conspiracies, whether it’s this false notion that non-citizens are voting or election systems are attached to the internet,” he told Votebeat by text message.

More instructions for the EAC on voting machines

Donald Palmer, chair of the EAC, said the agency is reviewing Trump’s order “and determining the next steps in enhancing the integrity of voter registration and state and federal elections.”

“We also anticipate consulting with state and local election officials,” he said in a statement.

State and local officials deal with the EAC on a largely voluntary basis. The agency oversees the minimum standards used to test and certify voting machines — Voluntary Voting System Guidelines — which many states have adopted.

The order requires the EAC to update the guidelines to disallow the use of QR codes or similar barcodes that get printed on ballots produced by voting machines, and to require the use of voter-verifiable paper records. Within 180 days, the order says, the EAC must review and potentially recertify voting systems under these updated standards, rescinding certifications based on previous guidelines.

VVSG standards were updated in 2021 to require paper records, but they currently do not ban QR codes. The executive order encourages all states to use machines compliant with the new standards, and directs both the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to “heavily prioritize” allocating funding to local and state agencies whose systems are compliant.

While the new standards have been approved, there are currently no voting machines on the market that have been certified to these standards. So no jurisdiction in the country currently uses such systems — nor could they begin to within 180 days, because none are available for purchase.

Levitt said the president does not have the authority to direct the EAC to update guidelines that were previously passed by the independent agency. “He’s presenting this as an order I don’t think they have to pay attention to,” he said.

Many jurisdictions — including some in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and the entire state of Georgia — use systems that record votes as a barcode printed on the ballot, along with a written record of the voters’ selections. Some critics of this process have argued that since the machine actually records votes via the barcode and not the written text, and since humans cannot read barcodes or QR codes, systems like this do not actually produce voter-verifiable records.

This became an issue in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, in 2023, when a programming error caused the written portion of the results to incorrectly display voter’s choices in a judicial retention race, but county officials said the barcodes recorded the selections accurately.

Order says late-arriving ballots can’t be counted

The executive order also asserts that federal law does not allow mail and absentee ballots to be counted if they arrive after polls close on Election Day. It relies on the same logic as a ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which recently invalidated a Mississippi statute that allowed counting ballots that arrived up to five days after the election. The ruling has been criticized by legal experts, and similar litigation is working its way through federal courts in California.

Eighteen states, plus Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, allow ballots that are received in the days after the election to be counted, as long as they are postmarked on or before Election Day. The number of days varies by state. Utah — which Trump carried by more than 20 points — counts ballots received up to the day the vote is canvassed, which may be more than a week after Election Day.

Most likely to be impacted by a change in the rules are military voters, who are given leeway in several states if their ballots arrive late. In Michigan, for example, voters amended the state Constitution in 2018 to allow military and overseas voters six extra days to get their ballots in as long as those ballots are postmarked by Election Day. Trump’s order allows no exception for military ballots, and would throw the Michigan law into doubt, said Byrum, the clerk in Ingham County.

DOGE gets power to inspect voter rolls

The executive order envisions a new role for federal agencies in scrutinizing the voter rolls maintained by states and municipalities. It allows the Department of Government Efficiency, the newly created arm of government led by billionaire Trump backer Elon Musk, and the Department of Homeland Security to view publicly available voter files and other unspecified “available records” to ensure the rolls are being cleaned to federal standards.

Trump attempted something similar when he established his Presidential Commission on Election Integrity in 2017, shortly after he took office in his first term. Delbert Hosemann, then the Republican secretary of state in Mississippi, said at the time that the commission could “jump into the Gulf of Mexico” before he would comply with the request for records.

“Trump has more control over the party than he had before,” said Hasen. “Now, of course, [Hosemann] couldn’t call it the ‘Gulf of Mexico.‘”

Levitt said he does not anticipate as much Republican pushback either. But he said he does not believe states are OK with “giving Elon the voter rolls and having him tell us what to do with them.”

DOGE is already facing multiple lawsuits about data privacy as it prods other areas of the government for purported waste. Levitts said he expects the same here. Every complaint in those lawsuits, he said, “applies on steroids to DOGE deciding to amass a national voter file, which is essentially what this is.”

Correction, March 26, 4:35 p.m.: A previous version of this story misstated when the U.S. Election Assistance Commission adopted the most recent version of the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines. It was in 2021, not last year.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s interim editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. She edits and frequently writes Votebeat’s national newsletter. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Texas’ ID number rule for mail ballots is struck down in federal court

2025-03-24T16:16:25+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

What happened?

A federal judge struck down Texas’ requirements for ID numbers on mail ballot applications, ruling that they are unconstitutional and discriminate against voters with disabilities.

The law required voters to write their driver’s license number, personal identification number, or the last four digits of their Social Security number — whichever number they originally used to register — on their mail ballot application and mail ballot envelope. But voters didn’t always remember which number they had used, and if they failed to include one, or included one that wasn’t on file, their ballots were rejected.

Texas restricts mail-in voting largely to voters with disabilities and elderly voters.

U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez said the requirements will remain in effect through municipal elections scheduled for May 3, because it’s too close to the election to change the process.

What’s the dispute?

The decision is the latest ruling in the consolidated challenge to SB1, the sweeping overhaul of election laws that Texas lawmakers passed in 2021. Rodriguez previously found that certain provisions restricting voter assistance violated the federal Voting Rights Act and could not be enforced. The judge had also struck down a provision that required election officials to reject mail-in ballot applications and ballots that did not include the identification numbers. That ruling is being appealed.

Who are the plaintiffs?

A coalition of plaintiffs, including voting rights groups such as the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, have challenged multiple provisions of the law, and the case is ongoing. The plaintiffs argue that various provisions of the sweeping law have made it harder for voters of historically marginalized communities to cast ballots, with some alleging the effect was intentional.

What are they asking for?

The plaintiffs want the courts to rule that the law is unconstitutional. In addition, they’re seeking an injunction that would prohibit the state from further enforcing the challenged provisions of the law.

What happens now?

The state is expected to appeal. Rodriguez’s previous rulings in the case are currently under appeal in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Read more Votebeat coverage of challenges to SB1:

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

Pennsylvania’s varied ‘curing’ policies affect voters’ chances of getting their ballot counted

2025-02-04T11:00:01+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Counties that allow mail voters to fix errors that could otherwise get their ballots disqualified rejected fewer ballots during the 2024 general election, a Votebeat and Spotlight PA analysis has found.

Overall, just 0.57% of mail ballots statewide were rejected due to voter errors, such as an improper date, a missing signature on the return envelope, or failure to use the ballot secrecy envelope. That’s less than half the rejection rates of 1.22% in the primary election and 1.31% in the 2022 general election.

However, according to the analysis, the rate was even lower in counties that allow voters to fix, or “cure,” their mail ballots — just 0.49% in those counties were rejected for technical deficiencies on average, compared with 0.59% in counties where curing isn’t allowed. The numbers mean 17% fewer voters had their ballots rejected in the curing counties.

That difference highlights the disparity in the rules Pennsylvania voters face based on where they live, said Jeff Greenburg, a senior adviser on election administration for the Philadelphia-based nonprofit Committee of Seventy. He considers inconsistency the state’s prime election administration problem.

“The number one issue is that we are having a conversation about counties doing things differently,” Greenburg said.

A ruling this past October from the state Supreme Court allows all voters who make such disqualifying mistakes with their mail ballots to cast a provisional ballot on Election Day and have it counted, so long as there are no other errors.

Some counties go beyond that. Thirty-eight counties allow voters to fix errors with their mail ballots in some way — according to information gathered by Votebeat and Spotlight PA ahead of the election — though exactly how varies widely.

Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, is one of the counties that send the defective ballot back to the voter with instructions on how to fix the error, as well as a new return envelope. Chester County tells voters to come into the election office with their ID and fix it in person. Delaware County cancels the defective ballot and issues a new one.

Twenty-six counties do not allow any kind of second chance, and the policy in three others is unclear.

The lack of uniformity stems from ambiguity in the law that brought mail voting into the mainstream in Pennsylvania. Act 77, the 2019 law that expanded mail voting beyond absentee ballots — which required a specified reason — says voters must place their ballot in a secrecy envelope, and place that envelope in a return envelope that they must sign and date. Failure to do one of these things will prevent the county from counting the ballot.

But the law is silent on what, if anything, counties can do to help voters fix those errors, and court decisions in the years since have established that the choice is up to county election officials.

Greenburg, who served as election director in Mercer County for several years before Act 77 was implemented, said that when absentee ballots were the primary form of mail voting, curing was not an issue for most counties.

“We made efforts to contact voters to give them the opportunity if they forgot to sign or had a missing date,” he said. “I think you will find that most counties were doing something similar in that era.”

Now, as mail voting has grown exponentially with Act 77, counties have gone from having to decide how to deal with a handful of errant ballots to hundreds or potentially thousands of them. And they continue to revise their policies.

The Pennsylvania Department of State has made changes to the return envelope to try to reduce the number of flawed mail ballots counties have to deal with. A Votebeat and Spotlight PA analysis following the 2024 primary found that those changes helped reduce the number of ballots facing rejection, and further changes the department made to the date section of the envelope appear to have helped cut that number even more.

The department’s own analysis, which was verified by Votebeat and Spotlight PA, found that the state’s overall ballot rejection rate for the 2024 general election — which would include ballots rejected for being returned late or the voter failing to provide ID — was roughly 1%. That’s down from 2.4% in the primary.

Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt credited the reduction to voter education efforts and the envelope changes, and said the administration is pleased with the improved numbers.

“The Department of State will continue to work with county elections officials to ensure every eligible Pennsylvanian’s legally cast vote can be counted in 2025,” Schmidt said in a statement.

Counties have tended to view the lack of precise language in Act 77 on curing in one of two ways: either as a green light for the practice, or as a barrier.

“None of this is authorized by statute,” Indiana County Solicitor Matthew T. Budash told the county’s commissioners when they voted to adopt a curing policy ahead of the 2024 election. “But it is not prohibited, either.”

Other counties, like Snyder, take the opposite view.

“Our board has consistently taken the stance that the law does not tell us. It doesn’t say we ‘shall’ cure ballots,” county Commissioner Joe Kantz told Votebeat and Spotlight PA in October.

Other non-cure counties have argued that it gives mail voters the ability to change their initial votes, an option not provided to in-person voters.

“I don’t think that voters should be able to correct” their ballots, Bradford County Commissioner Doug McKlinko said during an October meeting where the county voted to discontinue its curing practice.

But Greenburg said counties have never given in-person voters only “one bite at the apple.” Ballot tabulation machines at polling places will reject ballots that have more candidates selected than a race allows — known as “overvotes” — and poll workers typically alert provisional-ballot voters if they forget to sign or date the envelope that goes with it.

With voters taking advantage of curing options, “they’re not saying to the county, ‘I made a mistake on the ballot, I want a new ballot,’” he said. “They made a mistake on their envelope.”

Curing policies like the one in Delaware County, where the county cancels the original mail ballot and sends out a new one, would theoretically allow voters to change their votes. Other counties allow voters to come into the office only to fix problems with the envelope such as signature or date, though this usually doesn’t give voters who forget to use the secrecy envelope a way to fix their error.

Giving mail voters some ability to fix mistakes to ensure their ballot can be accepted, as in-person voters have, is “only fair,” Greenburg said, “but we need the General Assembly to take the lead, in collaboration with election officials, so that we are doing this uniformly across the commonwealth.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Pennsylvania Supreme Court to hear latest case over undated mail ballots

2025-01-17T19:55:25+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

What happened? The Pennsylvania Supreme Court said Friday that it will take up a case, Baxter v. Philadelphia, on whether requiring voters to date mail ballot envelopes violates the state constitution.

What’s the dispute? Pennsylvania’s 2019 no-excuse mail voting law, Act 77, says mail voters must sign and date their ballot return envelope for their vote to be counted. Thousands of voters have had their ballots rejected in every election because the envelopes lacked a proper date. The validity of the dating requirement has been disputed for years, but the issue in the current case is whether it violates the “free and equal” election clause of the Pennsylvania Constitution, which bars any interference with “the free exercise of the right of suffrage.” Voting rights advocates argue that because election officials do not use the handwritten date to determine a ballot’s eligibility, it represents an unnecessary — and unconstitutional — burden that interferes with voting.

Who are the plaintiffs? The plaintiffs are Brian Baxter and Susan Kinniry, two Philadelphia voters whose mail ballots in September 2024 special elections were rejected for lacking a date. They’re represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and the Public Interest Law Center. On the other side are Republican groups that have sought to defend the requirement. Other groups have also intervened on either side, including the Pennsylvania Department of State, the state Democratic Party, and state House and Senate Republicans.

What are they asking for? They initially asked a local court in Philadelphia to declare that the Philadelphia Board of Elections had violated their constitutional rights by deciding not to count the ballots. The court agreed, as did the Commonwealth Court, an appellate court. Republican groups challenged the decision to the state Supreme Court.

What happens now? The Supreme Court is taking up the case and has directed the plaintiffs to notify the state attorney general of the Republicans’ challenge. Republican Dave Sunday, who will be sworn in soon as attorney general, can choose whether to intervene in the case. The court may then order written or oral arguments on the case.

Read more of Votebeat’s recent coverage of challenges to the dating requirement:

Pennsylvania Supreme Court stops 3 counties from counting undated, incorrectly dated ballots, Nov. 18, 2024
Philadelphia must count undated and misdated mail ballots from September election, Pa. court rules, Oct. 30, 2024
Pennsylvania Supreme Court restores date requirement for mail ballots, voiding lower-court ruling, Sept. 13, 2024
Mail ballots can’t be rejected over improper date on envelope, Pennsylvania court rules, Aug. 30, 2024
Pennsylvania’s rule on dating mail ballots faces new challenge in state court, May 29, 2024

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Pennsylvania legislative preview: Will long-discussed election proposals finally get through?

2025-01-15T16:51:41+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Pennsylvania lawmakers beginning their new legislative session this month are preparing to debate what changes, if any, should be made to the way the state’s elections are run.

Once again, Republicans are planning to champion expanded voter ID requirements, while Democrats want to answer county calls for more time to process mail ballots and implement early voting.

Their discussions will follow a highly scrutinized presidential election that ran smoothly compared with the 2020 contest, when counties were slow to produce unofficial results and faced a barrage of fraud claims.

Aside from a new law providing state funding for county election offices, no major changes have been made to Pennsylvania’s elections in the past four years, despite plenty of discussion about it.

One top lawmaker hopes Donald Trump’s election — and Democrats’ ready cooperation in accepting and certifying it — will open up space for more fruitful legislative talks during the two-year session.

“Hopefully there’s an ability to move on some of these election reforms without some of the vitriol and hyperbole that unfortunately overtook the GOP after being defeated in the 2020 presidential election,” state House Majority Leader Matt Bradford (D-Montgomery) said in an interview.

A few areas for possible bipartisan agreement

Polling from the Pew Research Center released in December showed that confidence in elections had increased roughly 30% since 2020, driven by increased trust among Republicans.

Despite that increase, some right-wing election integrity activists at the national level are continuing to pursue the priorities they’ve been pushing since the 2020 election. That goes for Pennsylvania as well, where Republican legislators have said they will reintroduce prior legislation on issues like banning mail-ballot drop boxes and satellite voting offices and repealing mail-in voting, or at least suspending it for three years.

But there are areas of agreement and for potential compromise between the parties.

State Sen. Pat Stefano (R-Bedford) is asking colleagues to join him to end the annual mail voter list, where voters can sign up to receive a mail ballot application automatically every year. Election officials say that program confuses voters who do not remember enrolling for it.

He also wants to make it so that only the Department of State and county election offices can send out ballot applications, which many third parties now send out on their own. Mail ballot applications sent to voters by third parties are often also confused for actual mail ballots.

At least one Democrat appears to support these ideas. State Rep. Joe Webster (D-Montgomery) plans to introduce similar bills aimed at reducing confusion on both issues.

A bipartisan group of state senators wants to combat the use of artificial intelligence to generate content that fraudulently misrepresents candidates. The potential for AI to disrupt elections and spread misinformation is something Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt has also warned about.

As for House Democrats’ priorities, Bradford pointed to a collection of bills the caucus put forward last session. They would create early voting, address the lack of uniformity in voting rules among counties, and give counties time before election day to prepare mail ballots for counting, a process known as precanvassing.

The precanvassing bill has already been reintroduced for this session by state Rep. Scott Conklin (D-Centre).

“Obviously there would need to be some give and take by both sides to get [those issues] over the finish line,” Bradford said, “but we are hopeful again as we move past the election craziness of 2020 that our Republican friends can engage meaningfully on election reforms.”

Debate over mail ballot preprocessing continues

Precanvassing has been the most sought-after reform for county election offices since the introduction of no-excuse mail voting in 2020. The increase in mail ballot volume has strained the resources of county governments, and they have advocated for a system used in many other vote-by-mail states, where election administrators can start precanvassing before election day to spread out the work. Currently, Pennsylvania counties cannot start processing mail ballots until 7 a.m. on election day.

Lawmakers made a last-ditch effort to pass such a bill in the run-up to the 2024 election, but it stalled in the state Senate, where Republican leadership has maintained that any election reform must be paired with stricter voter ID requirements.

State Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R-Indiana) says that tightening voter ID requirements is still “fundamental” to his caucus’s priorities.

“Current law is that a first-time voter has to demonstrate that they are who they say they are, and we see no reason that shouldn’t be enshrined as something that is consistently done when an individual exercises their right to vote,” he said in a separate interview.

Public polling shows a majority of Pennsylvania voters support requiring ID to vote. Bradford said that House Democrats are ready to discuss it, and noted that in the last session, he and other members of his caucus supported expanding voter ID rules to all voters whenever they vote.

Pittman said that he thought counties managed the 2024 election well, and that any changes to election laws should be done cautiously with that in mind. He said that he thinks the county’s efficiency in processing mail ballots during the presidential election, for example, shows that precanvassing is not a necessity.

“When there’s a perception that the rules have changed … it leads to suspicion, and we cannot have a lack of confidence in our electoral process, perceived or real,” he said. “And anything that we do in statute going forward has to be done in a way that makes sure that it does not somehow erode the confidence in our process.”

Election reform has remained elusive in Pennsylvania, but the long break before the next federal election and growing trust in elections could provide a new window of opportunity.

“Municipal years are the most critical when it comes to making changes,” said Jeff Greenburg, a senior adviser on election administration for the Philadelphia-based nonprofit Committee of Seventy. “The time to do it is now, so counties are not doing it in a presidential year.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

The Votebeat stories that made a mark on us in 2024

2024-12-23T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

Good morning,

Happy holidays to all the dedicated, smart, witty readers of this newsletter, and welcome to our last edition of 2024! Thanks for supporting our work this year. Before we all go our separate ways to celebrate the holidays, we asked Votebeat’s reporters to highlight some of their most memorable stories of the year. Here are their selections:

From Jessica Huseman:

In Shasta County, Calif., fights over elections have left wounds that just won’t heal

This story is from California, a state Votebeat does not typically cover. There, longtime election administrator Cathy Darling Allen faced a more concentrated version of the problems plaguing elected officials across the country — intense scrutiny and mistrust from local residents, spurred by conspiracy theories about Donald Trump’s loss in 2020. The situation became so overwhelming that Darling Allen chose to retire before her term officially ended, and after she was diagnosed with heart failure due to stress.

I was able to spend time in Shasta County and with Darling Allen and her staff, untangling how the situation there became so toxic. I found county leaders who lied to their constituents, a concentration of political extremism, and growing anxiety among lifelong residents that Shasta County had fundamentally changed for the worse.

From Jen Fifield in Arizona:

How Arizona tackles a language barrier to provide Navajo voters a ballot they can listen to

In Arizona, the Navajo Nation is a crucial voting bloc. High turnout on the nation in 2020 helped Joe Biden win the state. Yet about 7,000 voting-age Navajo residents in the state can’t read English proficiently, making it difficult for them to vote. The state is required to translate the ballot for those voters, but courts have found that election officials haven’t done enough to meet these requirements. We wanted to take a closer look.

In a partnership with Indian Country Today, we gained access to a crucial, typically closed meeting in which Navajo speakers tried to translate culturally sensitive and highly controversial ballot propositions into Navajo. That included a measure to secure abortion access in the state. Our story found that the lack of transparency into the process made it difficult for the Navajo community to ensure the ballot was properly translated on these key issues. The story was broadcast across Navajo Nation, on TV through our partnership with Indian Country Today, and in print in community papers serving the reservation. Voting rights groups used the story to continue to call for better translation services.

Signed, sealed, rejected: How Arizona’s system for verifying mail ballots is hurting key voters

Election margins are tight in Arizona, and races can turn on just a few hundred ballots. But in 2022, I noticed that the number of ballots rejected for mismatched voter signatures had tripled, to around 1,800 in Maricopa County alone. I knew the signature review process was designed to block potential fraud, but I also knew, from my time talking to voters in the state, that many voters didn’t even know the importance of the signature. I set out to figure out if this system was working as intended.

In a monthslong project with the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, we found that many signatures had been rejected not because they were fraudulent but simply because they were sloppy — meaning that ballots with legitimate signatures were not getting counted. This was often the case for younger and newer voters who only had an e-signature on file. This flaw in the system will be an important target as lawmakers look for ways to improve voting in the state.

From Hayley Harding in Michigan:

No, Michigan does not have more voters than residents eligible to vote

In Michigan, misunderstandings about how the state maintains its voter rolls quickly blew into something bigger as Elon Musk and other conservative activists spread bad information across social media. Michigan has about 8.4 million registered voters and only about 7.9 million residents older than 18. But that’s the result of Michigan’s proactive voter registration policies — everyone eligible to vote is registered when they get a driver’s license in the state, for instance. There are only about 7.2 million active voters in Michigan, with the remainder on the rolls being the dormant records of people who have left Michigan or died, but whose records haven’t yet been removed because of federal laws that restrict such removals.

Votebeat’s reporting on this issue helped to slow the spread of incorrect information and restore trust in the state’s election system during the critical last few weeks before the November election.

From Carter Walker in Pennsylvania:

This Pa. activist is the source of false and flawed election claims gaining traction across the country

Missing voting machine documents raise concern about Pa. county’s testing processes

These two stories share a common theme: They didn’t end with the 2024 presidential election.

In the first story, I took an in-depth look at how Pennsylvania resident Heather Honey had quietly become one of the most influential voices in the conservative election integrity movement. By meticulously fact-checking her report and advocacy on ERIC, an obscure multistate coalition for voter list maintenance that’s been the subject of conservative pushback, we demonstrated how the Lebanon County-based researcher often omitted facts and selectively analyzed data in a way that produced flawed conclusions.

The second story detailed how simple process missteps can lead to big election problems. Before each election, counties must test voting machines to ensure they are functioning properly. After voters in Northampton County noticed a programming error in the 2023 municipal election, it was immediately apparent that officials had not properly tested the county’s machines. They admitted as much. By reviewing thousands of documents, despite the county’s heavy restrictions on my access, I showed that the county’s testing documentation was incomplete, inconsistently filled out, and, in more than 150 instances, missing entirely.

Election administrators are going to continue to make mistakes, and outside observers are going to continue to misinterpret how our elections infrastructure works. That didn’t end on Nov. 5.

From Natalia Contreras in Texas:

How Texas’ paper-based voter registration system has led to the disenfranchisement of some voters

This investigation was sparked by the problems I experienced while registering to vote in Texas. I set out to understand exactly how the voter registration process works in this state, talking to about a dozen election officials, and multiple voters and volunteer deputy registrars. They all confirmed that I wasn’t alone in having filled out a voter registration application but still being left off the voter rolls. Nor was I the only one who had also registered at the Department of Public Safety as a failsafe, while still not being added to the rolls. This happens often to people who try to register in Texas, and means that some voters who think they’re registered aren’t able to cast a ballot. The crux of the problem, my reporting found, is the state’s refusal to adopt online voter registration.

Texas ballot-numbering lawsuit leaves election officials puzzled

Together with colleagues at the Texas Tribune, I reported on how since 2021, in an effort to increase transparency, Texas lawmakers have put some voters’ ballot secrecy at risk.

By the time we reported this, one longtime Texas poll watcher, Laura Pressley, had already sued the state and local election officials, alleging that they violated her and other voters’ right to a secret ballot. In her lawsuit, she said she used publicly available records to come up with an “algorithmic pattern” that helped her find the ballot choices of more than 60,000 voters in Williamson County. Pressley alleges that the state isn’t complying with a century-old Texas law that says ballots have to be numbered sequentially starting with 1. In the course of my reporting, I found that Texas is one of only a few states that still number their ballots at all. Most don’t, to prevent ballot secrecy breaches. Bills that lawmakers say would further expand election transparency have already been filed, but I have yet to see one that would address the ballot secrecy issues. I am on the lookout for it as the legislative session gets underway in January.

From Alexander Shur in Wisconsin:

Under Wisconsin’s ‘drawdown’ election law, one person’s error can cost another person their vote

I’ve reported on all sorts of issues in my career, but none provoked such a visceral reaction from my sources as this one. My national contacts in the election community were appalled to hear that when Wisconsin polling place records show more ballots cast than the number of voters who correctly checked in, election workers, under state law, can resolve the discrepancy through a “drawdown” — that is, by randomly pulling a number of voters’ (likely) legitimate ballots to toss out. Every Wisconsin clerk I spoke with for this story found the idea of conducting a drawdown a distressing, last-resort option. Some said they would never do it again.

I set out to understand why Wisconsin continued to use this practice — first implemented a year after the state’s founding — while almost every other state that once had it has since disavowed it. The answer, I learned, has nothing to do with election workers finding the practice fair or useful. Much the opposite. But the Legislature hasn’t stepped in to change the state’s drawdown law, and the practice continues to jeopardize properly cast ballots — a risk that can change election outcomes. It’s just one example of Wisconsin having some election laws on the books that are widely disliked by election workers.

As Votebeat prepares for 2025, we want to know what journalism would best serve your needs and interests. What should we report on in the upcoming year? Please give us your thoughts in this short survey.

Pennsylvania Supreme Court stops 3 counties from counting undated, incorrectly dated ballots

2024-11-18T22:53:50+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Pennsylvania’s highest court has directed three counties not to include undated or misdated mail ballots in their November election results.

Such ballots have been the subject of years of litigation in various courts, and became an issue again after Bucks, Montgomery, and Philadelphia counties moved to count them for the Nov. 5 election.

These are the ballots where a voter has neglected to write the date on the return envelope or written something incorrect, like their birthday. There are roughly 1,500 or so ballots in play in the three counties, likely not enough to change the outcome of the U.S. Senate race that is spurring the litigation.

Pennsylvania calls off recount in Senate race after Casey concedes to McCormick

Still, the legal action highlights an unsettled area of policy that has long frustrated people in charge of running elections in Pennsylvania.

Attorneys for the counties had argued that officials there had constitutional concerns about rejecting the improperly dated ballots.

They pointed to Commonwealth Court, which has ruled multiple times this year that rejecting mail ballots solely for an improper date violates the state constitution’s free and equal elections clause.

On Monday, a 4-3 majority of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court told the three counties not to include undated and misdated ballots in their counts. It clarified that the Commonwealth Court rulings do not apply to the Nov. 5 election.

Here’s how to understand the background leading up to the decision:

What exactly is an undated mail ballot?

A mail ballot in Pennsylvania comes with two envelopes: an inner secrecy envelope and an outer return envelope.

There is a field on the return envelope for the voter to write “today’s date” — meaning, the date they fill it out.

An undated ballot is one where the voter left that field blank. A “misdated” ballot is generally understood to be one on which a voter wrote a date outside a range described in a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling — between when counties begin mailing out ballots and Election Day, when they are due.

The Pennsylvania Department of State directed counties to pre-print the full year — 2024 — on the envelope to help voters avoid writing the wrong date, like their birthdays, previously one of the most common errors.

Is counting undated mail ballots ‘illegal’?

The first way to understand the issue is based on what state law has to say about these ballots. The Pennsylvania Election Code requires voters to date and sign the return envelope in order for the ballot to be accepted and counted. However, this enforcement of this provision has been heavily litigated over the past several years.

You may have seen headlines like this one from Fox News: “Pennsylvania Democrats openly admit to counting illegal ballots in McCormick-Casey race.” Or this one from the Washington Post editorial board: “Democrats thumb their nose at the rule of law in Pennsylvania.”

These pieces reference the decisions in Bucks, Montgomery, and Philadelphia counties to accept and count improperly dated ballots.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s order on Monday cited a ruling it made in 2022 that “the Election Code’s command” to date ballots “is unambiguous and mandatory.”

But in the years since, both state and federal courts have been asked to consider other legal challenges to the rule, including most recently an argument that it violates the state constitution.

In August, the Commonwealth Court — one of Pennsylvania’s appellate courts — ruled that the dating requirement violates the free and equal elections clause of the state constitution. It ruled the same thing in October in response to a case stemming from a Sept. 17 special election in Philadelphia.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has yet to rule on the merits of such a challenge and repeatedly declined to do so ahead of the Nov. 5 election.

Instead, it threw out the August ruling on a technicality. And then, on Nov. 1, it ruled that Commonwealth Court’s decision in the Philadelphia case would not apply to the general election.

The three counties in turn argued that they had to consider whether rejecting someone’s improperly dated ballot this election would violate their constitutional rights, since the high court had not ruled on the issue.

The counties did not believe that Nov. 1 ruling prohibited them from “independently assessing whether rejecting mail ballots with voting errors cast is consistent with the Pennsylvania Constitution and the statutorily prescribed process for counting votes,” their attorneys argued.

The court made itself clear Monday afternoon, telling the counties to “comply with the prior rulings of this court in which we clarified that mail-in and absentee ballots that fail to comply with the requirements of the Pennsylvania Election Code shall not be counted for the purposes of the election held on November 5, 2024.”

One state Supreme Court justice, Kevin Brobson, admonished the counties for what he said was an overstepping of their authority.

Local election officials do not have the authority “to ignore Election Code provisions that they believe are unconstitutional,” he wrote. “Only the courts under our charter may declare a statute, or provision thereof, unconstitutional.”

What happens now?

Monday’s order stems from suits filed by the national and state Republican parties asking the high court to stop the counties from counting the improperly dated ballots. They asked the court to use its authority to immediately intervene in pressing issues, which it did in issuing Monday’s order.

Two lawsuits in Philadelphia and Bucks counties challenging the counting decisions were also filed last week by the campaign of U.S. Senate candidate Dave McCormick, the status of which is now unclear given the state Supreme Court’s ruling. McCormick, a Republican, leads Democrat Bob Casey, the incumbent, by fewer than 18,000 votes in a race that is currently being recounted because of the narrow margin.

The larger issue of whether rejecting improperly dated ballots is unconstitutional is still unresolved, although that may soon change. Republicans have appealed the Commonwealth Court ruling on the Philadelphia case to the state Supreme Court.

“I think the way the court handled this really did some harm to the election process in some ways,” said Quinn Yeargain, a professor of state constitutional law at Michigan State University and formerly of Widener University in Pennsylvania.

Yeargain said the courts have clearly known this issue was going to come up and have been presented with multiple opportunities to address it, but have “repeatedly refused to do so.”

“I really take some offense to this high and mighty ‘How dare you?’ particularly in Brobson’s concurrence, because the court has not provided guidance,” Yeargain said. “I don’t think the courts are going to be able to play that game of ‘not it’ forever. They are eventually going to have to deal with it. It is not going away.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Efforts to challenge Pennsylvania voters’ mail ballot applications fizzle

2024-11-08T22:44:09+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Update, Nov. 9, 2024: This story has been updated to include comments from PA Fair Elections and Heather Honey.

All of the more than 4,000 mail ballot challenges filed in Pennsylvania in the past two weeks have been withdrawn or dismissed. The resolution of the challenges means the voters’ ballots will be counted, barring any other disqualifications, such as signature or date issues.

“It’s encouraging that every one of those challenges has been dismissed or withdrawn,” said Al Schmidt, secretary of the commonwealth.

The challenges were submitted in many instances by right-wing activists associated with PA Fair Elections, a group led by Heather Honey, a Pennsylvania researcher whose data analysis methods have produced inaccurate or flawed conclusions in the past.

Two state senators, Cris Dush and Jarrett Coleman, submitted challenges in four counties, all of which were withdrawn. Neither responded to a request for comment Friday.

In all, there were challenges to the eligibility of thousands of mail voters filed in 15 counties across Pennsylvania by Nov. 1, the deadline for such objections.

“I don’t know whether this challenge is disingenuous or just misplaced,” Patrick Judge, one of 52 voters challenged in Lawrence County, said at a hearing Friday. He said that the challengers may have a point that the state’s voter rolls could be managed better, but that seeking to invalidate the votes of U.S. citizens who followed the rules as they stand now is not the way to raise that concern.

Judge’s ballot wasn’t rejected. Still, at the hearing he said the challenge didn’t feel very democratic. “I feel very disenfranchised right now, for what I am not sure,” Judge said.

Pennsylvania law requires that someone must be a resident of the state to be an eligible voter. It also established a process by which — for a fee of $10 — anyone can challenge a person’s application for a mail ballot on the grounds that the applicant is not qualified to vote.

The bulk of the challenges focused on overseas voters, who are permitted to cast ballots because of a 1986 federal law called the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, or UOCAVA. The law established that U.S. citizens and military personnel living overseas can still vote by absentee ballot in the state where they last lived, though if they have no immediate plans to move back they can participate only in elections for federal offices like president, not state and local races.

Many challengers claimed that they were not looking to contest the voters’ eligibility to vote, but rather the practice of not registering the voters before issuing them ballots. But the effect of the challenges, had they been successful, would have been to invalidate the voter’s ballots. County officials argued the challengers were misinterpreting the requirements of UOCAVA and state law, and how these two statutes interact.

Other challenges were based on a comparison of the voters’ addresses in the state’s mail ballot request file against addresses connected to the voters’ names in a U.S. Postal Service database. Experts and officials have criticized this method of comparison for its propensity to produce false matches or misconstrue why the person requested a change in their mailing address.

Over the past week, counties held hearings on the challenges, featuring questioning by county officials and testimony from the voters. They concluded either with officials dismissing the challenges or the challengers withdrawing them. In many cases, officials said there was a lack of evidence. Several challengers withdrew their challenges after Election Day.

The hearings also revealed who the challengers were. In at least seven counties, the person filing the challenge had attended PA Fair Elections meetings in the past or identified themselves as working with the group.

An unsigned statement from the group denied that the challenges were in any way coordinated or approved by them. Honey, the leader of the group, separately rejected any suggestion that the group was involved.

In Lycoming County, a challenge was filed by Karen DiSalvo of the Election Research Institute, another group led by Honey. DiSalvo previously denied that her challenges were filed in association with the group.

One of the challengers was Patricia Bleasdale, who has attended PA Fair Elections meetings and submitted 143 challenges in Delaware County based on change-of-address forms.

At a hearing Thursday, Bleasdale acknowledged that she hadn’t done the analysis herself and had gotten the information from an outside group, which she did not name.

Ashley Lunkenheimer, chair of the county board of elections, expressed frustration with Bleasdale’s actions.

“Do you understand what you’ve done here?” Lunkenheimer said. “We have 143 voters that we have notified that they may not have their mail-in ballots count in a really important election ... You’ve done that with not actually having looked to see if each of them filed a national change-of-address form.”

Voters targeted by Bleasdale’s challenges testified as well. Nicholas Maston invited Bleasdale to visit his home 1.6 miles away from where the hearing was held to verify his residency. The filing against him cited a years-old change-of-address to a home in Chicago, but didn’t acknowledge a more recent record changing his address to his current Delaware County home in August.

The claim that his vote in Pennsylvania should be ineligible “is to me a very serious allegation, and that’s why I’m here today,” he said. “In addition to the assumptions that were made leading to this database and leading to these challenges being flawed, the data itself is flawed.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Milwaukee starts over with counting of absentee ballots, after open locks are discovered on tabulators

2024-11-06T00:06:51+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Milwaukee election officials started counting the city’s absentee ballots all over again Tuesday afternoon after an observer noticed that the panel doors on the city’s 13 tabulators weren’t properly closed.

By the time city officials decided to restart the counting around 4 p.m., over 30,000 absentee ballots had already been fed into the tabulators, Milwaukee spokesperson Caroline Reinwald said. The city had more than 106,000 absentee ballots in total by midday Tuesday.

A Republican observer at the city’s central counting facility pointed out that the panel door that covers a tabulator’s on and off switch — and, in at least some cases, slots for inserting USB drives to export election results — was unlocked after workers had been using the tabulators for several hours. Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Paulina Gutiérrez then went from tabulator to tabulator, monitored by representatives from the Democratic and Republican parties, to secure each one between 2 and 2:30 p.m.

City election officials said that there was no indication any of the tabulators had been tampered with — and that it would have been clear if somebody had accessed them. The slots are used at the end of the night, when election officials insert USB drives to export election results before driving them to the county to submit the data.

Milwaukee setback stands out in otherwise orderly Wisconsin election

If the off buttons were “tampered with, it would completely turn off,” Gutiérrez told Votebeat. “That would be very evident of tampering, so we just properly locked them and resealed them.”

There were no USB drives in any of the tabulators, she added.

The decision to restart the count, city spokesperson Jeff Fleming said, was “out of an abundance of caution.”

“We have no reason to believe that there was any compromise to any of the machines,” he said. “But because they were not fully sealed — human error — … we are going to zero them all out again and rerun the ballots that had already been processed.”

Re-tabulating all of the ballots may take up to three hours, Fleming said. City officials initially said the count could go until 2 or 3 a.m.

Votebeat spoke with multiple Republicans at central count who were aware of the oversight. None said they were concerned about any possibility of tampering.

Before the decision to restart the tabulation process, Republican Party of Milwaukee County Chair Hilario Deleon, who watched Gutiérrez reseal each machine, told Votebeat that he doesn’t think anything nefarious happened.

“I’m not worried about it, although it is a concerning thing when those things are supposed to be locked,” he said.

“Both observers were able to see whether or not there’s flash drives in any of the machines. There’s no flash drives in the machines. There should be no flash drives until the end of the night,” he said, adding that he appreciated Gutiérrez’s transparency.

Paulina Gutiérrez, executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, middle, works on securing the tabulation machines after learning that the doors of the machines at the central counting facility at the Baird Center were not properly sealed on Election Day, Nov. 5, 2024.

But Deleon expressed frustration over the decision to restart counting and said local Democrats and city election officials disregarded his view on that matter.

“Let them continue doing their job,” he said. “So many more ballots still have to be counted. Why are we adding more time onto this?”

“It’s just going to be extra work for everyone, and any chance to get these numbers maybe by midnight or 1 a.m., that might have just been pushed back,” he said.

Jefferson Davis, a former Menomonee Falls village president and conservative election activist who has promoted conspiracy theories, similarly said he wasn’t concerned.

“We had observers at each station as they were taken, and we didn’t see anything that would cause us concern,” he said.

Davis told Votebeat that he welcomed the decision to restart the count as a transparency measure.

Milwaukee election officials typically follow a checklist at central count to ensure that the tabulators are secure, and that thumb drives carrying vote totals end up where they’re supposed to, aren’t tampered with, and remain tracked through a full chain-of-custody process. It appeared one of the earlier steps of closing the panels wasn’t done correctly.

Claire Woodall, Gutiérrez’s predecessor as Milwaukee election chief, said there are multiple layers of security to prevent tampering, of which the seal is “the most visible but superficial.”

“Rigorous cross checks exist in the election system, including audit logs that track every action on the tabulator,” she said. “I am confident that this was human error in how the doors [were] closed and seals placed, as no one present at Central Count has presented any concerns of tampering.”

Ann Jacobs, a Democratic commissioner on the Wisconsin Elections Commission, also watched Gutiérrez as she resealed and locked each tabulator.

“Elections are run at the municipal level, and at this point, it is up to the Milwaukee Election Commission and the Milwaukee city attorney’s office to decide what their plan is, in light of what’s happened,” she told Votebeat.

National Republicans — long critical of the heavily Democratic city and its elections — decried the mistake.

“This is an unacceptable example of incompetent election administration in a key swing state: voters deserve better and we are unambiguously calling on Milwaukee’s officials to do their jobs and count ballots quickly and effectively,” Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley and Co-Chair Lara Trump wrote in a media statement.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Early voting by Republicans helps drive surge in absentee ballot numbers in Wisconsin

2024-11-04T21:48:09+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Wisconsin’s early voting period finished Sunday, and a couple of things are clear: Voting by absentee ballot, which spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, remains very popular, and Republicans are coming around to it despite mixed messages from party leaders.

As of Nov. 4, a day out from the election, voters cast and returned over 1.5 million absentee ballots, including nearly 950,000 cast at early voting sites. Ballots are still arriving by mail — the deadline for them to reach clerk’s offices is 8 p.m. on Election Day — but already, the total number of returned absentee ballots exceeds the total from the 2008, 2012, and 2016 presidential elections.

“Clerks were a little surprised by turnout,” Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe said on Friday. “Everything still went really smoothly, but I think our local election officials were surprised to see the volume of in-person absentee.”

The volume was so high, Wolfe said, that the commission bought extra absentee ballot return envelopes in case municipalities ran out. None had run out as of Friday, she said.

Republican areas coming around to absentee voting

Statewide, the total number of returned ballots is about 20% lower than it was at this point in 2020, when COVID-19 pushed voters to rely on mail voting far more than usual.

As of Monday, no county had received more returned ballots than it had at this point in the 2020 election, but the six counties closest to their 2020 levels — Washington, Adams, Waukesha, Ozaukee, Florence, and Walworth — have Republican majorities.

In Walworth County, a southern county with just over 100,000 residents, county and municipal election staff anticipated an embrace of early voting, but “I don’t think we thought it was going to be the volume that it is,” County Clerk Susi Pike said. “It’s a lot different than any other election, for sure.”

A Wisconsin voter’s guide to dealing with Election Day pitfalls and problems

One municipality in Walworth County that typically had early in-person voting only by appointment had open early-voting hours this time around, Pike said.

Voters like the availability of in-person early voting, Pike said, because it provides more flexibility and reduces the likelihood of people not being able to vote if, for example, weather is bad on Election Day.

The state doesn’t track the partisan breakdown of the early voting data, but polling shows a growing Republican embrace of voting before Election Day — at least, some versions of it.

Among likely voters in Wisconsin who said they would vote early in person, 52% support Donald Trump while 47% support Kamala Harris, a Marquette Law School Poll released Oct. 30 showed. Among those who planned to vote by mail, 70% support Harris, while 30% support Trump.

The percentage of Republicans voting early by mail and in person has increased since the last presidential election.

In 2020, 78% of Republicans planned to vote on Election Day, while 12% planned to cast a ballot early in person and 7% planned to vote by mail, according to the Marquette Law School Poll. In 2024, 70% of Republicans planned to vote on Election Day, with 19% planning to cast a ballot early and 10% by mail.

That change has come as Republican leaders emphasize early voting, a departure from 2020, when Trump and his allies baselessly alleged widespread fraud related to the casting of absentee ballots.

“We can’t keep walking into Election Day 100,000-200,000 votes down and expect we’re going to make it up in 13 hours between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m.,” Wisconsin Republican Party Chair Brian Schimming said.

Still some Republicans, including Trump, have persisted in casting doubt on some absentee voting methods. Trump has already said without evidence or explanation that this election is rigged, and U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde, a Wisconsin Republican, called for monitoring drop boxes to ensure people aren’t “jamming fake ballots.”

In solidly Republican Washington County, voters have already returned about 54,000 ballots, just 2% fewer than at this point four years ago.

Voting by absentee ballot voting was less embraced in some outstate, mostly Republican counties. As of Monday, seven counties had 40% or fewer absentee ballots in this election than in 2020, and all but one voted for Trump that year.

In Clark County, where voters have returned under 2,000 absentee votes compared with nearly 3,500 in 2020, County Clerk Christina Jensen said voters typically wait until Election Day to vote.

Still, Jensen added, the pandemic changed county residents’ voting habits, and she fielded more calls about early voting this year than any year before it.

In Wisconsin’s Democratic strongholds of Dane and Milwaukee counties, voters continued to embrace early voting. Dane County voters had returned over 202,000 ballots, the elections commission stated on Monday, compared with just under 249,000 at this point in 2020. Milwaukee County voters returned about 230,000 this time around, compared with 314,000 at this point in 2020.

Early voting ran smoothly despite persistent printing delays

Even with higher in-person early voting numbers than ever before, early voting ran relatively smoothly. But voters faced long lines and delays across the state for several days, especially during the first week of early voting, because of a printing issue related to the state’s voter registration and election management system.

It remains unclear what caused the printing problem, but it resulted in up to 15-minute wait times to print each label that election officials typically stick on every absentee ballot, usually before voters cast their vote. The election commission encouraged local election officials to hand-write the information usually printed on the label, like a voter’s name and address, which some did.

The issue went away for most of the second week of early voting, but popped again on Friday as election officials across the state tried to print 20,000 labels in an hour, said Ann Jacobs, a Democratic commissioner on the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

Wolfe, the administrator, credited the increase in early voting turnout to “a lot more awareness on all of the options that are available.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Philadelphia must count undated and misdated mail ballots from September election, Pa. court rules

2024-10-30T19:05:31+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Update, Nov. 1, 2024: The Pennsylvania Supreme Court clarified in an order Friday that this ruling does not apply to the Nov. 5, 2024, general election. This story has been updated with comment from the RNC.

Philadelphia must count mail ballots from the September special elections that were submitted with return envelopes that voters incorrectly dated or failed to date, a state appellate court ruled Wednesday in a decision that doesn’t explicitly apply to the November general election.

While the ruling applies narrowly, it raises the possibility of additional action by the state Supreme Court and gives county officials yet another ruling to consider when deciding how to handle ballots this November.

In the 3-2 ruling Wednesday, the state’s Commonwealth Court said that the city had to count ballots from mail voters who made dating errors in the Sept. 17 special elections for two vacant legislative seats.

The ruling said a local Philadelphia court got it right when it said rejecting the ballots violated the state constitution.

“We hold that the trial court did not err in ordering the County Board to count the 69 undated and incorrectly dated absentee and mail-in ballots cast in the [special elections] on the basis that not counting those ballots violates the free and equal elections clause of the Pennsylvania Constitution,” Judge Ellen Ceisler wrote for the majority.

In a footnote, Ciesler wrote that the case “relates to a special election that has already occurred, and not the 2024 general election.”

In a dissenting opinion, Judge Matthew Wolf said the majority decision risked “causing confusion on the eve of the 2024 General Election.” Judge Patricia McCullough raised the same concern in a separate dissent.

“There simply was and is no reason to decide this question now, and the Majority certainly has not done so in ordinary course,” McCullough wrote. “Both the trial court and this Court should have declined to issue rushed and novel constitutional rulings that surely will confuse the expectations of both voters and county boards of elections alike.”

The decision leaves unresolved constitutional questions about counting undated or misdated ballots in the November election, though it does not force officials to count them.

“Of course we hope they will, because if [rejecting them is] unconstitutional in September it is unconstitutional in November,” said Andy Hoover, a spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, which along with the Public Interest Law Center brought the case on behalf of two voters. “And if they or any county don’t, this ruling sets up post-election litigation.”

While an appeal in the case could prompt the state Supreme Court to step in next, for now, other counties aren’t bound by the ruling.

“The order certainly does not expressly apply to all counties,” said Adam Bonin, a Philadelphia-based Democratic election lawyer, who was not part of this case but has been involved in other lawsuits challenging the dating requirement. But Bonin said all county attorneys need to take note of the fact that a state court has ruled that disqualifying ballots for these reasons violates the constitution, and advise their counties accordingly.

After the September special elections, the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and Public Interest Law Center sued Philadelphia on behalf of two voters who neglected to date their ballot envelopes, which officials rejected. The groups argued that under a provision in the state constitution, the city could not reject the ballots for such a trivial paperwork error.

The argument is identical to one made by the groups in a separate case this summer. The Commonwealth Court ruled in the groups’ favor in that case in August, but the state Supreme Court voided the decision on procedural grounds in September. The high court then also declined an ACLU request to exercise its authority to bypass the usual court process and immediately decide the dating issue.

The ACLU and Public Interest Law Center hailed Wednesday’s ruling as a victory.

“We applaud the Commonwealth Court for its ruling recognizing the rights of voters, and we hope that every county will abide by this ruling in its processing of mail ballots next month,” said Mimi McKenzie, legal director of the Public Interest Law Center. “Because today’s decision may not be the last word on this issue, we still advise voters to date their return envelope, take any opportunity they have to cure mistakes, or vote provisionally on election day if they made a mistake on the envelope date.”

In the Philadelphia case, a local judge ruled that the city erred in not counting the ballots on the grounds that it violated the state constitution’s free and equal elections clause, but the city and Republican groups that intervened in the case appealed that ruling to the Commonwealth Court.

The city commissioners appealed on the grounds that they did not want to be in a scenario where Philadelphia was the only county counting the ballots or was required to count the ballots for the special elections but not the November general election.

“The Board appreciates the Commonwealth Court’s ruling in this case, which will enable the Board to avoid inconsistency, comply with the Election Code, and uphold the voting rights of electors under the Pennsylvania Constitution,” Ava Schwemler, a spokesperson for the city said. “We are grateful for a resolution on this matter to guide consistent and equitable election operations.”

Schwemler said the city will not be appealing to the state Supreme Court.

Republican groups that intervened in the case argued the ACLU and Public Interest Law Center’s case had procedural defects, and the Philadelphia court’s ruling violated a legal principle of not changing the rules close to an election.

“The Department is pleased with the result, which won’t interfere with the upcoming election and will only serve to enfranchise voters who otherwise would have their votes thrown out for meaningless mistake,” said Amy Gulli, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of State.

Following the Nov. 1 Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision, RNC Chairman Michael Whatley hailed the order as a victory.

“This is another big win for election integrity and Pennsylvania voters,” he said in a statement. “For the fifth time, we have successfully defended the state’s dated ballot requirement.”

Bonin said he anticipated the state Supreme Court will take up the issue soon.

“I assume that the state Supreme Court is going to bring clarity to this between now and when the counties are counting their ballots,” he said. “They have had multiple opportunities to bring finality to this. … The only way that this issue goes away is if all the courts close all the doors.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Group seeks to block mail ballots for hundreds of Pennsylvania voters, based on flimsy USPS records

2024-10-30T08:45:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

A group of citizens are challenging hundreds of mail ballot applications in southeast Pennsylvania, claiming they were submitted by voters who have moved to a new address that disqualifies them from voting in the state.

The challengers, apparently working as organized activists across multiple counties, are claiming that these voters are ineligible for a mail ballot because the address in the state’s mail ballot request file does not match an address connected to the voter’s name in a U.S. Postal Service database. This method of cross-checking has been regularly criticized by election experts as insufficient to confirm that the records refer to the same person.

The challenges filed with counties claim the voters are no longer Pennsylvania residents and thus are not eligible voters and cannot receive a mail ballot. The challenges apparently cite data from the Postal Service’s National Change of Address database showing a record that someone matching the voter’s name has filed an address change for mail delivery.

Pennsylvania law requires that someone must be a resident of Pennsylvania to be an eligible voter but does not require that their Pennsylvania address be where they receive mail.

A coalition of voting rights groups is pushing back against the challenges, calling them a “malicious attempt” to disenfranchise voters.

“We are very concerned about the validity and intent of these challenges, deliberate abuse of the election system, and the time and energy it will take for our local election officials to address them,” said Susan Gobreski, president of the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania. “We will defend the freedom to vote for all Pennsylvanians.”

According to Pennsylvania law, mail ballot applications can be challenged up until 5 p.m. the Friday before the election — for a fee of $10 each — on the grounds that the applicant is not qualified to vote.

The challenges appear to be a coordinated effort. Broad and Liberty, a conservative Philadelphia-based news outlet, reported Monday that it had reviewed a list of the 865 challenges, targeting voters registered in Bucks, Chester, Montgomery, and Delaware counties. Broad and Liberty did not name the group behind the effort, and reported that the challenges are mostly targeting Democratic voters’ applications.

Votebeat and Spotlight PA confirmed with Bucks County that its election office had received 191 challenges Friday from the same person. Spokesperson Jim O’Malley said a hearing by the board of elections would need to take place to determine the validity of the challenges, and that the hearing had not yet been scheduled.

Chester County spokesperson Rebecca Brain said the county had received 212 challenges, all using the same standard phrasing, and that a board of elections hearing was scheduled for Friday to review the challenges.

Megan Alt, a spokesperson for Montgomery County, said the county has not received any challenges yet, but would address them if they come. Jim Allen, elections director in Delaware County, said someone did recently come in with 140 challenge forms, but when they were informed they needed to use the county’s affidavit, they took all 140 forms and left.

According to a petition reviewed by Votebeat and Spotlight PA, the person filing challenges in Chester County is Diane Houser. Houser is a plaintiff in a lawsuit brought this summer by a right-wing group called United Sovereign Americans challenging the state’s voter roll maintenance.

Houser did not immediately return a call or email seeking comment.

Such challenges using USPS data may also be occurring in other states. A lawsuit filed in Harris County, Texas, this month seeks to challenge thousands of registrations based at least in part on what the lawsuit describes as a “simple comparison” of the change of address data to the county voter rolls.

David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research, said USPS change-of-address data can be unreliable on its own for determining voter eligibility because it does not contain unique ID numbers for individuals, birthdates, or driver’s license information, and often doesn’t differentiate between family members with the same or similar names, like a senior and junior.

While election officials do use this data for list maintenance, they use it in combination with other sources such as driver’s license records to improve confidence that they’ve got the right person.

“No data scientist would ever consider matching a National Change of Address file to another file and say with confidence this is the same person,” Becker said. “And of course you definitely don’t want to say that when you are in close proximity to an election and might disenfranchise someone.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, in a letter to all 67 counties, is cautioning them that deeming the applications ineligible on the basis of the challenges would violate the law, since the only requirement to receive a mail ballot is that a person be a registered voter. The ACLU asserts that the USPS data can not be used to distinguish between a person’s plan to temporarily relocate or to permanently move, and thus is insufficient alone to prove the voter is not qualified.

The letter also reminded counties that it is too late to remove voters from voting rolls, as federal law prohibits systematic removals within 90 days of an election.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

These Pennsylvania counties give voters a chance to fix errors on their mail ballots

2024-10-23T23:13:26+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Update, 7:10 p.m., Oct 23, 2024:This story has been updated with news of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision on provisional ballots.

Update, Oct. 26, 2024: This story has been updated to reflect changes this past week to Indiana County’s policy, as well as information on Mifflin County’s policy.

Voters in most Pennsylvania counties will have the chance to fix errors with their mail ballots during this election and spare them from being rejected, according to a review of county policies by Votebeat and Spotlight PA.

Thirty-eight counties allow voters to fix errors with their mail ballots in some way.

The practice, referred to as notice-and-cure, is a policy some counties have adopted to inform voters of errors with their mail ballots that put those ballots at risk of rejection and allow those voters to correct the mistakes.

At least 26 counties, however, will not offer voters the chance to fix errors, according to the survey. But in light of a new ruling from the state Supreme Court, counties will at least have to accept valid provisional ballots cast on Election Day by those voters.

The rules that can lead to mail ballots being rejected are outlined in Act 77, the 2019 law that expanded mail voting in Pennsylvania. It requires that voters place their ballot in a secrecy envelope before placing that envelope in the return envelope, and that voters sign and put the current date on the return envelope. Failing to do one of these things will prevent the county from counting the ballot.

Precisely how voters can fix these mistakes varies from county to county, creating a patchwork of policies around the state that can sometimes be confusing for voters and advocates to keep track of.

Some counties, including Allegheny, send the defective ballot back to the voter with instructions on how to fix the error, as well as a new return envelope. Chester County tells voters to come into the elections office with ID and fix it in person. Delaware County cancels the defective ballot and issues a new one.

How successful curing is also depends on the method. A spokesperson for Allegheny said that voters there fixed nearly 62% of defective mail ballots in the spring primary using its method. Data from Fayette County shows a roughly 50% cure rate this past election. In Venango County, roughly 40% of ballots at risk were fixed and counted.

The variation comes from the fact that curing is not a process defined by the state’s election code. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has held that while counties aren’t required to offer an opportunity to cure, the law doesn’t prevent them from doing so either.

Some counties have interpreted that lack of clear direction to mean that they shouldn’t allow curing.

“Our board has consistently taken the stance that the law does not tell us, it doesn’t say we ‘shall’ cure ballots,” said Joe Kantz, chair of the Snyder County Board of Commissioners. “So because of that, we don’t. Because when people go outside of what the law tells them to do, that’s not usually a good thing.”

Kantz, who formerly served as the chair of the Election Reform Committee in the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania, said many other counties take that viewpoint. He said he “would love nothing more” than to have uniformity across the state, but he said that requires legislators to “do their job.”

“I’m not saying either side is wrong or right, but what we need is clear definition in the law,” he said. “This is a pretty simple issue: Either we are going to cure, or we are not going to cure. So give us some clarity in the law.”

Since 2020, the legislature has tried to clarify what curing means and whether counties should be able to allow it, but no legislation has made it through Harrisburg’s partisan gridlock.

The state Supreme Court has just resolved one such question, and stands to provide clarity on another.

The court ruled late Wednesday in one case, from Butler County, that dealt with whether voters whose mail ballots are rejected have the right to cast provisional ballots at their polling place on Election Day and have those votes counted. The 4-3 decision found that these ballots must be counted.

The other case, from Washington County, deals with whether counties are required to notify voters when they are going to cancel the voter’s mail ballot due to defects. The court has yet to rule on that case.

For now, counties continue to navigate this lack of clarity on their own. Just last week county commissioners in Bradford County, which previously allowed curing, voted to discontinue the practice, while Indiana County changed course in the opposite direction, voting to allow curing.

The analysis by Votebeat and Spotlight PA also shows that, contrary to popular belief, notice-and-cure is not a strongly partisan issue. Thirteen counties that Joe Biden won in 2020 have implemented the practice, but so have 25 counties that Donald Trump won.

Fayette County, in south central Pennsylvania, is one of the Trump counties that have a notice-and-cure policy.

Sophia Murray and her husband, John, both submitted mail ballots to the county during the primary, but they had the wrong date on the envelope.

Sophia said she and John, who are both in their 70s, wrote the wrong year or day of the month. Data shows ballot errors tend to affect older voters more frequently. But the county called to let them know, and they both were able to fix the problem and have their vote counted.

“It was really great that they let us do that,” she said. “They let us save our vote.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Correction, Oct. 29, 2024: This story has been updated to reflect that Cambria and Lackawanna counties do allow ballot curing in person at the county elections office.

Voters deserve second chance if mail ballots are rejected, Pennsylvania Supreme Court rules

2024-10-23T22:41:41+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Update, Nov. 1, 2024: The U.S. Supreme Court denied an application from the Republican National Committee and Pennsylvania Republican Party to halt the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s Oct. 23 decision.

Marian Schneider, senior voting rights policy counsel at the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said this means voters who make disqualifying mistakes when returning their mail ballot can cast a provisional vote on Election Day and have it counted.

“We think that was correct,” she said. “The Geneser case in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was a very straightforward exercise of the court’s roles.”

An RNC spokesperson said the party was “disappointed” in the ruling but touted its other recent court victories in Pennsylvania.

This story was previously updated with comments from a Butler County commissioner and RNC spokesperson.

Pennsylvanians must be given a chance to vote on Election Day if their mail ballots have been rejected because of a disqualifying mistake, the state Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.

That means voters who fail to correctly sign or date the return envelope or fail to use a secrecy envelope are entitled to cast a provisional ballot on Election Day at a polling place and have it counted, as long as that ballot wouldn’t be rejected for some other disqualifying issue.

In a 4-3 decision, the court said that provisional voting was meant to assure access to the right to vote, while simultaneously preventing double voting.

Justice Christine Donohue, writing for the majority, noted that the Republican litigants argued that in order to maintain election integrity, provisional ballots should not be counted, but said the majority was “at a loss to identify what honest voting principle is violated by recognizing the validity of one ballot cast by one voter.”

“If appellants presume that the general assembly intended to disqualify the provisional ballot of a voter who failed to effectively vote by mail in order to punish that voter, we caution that such a construction is not reconcilable with the right of franchise,” she wrote.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and the Public Interest Law Center, which brought the case on behalf of two voters, celebrated the ruling as a victory.

“Today’s decision affirms that if you make a paperwork mistake that will keep your mail ballot from counting, you have the right to vote by provisional ballot at your polling place on Election Day,” said Ben Geffen, senior attorney at the Public Interest Law Center. “This reinforces the right to vote in Pennsylvania.”

The case began in Butler County, which rejected provisional ballots cast by two voters whose mail ballots for the April primary had been rejected earlier for being returned without a secrecy envelope. Provisional ballots are used at polling places by voters whose eligibility is in question but who still want to vote. Those ballots are counted only after the voter’s eligibility is confirmed, including a check to make sure no mail ballot from that same voter has already been counted.

The ACLU and Public Interest Law Center sued the county, arguing that the county had misinterpreted a section of the state’s election code in considering the rejected mailed ballots as “cast.”

The groups lost at the county court level, but that decision was overturned by the state’s Commonwealth Court in September. Republican groups that intervened in the case appealed it to the state Supreme Court. The ruling from the state’s highest court means it will apply statewide, not just in Butler County.

Pennsylvania law requires voters to sign and date their ballot return envelopes, and to place the ballot in an inner secrecy envelope before being placed in the return envelope, in order for the ballot to be counted.

Thousands of ballots are rejected each election for these issues. During the April primary, counties rejected roughly 8,500 ballots, or 1.22% of those returned, for lacking a signature, date, or being returned without a secrecy envelope, according to an analysis of Pennsylvania Department of State data.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently declined to weigh the merits of the dating rule on an emergency basis, meaning it will likely remain in effect for at least the Nov. 5 election.

In a dissent joined by two other justices, Justice P. Kevin Brobson wrote that the state’s election code was “clear and unambiguous” that Butler County “not only lacked the authority to count Electors’ provisional ballots, [but] the Election Code expressly prohibited the Board from counting them.”

Butler County Commissioner Kimberly Geyer said the county wasn’t looking to disenfranchise any voters, and the root cause of what is happening is ambiguities in the law and the legislature’s lack of action to address them.

“Attorneys from special advocacy groups, such as the ACLU, including the Pennsylvania Department of State, who is the State overseer of statewide elections, is utilizing the courts to rewrite the election laws,” she said. “The bottom line is this, counties are following the laws on the books, are then sued in court and the courts are making the final determination. Counties then are required to carry out the Supreme Court’s ruling.”

Claire Zunk, a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, which intervened in the case, said Wednesday the party was disappointed in the ruling.

“The legislature has set clear, commonsense safeguards to protect the ballot, and those rules must be enforced. We will pursue all legal avenues to protect the vote for Pennsylvanians,” she said.

The case is one of three major cases on mail ballots the high court could rule on before the election.

In another case from western Pennsylvania, the ACLU and the Public Interest Law Center sued Washington County over its policy of not notifying voters of errors with their mail ballots. That case is currently before the state Supreme Court, where a decision is pending.

Another case brought by the two groups deals with whether mail ballot return envelopes need to be dated in order for the ballot to be counted. The groups have brought several iterations of this case; the latest one began after a special election last month in Philadelphia for an open seat in the state House, when the groups sued the city on behalf of voters for not accepting improperly dated mail ballots cast in the race.

That case is awaiting a decision from the state’s Commonwealth Court, and could be appealed up to the state Supreme Court after that.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Philadelphia aims to speed up mail ballot processing with new equipment

2024-10-16T19:34:38+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Update, 3:00 p.m., Oct 16, 2024: After this story was published, the commissioners affirmed at a public meeting that they would use faster ballot-processing equipment this November. The story has been updated throughout.

A few relatively minor changes would allow Philadelphia to process mail ballots much faster and finish counting them much sooner after polls close on Election Day, an analysis by Votebeat and Spotlight PA has found.

The analysis found a wide disparity between Allegheny and Philadelphia — Pennsylvania’s two largest counties — in how quickly they counted mail ballots during the November 2022 election.

That year, Philadelphia processed ballots at a rate of 5,000 per hour, while Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh and surrounding municipalities, processed more than 12,000 ballots per hour, based on an analysis of information provided by the counties, publicly available data, and data from the Pennsylvania Department of State.

While Philadelphia officials have publicly blamed counting delays on a state law that says poll workers can begin processing ballots only on the morning of Election Day, the analysis points to other culprits: outdated equipment and less staffing.

Public records show Philadelphia already has equipment that can open ballot envelopes much more quickly than its current equipment. Yet — until Wednesday, less than a month before the election — it was unclear if the city commissioners who make election decisions planned to use faster machines. That changed after the publication of this story, when the board agreed during a public meeting to move forward with using both types of machines on Nov. 5.

The stakes of an accurate yet swift ballot count couldn’t be higher, because each day that unofficial election results are delayed could breed more mistrust in the outcome.

In 2020, it took four days for the state to be called for Joe Biden, in large part due to the approximately 375,000 ballots Philadelphia was processing in that time. The delay led to conspiracy theories that fraudulent votes for Biden were added late in the counting process.

How Philadelphia and Allegheny diverge on the same task

Allegheny County and Philadelphia, for the most part, have similar processes.

The day starts with election workers checking the outer envelopes of mail ballots to ensure there are no defects that prevent them from being counted, such as a missing date or signature. The ballots are then run through a machine that opens the outer envelope. In both counties, workers then physically remove the secrecy envelope from the return envelope, and run the secrecy envelope through the opening machine, allowing access to the ballot inside. Then, workers take it out and flatten it so that the votes can be scanned and counted by a tabulation machine.

In comments to the Washington Post over the summer, City Commissioner Lisa Deeley said the barrier to having unofficial results on election night was that the city cannot, by state law, open mail ballot envelopes before 7 a.m. on Election Day. Commissioner Seth Bluestein made a similar comment to the Philadelphia Inquirer in September.

Getting a head start on that process before Election Day would require a change in the law. Many election officials, politicians, and the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania have advocated for such a change. But as many counties have shown in the years since the 2020 presidential election, with enough workers and the right equipment it is possible — albeit expensive — to count all mail ballots on Election Day.

Allegheny County election officials said the “secret sauce” to their county’s success is its high-speed envelope-opening machine. With an attachment, the Bluecrest Vantage mail sorter can open up to 50,000 envelopes an hour, according to the manufacturer. Allegheny County also uses three Opex Omation 306 machines for smaller ballot-processing jobs, which the manufacturer says can open 40,000 envelopes an hour.

By comparison, Philadelphia has 22 Opex machines called extraction desks, which can each open up to 3,600 ballots per hour, according to the manufacturer.

Records show that the Philadelphia City Commissioners office, which makes election-related decisions, purchased four of the faster Opex Omation machines over the summer. Philadelphia also has a Bluecrest machine it uses to sort ballots, not to open them.

At least one of the three commissioners, Deeley, does not want to use the new equipment this November to open envelopes. She made a motion at Wednesday‘s commissioners’ meeting to only use the extraction desks or hand letter openers to open both the secrecy and return envelopes.

Deputy City Commissioner Nick Custodio said Deeley opposes using the new Omation machines for opening ballots because they use a method that has been found with similar machines to damage the ballots inside. When that happens, election workers have to duplicate the ballot to tabulate it, a time-consuming process.

“Our priority is accuracy over speed,” Deeley said in an interview last Thursday. “It always has been and it remains that.”

However, Chairman Omar Sabir said last Friday a decision had not yet been made about the new machines.

“That’s like buying a Corvette and [you] don’t drive it,” he said. “We’ll do testing. We’ll see how it works. If it works the way we want it to work, we’ll use it.”

At Wednesday’s meeting, Deeley again expressed concern about the way the new machines open envelopes, saying she did not want to have the nation waiting on Philadelphia to recreate damaged mail ballots.

Joseph Lynch, director of election operations, said at the meeting he had tested the new equipment Tuesday and found no issues with it and would not recommend their use if he was not confident in their performance.

In a comment to Votebeat and Spotlight PA Wednesday, Forrest Lehman, elections director in Lycoming County, said he and many other counties also use the faster Omation machine. He said once it is adjusted properly, ballot damage rarely occurs.

Deeley’s motion was unsuccessful as no other commissioner seconded it, meaning that the city will use both sets of machines — each for a different type of job — in the upcoming election.

Other subtle differences between the two counties’ operations could also account for the disparity in speed.

Allegheny County will have a staff of roughly 200 to 220 people at its mail ballot processing facility on Election Day, while Philadelphia will employ two alternating day shifts of about 150 workers each, and 90 in a third overnight shift.

Philadelphia’s ballots are “batched” and kept together throughout all steps of the process and not mixed with other groups, to serve as another check on accuracy. Allegheny County does not keep ballots together in batches, a spokesperson said, though the county feels it can simultaneously prioritize accuracy, integrity, and speed.

“We have no concerns with our process,” Abigail Gardner, a spokesperson for Allegheny County, said.

Philadelphia also does what is called pollbook reconciliation, where it compares the names of people who cast ballots at in-person voting locations to those who sent in mail ballots, to ensure that no one who voted in person also voted by mail. This contributed to the delayed results in 2020, though it should be much quicker this year with the city’s adoption of electronic pollbooks, Deeley said.

Why mail ballot processing will be much faster than in 2020

A lot has changed in counties’ capabilities to process mail ballots since 2020, when Pennsylvania faced long waits for unofficial results, Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt said at a community event in Gettysburg last month.

Counties have learned how to organize their counting process more efficiently, figured out how to staff their counting operations with enough workers, purchased new equipment with the help of state funding, and seen a decline in mail ballot voting since the pandemic.

“So hopefully we’ll know the results earlier,” he said. “But ultimately, it always comes down to how close elections are and always has.”

Votebeat and Spotlight PA reached out to more than a dozen counties of varying sizes and asked them when they completed counting mail ballots in each of the four November elections from 2020 to 2023. By combining that with data on the number of mail ballots the county had to process from records maintained by the Department of State, the news organizations were able to calculate processing rates and project those estimates onto counties of similar size.

The results show what many election officials have said: Many, if not most, counties should be able to complete counting on Election Day, but counting in a few of the larger counties could run into Wednesday or Thursday. That would mean getting unofficial results should be quicker than in 2020, but perhaps not fast enough to contain misinformation and mistrust about the election.

In any case, Schmidt pointed out, just how quickly news outlets can declare a winner in the presidential race will ultimately come down to how close the election is.

As of Oct. 15, Allegheny County had approved more than 200,000 ballot applications, while Philadelphia had approved 182,000. In the November 2020 election, roughly 350,000 were returned to Allegheny County, and 375,000 ballots to Philadelphia. The last day to request a mail ballot is Oct. 29.

Prior to Wednesday’s meeting, Philadelphia was projecting it would finish tabulating 75,000 to 100,000 mail ballots by shortly after 8 p.m. on Election Day, Custodio said. Allegheny County is projecting it will be done with all of its ballots in about the same timeframe.

“We have every intention of completing [our mail ballot processing] on Election Day,” Jessica Garofolo, director of administrative services for Allegheny County, said.

That doesn’t mean counties wouldn’t benefit from having additional time before Election Day to prepare mail ballots for counting, a process known as pre-canvassing, Garofolo said.

“You have to keep in mind that we’re pulling a few hundred people from their normal county jobs,” she said.

Lisa Schaffer, executive director of the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania, said officials have learned a lot since the last presidential election about what resources and staffing it takes to process mail ballots efficiently and finish counting on election night.

“But we have always said that the point of pre-canvassing isn’t just to get results on election night,” she said. “The point of pre-canvassing is also to help counties use their resources better. … It would make election administration a lot more effective if we could run that processing of mail ballots beforehand and then shift our focus solely on the in-person election.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Judge strikes down strict voter assistance rules in Texas’ 2021 rewrite of election laws

2024-10-12T02:33:33+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Certain provisions of Texas’ sweeping 2021 voting law that restrict voter assistance violate the federal Voting Rights Act and cannot be enforced, a federal judge in Texas ruled Friday.

Among the rules struck down by U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez was a ban on compensation for anyone who assists a voter and a requirement for anyone who assists a voter to sign an oath under penalty of perjury that the voter qualifies to receive help.

Rodriguez also blocked provisions that require assisters to make certain disclosures about their relationship to the voter they are helping and a provision that restricts voter assistance given during door-to-door voter outreach operations.

Rodriguez based his decision on the section of the 1965 federal Voting Rights Act that guarantees voters with disabilities or literacy limitations the right to receive assistance from whoever they choose.

“This ruling will be most impactful for voters with disabilities, voters who have limited English proficiency, voters with literacy issues and the people who assist them,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, voting rights program director at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Although the judge has blocked any type of prosecution under these provisions, the rules and instructions on forms about requiring voter assisters from signing an oath are technically still in place for the upcoming Nov. 5 presidential election, because it is too close to the election to change the forms themselves.

“It’s a shame that we’re now going to go through yet another election where people continue to have their rights violated as a result of what the Texas Legislature did,” Morales-Doyle said. “But this is still a big win for voters in Texas.”

Last year, the state argued the provisions did not violate the Voting Rights Act and that it “permits state-law restrictions on who may serve as an assistor beyond the limitations provided in federal law.”

The sweeping voting law dubbed Senate Bill 1 — which changed how some Texans vote and how election officials administer elections — was championed by Texas Republican legislators in 2021. Its passage led to a dramatic fight with Texas Democratic lawmakers, who broke quorum in an attempt to prevent the law from moving forward. Democrats in Texas and nationwide accused Republicans of basing the new rules on unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud in the November 2020 election.

Soon after the bill was signed by Gov. Gregg Abbott, more than 20 state and national organizations filed suit, seeking to overturn the new law. The lawsuits were consolidated into this case. The groups claimed provisions of the new law violate federal statutes, including the Voting Rights Act, the Americans With Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act, and the U.S. Constitution.

In his Friday ruling, Rodriguez laid out a few scenarios that would put voters at risk under the law’s voter assistance provisions:

“A man helps his blind wife of 20 years cast her ballot at the polls without first securing a representation from her that she is ‘eligible for assistance.’ Even if he completes her ballot according to her exact instructions, he faces up to two years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000,” he noted.

“While meeting with a client about his tax return, a staff member for a community organization that provides free income tax services agrees to help translate the man’s mail-in ballot,” Rodriguez wrote. “The client fills out his own ballot, with accurate translation assistance from the staff member. Even though the ballot reflects the client’s wishes, the staff member faces up to two years in prison, she and her employer may be fined up to $10,000, and the client’s ballot may not be counted.”

The two-month trial began in September 2023. Lawyers later presented closing arguments in February 2024.

Plaintiffs challenged dozens of provisions, including a ban on 24-hour and drive-through voting; a prohibition stopping election officials from distributing mail-in ballot applications to voters who did not request them and provisions that expand poll watchers’ access, among others. Rodriguez has yet to rule on the remainder of those. Phase two of the trial, over whether the law’s intent was to discriminate against voters of color, is still making its way through the courts, which won’t begin until Rodriguez rules on all the remaining challenges to the provisions of the law in its current phase.

Plaintiffs said these provisions of the law made it harder for voters of color, voters with disabilities, and voters who don’t speak English to cast ballots.

Additionally, plaintiffs said the law made it more difficult for some voting rights advocacy organizations, forcing them to divert resources away from other programs to expand voter education efforts.

For its part, the state claimed Senate Bill 1 was passed to resolve “irregularities during the 2020 election caused by the COVID-19 pandemic,” singling out the decision by Harris County, the state’s most populous, to offer drive-through voting, and several issues with Harris County’s election.

The list of plaintiffs includes several organizations advocating for Latino, Black, and Asian-American voters, including the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC and OCA–Asian Pacific American Advocates, as well as groups advocating for voters with disabilities.

To support their claims, the parties relied on 52 witnesses during the trial including county election administrators from across the state, voters, lawmakers, representatives of the Texas secretary of state, and experts in political science and voting rights.

The judge had previously struck down other key provisions.

For example, the legislation created new requirements for Texans who qualify to vote by mail. They are now required to provide either a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number on their absentee ballot application and the envelope used to return their completed ballot, whichever matches the number the state has in its voter registration file. Last year, Judge Rodriguez said that provision is illegal, though it remains in effect pending an appeal making its way through the courts.

Earlier this month, Rodriguez blocked a provision that effectively criminalized door-to-door canvassing for ballot initiatives.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

After Hurricane Helene, North Carolina and other states scramble to keep election on track

2024-10-04T14:14:46+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

The death toll from Hurricane Helene continues to climb in the mountain towns of western North Carolina. Emergency workers airlifted aid to hollows and hamlets cut off from roads half-swallowed by the storm. People without electricity, cellular service, or internet chainsawed through fallen trees and debris, searching for loved ones. Many won’t be able to return to their homes.

These people probably weren’t thinking about elections. But state and local election officials were. With Election Day barely a month away — and mail ballots about to go out — they had no choice.

On Monday and Tuesday, Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, said her office had been in touch with election staff around the region. Many were themselves without water, power, or Internet, and contending with impassable roads and damage to their homes. One worker who went to check on the Buncombe County elections office made the trip on foot, a distance she estimated at about 4 miles.

For all the devastation in these communities, somehow, the 2024 election must go on. “We can’t stop elections,” Bell said during a press call Tuesday.

As of Tuesday, Bell said the state board had confirmed that voting equipment, ballots, and ballot paper stock had apparently made it through the storm. The next step, she said, will be to get every county elections office open and operating; around a dozen in the 25 counties covered by the federal disaster declaration were still closed at the time of the call (the state board is tracking their status here, on a new website set up to help voters after the storm). The state has provided emergency kits to counties that requested them, including Watauga, Mitchell, and Haywood, each with clean laptops, cellphones, and devices to help them securely connect to the Internet.

Among the questions election officials were confronting last week: which early voting sites and polling places across the region will still be usable, and which ones are too damaged by mudslides or falling trees, or simply inaccessible by road; whether some polling locations must be merged, even if that means residents will have to travel farther to reach them; whether election workers who had planned to staff those sites can still report for duty; and how to respond to disruptions to mail delivery, which was suspended through much of the area.

“We do not have all the answers right now,” Bell acknowledged, “but we are diligently working to figure them out.”

State officials were also working through different scenarios that could require the elections board to use emergency powers, or seek special action from the state legislature, such as more funding or a grace period for absentee ballots that arrive after Election Day, something lawmakers previously eliminated.

The state’s election officials have coped with disasters before. After Hurricane Dorian in 2019, Bell reminded reporters, the National Guard helped them set up voting in a tent in Hyde County. This time, state election officials are reminding voters that lost or damaged absentee ballots can be reissued and sent to temporary addresses, and the state’s voter identification law includes an exception for victims of a natural disaster occurring within 100 days of Election Day (see other tips for voting after Helene in North Carolina here).

But no matter how diligently election officials work, the aftermath of a natural disaster has the potential to confuse voters and upset typical voting patterns.

It can also set long-term shifts in motion by reshaping the region’s electorate, displacing residents, and scattering college students.

In heavily flooded Asheville, officials said it could take weeks to restore water service. UNC-Asheville, Bell’s alma mater, said it had evacuated students and would not resume classes until at least Oct. 28. Smaller towns like Chimney Rock, a tourism magnet near Lake Lure, were reduced to fields of debris and splintered wood, and emergency workers had limited ability to reach the most remote and isolated communities.

The decisions election officials make in the next few days will carry great weight in this swing state, which is critical to Republicans’ White House strategy and where Democrats are hoping for a breakthrough. North Carolina “is a state that’s going to be decided at the margins,” said Christopher Cooper, a professor of political science at Western Carolina University, which has also suspended classes.

Trump won the state by around 75,000 votes in 2020, and carried most of the counties in western North Carolina. Buncombe County, which includes Asheville, and Watauga County, home to Appalachian State University, were islands of blue. The North Carolina counties included in the federal disaster declaration include roughly 17% of the state’s registered voters, including 1 in 5 five Republicans and about 1 in 8 Democrats.

Officials in Florida, Georgia, Virginia, South Carolina, and Tennessee were also assessing damage from Helene. In Georgia, state officials also said no election buildings were compromised, though counties are still assessing damage to polling locations and roads. There, too, equipment and ballot paper appear to have been spared.

While power is out in several counties, the Georgia Emergency Management Service estimates that it will be back well in time for the start of early voting. Still, the lack of power and internet is affecting military and overseas voters, whose ballot requests cannot be processed.

Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office, said the biggest concern is the U.S. Postal Service. “We have a list of ZIP codes where they just aren’t delivering right now, and we have to get absentee ballots out” in just over a week, he said. Sterling said that the state is working out a contingency plan for having ballots delivered by UPS or FedEx. “We aren’t there yet,” he said, “but we are getting everything lined up in case we have to pull the trigger.”

In Tennessee, Doug Kufner, communications director for Secretary of State Tre Hargett, said in an email that at least six Election Day polling locations in northeast Tennessee “have experienced damage or currently have driving accessibility issues because of bridge or road damage.” That number could rise as the damage is still being evaluated, he said. Two county election offices also sustained water damage.

Election officials are resilient and will overcome the challenges, he stressed, but “the heartache, shock, and devastation are massive.”

In Florida, election officials are surveying damage and working with USPS, said Mark Ard, a spokesman for the Florida Secretary of State’s Office. Mark Earley, the supervisor of elections in Leon County, which was in Helene’s path but didn’t see as much severe damage as some other areas, said election officials are still assessing needs. There may be time to make repairs to at least some damaged polling places, for example, he said.

Earley, a former head of the state elections supervisors association, said Florida state and local election officials have a history of working well together to determine, for example, what should be included in an executive order addressing election needs after a natural disaster. Gov. Ron DeSantis issued such an order Thursday, giving election officials in 10 affected counties flexibility to make changes to voting sites, as well as some other requirements.

Such events demand flexibility, Earley said. For example, he delayed sending mail ballots to county residents until after the storm had passed, hoping to avoid having them damaged en route, or somehow lost.

Beyond that, he said, election officials have to “stay strong” and make sure emergency management officials are aware of their needs.

He said concerns about life and limb take priority. “But certainly,” he added, “elections are critical infrastructure.”

Editorial Director Jessica Huseman contributed. Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. She edits and frequently writes Votebeat’s national newsletter. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Voting rights groups ask Pa. high court to take up mail ballot dating issue immediately

2024-09-25T18:06:50+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

A coalition of voting rights advocates is trying again to get the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to conclusively decide whether voters need to date their mail ballot return envelope in order for their vote to be counted, likely the last chance to settle the question before the November election.

After the court rebuffed the plaintiffs on jurisdictional grounds in a decision earlier this month, the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and the Public Interest Law Center asked the high court to exercise its authority to bypass the lower courts to directly address pressing legal matters.

Because the court previously did not rule on the merits of the case, the organizations, suing on behalf of a coalition of voting rights groups, are again arguing that the dating requirement violates the state constitution.

“The refusal to count timely mail ballots submitted by eligible voters because of an inconsequential error violates the fundamental right to vote recognized in the Free and Equal Elections clause,” the suit says. “The imminent threat of mass disenfranchisement warrants this Court’s exercise of its King’s Bench authority.”

It is unclear if the court will use its discretionary power to take up the case, but at least three of the court’s seven judges indicated they were open to such a move.

If the court does take the case, it could have a large impact on voters this November, as thousands of ballots are rejected each election for lacking a proper date.

Pennsylvania’s mail-in voting law, Act 77, requires voters to sign and date the outer return envelope of their mail ballots, and return the ballot in a secrecy envelope, in order for it to be counted.

During the April primary, counties rejected roughly 8,500 ballots, or 1.22% of those returned, for lacking a signature or date, or for being returned without a secrecy envelope, according to an analysis of Pennsylvania Department of State data. More than 4,400 of those were rejected for dating issues. Applications for nearly double the number of ballots returned in the primary have already been approved, and ballots will soon reach voters. More voters are expected to apply before the Oct. 29 deadline.

The dating requirement has been caught in nearly continuous litigation since Act 77 was implemented in 2020. Federal and state judges have ruled at various points that the date should not be required, but those rulings have since been overturned.

Earlier this month in the most recent case, brought by many of the same litigants, the state Supreme Court voided a lower court’s ruling that had found the requirement unconstitutional.

The ACLU and others had argued to the state’s Commonwealth Court that the provision violated the “free and equal elections” clause of the state constitution. That clause says that “no power, civil or military, shall at any time interfere to prevent the free exercise of the right of suffrage.”

In a 4-1 ruling in late August, the Commonwealth Court agreed with them. But the ruling was quickly appealed by Republicans to the state Supreme Court, which voided the lower court’s order in a 4-3 ruling, on the grounds that the lower court did not have the authority to hear the case.

The three Supreme Court judges who disagreed with the majority’s ruling wrote in their dissent that the high court should use its authority to take up the issue immediately.

The ACLU is not the only group asking the court to exercise this power. The Republican National Committee and Pennsylvania GOP last week asked the court to take up a case on whether counties were violating the law in regards to a mail ballot policy adopted in some counties.

The policy, known as notice and cure, is adopted in some counties where elections offices notify voters of errors on their mail ballot — such as lacking a proper date — and permit them to fix those errors.

In a statement, RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said the policy “ignores the law,” though the Pennsylvania Department of State disputes that characterization.

The court has not yet said whether it will hear that case either.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Pennsylvania court says county should have warned voters before rejecting their mail ballots

2024-09-24T20:46:34+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

A Western Pennsylvania county that rejected hundreds of mail ballots in the April primary should have notified voters beforehand, a state appellate court ruled Tuesday. The ruling could add pressure on other counties to notify voters of errors with their mail ballots for the November election.

In a 2-1 decision, a panel of the Commonwealth Court agreed with a lower court judge that Washington County erred when it adopted a policy to reject mail ballots without telling voters and had a duty to inform them of their errors.

“The current policy emasculates the Election Code’s guarantees by depriving voters … the opportunity to contest their disqualification or to avail themselves of the statutory failsafe of casting a provisional ballot,” Judge Michael Wojcik wrote for the majority.

The decision applies to Washington County and does not set a statewide legal precedent, but county attorneys are likely to take note of the court’s opinion when advising their boards of elections about how to handle mail ballots with errors.

The decision can be appealed to the state Supreme Court, where a ruling would have statewide effect.

The case was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and the Public Interest Law Center on behalf of voting rights groups and voters whose ballots were rejected under the policy.

“Voters in Washington County can be assured that, if they make a mistake with their mail ballot, they’ll be notified and have a chance to rescue their vote,” said Claudia De Palma, senior attorney at the Public Interest Law Center. “That’s a win for voters.”

Before this year’s April primary election, the Republican majority on Washington County’s board of elections opted not to notify voters of mistakes with their mail ballots that would cause their votes to be disqualified, such as a missing date or signature, or being returned without a secrecy envelope.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that state law didn’t require counties to notify voters and give them a chance to fix the error, but it didn’t say that the practice was prohibited either. As a result, many counties adopted such a process, referred to as “notice and cure.” At least 14 counties now do this.

Many others say they do not have notice and cure policies, or have not answered questions about their policy.

But unlike other counties without notice and cure policies, Washington County gave voters no warning if their ballot had a defect that would result in it being rejected, even though it acknowledged receiving them. When Washington County received a mail ballot back from a voter, it used only generic codes in the state’s ballot tracking system to indicate the ballot had been received, rather than more specific codes that could indicate whether there is an issue that prevents the ballot from being counted. These codes generate distinct emails to voters, and the more specific codes would have generated emails that informed voters their ballots were at risk of rejection.

Ultimately, the county rejected 259 ballots during the primary for issues with a signature or date on the outer envelope, or being returned without an inner secrecy envelope. Statewide, roughly 8,500 ballots, or 1.22% of those returned, were rejected for one or more of those errors, according to an analysis of Pennsylvania Department of State data.

The ACLU and Public Interest Law Center sued the county — on behalf of seven voters, the local NAACP branch, and the Center for Coalfield Justice — arguing that by not informing the voters that their ballots were at risk of rejection, the county had violated the voters’ constitutional due process rights and denied them the opportunity to challenge the decision or cast provisional ballots.

He ordered the county to change its process for what codes it uses when receiving ballots, so voters better understand that their ballot is at risk of rejection.

Washington County appealed the decision to the Commonwealth Court, joined by state and national Republican groups that had intervened in the case.

Nick Sherman, the Republican chair of the county’s board of commissioners, did not immediately return calls or emails seeking comment on whether the county would appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

The Pennsylvania GOP and the Republican National Committee also did not reply to a request for comment.

Under new rules that the Supreme Court established last month to resolve election disputes quickly, an appeal must be filed within three days.

The case is part of a flurry of litigation to be resolved before the November election over which mail ballots should be counted in Pennsylvania, a crucial swing state with a tight race between presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

In a case from another western Pennsylvania county, the state Supreme Court is weighing whether counties should have to count provisional ballots cast in person by voters whose mail ballots were rejected for reasons such as lacking a secrecy envelope.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Pennsylvania Supreme Court restores date requirement for mail ballots, voiding lower-court ruling

2024-09-13T20:32:20+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Pennsylvanians who vote by mail must write a proper date on their ballot envelopes for their votes to be counted, under a decision Friday from the state Supreme Court that could affect thousands of voters this November.

The decision voids an Aug. 30 Commonwealth Court ruling that enforcing the requirement on ballot dating violated voters’ rights under the state constitution. The Supreme Court’s 4–3 decision was based on whether the lower court had jurisdiction in the case, not on the merits of the underlying claim, meaning that the constitutional argument could be made again in court.

Republicans who appealed the lower court’s decision argued to the state Supreme Court last week that the petitioners failed to include all counties as parties to the case, among other claims. The original suit, brought by the ACLU of Pennsylvania and the Public Interest Law Center on behalf of a coalition of voting rights groups, targeted the Department of State, Allegheny County, and Philadelphia.

“The Commonwealth Court lacked subject matter jurisdiction to review the matter given the failure to name the county boards of elections of all 67 counties,” the Supreme Court wrote in its order Friday. The inclusion of Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt as a named party was not enough to give the Commonwealth Court jurisdiction in the case, the order said.

Adam Bonin, a Philadelphia-based election lawyer who was not part of this case but has represented Democrats in other lawsuits challenging the dating requirement, said that, barring another ruling, voters will need to write a date on their ballot return envelope in order for their ballots to be counted.

In a statement to Votebeat and Spotlight PA, Gov. Josh Shapiro said it was “unfortunate” the court did not side with voters.

“It should be clear that voters who make an inconsequential dating error deserve to still have their valid vote counted,” he said.

Republicans called the decision a “victory for election integrity” in a critical swing state.

“This is a huge win to protect the vote in Pennsylvania that will protect commonsense mail ballot safeguards and help voters cast their ballots with confidence,” RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said in a statement.

Justice David Wecht dissented with the majority, and called for the Supreme Court to address the constitutional claims directly and quickly, given the fast-approaching election. The court should exercise its “King’s bench” authority to bypass the normal judicial process and have the parties submit briefs on the issue directly to the Supreme Court, Wecht said.

He was joined in his dissent by Chief Justice Debra Todd and Justice Christine Donohue.

Steve Loney, senior supervising attorney for the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said his group would continue its fight on behalf of the voting rights groups that brought the case.

“These eligible voters who got their ballots in on time should have their votes counted and voices heard,” he said in a statement. “The fundamental right to vote is among the most precious rights we enjoy as Pennsylvanians, and it should take more than a trivial paperwork error to take it away.”

A spokesperson for the ACLU said the groups involved had not decided what their next move would be or whether to seek a direct ruling on constitutional claim from the state Supreme Court.

[Update, Sept. 19, 2024: After the Supreme Court’s ruling, the ACLU and Public Interest Law Center moved to amend their filing in Commonwealth Court to include all 67 counties. On Thursday, the Supreme Court clarified that that was not sufficient for the Commonwealth Court to have jurisdiction, and ordered the lower court to dismiss the case.]

Federal judges have gone back and forth over whether enforcing the requirement violated federal voting law. The current case is the first to directly challenge this requirement under the state constitution.

It’s the latest of several challenges to the dating requirement since the state implemented its mail voting law, Act 77, in 2020. Act 77 required voters to sign and date the outer return envelope of their mail ballots, and return the ballot in a secrecy envelope, in order for them to be counted.

Thousands of ballots are rejected each election for dating issues. During the April primary, counties rejected roughly 8,500 ballots, or 1.22% of those returned, for lacking a signature or date, or for being returned without a secrecy envelope, according to an analysis of Pennsylvania Department of State data. More than 4,400 of those were rejected for dating issues.

The ACLU and the Public Interest Law Center initiated the challenge earlier this summer on behalf of a coalition of civil rights groups, arguing that enforcing the date requirement violated the “free and equal elections” clause of the state constitution. That clause says that “no power, civil or military, shall at any time interfere to prevent the free exercise of the right of suffrage.”

In August, a majority of a five-member panel of Commonwealth Court judges agreed with them.

“The refusal to count undated or incorrectly dated but timely mail ballots submitted by otherwise eligible voters because of meaningless and inconsequential paperwork errors violates the fundamental right to vote recognized in the free and equal elections clause,” Judge Ellen Ceisler wrote for the 4-1 majority.

The Supreme Court’s ruling means the requirement is back in place, Bonin said.

Bonin noted that the challenges to the date requirement are still active on multiple tracks. An NAACP challenge to the requirement under federal law could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, he said, and he is also representing clients challenging the requirement in a separate case.

The Pennsylvania Department of State was named as a defendant in the latest case, but did not defend the date requirement. In a statement, the agency said the decision was “disappointing” and left an important question unanswered.

“The Department hopes that this question is answered as soon as possible, for the sake of the voters and our county election administrators preparing for the upcoming presidential election,” the statement said.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Mail ballots can’t be rejected over improper date on envelope, Pennsylvania court rules

2024-08-30T21:23:16+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Not counting a voter’s mail ballot because they failed to properly date the return envelope violates their rights under the state constitution, a Pennsylvania appellate court ruled Friday.

Republicans said they would immediately appeal the ruling to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. But if the decision stands, it could affect thousands of ballots and influence the outcome of close races.

The five-judge Commonwealth Court panel split 4-1 on the decision.

The case, brought by a coalition of civil rights groups represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania among others, is the latest of several challenges to the dating requirement since the state implemented its mail voting law, Act 77, in 2020.

Act 77 required voters to sign and date the outer return envelope of their mail ballots, and return the ballot in a secrecy envelope, in order for them to be counted.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs hailed the ruling. “This decision has strengthened the right to vote in Pennsylvania,” said Brent Landau, executive director of Public Interest Law Center, one of the groups that sued to challenge the requirement. “Mail ballots will no longer be rejected because of a meaningless requirement to fill out a date that isn’t used for anything.”

The suit named two of the state’s largest counties and the Pennsylvania Department of State as defendants. The department declined to defend the requirement in court and called the ruling a “victory.”

The Pennsylvania GOP and the Republican National Committee both intervened in the case to defend the requirement. In a statement, Claire Zunk, a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, said the decision is “an example of the worst kind of judicial activism” and that the RNC would appeal the ruling “immediately.”

“Courts should not undermine election confidence and integrity by striking down commonsense election laws enacted by the people’s representatives,” she said.

Adam Bonin, a Philadelphia-based Democratic election lawyer, who was not part of this case but has been involved in other lawsuits challenging the dating requirement, said the ruling should apply statewide, even though only the Department of State and Philadelphia and Allegheny counties were sued.

During oral arguments earlier this month, a lawyer for the ACLU argued that if the state could not show a compelling interest for the date requirement, then the free and equal elections clause in the state constitution would bar officials from using the rule to reject ballots.

In the ruling, Ceisler highlighted the determination in previous cases that the date “is not used to determine the timeliness of a ballot, a voter’s qualifications/eligibility to vote, or fraud.”

“Therefore, the dating provisions serve no compelling government interest,” she wrote.

The state and national Republican parties had argued that the date could be helpful in detecting fraud, or could serve as a backup option for determining the receipt date of a ballot if electronic systems were to fail. They also asserted that, should the judges find the dating requirement invalid, all of Act 77 would have to be struck down, based on the way the law is worded.

But the majority disagreed, saying plaintiffs sought only “a declaration that enforcement of the dating provisions in a manner that excludes undated and incorrectly dated” ballots was unconstitutional.

In a statement, the Pennsylvania Department of State said the decision was a victory for voting rights.

“Multiple court cases have now confirmed that the dating of a mail-in ballot envelope, when election officials can already confirm it was sent and received within the legal voting window, provides no purpose to election administration,” the statement said. “This ruling makes clear a voter’s minor error of forgetting to date or misdating a ballot envelope cannot be a cause for disenfranchisement. Our Administration will always uphold Pennsylvanians’ right to vote and is pleased with today’s ruling.”

Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, tweeted that the court “got it right.”

The judge who dissented, Patricia McCullough, argued that the dating requirement “falls squarely” within the legislature’s authority to establish voting rules, and wrote that the majority ignored “more than a century” of state Supreme Court precedent on the free and equal clause of the state constitution.

The ruling could have a wide impact this November.

During the April primary, counties rejected roughly 8,500 ballots, or 1.22% of those returned, for failing to meet one or more of these standards, according to an analysis of Pennsylvania Department of State data. More than 4,400 of those were rejected for dating issues.

But those numbers are expected to be higher this fall, as more voters will turn out to vote in the presidential election and opt to cast their ballots by mail.

“If there was any real justification to this, we’d be in a different boat, but there isn’t,” Bonin said. “This is what the framers of the Pennsylvania Constitution meant by the free and equal elections clause.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Pre-processing absentee ballots means faster results. Why isn’t every Michigan clerk trying it?

2024-08-27T09:00:00+00:00

Michigan clerks who took advantage of new laws that allow them to prepare absentee ballots for counting ahead of election day found during the August primary that they were able to get results out faster, but not without some hiccups.

Under expanded pre-processing laws in Michigan, election officials can take in returned absentee ballots, verify signatures, open the envelopes, ensure the correct ballot was returned, and scan them through the tabulator, but they can’t yet count the votes. In communities with more than 5,000 people, officials can begin doing this eight days before the election; in smaller towns, officials are allowed to do it the Monday before the election. Election workers don’t issue vote totals until polls close on election day.

Across the state, pre-processing meant that results came in faster after polls closed, Jonathan Brater, director of the state’s Bureau of Elections, told the state board of canvassers on Monday.

“It does speed the process up, and it makes election day a little easier to deal with, because hopefully you’ve gotten through the vast majority of your absentee ballots, and you’re just waiting for the last ones to come in,” Brater said.

Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Canton get a strong head start

For Detroit, it made all the difference, the city’s election director, Daniel Baxter, told Votebeat. The city used about five days of pre-processing, plus election day, and that allowed more than 80% of the absentee results to be reported by about 10:30 p.m., averting the worst of the long delays that can fuel concerns about wrongdoing in the elections, Baxter said.

“In 2020, when the numbers flipped from Trump to Biden, one of the issues people saw was there was a large dump of ballots cast in southeast Michigan,” Baxter said. That was because election workers could begin processing absentee ballots only on Election Day, and Detroit had more than 174,000 absentee ballots compared with only about 83,000 votes from Election Day.

With this year’s primary results, Baxter said, “we wanted to make sure the lion’s share were reported by the 11 o’clock news. We were successful in achieving that goal, and pre-processing helped tremendously.”

He expects that this fall, Detroit will be using all eight days allowed by state law.

In Howell, the largest city in Livingston County, officials tried out pre-processing for the first time during February’s presidential primary. They tried it for a single day and it worked well, Susie Jarson, deputy clerk and election coordinator, wrote in an email. The head start allowed inspectors to get through every absentee ballot they had up until that point and ease the pressure on the absentee ballot counting board on election day.

But during the August state primary, they weren’t able to do the same.

“We didn’t have a complete board of inspectors that were available that day,” Jarson said. “Inspectors of two different party affiliations (are) required, and that day we only had a small group available that was all part of the same party.”

Jarson said officials hope to be able to return to pre-processing in November, given the expectation there will be significantly more ballots than in August’s relatively low-turnout primary, but they’re waiting to see if they can pull it off.

In Canton Township, Clerk Michael Siegrist said pre-processing allowed teams there to finish counting absentee ballots before election day votes were counted. In Grand Rapids, several days of pre-processing helped the city get caught up by Sunday, meaning that on election day, workers had to handle only a few days’ ballots, said Robert Macomber, chief deputy clerk for Kent County.

It also helps that municipalities are given more days — and more freedom — to process ballots than they once were. When the law allowing for pre-processing was first signed into law in 2022, clerks in the state’s largest communities were given just the Sunday and Monday before the election to start processing, and they were limited in what they could do. Officials could only open the envelopes and verify signatures, but they couldn’t feed ballots into the tabulator yet. At the time, many clerks felt it simply wasn’t enough time to do the less time-intensive part of the job.

But with additional days and flexibility added into law in 2023, the option has helped to expedite results in places that choose to use it.

“Overall, yes, a benefit, and I think you’ll see the local clerks fine tuning the number of days needed for the General as they watch the absentee return rates in real time,” Macomber wrote in an email.

Flint didn’t use pre-processing, and results took a while

Some jurisdictions have not yet given pre-processing a go. In Flint, for instance, officials did not pre-process ballots during the primary, and results didn’t come in until the next morning, which bothered members of the City Council. During a council meeting earlier this month, members said it was “ridiculous that it takes so long.”

“For us to be the last one in the county to put out results, it just adds fuel to the flame for conspiracy theories and everything else,” council member Dennis Pfeiffer said, suggesting that maybe the city needed someone else working elections.

Davina Donahue, the Flint clerk, responded that the city had more than 5,000 absentee ballots, which slowed things down, in addition to having the most precincts among all the municipalities in Genesee County. Donahue did not respond to requests for comment from Votebeat.

MLive reported that Genesee County Clerk Domonique Clemons has encouraged Flint to pre-process ballots but that the city chose not to start processing until the day of the election.

In less populated parts of the state, clerks report that they largely aren’t using pre-processing because it simply isn’t necessary. In Dickinson County in the Upper Peninsula, County Clerk Carol Bronzyk said that none of the towns in her jurisdiction were doing it because they weren’t populous enough to need it. The largest town in Dickinson is Iron Mountain, which has about 7,500 people.

“Maybe someone would consider it in the future, but I just don’t think our communities are big enough or have enough votes to do it right now,” Bronzyk said.

In areas with more people, being able to get results out quickly means that results come in sooner. That will make a difference not just in the August primary, but also in November when all eyes are on Michigan as a swing state.

The expansion of pre-processing rules was a long time coming, Detroit’s Baxter said. He first started working in elections in 1985 and started handling absentee ballots in 1998.

“I’ve been looking to take advantage of something like that since then,” he said.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Primary election day in Wisconsin: The return of drop boxes and other things to watch

2024-08-13T09:00:01+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

It’s primary election day in Wisconsin, and early voting has provided a test run for newly legalized absentee ballot drop boxes.

Wisconsinites’ votes today will determine whether the Legislature can take control of how the governor uses federal funds, who will be their legislative and congressional candidates and, in the few counties with contested clerks’ races, who will manage elections after this year.

Don’t expect a big turnout. Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe said turnout percentages for elections like these typically run in the mid-teens to upper 20s.

That means clerks will likely have fewer ballots to count and some extra time to make sure their processes are running smoothly ahead of November, when they can expect more eyes on them and potential legal challenges. It’s also a time for clerks to make sure their drop boxes are in order (or, in Wausau, to dust off those rusty drop box locks just one more time).

Here’s what’s new and noteworthy for this election day and what to watch for.

The popularity of drop boxes

When drop boxes were last used heavily for a critical statewide election, in 2020, Wisconsin was in the middle of a pandemic, in-person voting options were more limited, and there was less political and legal pushback against the ballot return option. These factors made drop boxes immensely popular.

Now, all polling locations are open again, and drop boxes are more politicized, seemingly scarcer and, depending where you are, not as much in demand.

That said, drop boxes are still a voting option that many Wisconsinites like and are thrilled to see available again. Depending on where you live, your municipality may have more than a dozen drop boxes, or none at all. I’ll be watching out for how many voters use drop boxes and vote absentee in general compared with in-person voting.

I’ll also be watching out for third-party efforts to monitor drop boxes, though we’re not likely to see intense activity until November. As I reported in July, new Wisconsin Elections Commission guidance says voters who use drop boxes must return only their own ballots, unless they’re helping somebody who has a disability or is hospitalized. That means a person returning a spouse’s ballot could be considered as having cast a ballot improperly.

Election conspiracy theorists and a Republican U.S. Senate candidate are already publicizing plans to look for suspicious drop box activity: Are voters returning more than one ballot? Are suspicious people opening drop boxes in the wee hours? As election experts have told me, just the perception of wrongdoing could be enough for a drop box monitor to go public with accusations and create suspicion. I’m curious whether we’ll see such an incident in this election.

Lastly, with drop boxes, I’ll be looking out for how municipalities use them differently.

In Madison, for example, drop boxes closed at 5 p.m. on Monday; voters who have a ballot to drop off must take them to their polling place. In Milwaukee, however, the boxes are open until 6 p.m. on Tuesday. Are the early closing times, like Madison’s, confusing voters who try to return ballots to them on Tuesday? Will Milwaukee be able to gather absentee ballots from drop boxes quickly enough to avoid additional vote-counting delays?

Some legal changes appear imminent but not for this election. For example, a Dane County judge is requiring municipal clerks to provide electronic voting options for people with disabilities. But the order requiring those accommodations is for the November election, not August. A judge recently denied a motion by Republican lawmakers to stay that ruling as they appeal it.

County clerks face off (or, in most cases, don’t)

Wisconsin’s county clerks are up for election this year, and in the vast majority of cases, voters are just going to see just one name on the August and November election ballots. Only about 10% of Wisconsin’s 72 counties will have competitive county-clerk primaries or general elections.

Although municipal clerks are charged with running elections at the local level, county clerks still have significant election responsibilities. They’re tasked with uploading election night results, providing ballots and other election supplies to municipal clerks on time, training other election officials, and conducting recounts.

In most counties, you’ll have the same county clerk at the beginning of the next term. In some, the incumbent may get replaced by a deputy county clerk or a municipal clerk.

There’s one high-stakes race, in Washington County, where Clerk Ashley Reichert, a Republican, is facing a challenge from the right by Sue True, who is advocating radical changes in the way Wisconsinites vote.

“The way to restore our Constitutional Republic is simple,” True said in a blog post. “Pray, Remove the Machines, Vote in Person, Hand Count Paper Ballots.”

Aside from the fact that Wisconsin law requires voting machines in municipalities with 7,500 or more people, multiple reports have outlined how error-prone hand-counting ballots is.

Reichert appears to be favored to win — she has received endorsements from the county executive, legislators, and other local officials — but can True pull off an upset, or show that even a substantial minority of Washington County voters supports the election practices she endorses?

Election conspiracy theorists seek legislative seats

Over the last few years, Republicans in control of the Legislature have largely pushed the chambers’ most fervent election conspiracy theorists to the sidelines. Now, two of them are looking to return to or stay in the Legislature against center-right candidates.

Rep. Janel Brandtjen, formerly the head of the Assembly Elections Committee, was not only relieved of her chairing duties but also kicked out of private Republican meetings as GOP leaders say they lost trust in her.

Former Rep. Tim Ramthun, a Republican who unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2022, was quickly shut down by legislative leaders when he proposed decertifying the 2020 election.

Brandtjen and Ramthun will be facing off against longtime Republican legislators on Tuesday. Do they stand a chance?

Brandtjen just might. Although she has lost the respect of many of her colleagues, she has former President Donald Trump’s support. Her opponent is Sen. Dan Knodl, currently Republican chair of the Senate Elections Committee. Voters backed Knodl over Brandtjen in a Senate primary in 2023.

This time, the district’s smaller. Do voters in Washington and Waukesha County prefer the candidate who has rallied behind Trump’s stop-the-steal rhetoric? Or do they prefer the center-right candidate in Knodl?

Ramthun, endorsed by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, also represents the GOP wing that’s focused on election conspiracy theories. Ramthun faces an unlikely bid against Sen. Dan Feyen, who’s backed by Republican legislative leaders and Wisconsin U.S. representatives.

It’ll be something of a surprise if Ramthun or Brandtjen wins. If they lose, it’ll be another sign that so-called election integrity is a losing message for Republicans.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Power outages and humid ink barely mar a smooth day of voting in Michigan’s low turnout primary

2024-08-07T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

Even after nine days of early voting and 40 days to return absentee ballots, Michigan’s August primary appeared to be a relatively low turnout election.

Officials said the majority of voters had already cast their ballots before election day on Tuesday. As of Monday, more than 1 million people across the state had voted, the vast majority of them doing so absentee.

Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said Tuesday night that she expected totals to be near 2 million, which would be less than a quarter of the state’s total registered voters. In 2022, there were more than 2.1 million votes cast in Michigan’s August primary. Four years ago, there were more than 2.5 million votes cast.

There are several reasons turnout was low, officials said. It could have been a general lack of interest in the races on the ballot, which featured U.S. Senate primaries and legislative races.

“At this point, most people are just ready for November,” Canton Township Clerk Michael Siegrist said Tuesday afternoon.

The weather also could have played a factor. Storms rolling through the southern part of the state knocked out power for some jurisdictions and made roads difficult to travel in others. There were three voting locations in Kalamazoo County that had to shelter in place because of a tornado warning, Benson said, but no voters were affected.

In Royal Oak, officials had to move two precincts to the Royal Oak Farmers Market after a power outage took out the Salter Community Center. The Detroit News noted similar struggles in Warren, Grand Rapid, Flint, Clinton Township and other communities across the state.

The storms brought in humid weather that also caused some tabulators to struggle to read ballots marked in ballpoint pen. Humidity can mean the ballot paper swells and that ink doesn’t dry as quickly, and it gets caught on the machines’ scanners, prompting error messages. Clerks had to figure out how to clean machines or even lend tabulators to other communities.

The Detroit Free Press reported that in Farmington Hills, some voters had to navigate problems finding their precinct after repairs and a small fire meant that the location changed twice. While the city sent out a letter and map alerting voters last month, there wasn’t time for another mailer after the fire, the Freep reported. Voters were supposed to receive a text, but several voters did not.

There were also potential instances of alleged voter intimidation throughout the state. Officials with the Department of State said Tuesday morning they were hearing reports about potential continued electioneering within 100 feet of the entrance of a polling place in Plymouth Township. The News reported about concerns initially on Friday, and officials said there were continued reports Tuesday morning. There were potential instances of intimidation, leading to township officials to contact local candidates about concern. Law enforcement also responded to an instance of potential voter intimidation in Crawford County, the Freep reported, where people who were campaigning allegedly partially obstructed an entrance to a polling location.

For the most part, though, elections ran smoothly throughout the state. More than 1,800 people registered to vote today, Benson said in a news conference after polls closed. Lines were minimal or nonexistent, she added.

She reminded voters that accurately tabulating races — especially close ones — takes time and is not a sign of a problem. Officials said their new option to pre-process ballots did help communities get results out faster, though. The practice means clerks open absentee ballot envelopes and begin the earliest stages of processing them — but not tabulating them — days in advance. In Canton, for example, Siegrist pointed to how absentee results were in before election day votes.

Since the pandemic, Michigan voters have largely shifted to early or absentee voting. It means that when there are issues like power outages, she said, they are less disruptive to voters.

“It underscores how election day is now essentially becoming the last day to vote, the last day to turn in your ballot, as opposed to the day everyone votes,” Benson said.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Election officials send the U.S. Postal Service a sharp message: The mail must go through

2024-07-29T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

After weeks of presidential election drama over everything from a candidate withdrawal to an assassination attempt, the real fireworks at the National Association of State Election Directors conference in Minneapolis this week were over ... snail mail.

Frustrated election officials raked a U.S. Postal Service representative over the coals Tuesday, telling him that his agency hasn’t been delivering ballots on time, and the situation isn’t improving enough despite repeated requests.

“You have to be better. The actual elections are being determined by these delays,” Bryan Caskey, Kansas’ election director, told Steve Carter, the USPS official in charge of election and government mail programs.

Members of NASED gather like this twice a year, and this time, with the presidential election looming, operational concerns over mail voting were top of mind for nearly all the attendees. These are the people who know election administration best, and if this is what they’re worried about, everyone should start paying attention.

Carter didn’t have specific answers to many concerns election directors raised — or at least didn’t provide the answers they were looking for.

For example, he said he didn’t know exactly when the Postal Service would begin enhanced service to bolster election-related mail delivery. He also repeatedly told the election directors to contact local USPS customer relations staff, even though election officials said those workers’ answers were often insufficient.

Carter said the USPS has improved in some areas, and cited numbers to back that up. Over the 2022 midterm election, the Postal Service delivered 97.3% of “identifiable and measurable ballots” to voters on time, a report from the USPS Office of the Inspector General found. That’s better than in 2018 or 2020, and 6 points higher than the target rate, the report said.

Caskey said while that uptick is “awesome,” it still leaves a significant proportion of improperly delivered or undelivered ballots, which threatens to disenfranchise voters.

Hypothetically, Caskey said, a jurisdiction that sends out 100,000 ballots and has a 95% on-time rate still has “5,000 pissed off, angry voters that are mad about the mail service.”

Election officials also criticized the Postal Service’s plan to wait until late October — a week or two before Election Day — to begin a series of election-related measures including extra deliveries, Sunday collections, early ballot pickup, and the creation of special post office lines for postmarking ballots.

“Why are we waiting till late October?” New Hampshire’s election director, Patricia Piecuch, asked, noting that ballots go out to voters weeks earlier than that.

Carter said the organization tries to keep normal processes in place for as long as possible.

“The extraordinary measures are dedicated for when we view the peak activity of ballots getting through the system,” he said.

Sensing Piecuch’s doubts, Carter offered to talk to her separately about what she’s experiencing in New Hampshire.

Election officials repeatedly raised concerns about mail delivery around the 2020 election, and a federal judge later found that some changes made by U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy contributed to a slowdown of mail delivery during the period leading up to the 2020 election. DeJoy, a former logistics industry executive and major Republican donor, was appointed by former President Donald Trump, who has been a vocal critic of mail voting.

But the concerns now come from jurisdictions across the country. A group of 18 senators, all Democrats, this month sent DeJoy a letter asking for more information about his plans to ensure timely mail delivery.

Washington, D.C., Board of Elections Director Monica Evans said that for one recent election, she never received her own ballot in the mail. She reached out to the USPS staff, and “they kept searching. And there was never any answer,” she said. “They just said, ‘Well, you need to request a new ballot or vote in person.’”

That was easy enough for Evans, she said, since she works in elections. But for other voters, that could have been the difference between being able to cast a ballot or not.

Elections directors told us they’ll keep pressing the Postal Service for answers, but understand that such a large and under-resourced organization may not change quickly.

Votebeat Editorial Director Jessica Huseman contributed. If you work in elections and have similar concerns about USPS delivery times heading into election season, we want to hear about them. Reach out and let us know.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Another change to Pennsylvania mail ballot envelopes: Full year will be preprinted

2024-07-18T17:30:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Update, July 19, 11:55 a.m.: This story was updated with additional comments from Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt to clarify his interview.

The Pennsylvania Department of State is hoping another change to mail ballot return envelopes will eliminate the chance of ballots being rejected this November because of voters failing to write in the year completely.

In a directive earlier this month, the Department of State told counties that they should now preprint ballot return envelopes with the full, four-digit year in the date field, leaving voters to fill in just the month and day alongside their signature.

“We conducted an analysis after this election of why ballots were rejected,” said Al Schmidt, secretary of the commonwealth. “We didn’t see a significant number of ballots missing the full year, but there were some, and every vote is precious in every election.”

It’s the second modification to the envelopes since the 2023 municipal elections, as state officials try to cut down on the number of ballots rejected for lacking a properly filled out date and resolve differing interpretations among counties on whether to count these ballots. The move will also eliminate a risk of lawsuits in November over whether incomplete-year ballots should be accepted or rejected.

Pennsylvania law requires that voters sign and date the outer return envelope of their mail ballots in order for them to be counted, but the date requirement has proven to be tricky for voters, and has drawn challenges from voting rights advocates. Roughly 8,500 ballots, or 1.22% of those returned, were rejected during the April primary for lacking a proper date or signature or for being returned without a secrecy envelope, according to an analysis of Department of State data.

With the November presidential election again expected to be close in Pennsylvania, even a small number of ballots rejected for technicalities like lacking a date could prove consequential for the outcome.

Problems with year show up in 2024 primary

In November 2023, the Department of State announced a redesigned ballot return envelope that it hoped would cut down on the number of rejected ballots. The new design had a shaded area where a voter would sign and date the envelope, to make it stand out, and had the first two digits of the year — “20″ — prefilled to deter voters from writing the wrong year by mistake. The state also changed the color of the inner secrecy envelope a voter must use to yellow and added watermarks to identify it.

In the April primary, the first election in which those envelopes were used, fewer ballots were rejected for voter errors. But as completed mail ballots came in, election officials around the state started to notice that many of the envelopes they were receiving had a problem: Voters hadn’t filled in the last two digits for the year in the date field.

After several counties reached out to the Department of State about how to handle these ballots, Deputy Secretary for Elections Jonathan Marks sent an email to counties advising them to count ballots even if the envelope didn’t have the last two digits of the year.

“It is the Department’s view that, if the date written on the ballot can reasonably be interpreted to be ‘the day upon which [the voter] completed the declaration,’ the ballot should not be rejected as having an ‘incorrect’ date or being ‘undated,’” Marks wrote on April 19.

Not all counties followed that advice, however. At least 22 counties opted not to count ballots missing the “24,” according to a Votebeat and Spotlight PA survey of elections officials.

Pennsylvania mail in ballot for the 2024 primary election on Tues., April 23, 2024.

An analysis of Department of State data found that the overall rejection rate for mail ballots went down following the redesign, compared with the 2023 primary. But counties that Votebeat and Spotlight PA identified as choosing not to count ballots missing the “24″ had virtually no decrease in the rejection rate as a group, and most saw an increase.

The Department of State said its analysis showed older voters were more likely to return ballots with errors that led them to be rejected.

This means the decision to prefill the full year is likely to prevent voters from making the mistake and further reduce the number of ballots rejected over issues with the date.

It would also resolve disparities among counties in how these ballots are handled, an issue that has sparked lawsuits on both sides of the decision.

Centre and Luzerne counties were sued, by the county GOP and a GOP candidate, respectively, for counting the ballots. The Centre County case was dismissed at the county court level on technical grounds, and the Luzerne case is currently being appealed to the state Supreme Court.

The Department of State argued in the Luzerne lawsuit that writing a year on the ballot was not necessary to satisfy the dating requirement. Asked why the state didn’t just do away with the year field altogether, Schmidt said that could be an option, but including the year makes it more clear when the ballot was voted and prevents further litigation over the issue in November.

Meanwhile, Lancaster County was sued for not counting the ballots, by the Pennsylvania Alliance for Retired Americans. But the group dropped its lawsuit last week after seeing the new Department of State directive on preprinting the full year.

Schmidt added that the litigation over this issue also motivated the department to issue the directive.

“With the presidential election ahead of us, and very strict deadlines for certification of election results at the county and state level, we thought it would be important to do our part to keep counties out of all this litigation,” he said.

Schmidt also noted that it took more than two months after election day for an appeals court to rule in the Luzerne case, which would have pushed the state well past the federal certification deadline had it been initiated after the November election.

“This is certainly a desired outcome, and much faster than going through litigation,” said Nina Beck, an attorney with Fair Elections Center, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit focused on voting rights, which represented the retiree group in the Lancaster case.

“We’re happy to have a uniform mandate across the state.”

How counties will handle the change

Election officials said it had become clear in recent weeks that the department was moving toward making a change to the date field.

Some counties were considering printing the full year on the envelope even before the directive.

Abigail Gardner, communications director for Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, said the county was talking to the company that prints its mail ballot envelopes about the feasibility of adding “24″ to envelopes that had already been printed.

“It was just obviously one of the biggest pain points for ballot errors, so it seemed like a smart fix,” she said.

Schmidt confirmed that other counties had been seeking permission from the department to preprint the full year.

Costs are likely to be low, Fayette County elections director Marybeth Kuznik estimated. Her county uses the same printing company as Allegheny and Philadelphia, Phoenix Graphics. She said that the directive was not a surprise.

“At this point, there have been so many changes and court cases, nothing surprises me anymore,” she said. She’d like the legislature to take up the issue to make sure a mail ballot envelope requires only critical information from the voter.

“We know when we mailed [the ballots] and when we get it back. The date in between is not useful to us,” Kuznik said.

A pending lawsuit filed in May by the ACLU of Pennsylvania and the Public Interest Law Center seeks to invalidate the dating requirement altogether, but for now voters will still need to write at least the month and day on their return envelope.

As counties move forward with adding “24″ to old envelopes or printing new ones, they will need to estimate how many envelopes they’ll need for a given calendar year, so they don’t waste money on envelopes that can’t be used in future years.

While state law spells out how many ballots a county must provide for in-person polling places, it doesn’t specify a number for printing envelopes, Beaver County elections director Colin Sisk said.

Sisk said he imagines most counties will err on the side of over-ordering.

But overall, Sisk said, any time counties can get direction that has the force of law, it helps streamline processes and create more uniformity across the state.

“The most important thing we can have is a consistent approach across the counties,” he said.

Now, he said, it’s just a matter of “getting voters to know they still need to put the month and the day.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Lawsuit could complicate absentee voting in Wisconsin

2024-06-03T13:00:00+00:00

This article originally appeared in Wisconsin Watch’s Forward weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

Update, June 4, 2024: The scheduled June 5 hearing in this case was cancelled after the Marinette County judge accepted a request from intervenors, Disability Rights Wisconsin and League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, to substitute judges.

A lawsuit that could complicate Wisconsin’s absentee voting process, create additional last-minute work for election officials, and confuse voters is coming before a Marinette County judge Wednesday.

The lawsuit asks Marinette County Circuit Court Judge James Morrison to require voters who request their ballot through MyVote, Wisconsin’s online voting portal, to return a signed copy of their request with their actual absentee ballot for their vote to count.

Additionally, the lawsuit asks Morrison to bar election officials from using a redesigned absentee ballot envelope that states the envelope is an original or copy of voters’ original absentee ballot request — something that the lawsuit alleges is not the case.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission urged the court to reject those requests in a Friday filing. But even if Morrison were to grant the requests, the commission asked him not to require any changes ahead of this year’s elections because they “would risk disenfranchising tens or even hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin voters in upcoming elections,” something the commission said would be “a stunningly undemocratic result.”

The requested changes to Wisconsin’s absentee ballot voting system would add work for clerks ahead of their June 27 deadline to begin mailing absentee ballots for August’s primary elections. Morrison may be sympathetic to the requests, considering that he granted a temporary injunction May 17 prohibiting the Wisconsin Elections Commission from requiring local clerks to use the redesigned absentee ballot envelope.

Thomas Oldenburg of Amberg filed the lawsuit. He’s represented by two attorneys who have been central to efforts casting doubt on the state’s election results.

One of them, Kevin Scott, represented former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who led a costly but fruitless partisan review of Wisconsin’s 2020 election, in a lawsuit that sought to jail the mayors of Madison and Green Bay if they didn’t sit for an interview about the election. The other attorney, Daniel Eastman, asked a federal court to decertify Wisconsin’s 2020 presidential election results.

The lawsuit was filed because “Wisconsin needs to demand fair election administration,” Eastman said at a May 20 press conference in Union Grove. “It has to be done right. It has to be done according to law.”

But critics say the lawsuit is one of many filed since the 2020 election that seeks to make voting harder.

The litigation “seems to be part of an ongoing effort to make what are now technical requirements into substantive hurdles for absentee voters,” said Mike Haas, Madison’s city attorney and the former administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

The lawsuit’s first argument is rooted in a state statute, enacted in 2006 but since modified slightly, that says voters do not need to provide a signature when submitting their absentee ballot request electronically, but they “shall return with the voted ballot a copy of the request bearing an original signature of the elector.” MyVote has been available since 2012.

When a voter requests a ballot using MyVote, it generates a copy of a standardized request form that is shared via email with the voter’s municipal clerk, according to a WEC official’s testimony submitted in a separate case. The lawsuit contends a copy of that request form must be included in the absentee ballot envelope, alongside the completed ballot, in order for it to be counted. If the form is not included, the lawsuit argues, that ballot should not be counted.

The redesigned envelope is intended to serve a “dual purpose as an absentee application and absentee certificate,” according to materials prepared by WEC’s nonpartisan staff for an August 2023 meeting where the commissioners approved the new design. The new envelope fulfills statutory requirements for both in-person absentee voters and voters who cast their absentee ballot by mail, staff wrote.

In a Friday filing, the election commission said the plaintiffs were incorrectly interpreting “copy” to mean “duplicate,” adding that the form is indeed a copy because it contains all the information needed to identify the voter and confirm they requested a ballot.

The new design was “put through extensive rounds of testing, with serious consideration given to ease-of-use, accessibility, and compliance with state law,” WEC spokesperson Riley Vetterkind said in a statement. “An extensive audit of absentee processes and materials by the Legislative Audit Bureau did not identify any problems with the absentee certificate envelope’s dual purpose, nor did prior court decisions that have involved the absentee certificate envelope.”

The suit’s second claim is based on a line on the state’s redesigned absentee ballot envelope that states: “I requested this ballot and this is the original or a copy of that request.”

The lawsuit argues the ballot is not the original or a copy of the request voters submitted to receive their absentee ballot and therefore would require Wisconsin voters to make a false statement if they sign the form. Accordingly, the lawsuit says, the judge should bar clerks from using the envelopes.

The commission also argued that Oldernburg doesn’t have standing to bring the legal challenge.

“At best, (Oldenburg) has a quibble with one line of language on a WEC form — but that narrow quarrel cannot support the much broader declarations he seeks about how absentee voting laws should be interpreted and applied,” the commission said in its court filing.

If the judge agrees with the lawsuit’s arguments, local election officials could need to print copies of each absentee ballot request form they receive from MyVote and include it in the envelope alongside a voter’s absentee ballot. That could create additional last-minute work for election officials ahead of the August primary. It could also require voters to complete another step in order for their absentee ballots to be counted.

“Absentee ballot requests have increased so much, even just since COVID-19,” Marinette Deputy City Clerk Mindy Campbell said. “Marinette has 10,000 people, and before COVID-19 we used to have between 100 and 200 absentee ballot requests. This April, there were 500 requests, and that’s for a low-turnout election.”

“So to find everybody’s absentee request, print it off, make a copy — it’s another thing to fold and shove into an envelope. It is a lot, but it’s possible,” she said, adding that the task could be more challenging in bigger cities like Milwaukee and Madison.

Redesigned envelope leads to fewer rejected ballots, but a new type of error sticks out

2024-05-31T16:09:49+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Fewer mail ballots were rejected for voter errors overall in this year’s primary election, a Votebeat and Spotlight PA analysis shows, an achievement that the state credits to a modified ballot return envelope designed to help voters avoid mistakes.

But state data points to a new type of voter mistake affecting ballot rejections. And the way counties have diverged in their response to this error has opened up a new avenue for litigation ahead of November’s presidential contest.

Compared with the 2023 primary, counties rejected 9.6% fewer ballots for the kinds of errors that the redesign sought to address: a missing date or signature on the return envelope, an incorrect date, or ballots returned without an inner secrecy envelope. (See the methodology for Votebeat’s data analysis below this article.)

“I think it is clear that the ballot redesign resulted in fewer voters making errors,” Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt said.

Pennsylvania’s election code requires that mail voters place their ballot in a secrecy envelope before placing it in the return envelope. They must then sign and date the return envelope.

But since Pennsylvania implemented its no-excuse mail voting law, Act 77, in 2020, thousands of ballots have been rejected because of procedural errors by voters, such as missing dates and signatures. Courts have gone back and forth on which errors should cause a ballot to be rejected. So far, the divided legislature hasn’t successfully stepped in to clarify the rules.

After the 2023 municipal elections, the Department of State announced a redesigned ballot return envelope that it hoped would cut down on the number of rejected ballots. The April 23 primary was the first to see that envelope used.

But with the redesigned envelope, officials noticed a new error cropping up: voters who put a date on their envelopes but left the year only partially filled in. Some counties rejected those ballots on that basis, while others, heeding advice from state officials, accepted them.

Redesign made date and signature box stand out

The Department of State’s redesign of the mail ballot return envelope sought to address four of the most common errors that require counties to reject ballots: a missing date, an incorrect date, a missing signature, or a ballot not returned in a secrecy envelope.

In the new design, the area where a voter is to sign and date the envelope is shaded, to make it stand out, and it has the digits “20″ prefilled for the year, to prevent voters from writing their birth date. Secrecy envelopes were also changed to yellow and included new watermarks to make them stand out.

Overall, the rate of ballots rejected for these reasons, as a proportion of all mail ballots returned, went down, which officials claim as success for the new design. But when the categories are broken apart, the success of the effort is less clear.

The rejection rate for ballots lacking a date or being returned without a secrecy envelope went down. But the rates for those returned with an incorrect date or no signature went up, and those errors now represent a greater proportion of rejected ballots.

In the 2023 primary, they were the third and fourth most common errors that led to ballot rejection. Now they are No. 1 and 2. Aside from voter errors, the top overall reason for rejection in both elections was ballots that arrived after election day.

There are some limitations to the more detailed data. Schmidt noted that the system counties use to track mail ballots allows them to enter only one code denoting the reason for rejection. So if a ballot lacks both a signature and a date, they can record it as rejected for only one of those reasons.

He added that there is not a consistent method across counties for what order to check for errors, and which code to use first. Some counties might also change the order in which they check the fields from year to year.

“That’s why the overall number is most reliable in my opinion,” he said.

In the 2023 primary, 1.35% of returned ballots were rejected for the four reasons that the redesign sought to address. That rate dropped to 1.22% for April’s primary, according to Votebeat and Spotlight PA’s analysis. In total, just under 16,000 ballots were rejected, for any reason.

A date detail: The last two digits of the year

One feature of the redesigned envelope was a date field with the first two digits of the year — “20″ — prefilled. But as election day approached, voters were returning ballots without writing “24″ after the prefilled “20.”

On the Friday before the election, Deputy Secretary for Elections Jonathan Marks sent an email to counties advising them to count ballots even if the envelope didn’t have the last two digits of the year. Courts have interpreted the state’s dating requirement to mean it needs to have a date between when the ballot was sent to the voter and election day.

Pennsylvania mail in ballot return envelope for the 2024 primary election.

Not all counties followed that advice.

Colin Sisk, Beaver County’s election director, said that the county viewed the department’s choice to prefill the “20″ in the year field as an indication that the voter was meant to fill in the year section. He also said that if a voter last year had only written “20″ for the year, the ballot likely would have been rejected, as it would have been assumed they meant 2020. So for consistency, the county chose not to accept the ballots.

The advice also came late in the election cycle.

“I know a lot of us (directors) were like ‘Holy crap, this is late’ and ‘Holy crap, this change is something that can be litigated,’” Sisk said of his reaction when he received the email on April 19, four days before the election.

Sisk was right. A candidate sued Luzerne County over its decision to count the ballots, and the Centre County GOP did the same there.

The Court of Common Pleas judge hearing the Centre County case dismissed it Friday as improperly filed, without addressing the county’s decision to count the ballots. In Luzerne County, the judge ruled the county was correct to count the ballots, but that decision is now on appeal in Commonwealth Court.

Counties were split over whether or not to accept the ballots, and that decision appears to have had an impact on their rejection rate.

Votebeat and Spotlight PA looked at 36 counties that had suitable data to determine the change in rejection rates from year to year. Among them, counties that decided to count ballots with a missing “24″ for the year had lower average rejection rates than in the previous primary election, while counties that chose not to count these ballots on average had virtually no change in the rejection rate, and most saw an increase.

“I think they were trying to make it easier for people so they didn’t put their birth year, but it confused people in my opinion,” said Karen Lupon, chief clerk and election director for Jefferson County, although she added she thinks the redesign was successful in reducing “naked ballots” that were returned without a secrecy envelope.

November is the next big test

The Department of State would not say whether it plans to make any changes to the envelope before the November election as a result of the issue.

Whether the lower rejection rate holds in November will be the next big test, both for the redesigned envelope and recent educational efforts from the department, campaigns, and other groups looking to inform them on how to properly cast their ballot.

“It’s a good sign to see rejections going down,” said Kyle Miller, a policy advocate with the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy. “I’m really interested to see what happens in the general, when you have more casual voters.”

Compared with general election voters, those who participated in April’s primary — during which many high-profile races were uncontested — were more likely to be tuned into the rules and educational efforts.

At least one county foresaw the missing “24″ as an issue. In Bucks County, election officials opted to preprint the full year on the ballot, rather than just “20″ as the Department of State recommended.

“As a result, I think we saw lower numbers of errors on the date than we would have,” Bucks County Solicitor Amy Fitzpatrick said at an April 30 election board meeting.

Lycoming County may follow suit. Its election director, Forrest Lehman, said he has been in contact with the vendor who prints his return envelopes to ask if it would be possible to add the “24″ on envelopes that were already printed.

The issue could be moot come November if the ACLU of Pennsylvania and Public Interest Law Center prevail in their lawsuit seeking to nullify the requirement that voters write a date on the return envelope.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

About this Data

The Department of State calculated the reduction in the rejection rate from the 2023 primary to the 2024 primary to be 13.5%. The department used a method of analysis that adjusted rejection figures from the 2023 primary to match what they likely would have been had that election seen the same turnout as 2024. After consultation with several political scientists who regularly analyze election data, Votebeat and Spotlight PA opted to use a different method that directly compared the actual rejection percentage from each election, though the political scientists said both methods are legitimate. Votebeat and Spotlight PA’s calculation also included ballots marked with “pending” codes in the state’s mail ballot tracking system, which the Department of State did not. All but one county had certified its election at the time of Votebeat and Spotlight PA’s analysis, which was not the case at the time the department opted to exclude “pending” ballots.

ACLU signals effort to target disparate ‘notice and cure’ policies for flawed mail ballots

2024-05-16T17:47:46+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

The ACLU of Pennsylvania is suing one county, and may file more cases, in an effort to challenge a policy that it says disenfranchises voters who make an error when casting ballots by mail.

The case against Butler County, filed after the April primary, appears to be the start of a broader statewide effort by the group targeting the “notice and cure” process, a major gray area in state law that leads to uneven rules for voters across Pennsylvania.

Along with that lawsuit, the organization has signaled it is considering another lawsuit, and has been filing public records requests to identify more counties that don’t allow voters to correct flawed mail ballots or provide notice to voters that their ballot will be rejected. Such records requests are often a precursor to a lawsuit.

A legal effort that changes where the courts stand on notice and cure policies could have a profound impact. Since Pennsylvania enacted its no-excuse mail voting law in 2020, counties have rejected thousands of ballots because voters failed to sign or date the outer envelopes, or made another technical error. The rejection rate goes down significantly when a county notifies voters and allows them to fix, or cure, the error, according to county officials and a Votebeat and Spotlight PA analysis of available data.

“This should not be a game of gotcha,” said Vic Walczak, legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania. “‘Here is your ballot. You got one shot. If you mess it up, it won’t count.’ That’s not how this should work.”

State law is silent on whether counties must allow voters to correct their ballots, and courts have interpreted the absence of rules to mean that it’s up to the counties to choose whether to allow it. The result is a patchwork of rules across the state.

At least 17 counties allow some form of curing, though the methods vary. Others say they’re not obligated to do so, citing the election code and court rulings.

The ACLU’s lawsuit targeting curing marks a shift in its voting rights strategy following a failed challenge at the federal level to the state’s requirements that voters put a date on ballot envelopes.

In March, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the ACLU and other plaintiffs in a two-year case arguing that Pennsylvania’s requirement that voters correctly date their ballot return envelopes violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The ACLU has not said whether it will appeal that decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

What is ‘notice and cure’?

Since Pennsylvania implemented Act 77, the no-excuse mail voting law, in 2020, counties have received thousands of ballots each election with errors that could cause them to be rejected by election officials. Some voters fail to sign or date the return envelope, as required by law, or don’t place the ballot in a secrecy envelope designed to protect the privacy of their selections.

Some counties inform voters of the errors, and allow them to correct them, so their votes are counted. This “notice and cure” process quickly became a point of contention.

In September 2020, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected a request from Democrats that all counties be required to contact voters and allow them to fix errors. The Democrats’ appeal to the free and equal elections clause in the state constitution, the court ruled, was not enough to surmount the lack of precise language in the law directing counties to allow curing.

The state Supreme Court has also turned away an effort by Republicans to bar counties from allowing ballot curing, citing the same lack of precise language in the law. Just before the 2022 election, the court upheld a lower court decision that said Republican groups that were seeking to block counties from implementing curing had failed to show how it specifically violated the election code.

Among counties that allow curing, practices vary.

Some, like Allegheny County, return defective mail ballots to voters with an explanation of the error and a new return envelope. Nearby Fayette County allows voters to come into the elections office and fix mistakes in person. Philadelphia posts lists of voters with defective ballots online and lets them request a replacement ballot in person at the election office. Erie County posts a list and allows voters to correct mistakes in person.

How successful curing is also depends on the method. A spokesperson for Allegheny said that nearly 62% of defective mail ballots were fixed in last month’s primary using its method. Data from Fayette County shows they saw roughly a 50% cure rate this past election. In Chester County, roughly 66% of ballots at risk were rectified and counted, county officials said.

Jeff Greenburg, a senior adviser on election administration for the good-government group Committee of Seventy, said the varying policies are a reminder that the legislature needs to clear up this and other vague portions of Act 77.

“If I was grading the General Assembly on Act 77, they would get an incomplete,” he said.

Greenburg said counties are acting in good faith to interpret the law and court cases, but the inconsistencies risk shaking voter faith in elections.

“Voters see that, and they understand that and begin to question why,” he said. “It’s a valid question.”

Where the ACLU may be headed

The ACLU’s suit against Butler County was filed on behalf of two voters who didn’t insert their mail ballots into secrecy envelopes before they returned them for the April 23 primary. Their mail ballots were rejected, and when those voters cast in-person provisional ballots on election day, the county rejected those votes, too. Provisional ballots are used by voters whose eligibility is in question but who still want to vote. Those ballots are only counted after the voter’s eligibility is confirmed.

The ACLU brought a similar challenge against Delaware County last year and won. But because the case ended in county court, it did not set a statewide precedent.

In the Butler County case, a judge recently granted the state and national GOP’s request to intervene in the case in support of the county. If a judge rules against the county, the party organizations would have the option to appeal to Commonwealth Court. A ruling there could give the case a statewide impact.

Even if the case reaches that level, a decision would be limited to one type of voting scenario: determining whether a voter can cast a provisional ballot in person if their original mail ballot is rejected.

But more lawsuits on curing appear to be on the horizon. Starting in late March, the ACLU of Pennsylvania began sending identical public records requests to all counties. The requests — copies of which were obtained by Votebeat and Spotlight PA through separate records requests — sought information about the counties’ written policies on curing or notifying voters of errors, or documents reflecting the county’s decision not to allow curing.

“We believe the Pennsylvania and U.S. constitutions require counties to make sure voters are not disenfranchised by mistakes on their mail ballot envelopes,” Walczak said. He added that the organization has been “investigating” notice and cure procedures.

The ACLU declined to discuss its specific legal strategy, but its recent actions hint at what its approach may be.

In April, Washington County officials voted to reverse course and no longer notify voters of errors with ballots or allow them to fix them. In a letter before the April 23 primary election, the ACLU advised the southwestern county that the decision raised “serious constitutional procedural due process concern(s),” pointing to a U.S. Supreme Court case.

Letters such as this one often precede litigation, as was the case in Butler County, and Washington County leadership said they expected the decision would result in a lawsuit.

County election directors have anticipated more litigation on ballot curing procedures, often expressing frustration that it seems as though no matter what policy they adopt — allowing or not allowing curing — some group will be unhappy and sue.

“It’s not going to increase public confidence in elections if we have groups suing over portions of the code which have already been litigated,” Mercer County Elections Director Thad Hall said.

Counties that don’t allow curing, like Mercer, generally have based that decision on their county attorney’s legal finding that the state’s election code gives no clearly defined authority to do so.

“It’s nothing malicious,” Hall said. “It’s just that we don’t have a curing law.”

Hall said that those looking to change policy should lobby the legislature to clarify the law. He said he thinks litigation that aims to force counties to adopt notice and cure procedures may have an unintended, opposite effect if groups object to a certain kind of curing policy.

“Counties may very well say, ‘Well, you won’t allow us to have the curing that we want, so we’re not going to do any curing,’” he said.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Correction, May 16, 2024: This article originally misstated that Philadelphia voters can fix mistakes on their ballot envelopes in person. In fact, Philadelphia will issue replacement ballots to voters in person if they’ve made a mistake.

Pennsylvania’s redesigned mail ballot envelopes trip up many voters who left date incomplete

2024-04-23T21:47:41+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

A design change Pennsylvania officials made to prevent voters from making a disqualifying error on their mail ballots appears to have backfired.

The issue — voters failing to write the final two digits of the year on the return envelope — is leading some counties to reject ballots in the primary, despite the state’s new advice to count them.

Last fall, the Pennsylvania Department of State announced it was redesigning the state’s mail ballot return envelope, in part to reduce the number of ballots rejected for lacking a proper date, which is required by law. This year’s envelope has “20″ prefilled in the year line and leaves spaces for the voters to fill in the last two digits.

One election director said a “significant” number of voters who returned flawed ballots had not filled in the last two digits of the year, and other election officials around the state echoed that observation.

On the Friday before the election, Deputy Secretary for Elections Jonathan Marks sent an email to counties advising them to count ballots even if the envelope lacks the last two digits of the year.

But the department’s emailed advice does not carry the force of law, and counties are making different decisions about whether to count the ballots. Votebeat and Spotlight PA contacted eight counties and found that Philadelphia, Allegheny, and Delaware counties are counting the ballots, while York, Lycoming, Lancaster, and Snyder counties are rejecting them. Montgomery County said it would make a decision next week.

It’s unclear exactly how many voters will be affected by rejections. Philadelphia said those figures would not be available until Thursday. In Snyder County, 10 of the 21 ballots rejected for dating issues were properly dated except for the last two digits of the year, Election Director Devin Rhoads said.

In Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, spokesperson Abigail Gardner said ballots with dating errors were the majority of the county’s mail ballots at risk of rejection, and this specific dating error was an “overwhelming” majority of those. Gardner said that until Friday, Allegheny County had been marking these ballots as improperly dated but changed that determination after receiving Marks’ email.

Lycoming County Election Director Forrest Lehman said his county will reject ballots that lack the final two digits. He added that such ballots make up a “significant” number of the ones his staff was rejecting, though he did not have exact figures.

Reacting to the Department of State’s advice, Lehman said, “I don’t know what they’re basing it on or why they decided to say it at the last minute.”

Did you vote for the first time this year? Tell us how it went.

As part of the 2022 case Marks cited, Ball v. Chapman, the state Supreme Court issued an order on what a proper date for a ballot was. That order defined a proper date by setting a date range with the full, four-digit year. Lehman said he thinks counties will look at that as a signal that all four digits must be included.

Asked about this contradiction with the Ball case, Amy Gulli, director of communications for the Department of State, said Marks’ email “speaks for itself.”

The email also appears to run afoul of Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt’s promise not to issue any new election-policy guidance to counties within 45 days of an election.

The department said the email did not violate the secretary’s promise, as it was not full guidance but rather an email in response to multiple questions from counties.

Asked if the state would be redesigning the envelopes in response to the problem, Gulli said the department is “continually looking for ways to improve election administration” and “will follow up with the counties on their experience after the primary.”

Whether voters should even be required to write the date on ballot return envelopes has been a subject of debate and litigation since 2020, when Pennsylvania’s mail voting law, Act 77, went into effect. The NAACP, which along with other voting rights organizations being represented by the ACLU of Pennsylvania, is currently seeking to invalidate the requirement in federal court based on a provision from the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Marian Schneider, senior voting rights policy counsel at the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said the email from the department was a good attempt to keep voters from being disenfranchised.

“If someone wrote 4/17 and didn’t write the year, there’s only one year it possibly could have been written because we know when counties mailed the ballots and when the counties received them,” she said. “What Jonathan is writing is common sense guidance.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Inside the private company Maricopa County depends on to power through the last-minute ballot slog

2024-04-22T09:00:00+00:00

The “bing bong, bing bong” of the security gate bell rings over the loudspeakers at Runbeck Election Services. Polls in Arizona’s presidential preference election closed three and a half hours ago, and ballots have finally arrived here.

The loading dock door flies up, letting in cool spring air, and workers roll in two locked cages carrying trays of green envelopes. Soon, the envelopes, with ballots still sealed inside, are shooting through Runbeck’s scanner at a rate of 12 per second. Within minutes, the voter signatures on thousands of envelopes have been scanned.

It’s fast for a reason. At times, all of America is waiting to find out the results from these ballots, which are cast in the largest swing county in the nation.

Dropped off at polling places or in ballot drop boxes on Election Day, these ballots are among the last in Maricopa County to be counted, because the voter signatures on the outer envelopes still need to be verified. It often takes days to count the votes inside, with the outcome of an election hinging on the result.

In 2020, these ballots were enough to flip the county recorder race for Stephen Richer, more than a week after the election. In 2022, these were the ballots candidate Katie Hobbs waited to be counted for days before she declared victory in the governor’s race. And this year, these are votes that could help determine who wins Arizona, and the presidency.

With the volume of these Election Day drop-offs now in the hundreds of thousands, Maricopa County turns to Runbeck, a ballot printing and processing company, out of necessity. If not for the high-speed machines Runbeck owns, it would take the county days, working nonstop, just to do the initial scan of the ballot envelopes. Even after Runbeck is done scanning the envelopes, the actual votes on the ballots still have to be counted. That’s done later, back at the county’s election headquarters.

With all eyes on Arizona for both election results and election integrity, there’s growing scrutiny of who handles these last-minute drop-offs, how they are tracked, and how fast they are counted. Complaints about the speed of counting and about ballot tracking have spurred the county and Runbeck to make changes that voters may notice in the upcoming election.

Maricopa County staff test the high-speed ballot-counting machines at the county's election headquarters before the March presidential preference election.

To try to speed up counting this year, Maricopa County has spent millions renovating its space to make room for more counting machines and people. Runbeck and the county are working together on other changes to count faster and allow more political party observation. The changes, according to the county’s director of Election Day voting, Scott Jarrett, are part of the election department’s drive for continuous improvement.

But larger questions remain.

Watching the ballot envelopes zip through Runbeck’s machine as a GOP observer in the March 19 presidential preference election, Don Hiatt wondered: Why is this being outsourced to a private company? Why doesn’t the county own this machine?

The county has been quietly considering this question as well. For now, it just doesn’t have the space to do the work in house, according to Jarrett and Rey Valenzuela, the county’s director of early voting. And even if it had the space, Valenzuela said, it would take time for county employees to staff up and gain the skills that Runbeck has.

But that may change. In October, county supervisors entered into a $9.8 million contract to design an entirely new election center down the street from the current one. If they approve the design this summer, the county would spend more than $85 million to build the new center in time for the 2028 presidential election.

It would allow the fast-growing county to comfortably count the more than 2 million ballots it now receives each presidential election cycle, fit the hundreds of temporary election workers it hires during these elections, and store the equipment it requires.

Jarrett and Valenzuela said in a joint phone interview that the new building might also have enough space for the county to take over the ballot envelope scanning work Runbeck currently does.

To address concerns about speed, county expands staff

The speed of ballot counting is a politically charged issue, especially in swing states like Arizona. Concerns that began in earnest in 2020 over how long it took Maricopa County to finish counting the presidential election results grew dramatically in 2022, as Hobbs and GOP opponent Kari Lake awaited their results. Lake’s claim that the county was intentionally slow-rolling the results to perpetrate election fraud attracted national attention.

The fact is, many large voting jurisdictions take a week or more to tabulate mail ballots, but depending on the volume of those ballots and the overall margins in the race, that wait doesn’t raise many concerns, because the outcome of the race doesn’t hinge on those votes.

In swing states like Arizona, these lingering, last-to-be-counted ballots command much greater attention. Statewide races here have become tighter in recent elections, and the number of voters waiting until Election Day to drop off their ballots has grown, leaving a larger percentage of the state’s results outstanding on election night. By 2022, nearly 1 in 5 voters cast their ballot this way. That’s about 290,000 ballot envelopes to scan, voter signatures to verify, envelopes to open and ballots to count.

Lake’s allegations drew more attention to the long wait in 2022. But Maricopa County was actually counting just about as fast as it typically does. County officials posted final results 13 days after the 2022 election, roughly in line with the average of 12.5 days in statewide elections since 2006. The counting timeline has not increased even as the number of votes cast has doubled.

Still, county officials started looking at how to further speed up the process. The county has spent millions since 2022 tearing down walls in its counting room and other spaces within its election center. It’s also set up trailers as temporary buildings for use during elections.

The space can now fit considerably more people to work in the areas where there were “bottlenecks,” Jarrett said. In the upcoming election, the number of workstations available for verifying voter signatures on mail ballots will be 45, nearly double the 25 stations available in 2022. There will be 75 work stations for processing boards — the two-member bipartisan teams who open ballot envelopes to prepare ballots for counting — up from 55 in 2022. And there will be twice as many bipartisan teams reviewing voter selections on ballots where machines can’t determine the voter’s intent.

The county doubled the number of high-speed ballot-counting machines at its central counting location, too, meaning that it can tabulate votes twice as fast.

On Runbeck’s end, it plans to have enough staff on election night to run two or even three of its high-speed scanning machines at once.

Even with these changes, Jarrett and Valenzuela are hesitant to make promises about how much faster, if at all, counting may go this year.

It all depends on how many people wait until Election Day to vote. And Jarrett is estimating Election Day mail ballot drop-offs will increase from about 290,000 in 2022 to 350,000 in 2024.

To address concerns about transparency, Runbeck makes changes

In Arizona, polls close at 7 p.m. Typically, it’s 9 p.m. or later when the first shipment of Maricopa County’s Election Day drop-offs make it to Runbeck.

Before that, poll workers need to pack the ballots up at 200 or more voting locations, and county workers need to pick them up from drop boxes and bring them to the county’s central counting facility. Under camera surveillance and with bipartisan observers, workers arrange the envelopes face-forward in trays. Then the trays are packed in cages with locks and rolled onto trucks waiting outside the warehouse.

As all that happens, it’s mostly quiet in the Runbeck warehouse, located down a winding road in an industrial area near Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International Airport.

Runbeck, one of the largest ballot printers in the nation, will print ballots here for 49 counties across the country in 2024, and ship more than 13 million ballots directly to voters. But on election night, only Maricopa County’s cast ballots will come through here.

The night of the presidential preference election, Runbeck workers eat pizza in the breakroom and watch a movie as they wait for the envelopes to arrive.

On a whiteboard on the wall near the envelope scanning machine, employees have written down guesses of how many ballot envelopes there will be for them. The guesses can range widely, and no one has ever gotten it exactly right, said senior vice president of operations Bryan Dandurand. Tonight, one guess is 10,000. Another is 48,729.

When the ballots do arrive, the warehouse starts buzzing. Observers from each party follow the caged ballots from the truck loading zone to the envelope scanners, each 80 feet long and 6 feet high. Security guards, from Runbeck and Maricopa County, watch over the envelopes at every step. Multiple workers confirm ballot transfer numbers at multiple steps.

Once the signatures and barcodes on about 10,000 ballot envelopes are scanned, Runbeck sends the county a file with the photos. County workers then use those photos to start comparing voter signatures with registration records. If workers end up challenging a signature, Runbeck uses the machines to separate those envelopes into separate trays before they are returned to the county.

In all, about 30,000 envelopes come through the warehouse on the night of the presidential preference election, right in the middle of the range of guesses on the whiteboard.

Maricopa County picks up the ballots from Runbeck after they are scanned, opens the envelopes and counts the votes inside once they are back at its central counting facility.

Don Hiatt (left), the Republican volunteer political party observer, signs off for ballots at Runbeck Election Services during the March 2024 presidential preference election.

Seeing all of these security protocols in place at Runbeck in person for the first time, Democratic Party observer Ed Giebel said he was even more confident in the process, and even more disturbed by the “wild claims” he has heard about widespread voting fraud.

“It’s not like you can inject 5,000 ballots into the process,” Giebel said.

Yet, that’s effectively what Lake alleged in 2022. And while there has been no physical evidence to support that claim, the allegation has forced Runbeck and the county to take even more steps to increase transparency.

In 2022, Lake’s legal team noticed that on ballot-tracking documents, the county had recorded an incorrect estimate of Election Day mail ballot drop-offs before the ballots were shipped to Runbeck.

The county hadn’t counted the exact number of these ballots before shipping them to Runbeck, and historically never has. Instead, it has estimated the number of ballots it was sending to the warehouse based on the number of trays they packed.

But Lake said in court that the incorrect estimate was proof that there were tens of thousands of ballots illegally inserted at this facility. Also, a witness told the judge that Runbeck employees had been casting ballots on site.

Courts repeatedly rejected Lake’s claims for lack of evidence, and her attorneys were eventually sanctioned for falsely claiming that it was an “undisputed” fact that 35,563 ballots were injected to the results at Runbeck.

Jeff Ellington, CEO of Runbeck, has since told Votebeat these claims have led to harassment and threats against him. But Dandurand said that their employees have been mostly isolated from all this.

He talks in great length about the efforts that Runbeck takes to hire employees who call out errors when they see them and understand the importance of integrity when processing ballot envelopes.

Yet, the pressure to tighten processes hasn’t let up.

After the 2022 election, State Rep. Alex Kolodin and state Sen. Wendy Rogers, both Republicans, led an investigative committee in the legislature that pushed Runbeck to provide greater transparency into its process. Earlier this year, Runbeck signed an agreement with state lawmakers to provide for more transparency in ballot tracking and political party observer rules.

The ballot tracking forms now make clear when numbers are estimates, and when they are exact machine counts. There will be more political party observers allowed, and these observers will have access to a room where they can watch TV screens that show all ballot activity in the building live. And Runbeck will no longer allow employees to cast their own ballots on site, Dandurand said.

Also, under a new law, poll workers will try to get an exact count of the number of these ballots on site at their location, before they are transferred to the county for sorting, then to Runbeck for scanning. Kolodin pushed for this new rule hoping it would avoid the incorrect county estimates, but election officials worry that any inaccuracies will lead to more fraud claims.

Kolodin said that after his investigation, he is “a lot less concerned about Runbeck” than he was before, and he is glad Runbeck agreed on new transparency measures.

“Eyes on the process is always the best way to avoid problems,” he said.

Still, Kolodin said many of his constituents are concerned that the ballots they cast go through Runbeck afterward. He sees a few good arguments for doing the work in house.

Involving Runbeck in the chain of custody creates more opportunities for errors or bad actors, he said. He is also concerned that private contractors can more easily push back against public records laws.

Indeed, in 2022, a judge denied a public-records request from an advocacy organization allied with Lake to force Runbeck to turn over security video footage. Runbeck has since agreed to let lawmakers review its video.

Kolodin said if the county did the ballot scanning work instead, there would be “better legal teeth for oversight for ordinary members of the public.”

Why moving scanning in house would be a challenge

As concerns about Runbeck circulated in the public this summer, Jarrett said elections staff studied if Maricopa County could take on the work of scanning the ballot envelopes. Right now, Maricopa County pays Runbeck 98 cents per ballot for its scanning services.

The high-speed machines cost about $1 million each, according to Runbeck, and the county would need a few. The county would also need staff and money on hand for machine maintenance, and skilled staff to operate the machines.

The county has always been planning to continue to expand its election space, even after the renovations it just finished. This summer, around the time it was evaluating if it could replace Runbeck for ballot scanning, it decided it should build an entirely new building in order to accommodate all its future needs.

The new building, if approved, would double the amount of space the county has available for elections, and allow the recorder’s office early-voting team to move in.

Each day, more than 150 people move to Maricopa County, making it one of the nation’s fastest-growing counties and pushing its rolls of registered voters toward 2.4 million. About 79% of voters are on the early-voting list to receive mail ballots, up from 40% in 2016.

Only a few places in the country see as many mail ballots. But some California jurisdictions compare, including Los Angeles and Orange counties.

In 2007, Orange County’s then-registrar of voters, Neal Kelley, decided to take the county’s entire ballot printing and scanning process in-house after growing frustrated with mistakes the county’s ballot printer was making. He purchased the same high-speed scanners that Runbeck uses to scan envelopes.

He said taking it all in-house allowed the county to gain more control over timing. But it came with challenges. He ended up needing to staff a machine maintenance manager year-round, and his elections center “became a parts warehouse” as he tried to keep the machines in working order.

Los Angeles County, which is larger than Maricopa County with 5 million registered voters, owns six or seven high-speed envelope scanners, said spokesperson Mike Sanchez. It takes between 12 to 20 people to staff those machines, most of them seasonal, temporary employees, with permanent staff supervising.

But in California, there isn’t the same pressure to count the wave of Election Day ballots quickly. State law allows voters to put their ballots in the mail right up until Election Day and still have them be counted when the counties receive them. Counting runs for weeks after the election, Sanchez said.

A sign directs voters to the Maricopa County Recorder's Office in downtown Phoenix where they can drop off their ballot in a secure ballot drop box during the March presidential preference election.

In Maricopa County, the new facility being designed would help ease some bottlenecks in the ballot-handling process, but county spokesperson Fields Moseley said he wouldn’t want to promise faster counting because of it.

Taking Runbeck’s scanning work in-house wouldn’t necessarily make ballot processing faster either, Jarrett and Valenzuela said. It would just put everything under one roof, making the process more efficient and transparent. It might cut out the 15 minute trips the ballots make back and forth to Runbeck, they said, but the process still has to start with sorting and scanning the envelopes, no matter where it happens.

Finding skilled staff is another challenge, a point emphasized by both Kelley in Orange County and Dandurand at Runbeck. Few workers have experience handling ballots, they said, which requires more integrity than working in other mail or printing businesses.

Maricopa County already struggles to find enough temporary workers during busy election cycles, and taking this work in-house would mean finding more each year, and more willing to work odd hours.

At Runbeck, workers take their “lunch break” at midnight, when work on machines pauses for a required daily reboot.

These workers won’t be done with their shift until just before the sun comes up.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

How Pa. secures mail ballots, prevents fraud, and more

2024-04-15T12:45:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

You may be one of the hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians who plan to vote by mail during the 2024 election. Or maybe it’s an option you’ve considered but haven’t pursued because you distrust the process or have concerns about fraud.

Pennsylvania election officials have safeguards in place to verify the identity of people who request and cast mail ballots. Many counties also follow guidance from the Department of State to secure ballots and track who handles them.

Despite these layers of security and verification, former President Donald Trump has routinely attacked mail voting since 2020 and falsely claimed in recent months that “you automatically have fraud” with this kind of balloting.

Republicans in recent years have made many efforts to suppress or ban mail voting, which in Pennsylvania is more popular among Democrats. This approach has backfired, and GOP leaders — except for Trump — are now trying to get the party’s voters to embrace this method of voting.

Mail ballot fraud is exceptionally rare, and there is no evidence of widespread issues that would change the outcome of any Pennsylvania election.

Here’s what you need to know about mail voting ahead of the 2024 election:

How Pennsylvania verifies mail ballots

Voters who want to vote by mail in Pennsylvania have two options: absentee ballots and no-excuse ballots.

Absentee ballots are available for voters who will be out of their voting district on Election Day or have a medical condition that prevents them from going to their polling place. To vote this way, a person must list the reason they cannot go to their polling place on their ballot application.

No-excuse mail voting — created when the then-Republican-controlled legislature passed Act 77 in 2019 — doesn’t have this requirement.

Both applications require that voters provide their name and the address where they are registered to vote. The applications also ask for a driver’s license number, identification card number, or the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number.

This information is then checked against the state’s voter roll to ensure the person applying for a mail ballot is who is registered.

“The ID number they provide is run through the state’s driver’s license database or other databases to see if you can find a person with the same ID number and birth date, so it ties back to a real person,” said Forrest Lehman, Lycoming County’s election director.

How Pennsylvania counts mail ballots

Voters return mail ballots to their county election office, either through the mail, drop box, or by returning them in person to the office.

Once a voter has returned their mail ballot to their county election office, a barcode on the outer envelope is scanned into the state’s voter roll system to record that it has been received. This step also prevents that voter from returning any other mail ballots or voting in person.

Ballots are accepted only if they are sent in an official return envelope and within an inner secrecy envelope. Your county’s election office must receive the ballot by 8 p.m. on Election Day. If a ballot is postmarked on Election Day but not received by the county until after Election Day, it will not be counted.

Election office employees typically organize the returned envelopes containing the ballots by precinct and securely store them in the county election office or an official warehouse.

The ballots are not opened or counted until 7 a.m. on Election Day. County election staff open and count the ballots in front of observers from political parties and campaigns.

Remaining gray areas

Act 77, and mail voting in general, have been subjected to near-constant attacks and litigation since 2020, when the law went into effect. The suits center on various aspects of the law, such as it being silent on some key details, or conflicting with other election rules. Some challenges argue parts of the law are legally unsound.

The courts have resolved some issues. For example, the state Supreme Court ruled in September 2020 that “naked” ballots — those missing a secrecy envelope — must be rejected. That court also unanimously ruled in 2020 that counties could not reject ballots because the voter’s signature on the outer envelope did not match one on file.

Other issues remain as litigation continues to move through the courts and the legislature finds itself at an impasse over additional changes to the law.

Drop boxes

Act 77 is completely silent on drop boxes, which are secure receptacles used to collect mail ballots.

In 2020, the Pennsylvania Democratic Party asked the state Supreme Court to explicitly allow counties to collect mail ballots through drop boxes — a response to a suit from the Trump campaign seeking to have them barred.

The state Supreme Court agreed with the Democratic Party. As a result, some counties offer drop boxes while others don’t, a system that has created a disparity in access across the state.

A voter must return their own ballot unless they have a disability and have filled out paperwork to authorize another person to do so. This rule has created confusion, with some voters, including former First Lady of Pennsylvania Frances Wolf, returning other people’s ballots. Videos of such incidents sparked Republican calls for drop boxes to be banned.

In 2022, the state Senate voted to ban so-called “unsecured ballot drop boxes,” but the bill did not become law. Many counties have voluntarily opted to staff or implement video surveillance of their drop boxes.

Date requirement

Act 77 mandates that voters sign and date the outer envelope for a mail ballot to be counted, but the date requirement has been litigated on the grounds it violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Since 2021, different courts have come to different conclusions.

Most recently, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the ballots must be properly dated. The decision could result in tens of thousands of ballots being rejected in this year’s election because they lack a date or are misdated.

Voting rights groups have appealed that ruling, but a decision is not expected before the April 23 primary.

Ballot curing

Act 77 does not explicitly state what should happen to a ballot if a voter forgets to sign or date the outer envelope.

As a result, some counties notify voters of these mistakes and give them a chance to rectify them, while others don’t.

The state Supreme Court in 2022 ruled that counties can reach out to voters who made mistakes, inform them of the errors, and allow them to fix them — a process known as “notice and cure.” However, it did not require counties to do so, creating a disparity.

Al Schmidt, Pennsylvania’s top election official, said the Department of State encourages counties to allow voters to fix these mistakes so that their ballots are counted.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

After defeat in undated-ballots case, voting rights plaintiffs seek new ruling in federal appeals court

2024-04-10T14:15:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

After a court defeat last month, Pennsylvania voting rights organizations are trying to convince a larger group of federal appellate judges that the state shouldn’t be allowed to reject mail ballots that lack a proper date on their return envelopes.

The plaintiffs, led by the NAACP, are appealing a March 27 ruling from a three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and are seeking an opinion from the full court. A favorable outcome for the NAACP could prevent thousands of mail ballots from going uncounted this November, but it would not happen in time for the April 23 primary, the plaintiffs’ lawyers said.

The panel’s 2-1 ruling found that a Pennsylvania law requiring mail voters to handwrite a date on the return envelope did not violate a provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that’s meant to protect voters from being disenfranchised.

Marian Schneider, senior voting rights policy counsel at the ACLU of Pennsylvania, which is representing the plaintiffs, said the appeals court panel got the case wrong by narrowly interpreting the federal statute at issue as applying only to the voter registration process.

“It cannot be that Congress meant for it to apply only to registration,” she said “Because the absurdity of that result is that you have people apply to register, but then after you register them, you can disenfranchise them for some immaterial errors.”

Roughly 8,000 ballots were rejected during the 2022 midterm election for lacking a proper date or signature on the outer return envelope, according to the Pennsylvania Department of State.

A Votebeat and Spotlight PA analysis of data from three counties in 2022 found voters submitting the flawed ballots were more likely to come from communities with higher than average non-white populations compared with the overall voting population in the county. The department said that in last November’s election, the dating issue accounted for roughly 2,500 rejections.

At issue in the case was a provision of the Civil Rights Act known as the “materiality provision,” which says a person cannot be denied the right to vote because of “an error or omission on any record or paper relating to any application, registration, or other act requisite to voting,” if that error isn’t material to determining a voter’s eligibility.

Although a U.S. District Court judge ruled in November that Pennsylvania’s dating requirement violated that provision, the 3rd Circuit panel overturned that decision, with the majority writing that the materiality provision is limited to documents related to a voter registering to vote.

“It does not preempt state requirements on how qualified voters may cast a valid ballot, regardless what (if any) purpose those rules serve,” the opinion read.

Schneider said this interpretation invalidates the “or other act requisite to voting” part of the provision, and violates a “cardinal rule” that courts interpreting a law must “give meaning to all parts of a statute.”

The circuit court does not automatically have to grant the appeal, but some factors may weigh in the NAACP’s favor.

First, a separate three-judge panel of the court ruled the opposite way in a previous case, although the Supreme Court eventually nullified that ruling as no longer relevant. That case, a 2021 suit out of Lehigh County, also challenged the dating requirement, citing the Civil Rights Act’s materiality provision.

Additionally, the 3rd Circuit — which covers Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and the U.S. Virgin Islands — may decide to take the case because it is a matter of national significance, Schneider said, and because other circuit courts have similar issues pending before them.

The 11th Circuit, which covers Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, has a case before it dealing with whether voters in Georgia should be required to write their birthdate on the outer ballot envelope, or whether that violates the materiality provision.

The 5th Circuit, which covers Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, also has a pending case dealing with the provision. In that case, plaintiffs are challenging a Texas law that requires voters to write their voter ID number on their mail ballot.

If the 3rd Circuit decides to rehear the case, there could still be more challenges ahead.

A ruling overturning the three-judge panel’s opinion would give Republicans intervening in the case the option of appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court, which they have signaled they may do. And if the circuit courts split on the larger materiality issue, the Supreme Court would be more likely to take the case.

An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court might not be a favorable scenario for those looking to invalidate the dating requirement. Derek Muller, an election law professor at Notre Dame Law School, previously noted that when the Lehigh case made its way to the Supreme Court and was nullified, three of the court’s nine justices “sketched out a preliminary position” against the NAACP.

The NAACP could also appeal to the Supreme Court, in the event of another defeat in the 3rd Circuit.

“We’re going to have to cross that bridge when we get to it,” Schneider said. “It’s premature … but I’m trying to think optimistically.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

How will Trump’s false claims about mail ballots affect his own supporters?

2024-04-08T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s free weekly newsletter. Sign up to get future editions, including the latest reporting from Votebeat bureaus and curated news from other publications, delivered to your inbox every Saturday.

The Republican Party has tried, at least nominally, to undo some of the damage former President Donald Trump has done since 2020 to the party’s faith in voting by mail. But it appears Trump — the GOP presidential nominee three times running — doesn’t want to cooperate. In recent months he has called mailed ballots “a disaster” and “totally corrupt.” On Fox News, he said, “If you have mail-in balloting, you automatically have fraud.”

The evidence does not support his statements — something that’s been pointed out ad infinitum — and the Republican Party’s official position is that voters should use any method they can to cast their ballots. “We’ll have early voting in Michigan for the first time. We’ll take advantage of it,” a top Republican National Committee official said on a press call last week, CNN reported. “Mail ballots are not very old in Pennsylvania. We’ll have an opportunity to grow that. Ballot harvesting in Nevada is legal under certain circumstances. We’ll take advantage of it.”

Trump’s campaign appears aware that he is contradicting the party. In an emailed response to the Washington Post about the campaign’s position on vote by mail, a spokesperson sent back the party’s official line. Still, Trump himself continues to discourage GOP voters from casting ballots this way, a choice that has potential repercussions for voting in 2024.

For one thing, lots of people are writing about the challenge this presents for Republicans. In those articles, they’ll remind you of the 2020 U.S. Senate runoff in Georgia, after which Republicans lost control of the chamber. I was there, sitting next to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in the Georgia Emergency Management Agency office. Others on his staff had been warning for weeks that Trump’s comments had the potential to suppress the vote.

When the Senate results were called — TVs were mounted on every wall and people were running in and out with updates — Raffensperger didn’t really seem surprised.

“Trump did this,” Raffensperger said to me, dejectedly looking at the television on the far wall.

Nearly four years later, Trump’s claims about mail voting, and elections in general, continue to undermine confidence in elections among his supporters, and the leadership of the Republican Party is clearly worried about a similar outcome (even if many of their candidates haven’t made the same realization). A recent poll from the Secure Elections Project found that roughly two-thirds of Republicans in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin say they believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, which is consistent with the national average for Republicans and conservatives.

“I worry as both someone who is concerned about our country but also as a Republican” about Trump’s false claims, Trey Greyson, the co-chair of the advisory board for Secure Elections Project, told me. “After all, why take the time to vote if it’s rigged?”

Greyson points out more practical concerns about setting up voters to be disenfranchised. “What if too many GOP voters were to listen to Trump and ignore voting by mail, if that were an option, and something unexpected — weather, illness, traffic delays, work — were to pop up on Election Day?” he said. “I’m reminded of the potential big snowstorm in the GOP areas of Nevada that was forecast for Election Day in 2022.”

The only real whiff of good news the Secure Elections poll found was that most of the swing state Republicans who responded trust their own elections: They’re happy with the election processes in their states and have confidence in their own election administrators. Most believed their own vote counted.

But, of course, most also still believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump because they believe the votes of others were stolen, and Trump is continuing to promote that claim.

In a radio interview this month, Trump again falsely claimed he won Wisconsin in 2020. “And after the wrongdoing was found, people said, ‘Well, he actually did win,’” Trump said during a radio interview. Actually, President Joe Biden narrowly won Wisconsin in 2020, and there has been no evidence the results were fraudulent. Nevertheless, it is a sign that Trump plans to continue falsely asserting he won the 2020 election — claims that supercharged his fundraising pitches four years ago.

It remains to be seen how his claims affect voter behavior this time around — or whether it makes a difference that his own party has reasons not to support his assertions this time.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

How Milwaukee’s top election official has worked to restore trust after a 2020 misstep

2024-04-05T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

Update, May 9, 2024: Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson decided in early May not to reappoint Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Claire Woodall, instead putting her deputy, Paulina Gutiérrez, in her role. Johnson’s staff said the decision not to reappoint Woodall was made over “management issues,” not her technical ability to do the job well.

Before a single vote is counted at Milwaukee’s central counting facility, Step 1 is for an election official to check every ballot tabulator to make sure the number of absentee ballots processed so far is zero. Hours later, and after several thousand ballots have been scanned, comes the climax: a late-night delivery of the voting results at the county’s election office.

In between is a meticulous process to make sure thumb drives carrying vote totals in Wisconsin’s largest absentee ballot processing facility end up where they’re supposed to, aren’t tampered with, and remain tracked through a full chain-of-custody process.

All 26 steps are covered by a checklist that Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Claire Woodall developed after the same process went awry four years ago, landing her in the crosshairs of some who falsely accused her of rigging the 2020 election.

Woodall devised the checklist in consultation with a Republican who was wary of the city’s lack of an official policy for extracting absentee ballot election results and sending them to the county. It was one of a handful of changes Woodall has implemented recently in reaction to criticism of her office’s handling of the 2020 election, when real and perceived missteps fed into false allegations.

The new policies, Woodall said Tuesday, are about balancing two priorities:

“We’re appeasing those folks,” she said of the critics and skeptics. “But we’re also protecting ourselves by giving as much transparency as humanly possible.”

Did you vote for the first time this year? Let us know how it went.

Woodall spoke to Votebeat during Tuesday’s primary election from her City Hall office, where she and other Milwaukee Election Commission staff spent most of the day troubleshooting minor issues, from political activists electioneering too close to a polling site to voting machines briefly jamming. Meanwhile, city residents cast just over 85,500 votes, including over 26,000 absentee ballots, at 181 polling sites.

The 2020 presidential contest was Woodall’s first general election as Milwaukee’s top election official, and it still hovers over her work.

That year, after officials finished tabulating absentee ballots at the city’s central counting facility in the wee hours after Election Day, Woodall left with a police escort to deliver the flash drives containing the vote totals to the Milwaukee County election office. But she forgot one of the 12 flash drives at central count, a mistake some conservatives seized on as a flagrant oversight.

Some went further and alleged that Woodall and other election officials tampered with the results, noting that the 3 a.m. slip-up happened right around the time Milwaukee officials updated the results with votes from 169,000 absentee ballots, which broke heavily for Joe Biden.

There’s no evidence of any such tampering, and a recount confirmed the initial election results, but Woodall said her error prompted a Republican election worker, Sheila Stapleton, to suggest creating a new chain-of-custody policy to increase trust with the public.

The suggestion came just before the November 2022 midterm election, around the time the Milwaukee election office was caught in the middle of another scandal, Woodall said.

As city officials prepared to administer the election that year, then-Milwaukee Election Commission Deputy Director Kimberly Zapata told Woodall that she had requested three military absentee ballots under fake names to be sent to the home of a Republican state Assembly member. Zapata was quickly fired, but the news sullied the office’s reputation and shook up Milwaukee’s election operation.

On short notice, Woodall had to take over for Zapata to manage the central count for that election and, in the aftermath of the firing, noticed an air of skepticism among the workers she was supposed to train.

“That weekend, I was just in a mode of like, wow, we have abandoned all trust now after this has been the news story this week.” she said. “And so really just trying to be extra patient and listen to all of their concerns.”

Woodall develops new election policies to restore trust

Stapleton’s concern, the issue she raised with Woodall in 2022, was that there weren’t official policies to make sure the USB drives inserted into tabulators had zero counted ballots before they started recording vote counts, or to ensure the secure transfer of city absentee voting results to the county level.

Without those policies, Stapleton said, “How do we even know what’s going on once the data is taken off the machines?”

Woodall and Stapleton then developed a version of what has now become a 26-point checklist. The goal was to show that the USB drives carrying the city’s absentee ballot election results were visible to the public and untampered with as they moved from the city to the county, she said.

With the new checklist, Stapleton said, “I’m a lot more confident in the process of just knowing that the flash drives have been properly formatted, properly downloaded and properly maintained.”

Milwaukee Election Commission Deputy Director Paulina Gutierrez operates a tabulator at the city's central ballot-counting facility on April 2.

Per the checklist, after a member of the Milwaukee Board of Absentee Canvassers ensures tabulators show no processed ballots at the start of the day, the election official leading the central count operation — in public view — clears and reformats the flash drives that’ll store the election results from each machine.

Later in the process, after completed absentee ballots are fed into the tabulator, the official goes from machine to machine, inserting the USB sticks in the tabulators to export the results. After every machine’s results are exported, the official places the flash drive in a clear, tamper-proof bag in public view.

On Tuesday, several election observers along with a Republican and Democratic city election commissioner observed Milwaukee Election Commission Deputy Director Paulina Gutierrez exporting the election results from central count’s eight tabulators. The two partisan commissioners then accompanied Gutierrez to deliver the USB drives to the county.

The city-to-county handoff is a feature of Wisconsin’s decentralized elections, with about 1,850 clerks administering elections at the municipal level and then each providing the results to the state’s 72 county clerks, who are required to post unofficial results to their websites.

The new Milwaukee procedures “support the integrity of the process, to show voters that it is the proper chain of custody so that there’s no perception of inaccuracies occurring,” said Douglas Haag, the Republican commissioner who observed the handoff between the city and county on Tuesday.

Before the new process, election observer Jefferson Davis said he had “major concerns” about the chain of custody in Milwaukee. Davis, a former Menomonee Falls village president, is a conservative election activist who has entertained and promoted conspiracy theories.

Since then, Davis said, Milwaukee election officials have “done more than they need to, to assure us that this is being done right.”

Davis spent hours at the central count facility Tuesday, sitting in front of election workers processing absentee ballots and walking around to watch workers tabulate votes. He checked where the tabulators and their access points were, figured out the floor plan of central count, observed how many election workers were at each table, and watched to ensure the correct ballots were going to the right workers.

“We’re not suggesting anything. We just want to be part of that process, which they’re always very good about,” he said. “You can’t find better people than Claire, Paulina.”

But others remained skeptical.

Just before 8 p.m., as absentee ballot counting was wrapping up, election officials at central count were notified that they just received the Postal Service’s final delivery of the night: 150 absentee ballots. Workers were notified there would be a slight delay in finishing up work.

After officials tabulated those ballots, Gutierrez and the partisan election commissioners watching her work left central count at about 9:45 p.m. and arrived at the county courthouse about 15 minutes later to deliver the city’s unofficial absentee ballot results.

The results, posted soon after, were enough to swing the previously reported margin on a city referendum the other way, leading to the passage of a measure to spend $252 million on Milwaukee Public Schools.

Shortly after, conservative radio host Dan O’Donnell posted on social media, in an apparently sarcastic reference to the city’s overnight 2020 upload of absentee ballots, “No way: Late night votes in Milwaukee have won an election for liberals. That sort of thing NEVER happens here!”

“I don’t know why anyone thinks voting is real anymore,” another social media user responded.

Election officials and experts have repeatedly explained that updating election results with absentee ballot totals can often cause shifts like this, because of the difference in voting patterns between Republicans and Democrats. But even with the new processes and close public scrutiny, their message is often contradicted by people who raise baseless suspicion.

Addressing more election concerns, but still facing hurdles

Other measures grew from Woodall’s effort to address various election concerns since 2020.

In late 2021, Peter Bernegger, an election conspiracy theorist who has been convicted of fraud, filed a public records lawsuit against her alleging that she was part of a “sect” of Milwaukee election officials who, with the help of an unnamed man from Illinois, printed pre-filled ballots for Biden in a “hidden room.”

That room he was referencing was a conference room in the Milwaukee Election Commission’s City Hall office filled with printers, telephones, monitors, and some extra unused absentee ballots.

Although Bernegger’s claims were baseless, Woodall added a keycard lock to the room this year so the commission could track who had access to it. The room previously had key access, and only authorized staff got keys, but it was harder to tell who entered the room, Woodall said.

With the new lock, she said, “We are able to say, look, here’s the audit record of everyone who entered that room: What is the accusation?”

Using a private grant, Woodall also purchased about 20 more cameras to monitor the central count facility.

The purchase wasn’t a direct response to any specific accusations, Woodall said, but rather a proactive measure that will allow city officials to provide video records in case something goes awry — or if somebody makes false allegations that officials want to refute.

Despite Woodall’s efforts, the election office continues to face scrutiny, sometimes for its own mistakes.

Just after Zapata, the former Milwaukee deputy election official, was convicted for absentee ballot fraud and misconduct in office in March, reports emerged that almost 220 Milwaukee residents received absentee ballots for the incorrect ward.

“Horrible week for that to happen,” Woodall said.

The Election Commission alerted the residents, issued them new ballots, and developed plans to make sure only one of the ballots they were issued would be counted, Woodall said.

Woodall said there are still bound to be some mistakes because of human error and technological faults, but she said the goal is to make sure voting is 100% accurate.

“I think all we can do is continue to be totally transparent, both in our successes and our failures … regarding all aspects of election administration.” she said. “I mean, we didn’t hide the wrong ballots. We didn’t try to conceal it. We immediately went public, wanting to alert voters, to double check our work.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Pennsylvania can require voters to put a date on mail ballots, U.S. appeals court rules

2024-03-29T00:21:07+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

A federal appeals court decision upholding Pennsylvania’s rules for voting by mail could mean that tens of thousands of ballots are rejected in this year’s election because they lack a date or are misdated. But the full impact of the ruling is still up in the air while the parties who brought the case decide whether to appeal.

A panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 Wednesday that a Pennsylvania law requiring mail voters to handwrite a date on the return envelope did not violate a provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that’s meant to protect voters from being denied the right to register to vote.

Update April 10, 2024: Voting rights plaintiffs seek new ruling on undated ballots case in federal appeals court

The decision could have broad implications: If plaintiffs appeal to the Supreme Court and justices uphold it, it could become precedent for the entire country, rather than just the jurisdictions in the 3rd Circuit. Such a ruling could limit how the Civil Rights Act applies to requirements for casting a ballot.

And some conservative justices already hinted in an earlier ruling that they’re skeptical of the argument that the date requirement violates the Act. When the court nullified a previous opinion from the 3rd Circuit that ruled such ballots should be counted, three of the court’s conservatives wrote that the lower court’s opinion was “likely wrong.”

The plaintiffs will now need to make a choice about whether it is worth pushing this case forward, or containing the decision to the 3rd Circuit, said Derek Muller, an election law professor at Notre Dame Law School.

“I think there’s a lot of challenges raising it with the Supreme Court if you are the plaintiffs,” he said. “You’ve already got three justices who sketched out a preliminary position against your position, so I just think it’s an uphill battle to go to the court and make that claim now.”

Andy Hoover, a spokesperson for the ACLU of Pennsylvania, which represented the plaintiffs, said, “We are analyzing the ruling and have not made a decision about next steps.”

The Department of State, which was a defendant in the case but took the view that the ballots should not be rejected, said in a statement that it was “reviewing potential next steps” and highlighted recent changes it made to the return envelopes that it hopes will reduce the number of ballots rejected this year.

Even if it is appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court — given where we are in the court’s current term — Muller thinks any decision would be unlikely to come before 2025.

“My guess is this rule will be in place for 2024.”

There may be other action in the courts in the meantime.

Adam Bonin, a Philadelphia-based attorney who regularly works with Democratic candidates, is currently representing a township supervisor candidate in a case tangentially related to the 3rd Circuit appeal.

“I think the majority got it wrong here,” said Bonin, who was also involved in a 2021 case from Lehigh County on the same issue. “This was a remedial statute intended to remove all sorts of barriers to the right to vote. I thought that Congress was very clear that this goes to all the steps” that involve ensuring a vote is counted.

The three-judge panel’s ruling can still be appealed to the full 3rd Circuit by April 10.

For their part, Republicans are embracing the decision as a victory.

“The Court ruling is a gigantic win for Pennsylvania, the nation, and election integrity,” said Chairman Lawrence Tabas of the Pennsylvania GOP, which was one of the intervening defendants in the case.

Wednesday’s ruling, from a three judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, centered on whether the date requirement under Pennsylvania election law violated a part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act known as the “materiality provision.”

That provision says a person cannot be denied the right to vote because of “an error or omission on any record or paper relating to any application, registration, or other act requisite to voting, if such error or omission is not material in determining whether such individual is qualified under State law to vote.”

The majority on the panel ruled that the provision only applies when the state is determining who may vote.

“In other words, its role stops at the door of the voting place,” Judge Thomas Ambro, an appointee of former Democratic President Bill Clinton, wrote for the majority. “The Provision does not apply to rules, like the date requirement, that govern how a qualified voter must cast his ballot for it to be counted.”

Mike Lee, executive director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said in a statement that if the decision stands, thousands of Pennsylvanians could lose their vote over a “meaningless paperwork error.”

“The ballots in question in this case come from voters who are eligible and who met the submission deadline,” Lee said. “In passing the Civil Rights Act, Congress put a guardrail in place to be sure that states don’t erect unnecessary barriers that disenfranchise voters. It’s unfortunate that the court failed to recognize that principle. Voters lose as a result of this ruling.”

Ruling distinguishes registration barriers from voting rules

Unlike the last time this question was before the 3rd Circuit, the court split on the issue, voting 2-1 against the plaintiffs.

Ambro, along with Judge Cindy Chung — an appointee of Democratic President Joe Biden — took the view that the materiality provision is limited to documents related to a voter registering to vote, which would “restrict who may vote.”

“It does not preempt state requirements on how qualified voters may cast a valid ballot, regardless what (if any) purpose those rules serve,” the opinion read.

Much of the decision came down to whether the provision deals only with documents related to registering to vote, or whether its reference to “other acts requisite to voting” applies to other documents voters may encounter when trying to cast a ballot. Ambro and Chung argued that when the materiality provision is read in context with the sentences around it, along with the discussion among legislators who wrote it, it was clear that it related only to registration documents.

They also argued that rejecting undated or improperly dated ballots did not take away the voter’s ability to vote and that states had the freedom to make rules concerning how votes are to be cast, such as rejecting mail ballots that have identifiable markings on the secrecy envelope.

“A voter who fails to abide by state rules prescribing how to make a vote effective is not “den[ied] the right . . . to vote” when his ballot is not counted,” Ambro wrote. “If state law provides that ballots completed in different colored inks, or secrecy envelopes containing improper markings, or envelopes missing a date, must be discounted, that is a legislative choice that federal courts might review if there is unequal application, but they have no power to review under the Materiality Provision.”

Judge Patty Schwartz — an appointee of former Democratic President Barack Obama — disagreed, noting that the date on the mail ballot return envelope is in relation to a declaration that states “I hereby declare that I am qualified to vote in this election,” which makes it fall under the provision.

She also pointed out that the 1964 Civil Rights Act defines “voting” as “all action necessary to make a vote effective including, but not limited to, registration or other action required by State law prerequisite to voting, casting a ballot, and having such ballot counted and included in the appropriate totals of votes cast.”

When this section is read in conjunction with the materiality provision, she argued, the dating requirement becomes subject to that provision.

How we got here

Wednesday’s decision came as part of an appeal of a November 2023 ruling from U.S. District Judge Susan Baxter in the Western District of Pennsylvania.

Shortly after the 2023 election, she ruled that the whether the ballot envelope had a date was “immaterial” to a voter’s eligibility, and that ballots should not be rejected over what is essentially a technicality.

“There are many reasons to date a document,” Baxter wrote at the time, adding, “Dates may also be wholly irrelevant, as in this case. The requirement at issue here is irrelevant in determining when the voter signed their declaration.”Her ruling was just part of a string of disputes over whether to count undated or incorrectly dated mail ballots that have been before the courts since the state’s no-excuse mail voting law, Act 77, passed in 2019.

That law required that voters sign and date the outer return envelope.

A 2021 case out of Lehigh County challenged the provision, citing the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s materiality provision.

In 2022, a separate three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously agreed in the Lehigh case that the date issue was immaterial, but the U.S. Supreme Court nullified the ruling later that year, after one of the candidates in the race in question conceded.

That left the question up in the air again ahead of the 2022 midterm election, until the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled on Nov. 1 that counties should not count the ballots if they were missing a date. The court defined an incorrectly dated ballot as one that fell outside of the time range for acceptable ballots, Sept. 19 through Nov. 8, 2022, the first day mail ballots were sent out through the day of the election.

In practice, this has often led to counties rejecting ballots that they know were cast in the correct time period.

Roughly 8,000 ballots were rejected during the 2022 midterm election for lacking a proper date or signature on the outer return envelope, according to the Pennsylvania Department of State.

A Votebeat and Spotlight PA analysis of data from three counties in 2022 — Philadelphia, Allegheny, and Erie — found voters submitting the flawed ballots were more likely to come from communities with higher than average non-white populations compared with the overall voting population in the county.The department began being able to track rejections specifically for dating issues in 2023, and said in last November’s election the issue accounted for roughly 2,500 rejections.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Everything you need to know to vote in Michigan’s presidential primary

2024-02-09T18:30:49+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

When Michiganders go to the polls this month to cast a ballot in the presidential primaries, it will be the first chance for every voter to take advantage of the state’s new early in-person option — one feature in a series of changes for elections this year based on the passage of Ballot Proposal 2 in 2022.

The Feb. 27 primary ballot features presidential candidates for the Democratic and Republican parties, including frontrunners President Joe Biden and Donald Trump, but also several Republican candidates who are no longer running. Some jurisdictions will also have local ballot questions up for a vote. Primaries for other offices, including for Congress and U.S. Senate, will be held Aug. 6.

Who can vote and how to register in Michigan

U.S. citizens who have lived in Michigan for at least 30 days and are at least 17.5 years old can register to vote for this election, but residents must be 18 years old by Election Day.* Those currently serving a jail or prison sentence cannot register or vote.

Since 2019, Michigan automatically registers to vote anyone who is eligible and of age when they obtain a state identification card or driver’s license. One can also register to vote online at Michigan.gov/Vote, in person at a local clerk’s office, or with organizations that register voters.

If you’re not sure whether your voter registration is up to date, you can check your status at the state’s voter information center.

Michigan eliminated in-person registration deadlines and implemented same-day registration starting in 2020, meaning residents can register and vote on Election Day through 8 p.m. However, if you are registering online, then you must complete your registration by Feb. 12 or have a mailed application postmarked by Feb. 12 — at least 15 days ahead of Election Day.

All Michiganders can vote in the election regardless of their party affiliation, but they may only vote in one party’s primary. In other words, a voter may not cast votes for both a Democratic and a Republican candidate. One could vote in the Republican presidential primary election in February, and later vote in the Democratic primary in August, or vice versa.

How to vote early with an absentee ballot

Michigan voters can request an absentee ballot, then choose one of several options for returning it.

Registered voters can obtain an absentee ballot by applying online at Michigan.gov/Vote. Ballots can be requested until 5 p.m. on the Friday before Election Day — in this case, Feb. 23 — but the secretary of state recommends applying at least 15 days prior to allow time for delivery. Absentee ballots are also available at local clerks’ offices through 4 p.m. on the day prior to the election, Feb. 26, or can be requested via mail.

The state also now offers voters the choice to be placed on a permanent absentee ballot list. The local clerk will mail voters on the list an absentee ballot for every local, state, and federal election. To sign up the next time you apply for an absentee ballot, check the box next to “automatically send me an absent voter ballot for each future election for which I’m eligible.”

Absentee ballots must be filled out correctly or they will not be counted. The absentee ballot package voters receive will contain a ballot, a secrecy sleeve, a return envelope, and ballot-marking instructions.

Be sure to sign and date the return envelope where prompted.
Ensure your signature matches the signature on your state identification.
Insert the ballot into the secrecy sleeve as instructed.

Once you have filled out an absentee ballot, it can be returned one of several ways. State law now requires all municipalities to offer secure drop boxes where one can drop their ballot. For locations, check with your local clerk’s office, or type in your address here.

Absentee ballots can also be dropped off at a local clerk’s office, or mailed to it with the provided pre-paid envelope, another new statewide feature under law this year. The secretary of state recommends hand-delivering an absentee ballot to the local clerk’s office or a dropbox if it is within 14 days of an election. Besides the voter, only a family member or a member of the same household can legally drop off someone else’s ballot.

No matter how they are returned, absentee ballots must be received by the local clerk by 8 p.m. on Election Day to count.

For members of the military stationed or overseas voters*, mail-in ballots must be received by the local clerk where the voter is registered up to six days after Election Day, or March 4.

Early in-person voting

This year’s new option to vote at early polling places differs from previous in-person absentee voting in that it allows the voter to fill out their ballot and insert it into a tabulator to see that it has been counted, just as they would on Election Day.

The state requires communities to offer early in-person voting for a minimum of nine consecutive days, but communities can offer it for up to 29 days. The mandatory period for in-person voting for this election begins on Feb. 17 and ends on Feb. 25.

Where communities provide early polling places will differ from place to place, because of flexibility written into the new law. Some townships and municipalities might be teaming up to offer a centralized polling place in a neighboring jurisdiction. In other cases, the county might run the early polling places and locate them across a number of key municipalities. You can type in your address at this link to find your nearest early vote location.

How to track your absentee ballot

Once you have returned your absentee ballot, you can check its status by tracking it here.

If you cast an absentee ballot and it was submitted incorrectly or is invalidated, you will likely need to go to your local clerk’s office and pick up a new one and fill it out correctly.

How to vote in person on Election Day

Polling places are open on Election Day from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., but, if there is a line, you can still vote later as long as you were already in line by 8 p.m. Find your polling place by typing in your address at the state polling place locator.

Bring a photo identification card to the polls if you have one. That can include federal, state, or local government-issued cards like a passport, military identification card, student identification card, tribal identification card, or a concealed pistol license.

If you do not have one of the above, you will be asked to sign an affidavit confirming your identity before casting your ballot.

Check your voter registration status at the state’s voter information center.

If your name does not appear on the check-in list at your polling place, you will be issued a provisional ballot. Once a provisional ballot is cast, a voter has six days to provide appropriate identification to their local clerk. Once election officials can verify that a voter is correctly registered, the provisional ballot will be counted.

If you don’t want to cast a provisional ballot, you can ensure you are correctly registered by going to your local clerk’s office, where you can take advantage of same-day registration and then cast an absentee ballot there if needed.

If you applied for an absentee ballot but decided to vote in person anyway, bring that unused ballot to the polling place to be surrendered so you’re clear to cast a new ballot.

Open carry of firearms is prohibited in common polling places, like schools or places of worship, unless the owner of the building gives permission, or “the person possesses a valid, concealed pistol license, and no other building policy prohibits firearms possession by a concealed pistol license holder.” Exceptions to the rules include security guards, or current or former law enforcement officers.

The secretary of state recommends individuals witnessing or experiencing voter intimidation report it to an election worker or their local clerk. One can also contact the voter protection hotline at:

English: 866-OUR-VOTE / (866) 687-8683
Spanish: 888-VE-Y-VOTA / (888) 839-8682
Arabic: 844-YALLA-US / (844) 925-5287
Bengali, Cantonese, Hindi, Korean, Mandarin, Tagalog, Urdu, and Vietnamese: 888-API-VOTE / (888) 274-8683

How to get assistance with voting

Voters in the city of Fennville, Clyde Township, and Covert Township have a right to a ballot in Spanish, while Hamtramck voters can obtain a ballot in Bengali, under the U.S. Voting Rights Act.* Voters in Dearborn and Hamtramck can also request ballots in Arabic.

Voters with disabilities that make it difficult to fill out a ballot may apply for a ballot that can be completed electronically, printed, and returned to the local clerk. You can apply for one here.

Voters who are blind, disabled, unable to read, unable to write, or cannot read English can bring anyone they choose to assist with voting except their employer, an agent of their employer, or a union representative.

Michigan has an ombudsperson for Accessible Elections to help people with disabilities who are attempting to vote. The ombudsman can be reached at 517-335-2730 or email MDOS-ADAVoting@michigan.gov.

Voters with hearing impairments should contact the Bureau of Elections by email at elections@michigan.gov.

If you run into any problems, we want to hear about them!

If you have any other questions or concerns about voting in Michigan, please let us know! We can be reached at community@votebeat.org.

Corrections, Feb 26: This article has been updated to clarify when 17-year-olds can cast a ballot before Election Day; to clarify how all members of the military or overseas voters can return an absentee ballot; and to correct the list of communities where voters can request ballots in Spanish.

Pa. counties must accept undated, incorrectly dated mail ballots, federal court rules

2023-11-21T21:55:14+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

A federal court has directed Pennsylvania counties to accept mail ballots that a voter has failed to date or misdated, a long-awaited decision that could affect thousands of ballots in the upcoming 2024 presidential election.

The date a voter writes on the envelope they return a mail ballot in is “immaterial” to its eligibility, Judge Susan Baxter of the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania ruled Tuesday. Under the materiality provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Baxter said ballots should not be rejected over what is essentially a technicality that isn’t related to the voter’s eligibility.

“There are many reasons to date a document,” Baxter wrote, adding, “Dates may also be wholly irrelevant, as in this case. The requirement at issue here is irrelevant in determining when the voter signed their declaration.”

The ruling in the complicated and long-running case could still be appealed within 30 days. If it stands, it means counties would no longer be forced to disenfranchise voters for failing to date their mail ballot or using a date previous courts have found to be outside an acceptable time range.

Plaintiffs including the NAACP and League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania applauded the ruling.

“Pennsylvania citizens must have complete and unfettered access to the ballot box, free from unnecessary obstacles or interference,” said Susan Gobreski, vice president of policy at the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania. “Today’s decision is a victory for voters and the accessibility of our elections.”

The Pennsylvania Department of State said in a statement that it is “pleased with the result.”

Roughly 8,000 ballots were rejected during the 2022 midterm election for lacking a proper date or signature on the return outer envelope, according to information from the Pennsylvania Department of State. The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania estimates that number was greater than 6,000 in this month’s municipal election.

“For 2023, the impact today is that counties should count the ballots they have set aside,” Marian Schneider, senior voting rights policy counsel at the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said.

Disputes over whether to count undated or incorrectly dated mail ballots in Pennsylvania have been before the courts since the state’s no-excuse mail voting law, Act 77, passed in 2019.

That law required that voters sign and date the outer return envelope.

A 2021 case out of Lehigh County challenged the provision, citing the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s requirement that a voter’s ballot could not be rejected for reasons that were immaterial to the voter’s eligibility.

In 2022, the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously agreed with the immaterial defect argument in the Lehigh case, but the U.S. Supreme Court mooted the ruling later that year, after one of the candidates in the race in question had conceded.

That left the question again up in the air ahead of the 2022 midterm election, before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled on Nov. 1 that counties should not count the ballots. The court defined an incorrectly dated ballot as one that fell outside of the range of Sept. 19 through Nov. 8, 2022, the date of the election.

In practice, this has often led to counties rejecting ballots that they know were cast in the correct time period.

Jeff Greenburg, a former election director in Mercer County who now works as a senior advisor on election administration for the Philadelphia-based nonprofit Committee of Seventy, said this issue has been one of the most pressing items counties have been looking to the Legislature to resolve.

When a mail ballot is sent from a county elections office or vendor hired by the county to a voter, the date it is sent is recorded in the Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors, or SURE system. As Baxter noted in the “undisputed facts” section of her opinion, counties also know exactly when the ballot is received back by election officials, since a barcode on the return envelope is scanned to record the return date.

Voters often forget to date the return envelope, write their birthdays, or, as a Votebeat and Spotlight PA reporter witnessed in Chester County earlier this month, they write just the month and year without a day.

“Simple voter error and partial omissions related to the date declaration also resulted in rejection of mail ballots that were timely received according to their entry into the SURE system,” Baxter wrote.

Shortly after last year’s election, the ACLU of Pennsylvania, along with the NAACP and several other organizations, sued the Pennsylvania Department of State in federal court to have these ballots counted.

It is not immediately clear if the losing parties, which include the Republican National Committee, Lancaster, and Berks counties, will appeal.

“You could imagine in a presidential cycle, when the number of ballots skyrockets, tens of thousands of ballots set aside due to errors like this,” Greenburg, of the Committee of Seventy, said. “My hope is that ultimately it is resolved in time for the 2024 election.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Texas fixes some obstacles to mail voting that dogged voters after 2021 restrictions

2023-06-30T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

Texas lawmakers are once again revamping requirements to vote by mail, this time with the goal of lowering rejection rates of mail-in applications and ballots.

The changes come a year after thousands of Texans’ applications were rejected due to more stringent identification requirements adopted as part of a sweeping 2021 law.

The latest round of changes, which passed with bipartisan support this legislative session, will give voters more opportunities and time to correct errors. Voters should also be able to more easily access the state’s online tracking tool for mail-in ballot applications and ballots.

Some voters are still questioning why more restrictive rules were necessary in the first place, as well as whether this year’s fixes go far enough.

“Why was everything changed? What was the problem? What are they fixing? And did they really fix it?” said Julie Espinoza, 58, of Collin County.

Espinoza has been voting by mail in Texas since the 1980s. But last year, she was unable to vote for the first time after her mail-in ballot for the March 2022 primary was never delivered. Espinoza, who uses a wheelchair and does not drive, was not able to find transportation to a polling location in time to cast a ballot.

“Now I have lost confidence. Now I am nervous that it’ll happen again and that this system might not work,” she said.

How Senate Bill 1 changed voting by mail in Texas

In summer 2021, Texas legislators, responding to false claims of widespread voter fraud, approved far-reaching election legislation that, among many other provisions, added new ID requirements to voting by mail.

Existing law already limited who could qualify to cast a mail ballot rather than an in-person ballot, primarily to older or disabled voters. Prior to Senate Bill 1, Texans who voted by mail were required to provide only their name, address, and signature.

The new law required mail voters to provide their driver’s license number or part of their Social Security number on their ballot application and carrier envelopes. When the new voting law was enacted, voters had very little time to get familiar with the new requirements, which typically arrived on forms packed with instructions written in very small print.

At the time, 1.9 million Texas voters had only one of the two numbers — either their driver’s license number or Social Security number — in the state’s voter registration database. If voters put down the wrong one, often because they didn’t remember which number they had provided when they registered, their ballot application or ballot was rejected.

Trudy Hancock, Brazos County elections administrator, told Votebeat that older voters often did not remember which ID number they used to register. They’d add one instead of the other or would simply leave that section blank.

If voters learned they had made an error on their application and wanted to correct it, they were allowed to do so only in person, “and that defeated the whole purpose of voting by mail for voters,” Hancock said. “They were angry. They’d call us and tell us that we were making it harder to vote.”

All of this led to confusion, frustration, and errors, election officials told Votebeat. And during the March 2022 primary election, only months after the governor had signed the bill into law, at least 12,000 mail ballot applications and more than 24,000 mail ballots were rejected, disproportionately impacting Asian, Latino, and Black voters.

“It really makes us question whether we live in a fair and open democracy when we have rejections at that rate. Especially with Asians being the fastest-growing demographic in Texas and becoming more civically engaged,” said Sarah Chen, a board member at Asian Texans for Justice and an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project. “Having a ballot rejected can be absolutely devastating for somebody who is so excited to exercise that right to participate in our democracy. ”

During the Legislature’s 2021 voting legislation debate, Republican lawmakers said Texans’ expanded mail-voting option during the COVID-19 pandemic was “convenient” but made elections more susceptible to voter fraud, although there’s no evidence of such widespread abuse. They added ID requirements previously sought by Sen. Bryan Hughes — drafted behind closed doors and without public input — requiring election workers to verify a voter’s identity and eligibility.

At a committee meeting that August, Hughes, a Mineola Republican, said Senate Bill 1 added “security measures aimed at those trying to cheat. At ballot harvesters trying to influence, trying to coerce, trying to steal votes, trying to mislead voters.”

The 2021 legislation did introduce a process for a voter to fix mistakes on their ballot application and their ballot. That year, lawmakers also passed a separate bill requiring the secretary of state to create an online tracking system for voters’ applications and ballots. However, the tool could be difficult to access because it required voters to enter their voter registration address, which had to match exactly the address the state had on file for each voter.

For example, if a voter typed in “St.” instead of “Street” or vice versa, a message would pop up that said “voter not found.” And if the state’s database had a typo in a voter’s address, which is filled in manually, that would also lead to problems accessing the system.

2023 changes to voting by mail in Texas

Throughout 2022, local election administrators across the state took note of the problems.

They mobilized to alert voters in their counties of the changes to the process. They talked to news outlets to spread the word about the new procedures and added brightly colored paper inserts to mail ballot packets, reminding voters to include their ID numbers.

By the November general election, the statewide rejection rates decreased from 12% in the March primary to 2.7%.

Then election officials told lawmakers about voters’ experiences with the new rules. Some said they are glad to see lawmakers this year listened to suggestions from election workers across the state.

“This is a very solid step in removing some of those barriers in the process,” said Remi Garza, the Cameron County elections administrator, pointing to how the changes make it easier for voters to access the online portal and correct errors without coming in person. “Every step has a deadline, and the harder it is to meet those deadlines for the voter, the harder it is for us to get their vote counted.”

This year’s Senate Bill 1599, authored by Hughes and sponsored by state Rep. John Bucy, an Austin Democrat in the House, requires election officials to notify voters of errors in their mail-in ballot application or mail-in ballot. It requires election officials to instruct voters on how to return their corrected forms by mail, in person, or through the state’s online tracking tool.

The bill will also allow election workers to begin reviewing mail-in ballots as soon as they are delivered, no later than the ninth day before Election Day.* Under previous law, small counties with a population of less than 100,000 could not begin that process until after the last day of early voting, giving them only a couple of days to do so, with fewer resources. That also meant they had less time to notify voters if they found a problem.

Another bill, House Bill 357, also authored by Hughes and sponsored by Bucy, changes the information a voter must provide in order to access the state’s online tracking tool instead of their exact voter registration address. Under this new law, voters now must provide their name, their date of birth, the last four digits of their Social Security number, and a state ID number. Both bills were signed by the governor this month.

Once the new measures take effect in September, here’s how the process will work:

A voter who qualifies to vote by mail — someone who is 65 or older, has a physical disability, is outside of the county, or is incarcerated but otherwise eligible — will need to fill out an application to vote by mail. Once it’s delivered to the county elections office, if a voter made a mistake on that application — for example, the address does not match what’s on file or maybe a voter forgot to provide their ID number — they’ll get a call or an email from an election official who’ll guide them on how to fix it and the deadlines to do so. Voters can also check the status of their application and ballot using the state’s online tracking tool. There, voters can see whether election officials flagged an error.

Texas remains one of the hardest states in which to vote, voting rights advocates say, and voting by mail is especially difficult, even for qualified voters. For instance, voters who qualify must annually request a new application to vote by mail in elections for that calendar year, and obtaining the application is hard for older voters who might have difficulty accessing the internet.

The San Antonio-based Southwest Voter Registration Project is part of a coalition of voting rights groups that sued the state over voting restrictions implemented by Senate Bill 1. The outcome of the case is pending a trial date later this year.

“Whatever changes they make,” said Lydia Camarillo, president of the Southwest Voter Registration Project, “they’re ultimately not improving the right of a voter to vote without having any issues.”

Who qualifies to vote by mail in Texas?

According to the Texas secretary of state, to be eligible to vote early by mail a voter must:

be 65 years or older;
be sick or disabled;
be out of the county on election day and during the period for early voting by personal appearance;
be expected to give birth within three weeks before or after election day; or
be in jail but otherwise eligible.

Correction, July 10: This article originally misstated the new time frame for election workers to begin reviewing mail-in ballots before Election Day.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

This Pa. county rejected voters’ flawed mail ballots. Then it refused to count their in-person votes, too.

2023-06-08T18:10:04+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

Delaware County disenfranchised a handful of eligible voters in the May primary by rejecting their provisional ballots based on an allegedly incorrect interpretation of the law, the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania argued in a new lawsuit.

Following the May 16 primary, Delaware County’s Board of Elections decided not to accept provisional ballots cast in person by voters who had already been told their mail ballots were rejected due to technical defects. That means that these voters were twice rejected, after trying to remedy their mail ballot mistake by voting provisionally at their nearby polling places, and ultimately were unable to have their ballot counted.

While the legal dispute only involves roughly a half-dozen voters, it could have implications statewide for whether voters whose mail ballots get rejected have the chance to vote by other means.

The dispute hinges on a contradiction between Pennsylvania’s vote by mail law and the state’s statute governing provisional voting, which, if not resolved, has advocates concerned that it could be used as a way to disenfranchise voters in future elections.

“We need clarity in the law on this,” said Marian Schneider, senior voting rights policy counsel at the ACLU of Pennsylvania. “I think that the intent was to prevent double voting, but there’s an inconsistency with the earlier version of the statute, and as we said in our petition the courts should reconcile that statute.”

At an election board meeting last month, the board members said that while they felt these ballots should be counted on principle, it was not accepting six provisional votes because the state’s mail voting statute, and established case law, prevented the county from doing so. The county pointed to a 2020 case from the state’s Commonwealth Court, though there was disagreement about whether that case set a binding legal standard.

“If we received a mail-in ballot that has a fatal flaw, it only makes sense that they should be able to cast a provisional ballot,” elections director James Allen said at a May 23 meeting of the board. “However, we have this Commonwealth Court ruling that says ‘you shall not do that.’ We don’t have any liberty to just make our own rules.”

Provisional ballots are given to voters whose eligibility to vote is in question when they check in at a polling place. Election officials withhold those ballots from being counted until the voter’s eligibility can be confirmed.

The provisional ballots came from voters who had requested and returned a mail ballot, but had that mail ballot canceled by the county due to defects before the vote was tallied. By law, counties cannot count mail ballots which lack a signature, proper date, or are returned without being placed in a secrecy envelope, though a case making its way through the federal courts may change that.

The total number of twice-rejected voters in the May primary is small, largely because Delaware County’s municipal primary was a low-turnout, off-year election. In a presidential or midterm election year, the number of these twice-rejected voters under this policy could be much higher.

In last year’s midterm elections, more than 16,000 Pennsylvania voters had their mail ballots rejected for such reasons, including more than 900 in Delaware County.

The county notified voters whose mail ballots were rejected ahead of primary day and gave them the opportunity to come to the election office, in Media, to fix their errors. But in two examples, the ACLU said its clients’ age made traveling to the election office difficult compared with going to their local polling place on election day.

Those voters and at least four others cast provisional ballots at their voting precincts after being notified of their mail ballot’s defect, according to the ACLU. The ACLU also claims a county employee advised two of the plaintiffs to use the provisional ballots.

A provision in Act 77, the 2019 law that established no-excuse mail voting in Pennsylvania, says “a provisional ballot shall not be counted if … the elector’s absentee ballot or mail-in ballot is timely received by a county board of elections.”

But, in the ACLU’s petition to the Delaware County Court of Common Pleas — which asks the courts to compel the board to count the ballots — the organization argues that another portion of the statute takes precedence. That section says that as long as a voter is eligible to vote, their signature on the provisional ballot envelope matches their registration, and they have not “cast” another ballot, their provisional ballot “shall” be counted.

“Cast” is the key word, the ACLU argues.

“We’re not encouraging double voting, but if the timeliness of the receipt of the mail ballot is not the end of the story, it has to be counted,” Schneider said.

To “cast” a ballot means for it to be counted, the ACLU argues, and voters who have their mail ballots canceled by definition did not have it counted.

Other counties, and the Department of State, appear to interpret the conflict between the statutes the same way the ACLU does. Schneider, as well as election administrators contacted by Votebeat and Spotlight PA, were unaware of any other counties taking Delaware County’s approach.

Nick Custodio, deputy city commissioner in neighboring Philadelphia, said the city counts provisionals cast under the same circumstances.

The Pennsylvania Department of State’s official website advises voters to vote provisionally if they “returned a completed absentee or mail‐in ballot that was rejected by the county board of elections,” although members of the Delaware County Board of Elections said they felt this advice was misleading because of case law on the matter.

The Department of State declined to comment specifically on the ACLU’s case, but said it was monitoring the litigation and would update its guidance if there is any authoritative court ruling. The guidance on the department’s website remained the same as of the time of publishing.

The clause in Act 77 regarding provisional ballots for mail voters with ballot defects was the basis of a 2020 Commonwealth Court decision involving voters from Allegheny County. In that ruling, the court found that provisional ballots cast by voters with defective mail ballots should not be counted.

Much of the dispute between the ACLU and Delaware County comes down to whether the 2020 ruling set a binding legal standard, known as a precedent.

Schneider and the board’s attorney went back and forth at the board’s May 23 meeting on whether the decision in the 2020 case from Allegheny County carries the weight of legal precedent.

A spokesperson for Pennsylvania’s court system said the decision was “an unreported memorandum opinion (i.e., unpublished),” meaning it does not have the same precedential value as a reported or published opinion.

[Update, June 8th, 3:30 p.m.: A spokesperson for the county said that even though the board felt the ruling in question is incorrect, the board members voted to follow the law as they understood it.

“It is not for the Board to ignore court rulings it does not like,” said spokesperson Adrienne Marofsky in a statement to Votebeat and Spotlight. “Rather, the Board will litigate this matter with the goal of seeking clarity from the courts of Pennsylvania on this important issue.”]

Lawyers with ties to former President Donald Trump have signaled the provision could be the basis for litigation in future elections for federal races.

A law firm composed of two attorneys who helped handle 2020 election cases for Trump and the Pennsylvania GOP — Pittsburgh-based Gallagher Giancola — sent a letter to counties last fall on behalf of the Republican National Committee stating that they intended to challenge such ballots, according to a copy of the letter obtained by Votebeat and Spotlight PA.

“The RNC intends to challenge the provisional ballots cast by voters who also cast an absentee or mail-in ballot, even if such absentee or mail-in ballot has been deemed unable to be counted under applicable law,” the letter read. It appears such challenges never materialized.

State regulators are also interested in resolving the discrepancy. At a recent meeting of the Joint State Government Commission’s Election Law Advisory Board, member Christina Iacono brought up the Delaware County situation and said it was something the board should consider addressing and issuing a legislative recommendation.

Schneider, the ACLU’s attorney, said it would be best to have ambiguities like this resolved before the next presidential election, which is why the ACLU is pursuing the case.

“I do think Delaware County is incorrect in their analysis, but we do need the courts to weigh in,” she said. “This is an important issue to get clarity on.”

The case will first need to be decided on by a Delaware County judge before it could potentially be appealed up to a high court and set precedent. The county has yet to file a reply brief to the ACLU’s petition.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org

Everything you need to know about voting in Philly’s 2023 primary election (and not just for mayor)

2023-05-22T21:16:04+00:00

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Votebeat Pennsylvania is a nonprofit newsroom reporting on voting access and election administration in Pennsylvania. Dig deeper into how your vote gets counted in our free newsletter.

Philadelphia’s May primary happened on May 16. You can find election results from Chalkbeat here. And be sure to follow Votebeat’s ongoing coverage of Pennsylvania here.

The biggest question for Election Day on Tuesday, May 16, is who will become the Democratic nominee for Philadelphia mayor, but there is a lot more on the ballot. Voters will also decide the races for all City Council seats, city commissioner, city controller, sheriff, state and city judges, and register of wills. In addition, four ballot questions are up for approval.

Votebeat has everything you need to know to make voting in Philly’s 2023 local elections go as smoothly as possible, and how to let us know if you run into any issues.

In this guide

Click on any link below to jump to a specific section.

Who can vote

How to vote by mail

Ensuring your mail ballot is counted

Voting in-person on Election Day

How to get assistance in voting

Why Philadelphia's primary election matters

How to learn about the candidates

What to know about the Philadelphia ballot questions

How to report problems with voting

Who can vote

In Philadelphia, in order to participate in the May 16 primary election, you need to be a U.S. citizen and Philly resident for at least 30 days before Election Day.

You also need to be registered to vote. The deadline was May 1, and has now passed. Check your voter registration status here.

Only registered Democrats and Republicans can vote in the primary races for candidates, because Pennsylvania is one of nine states that has closed primaries. This means if you are among the 1.2 million Pennsylvanians who are independent or unaffiliated voters, you cannot vote in any of the primary races. However, all voters can vote on the four ballot questions.

Philadelphians who live out-of-state, overseas, or who serve in the military can also vote, via mail-in, civilian, and overseas ballots. More on that below.

How to vote by mail in Philadelphia

All eligible Pennsylvania voters can request a mail-in or civilian absentee ballot. The deadline to request a mail ballot was May 9, and has now passed.

Completed ballots must be received at the County Boards of Election by 8 p.m. on May 16.

For questions about absentee and mail-in ballot voting, call the Philadelphia County Board of Elections at 215-686-3469 or visit their office at City Hall.

If you are a voter who has an illness or physical disability that prevents you from filling in your own ballot, you can also apply to have someone help you. This person can be a family member or friend, but cannot be your employer, employer’s representative, union representative, or a judge of elections. Both you and your assistant must fill out an Assistance Declaration — you should submit it at the same time that you apply for a mail-in or absentee ballot, and the person helping you to vote must carry a copy with them if they are delivering your completed ballot in person.

How to make sure your mail ballot is counted

Now that you’ve filled out both the front and the back of each page of your mail ballot, what next? In Pennsylvania, it’s important to make sure you read and follow the instructions carefully so that your ballot does not get invalidated.

Here are the necessary steps to take, but if these differ from what you read on your ballot, follow the instructions that are typed on the ballot.

Step 1: Seal the completed ballot in the inner secrecy envelope provided. It should say “official election ballot” on it. Do not write on the secrecy envelope.
Step 2: Insert the inner secrecy envelope into the pre-addressed outer return envelope. It is OK to write on the outer envelope, which is where you must sign and date the “voter’s declaration” on the outside. Your signature and the written date of when you signed it are required for your ballot to be counted.
Step 3: Seal the outer envelope. Add postage if you’re sending it through the mail.
Step 4: Either mail the sealed envelope or hand-deliver it to the County Board of Elections, City Hall, Room 142. Or you can deliver it to one of the city’s 18 official drop-off bo xes. Mail ballot drop boxes are open 24 hours a day until 8 p.m. on Election Day.

Completed ballots should be mailed at the post office several days before Election Day – in time for it to arrive at the County Boards of Elections by 8 p.m. on Tuesday, May 16.

However, military service members and overseas absentee ballot voters get a grace period for returning their ballots. They have until the night before – 11:59 p.m. on Monday, May 15 – to get their ballot postmarked and mailed in order to be counted. These ballots must be received at the County Boards of Elections by Tuesday, May 23.

You can also vote early in person by applying for and filling out a mail-in or absentee ballot, all in one visit, at the City Hall elections office.

How to vote in-person on Election Day in Philadelphia

Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. in Philadelphia on Election Day, Tuesday, May 16. You must be in line by 8 p.m. in order to be allowed to vote.

ID is required to vote only if you are a first-time voter in this county. If you have voted in Philadelphia before, no form of identification is required.

For first time voters, acceptable forms of ID include a valid voter registration card, state driver’s license or PennDOT ID card, U.S. passport, state-issued or U.S. government-issued ID, student ID, employee ID, non-photo ID issued by the state, current utility bill or bank statement, firearm permit, and other options listed here.

Find your polling place online by using the Pennsylvania Department of State’s Polling Place Search tool, or by calling the Philadelphia county voter registration office at 215-686-1590.

That phone number is also where you can confirm your voter registration status. Or log onto the state’s Voter Registration Status tool, where you can find your polling place, in addition to your registration status, voting districts, and political party, if any.

Watch this video to see how Philadelphia’s voting machines work.

When you arrive at your polling place, if for some reason your name is not listed in the book of registered voters, you will be asked to fill out a provisional ballot. It’s a paper ballot that will be counted if, when it is checked, you are confirmed as an eligible registered voter for that precinct. Provisional ballots are also used if you applied for, but did not return, a mail ballot or absentee ballot, as a safeguard to ensure voters cast only one ballot each.

Firearms are allowed in some polling places, but not if the poll site is a weapons-free place such as a school or courthouse, according to Pennsylvania law. Campaign materials and flyers are only allowed if they are part of a voter’s clothing or if the voter keeps it with them throughout the voting process and does not engage in campaign activities.

“Ballot selfies” are allowed under the First Amendment, but must not include other voters and their ballots.

How to get assistance in voting

Voters with an illness or disability who require a mail-in or absentee ballot can fill out an Assistance Declaration form to designate a friend or family member as the person to help fill out and deliver the ballot to the county elections office.

For language access and translation services, more than 300 interpreters provide interpretation services at every polling place in the city. A “Language Line” phone service is available on-site for all voters if a bilingual interpreter is not available in-person for the required language. Voters select the language desired from a Language Identification Guide, and then a poll worker will call the Language Line to get an interpreter as needed.

Voters are also allowed to bring a family or friend to help as a designated agent, as long as they are not their employer, union representative, or elections office leader.

For wheelchair accessibility, some polling places are fully accessible (“FH”) while others are partially accessible. A list of fully accessible sites is available here.

What closed primaries mean and why Philadelphia’s primary election matters

Pennsylvania is one of nine states that has closed primaries. This means that primary races are open only to registered members of that party – Democrats vote in a Democratic primary, Republicans in a Republican primary. Unaffiliated and independent voters – the state has 1.2 million of them – can only vote for candidates in general and local elections.

However, Philly’s May 16 election is open to all voters because four ballot questions about city government are up for vote.

And Philly’s closed primary has a lot at stake.

Philadelphia’s 100th mayor will likely be decided in this race, as registered Democrats dominate the city’s electorate. The city’s next mayor might also be its first woman leader. The entire 17-member City Council is up for a vote, as are the commissioners, sheriff, register of wills, and numerous municipal and statewide judges. Even the city controller is up for a vote this year in a special election, even though that official is normally elected in a different year. And, four ballot questions seek voter approval to amend the city Charter.

How to learn about the candidates

Votebeat has collected a few comprehensive voter guides that go over candidate bios and issues ranging from education to the environment, gun violence to general knowledge. Several are Every Voice, Every Vote partners. Here are a few:

There are nine remaining candidates for mayor in the Democratic primary, and one in the Republican primary.

All 17 City Council seats are up for a vote, including the seven at-large council seats. District council seats are open to residents of each open district, while the at-large Council seats — for which 27 candidates are vying for seven open seats — are open to all Philadelphians. In the at-large council, Democrats have historically held five seats while Republicans hold two, but in 2019, one of the minority-party seats flipped to be held by the Working Families Party, which seeks to maintain and grow its presence in this race.

What to know about the Philadelphia ballot questions

All registered voters in Pennsylvania can vote yes or no on the four proposed amendments to the city charter, which appear as ballot questions on the May 2023 primary ballot.

The Philadelphia Home Rule Charter is like a city constitution, overseeing the structure, roles and responsibilities of local government. It was created on April 17, 1951. When City Council proposes changes, voters decide whether to approve the amendments or not.

The four ballot questions are:

1. The question: Should The Philadelphia Home Rule Charter be amended to expand the requirements for annual minimum appropriations to the Budget Stabilization Reserve, more commonly known as the “rainy day fund”?

What it means: Voting yes means you approve a new requirement for the city to put a larger percentage of any annual budget surplus into the “rainy day fund.” Philadelphia did not allocate any money to the fund between 2011-2020, until the federal pandemic relief fund was made available in 2021.

2. The question: Should The Philadelphia Home Rule Charter be amended to create the Division of Workforce Solutions within the Department of Commerce and to define its duties?

What it means: Voting yes means support to create and fund a city agency focused on job training, placement, and workforce development. An existing agency focuses on support for employers; this new agency would focus on employees.

3. The question: Should The Philadelphia Home Rule Charter be amended to make employees of the Citizens Police Oversight Commission exempt from civil service hiring requirements?

What it means: Voting yes would support exempting the Citizens Police Oversight Commission from hiring according to merit-based requirements, in order to prevent staffing shortfalls. Voting no would support keeping civil service hiring requirements and addressing staffing issues in other ways.

4. The question: Should The Philadelphia Home Rule Charter be amended to create the Office of the Chief Public Safety Director and to define its powers, duties and responsibilities?

What it means: Voting yes would support adding a new cabinet-level position overseeing public safety efforts across police, fire, prisons, emergency management departments, and other agencies. This official would be appointed by the mayor but approved by the City Council. Voting no would oppose creating this new position, which shares many duties with the existing Charter-mandated Managing Director.

If you run into any problems, we want to hear about them!

Tell Votebeat what would make voting easier for you through our survey here.

If you have any other questions or concerns about voting in Philadelphia, please let us know! We can be reached at community@votebeat.org.

If you encounter or observe problems such as voter intimidation or possible voting rights violations at a polling place on Election Day, call the election hotline at 215-686-1590 or the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office at 215-686-9641 for assistance.

If an official mail-in ballot dropbox is full, not functioning, or is damaged in any way, call 215-686-3469 or email vote@phila.gov.

Heather J. Chin is a freelance journalist based in Philadelphia and Brooklyn who covers civic life, health, the arts, and Asian America. She has contributed to the Philadelphia Inquirer, NBC News, PBS, Village Voice, Edible Brooklyn, and other publications. She can be reached at heatherjchin@gmail.com with story tips.

This article is a part of Every Voice, Every Vote, a collaborative project managed by The Lenfest Institute for Journalism. Lead support is provided by the William Penn Foundation with additional funding from The Lenfest Institute, Peter and Judy Leone, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Harriet and Larry Weiss, and the Wyncote Foundation, among others. To learn more about the project and view a full list of supporters, visit everyvoice-everyvote.org. Editorial content is created independently of the project’s donors.

Inside one northeast Pa. county that has made light work of running “two elections” since the advent of mail-in balloting

2023-05-18T21:09:42+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

As counties around Pennsylvania toiled to count ballots on election day — again under pressure to report results within hours of polls closing — one rural northeast county put to work its creative solution for conquering such a big job with a small election staff.

Very small: two people.

The demands of processing ballots from Pennsylvania’s different methods of voting have led some county election officials to say they actually run two separate elections every time. The 2019 law that greatly expanded who can vote by mail does not prescribe a system by which counties must count their ballots, so counties each have designed various processes and made different adjustments to accommodate one of the most consequential changes to the state’s elections in recent history.

Depending on the size of a county, its resources, and its county government politics, some approaches work better than others.

Columbia County, with fewer than 39,000 registered voters, realized it could only pull off its “two elections” more smoothly if the office got lots of extra help. Its election day operation is now based on robust cooperation from employees across the county government.

“One of [counties’] core responsibilities is elections, and we have to do them well,” said County Commissioner Chris Young, a Republican whose job also puts him on Columbia’s Board of Elections. “My philosophy was — and the other two commissioners obviously support it — was all hands on deck. We don’t segregate it and say ‘Oh this is only election’s responsibility.’”

“When we’re running elections, it involves everybody.”

County leaders’ spirit of cooperation extends out to county residents, too. By inviting people in to participate in their election decision-making and to see all aspects of the election process themselves, they say they’ve won the public’s faith. Voters in the county, which favored Donald Trump in 2020 by more than a 30% margin, voiced that trust themselves during election day interviews.

County leaders don’t know for sure if they can take credit, but they note that election conspiracy theories have not taken as strong of a hold here as they have in other parts of the state, such as nearby Lycoming County. There, election conspiracy theorists succeeded in pressuring county leaders to order a hand recount earlier this year of the 2020 presidential election.

“We haven’t had the anti-trust, it hasn’t been to the same level here as some places,” said Young, who has consistently pushed back against accusations of election fraud.

Whether Columbia’s “all hands on deck” election effort remains in place after this year remains to be seen, given a political shakeup caused by Tuesday’s results.

How Columbia runs its elections

Throughout Tuesday, Columbia’s two-person election staff, Director Matthew Repasky and Assistant Voter Registration and Election Coordinator Thea Karas, were busy taking calls from poll workers and collecting mail ballots from voters returning them to the office.

Columbia County Elections Director Matthew Repasky answers phones during the 2023 municipal Primary. To his right sits Assistant Voter Registration and Election Coordinator Thea Karas.

That left them with no bandwidth for carrying out the county’s other election — the tallying of nearly 1,900 mail ballots. Columbia’s commissioners, who make up the board of elections, handed primary responsibility for that to an unlikely county employee from outside the elections office: the county’s human resources director, Marcie Strachko.

In 2020 when Strachko saw the elections department struggling to keep up with the influx of new mail ballot applications, she stepped up.

“When everything started, they were just so overwhelmed,” she said. “I just said, ‘I’ll take over.’ ”

Then, Strachko brought in reinforcements.

Estimating that one employee can open 400 envelopes in one day, Strachko assembles a team of employees from across the county government to assist her each election day.

An employee of the Treasurer’s Office organized ballots alphabetically ahead of election day to ensure counting went smoothly. County Chief Clerk Dave Witchey lent them the conference table in his office and helped upload results at the end of the night. Jeannie Lapinski, the county’s finance director, seamlessly sliced open mail ballots with a hand-held envelope opener while taking calls on speakerphone about the county’s finances.

Throughout the morning, four to six other employees filtered in and out of the office to process batches of ballots, also grabbing hand-held envelope slicers so they could open the outer and inner envelopes and unfold the ballots. By 10:15 a.m., all the ballots received ahead of election day were processed and ready to be scanned that night, alongside the 75 or so that would arrive over the course of Tuesday.

There are processing decisions these workers can make, and some that they can’t. Strachko and other employees know to automatically set aside mail ballots that have clearly disqualifying errors — if the voter failed to sign the envelope, say, or if the inner secrecy envelope is missing. But tougher questions — such as whether to count a ballot with a date written in the wrong spot on the return envelope — still get decided by Repasky.

For the most part though, Repasky said he stays out of the way of the mail ballot team because “they’re doing a great job.”

Many counties choose to have their director and deputy director split the in-person and mail-in election duties, leading teams to manage each.

That isn’t an option for Columbia, as Repasky and Karas were both busy running the in-person election Tuesday, despite the relatively low turnout that comes with a municipal primary.

Columbia is a majority Republican county, with two Republican commissioners who could consistently outvote the Democrat if they chose. But Witchey, the county clerk, and Strachko, the human resources director, agreed the commissioners’ commitment to bipartisan, collaborative leadership created a positive environment where employees work together.

“We’re very fortunate, the county works as a team,” Strachko said. “Not to say we always agree, we don’t, but we’re very fortunate.”

Witchey said it is this culture that has led to the success of their elections operation. And the openness between staff is something they extend to the community as well.

Public perception

Columbia has not been entirely immune to election conspiracy theories.

Last August, a local venue in Bloomsburg hosted a meeting of conspiracy theorists like Toni Shuppe of Audit the Vote PA and Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote, conservative groups that falsely claim the 2020 election was fraudulent.

A local group, We the People of Columbia PA, was successful in filing petitions to have ballots in the November midterms recounted in some precincts.

But Audit the Vote did not organize a door-to-door canvassing effort in Columbia as they did in counties where support was greater, like Washington, Lancaster and Butler. The county also did not face pressure to hand count ballots — a preference of election skeptics who don’t trust vote-counting machines — like nearby Lycoming, or York County to the south.

“I always tell people, if you want to challenge us, come in and see (our election process),” Witchey said.

While some counties only allow party members or credentialed media in to view their operation, Columbia is willing to give a behind-the-scenes look to anyone who has questions.

When a woman interested in the school board races stopped by shortly after polls closed Tuesday night to ask if results were in, Witchey said they were not, but added, “You’re more than welcome to stay if you want to see the process.”

Voters and party officials who spoke with Votebeat and Spotlight PA said they appreciated the county’s transparency and had faith in their process.

Tom Treadway, a Republican from the county’s seat, Bloomsburg, said he hadn’t heard any complaints about the county’s elections in the 20 years he’s lived there.

Michael Conner, a Democrat who dropped off his mail ballot at the county office, was intrigued by the county’s offer of viewing the process and said he might take them up on it.

Janine Penman, secretary of the Columbia County GOP, said the office does a “tremendous job.”

“I always get the answers for the questions I ask and there is always transparency,” she said. “They do invite anybody in, they say, ‘You can come in and watch.’”

The county also sought community buy-in when selecting its new voting machines in 2019, allowing citizens to vote on which one they preferred, Young said.

When asked if cultivating trust was only possible because of Columbia County’s small size, Young said larger counties could achieve the same effect.

“Maybe it’s not to the level as it is here, but they can always make sure you are giving as much access and are being as transparent as you can possibly be.”

What’s next for Columbia

There’s no guarantee that Columbia County’s current approach to elections won’t change.

How elections are run is up to the county’s board of commissioners, and there is a strong possibility there will be an entirely new board come January.

Young, a Republican, did not run for reelection this year, and the other Republican commissioner, Rich Ridgway, lost his reelection bid Tuesday.

On the Democratic side, incumbent David Kovach secured his spot on the November ballot, as did another candidate, Patricia Lawton, who received more votes than Kovach. Only one is expected to win one of the three open seats in November, due to the county’s heavily Republican voting trends.

Some county employees were nervous Tuesday night about the prospect of entirely new leadership after so many years, with one even mentioning they had already applied for a new job.

Witchey said they weren’t necessarily worried about any particular candidate or thing a candidate had said, but rather just about the “prospect of something new.”

Witchey said he’ll show whoever is on the Board of Elections after the November election how the system currently works and explain the county government’s collaborative culture, but ultimately it will be up to the commissioners to decide how to run things.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org

Todo lo que necesitas saber para votar en las primarias de Filadelfia de 2023 (y no solamente para elegir el candidato a la alcaldía)

2023-05-11T19:11:39+00:00

Read in English.

La mayor pregunta el Día de las Elecciones el martes, 16 de mayo es quién será el candidato demócrata a la alcaldía de Filadelfia, pero en la papeleta se decidirán muchas cosas. Los electores también decidirán quiénes se postularán para el Consejo de la Ciudad, comisionado de la ciudad, controlador de a ciudad, sheriff, juez estatal y de la ciudad y registro de testamentos. Además, en la papeleta se votará por cuatro preguntas.

Votebeat tiene todo lo que necesitas saber para que votar en las elecciones locales de Filadelfia en 2023 sea lo más fácil posible, y cómo informarnos si tienes algún problema.

Quién puede votar

En Filadelfia, para participar en las elecciones primarias del 16 de mayo se requiere ser ciudadano estadounidense y ser residente de Filadelfia un mínimo de 30 días antes de las elecciones.

Para votar también se requiere que te inscribas. La fecha límite era el 1 de mayo, que ya pasó. Verifica el estatus de tu inscripción electoral aquí.

En las elecciones primarias para elegir los candidatos de un partido solamente pueden votar electores que se hayan inscrito como demócratas o republicanos, ya que Pensilvania es uno de los nueve estados que tiene primarias ‘cerradas’. Esto significa que, si estás entre los 1.2 millones de residentes de Pensilvania que son electores independientes o no afiliados a ningún partido, no puedes votar en ninguna de las elecciones primarias. Sin embargo, todos los electores pueden votar por las cuatro preguntas en la papeleta.

Los ciudadanos de Filadelfia que viven fuera del estado, en el extranjero, o que prestan servicio militar también pueden votar mediante papeletas por correo, voto ausente y voto para personas en el extranjero. Más información a continuación.

Cómo votar por correo en Filadelfia

Todos los electores elegibles de Pensilvania pueden solicitar un voto por correo o un voto ausente. La fecha límite era el 9 de mayo, que ya pasó.

Las papeletas tienen que recibirse en las Juntas Electorales del Condado a más tardar a las 8:00 p.m. del 16 de mayo. Las solicitudes están disponibles en inglés, español y en chino tradicional.

Los votantes tendrán que demostrar su identidad en la solicitud indicando el número de su licencia de conducir o de identificación de PennDOT, o proporcionando parte de su número de Seguro Social y una firma, que puede ser digital si están solicitando en línea, o física si imprimen la solicitud para enviarla por correo.

Si tienes preguntas sobre el voto por correo o ausente, llama a la Junta Electoral del Condado de Filadelfia al 215-686-3469 o visita su oficina en la Alcaldía.

Si tienes una enfermedad o discapacidad física que te impide llenar tu papeleta, también puedes solicitar que alguien te ayude. Esta persona puede ser un familiar o un amigo, pero no puede ser tu empleador, un representante de tu empleador, un representante sindical ni un juez electoral. Tanto tú como tu asistente tienen que llenar una Declaración de Asistencia - que debes presentar al mismo tiempo que solicites el voto por correo o ausente, y la persona que te ayudará a votar tiene que llevar consigo una copia de esa declaración si él o ella va a entregar tu papeleta de votación en persona.

Cómo asegurar que tu voto por correo sea contado

Ahora que ya llenaste ambos lados de cada página de tu papeleta de voto por correo, ¿qué debes hacer después? En Pensilvania, es importante que te asegures de leer detenidamente y seguir las instrucciones para que tu papeleta no sea invalidada.

EStos son los pasos necesarios, pero si no coinciden con lo que dice tu papeleta, sigue las instrucciones en la papeleta.

Paso 1: Sella la papeleta completada en el sobre interior que recibiste en el paquete. Ese sobre interior debe tener la frase “papeleta electoral oficial” (official election ballot). No escribas nada en el sobre interior.
Paso 2: Introduce el sobre interior en el sobre externo que ya tiene la dirección a la que vas a devolver la papeleta. Puedes escribir en el sobre exterior, que trae un área donde deberás firmar y fechar la “declaración del elector” (voter’s declaration). Para que cuenten tu voto, se requiere que esa área tenga tu firma y la fecha en que la firmaste.
Paso 3: Sella el sobre exterior. Si vas a enviar el voto por correo, agrega los sellos correspondientes.
Paso 4: Envía el sobre sellado por correo o entrégalo personalmente a la Junta Electoral del Condado, ubicada el salón 142 de la Alcaldía. Como alternativa, puedes entregarlo en uno de los 18 buzones de entrega oficiales de la ciu dad. Los buzones para entregar votos por correo estarán abiertos las 24 horas del día hasta las 8:00 pm del día de las elecciones.

Las papeletas completadas deben enviarse por correo varios días antes del día de las elecciones; es decir, con tiempo suficiente para que lleguen a las Juntas Electorales de los Condados antes de las 8:00 pm del martes, 16 de mayo.

Sin embargo, los miembros de las fuerzas armadas y los electores en el extranjero que emitirán un voto ausente tienen un periodo de gracia para devolver sus papeletas. Esas personas podrán enviar su voto ausente por correo con matasellos de hasta la noche anterior (11:59 pm del lunes, 15 de mayo) para que su voto sea contado. Estas papeletas deberán ser recibidas por las Juntas Electorales de los Condados a más tardar el martes, 23 de mayo.

También puedes votar temprano en persona si lo solicitas y llenas una papeleta de voto por correo o ausente y lo puedes hacer todo el mismo día visitando la oficina electoral en la Alcaldía.

Cómo votar en persona el día de las elecciones en Filadelfia

El día de las elecciones, martes 16 de mayo, los colegios electorales estarán abiertos desde las 7.00 am hasta las 8:00 pm en Filadelfia. Tienes que estar ya en la fila a las 8:00 pm para poder votar.

Se requiere identificación para votar, pero únicamente si es la primera vez que vas a votar en ese condado. Si ya has votado anteriormente en Filadelfia, no se necesita ningún tipo de identificación.

Para que vayan a votar por primera vez, las formas aceptables de identificación incluyen una tarjeta electoral válida, licencia de conducir del estado o tarjeta de identificación de PennDOT, pasaporte de EE.UU., identificación emitida por el estado o por el gobierno de EE.UU., identificación de estudiante, identificación de empleado, identificación sin foto emitida por el estado, factura actual de servicios públicos o estado de cuenta bancaria, permiso de armas de fuego, y otras opciones en esta lista.

Encuentra tu colegio electoral en línea utilizando el buscador de colegio electoral del Departamento de Estado de Pensilvania, o llamando a la oficina de registro de electores del Condado de Filadelfia al 215-686-1590.

Ese teléfono también sirve para confirmar el estatus de tu inscripción para votar. También puedes usar esta herramienta en línea para confirmar tu estatus electoral, donde podrás encontrar tu colegio electoral, tu estatus electoral, los distritos electorales y afiliación política, si la tienes.

Este vídeo te muestra cómo funcionan las máquinas de votación de Filadelfia.

Cuando llegues a tu colegio electoral, si por alguna razón tu nombre no aparece en el libro de electores inscritos, te pedirán que llenes una papeleta provisional. Esta es una papeleta que se verificará y contará si se confirma que eres un elector elegible para votar en ese distrito electoral. Las papeletas provisionales también se san si solicitaste un voto por correo o ausente pero no devolviste la papeleta te enviaron, y su propósito es asegurar que los electores emitan solamente un voto cada uno.

Algunos colegios electorales permiten armas de fuego, pero no si el colegio electoral es un lugar designado como área libre de armas, por ejemplo una escuela o tribunal, según las leyes de Pensilvania. Los materiales de campaña y hojas de información solamente están permitidos si son parte de la vestimenta de un elector o si la persona los lleva consigo durante todo el proceso de votación y no participa en actividades de campaña.

Se permite tomar “selfies con la papeleta” en virtud de la Primera Enmienda, pero esas fotos no pueden incluir a otros electores y sus papeletas.

Cómo obtener ayuda para votar

Los electores con una enfermedad o discapacidad que necesiten votar por correo o en ausencia pueden llenar un formulario de Declaración de Asistencia para designar a un amigo o familiar como la persona que les ayude a llenar y entregar la papeleta en la oficina electoral del condado.

Para servicios de interpretación y traducción, habrá más de 300 intérpretes disponibles en todos los colegios electorales de la ciudad. Si no hubiese un intérprete disponible en persona para un idioma en particular, habrá un servicio de intérprete por teléfono (Language Line) en cada colegio electoral. De ser necesario, la persona seleccionará el idioma que necesita en una Guía de identificación de idiomas, y luego un funcionario electoral llamará al Language Line para conseguir un intérprete.

Los electores también pueden traer a un familiar o amigo para que les ayude como agente designado, siempre y cuando la persona no sea su empleador, representante sindical ni un funcionario de la oficina de elecciones.

En cuanto al acceso para sillas de ruedas, algunos colegios electorales son completamente accesibles (“FH”), mientras que otros son parcialmente accesibles. Aquí encontrarás una lista de los colegios electorales completamente accesibles.

Qué significan las primarias cerradas y por qué las primarias de Filadelfia son importantes

Pensilvania es uno de los nueve estados con primarias cerradas. Una elección primaria está abierta únicamente para los miembros registrados de ese partido; es decir, los demócratas votan en las primarias demócratas y los republicanos en las republicanas. Los electores no afiliados e independientes – en Pensilvania hay 1.2 millones – solamente pueden votar en las elecciones generales y locales.

Sin embargo, las elecciones del 16 de mayo en Filadelfia están abiertas a todos los electores, ya que se votará por cuatro preguntas sobre el gobierno de la ciudad.

Y las primarias cerradas de Filadelfia tienen mucho en juego.

Es probable que estas primarias decidan quién será alcalde número 100 de Filadelfia, ya que los demócratas dominan el electorado de la ciudad. El próximo alcalde de la ciudad podría ser también la primera mujer en ocupar ese escaño. Todos los 17 miembros del Consejo de la Ciudad están a votación, así como los comisionarios, el sheriff, el registro de testamentos y numerosos jueces municipales y estatales. Hasta la contraloría de la ciudad está a votación este año en una elección especial, aunque ese puesto normalmente se elige en un año diferente. Además, se votará por cuatro preguntas para modificar la carta de autonomía de la ciudad.

Cómo obtener información sobre los candidatos

Votebeat ha recopilado unas cuantas guías del elector muy completas que repasan las biografías de los candidatos y asuntos desde la educación hasta el medioambiente, la violencia armada o el conocimiento general. Varias son de entidades que forman parte de Every Voice, Every Vote. Estas son algunas de las guías:

En español:

En inglés:

Hay nueve candidatos a la alcaldía en las primarias demócratas y uno en las primarias del partido Republicano.

Se votará por 17 escaños para el Consejo de la Ciudad, que incluyen los siete escaños del consejo por acumulación. Los escaños del Consejo de Distrito están abiertos a residentes de cada distrito abierto, mientras que los escaños del Consejo General – en los que hay 27 candidatos compitiendo por siete escaños abiertos – están abiertos a todos los residentes de Filadelfia. En el consejo general, los demócratas históricamente han ocupado cinco escaños, mientras que los republicanos ocupan dos, pero en 2019, uno de los escaños del partido minoritario pasó a ser ocupado por el Working Families Party, que busca mantener y aumentar su presencia en esta carrera.

Lo que necesitas saber sobre las preguntas de la papeleta

Todos los electores registrados en Pensilvania pueden votar sí o no en las cuatro enmiendas propuestas a la carta de autonomía de la ciudad, que aparecen como preguntas en la papeleta de las primarias de mayo de 2023.

La Carta de Autonomía de Filadelfia es como una constitución de la ciudad, y establece la estructura, las funciones y las responsabilidades del gobierno local. Esta carta fue creada el 17 de abril de 1951. Cuando el Consejo de la Ciudad propone cambios, los electores votan para aprobar o no aprobar esas enmiendas.

Las cuatro preguntas en la papeleta de votación son:

1. Pregunta: ¿Debería modificarse la carta de autonomía de Filadelfia para ampliar los requisitos de las asignaciones mínimas anuales a la Reserva de Estabilización Presupuestaria, más comúnmente conocida como “rainy day fund”?

Significado: Votar “sí” significa aprobar un nuevo requisito para que la ciudad asigne un mayor porcentaje de cualquier excedente del presupuesto anual al “fondo para imprevistos” Filadelfia no asignó dinero al fondo entre 2011 y 2020, hasta que el fondo federal de ayuda para pandemias estuvo disponible en 2021.

2. Pregunta: ¿Debería modificarse la carta de autonomía de Filadelfia para crear la División de Soluciones Laborales dentro del Departamento de Comercio y definir sus funciones?

Qué significa: Votar “sí” significa apoyar la creación y financiación de una agencia municipal enfocada en capacitación, colocación y desarrollo de la fuerza laboral. Una agencia existente se enfoca en apoyar a los empleadores; esta nueva agencia se enfocaría en los empleados.

3. Pregunta: ¿Debería modificarse la carta de autonomía de Filadelfia para que los empleados de la Comisión Ciudadana de Supervisión de la Policía queden exentos de los requisitos de contratación de la función pública?

Significado: Votar “sí” significa apoyar que la Comisión Ciudadana de Supervisión Policial (Citizens Police Oversight Comission) esté exenta de contratar personal según los requisitos de mérito para así evitar la escasez de empleados. Votar “no” significa mantener los requisitos de contratación vigentes y resolver la escasez de personal de otras maneras.

4. Pregunta: ¿Debería modificarse la carta de autonomía de Filadelfia para crear la Oficina del Director Principal de Seguridad Pública y definir sus poderes, deberes y responsabilidades?

Significado: Votar “sí” significa apoyar la creación de un nuevo puesto en el gabinete para supervisar la seguridad pública en los departamentos de policía, bomberos, prisiones, manejo de emergencias y otras agencias. Este funcionario sería nombrado por el alcalde, pero aprobado por el Consejo Municipal. Votar “no” significa que no apoyas la creación de este nuevo puesto, que comparte muchas funciones con el actual Director General establecido por la Carta de Autonomía.

Si tienes algún problema, ¡queremos saberlo!

Dile a Votebeat qué cosas harían que votar sea más fácil a través de nuestra encuesta aquí.

Si tienes alguna otra pregunta o duda sobre cómo votar en Filadelfia, ¡no dudes en avisarnos! Nos puedes escribir a community@votebeat.org.

Si encuentras u observas problemas, como por ejemplo intimidación de electores o posibles violaciones de los derechos al voto en un colegio electoral el día de las elecciones, llama a la línea directa de las elecciones al 215-686-1590 o a la oficina del Fiscal del Distrito de Filadelfia al 215-686-9641 para pedir ayuda.

Si un buzón oficial de votos está lleno, no funciona o está dañado de algún modo, llama al 215-686-3469 o envía un email a vote@phila.gov.

Heather J. Chin es una periodista independiente en Filadelfia y Brooklyn que cubre temas de vida cívica, salud, artes y la comunidad asiática en Estados Unidos. Ella ha colaborado con el Philadelphia Inquirer, NBC News, PBS, Village Voice, Edible Brooklyn y otras publicaciones. Para comunicarte con ella y enviarle información, escríbele a heatherjchin@gmail.com.

Pennsylvania still doesn’t have uniform ballot curing policies after state appellate court ruling

2023-03-28T20:09:42+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

Pennsylvania’s patchwork of ballot curing policies will remain in place, at least for now, following a decision from a state appellate court last week.

Commonwealth Court Judge Ellen Ceisler dismissed a case brought by the Republican National Committee last year arguing that counties allowing voters to fix errors on their mail ballot had violated the state’s election code. The court made no determination on the facts of the case, but ruled the Commonwealth Court was not the proper venue.

The RNC is still weighing whether it will appeal Ceisler’s ruling to the State Supreme Court, but local elections directors worry the decision will open counties up to more lawsuits in local courts.

In Pennsylvania, people who vote by mail are required to seal their ballot in an interior, secrecy envelope, and sign and date an outer envelope. If a person fails to do so, county election officials must throw the ballot out.

Some counties in the state, however, notify voters when there is a disqualifying issue with their mail ballot.

According to a survey from Votebeat and Spotlight PA, 12 counties allowed ballot curing in the November 2022 election. Eight of those counties notified voters of errors.

Other counties, meanwhile, don’t allow voters to fix their mail ballots, creating an unequal landscape for voters across the state.

In 2022 the RNC had named then-Acting Secretary of the Commonwealth Leigh Chapman, and later her successor, Al Schmidt, as parties in the case, and argued that county boards of elections were regional organs of the Department of State and therefore state agencies, giving the Commonwealth Court jurisdiction.

But Ceisler ruled that county election offices are actually local government agencies, meaning the court did not have jurisdiction to hear the underlying arguments. Instead, she wrote, county courts are the proper venue.

Forrest Lehman, elections director in Lycoming County, which allowed curing, thinks the ruling is going to create more confusion. Since parties are now directed to file suit at the local level, he thinks county election departments will see an increase in lawsuits from both those opposed to and in favor of ballot curing.

“Now no matter what a county does, someone will sue you,” he said.

Ceisler “used this jurisdictional ruling to avoid the underlying issue,” said Vic Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania.

The RNC argued that viewing mail-in ballots to determine whether they lacked a signature or proper date constituted an “inspection” of the ballots, which is prohibited before Election Day.

“This is the equivalent of people forgetting to push the ‘vote’ button and the poll workers saying ‘hey, you forgot to push the vote button,’” Walczak said, adding that if counties don’t permit curing of such errors, eligible voters will have their votes discarded.

For now, the legal question posed by the lawsuit remains unsettled. Recent lawsuits brought at the county level regarding recount petitions resulted in contradictory rulings from the Commonwealth Court, and that could happen on curing, too.

“The underlying issue is super important and needs to be decided soon,” Walczak said. “Right now where the law stands is that some countries allow voters to cure, some notify them of errors, and some don’t do either. The law is unclear and we really need a court to say what the law is around notice and cure.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Unequal election policies disenfranchised some Pennsylvania voters in 2022. Explore what each county did.

2023-02-21T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

Pennsylvania voters did not have equal opportunities to cast or correct their ballots during the November 2022 election, the latter producing a disparity that disenfranchised hundreds of voters, a Spotlight PA and Votebeat analysis has found.

As part of a first-of-its-kind review, the news organizations contacted election officials in all 67 counties about policies regarding drop boxes and mail ballots that had disqualifying technical errors. The outlets focused on how counties treat mail ballots, as state law is silent on logistical details that directly impact how Pennsylvanians can vote and whether a person’s vote counts.

Spotlight PA and Votebeat also sought to understand the access voters have to physical polling places and to minutes of meetings held by county election boards that make critical policy decisions such as which ballots get counted and who gets a chance to fix their ballot.

The review found:

At least a dozen counties gave voters the opportunity to fix flawed mail ballots after they were turned in, a process known as ballot curing.
At least nine counties specifically forbade voters from coming into a county election office to fix a disqualifying error on a mail ballot like a missing date or signature on the outer envelope. Nearly 1 million registered voters live in those nine counties, and at least 1,599 mail ballots were rejected there for reasons including a missing date or signature, according to data from the Pennsylvania Department of State.
At least eight counties proactively reached out to voters to tell them about fatal defects with their mail ballots, while six published lists of voters that needed to cure their ballots.
Twenty-seven counties gave voters access to at least one round-the-clock drop box for mail ballots, while 40 — primarily in rural areas — required voters to either mail such a ballot or turn it in during daytime hours to an election office.
Sixty-two counties exceeded a state recommendation on how many voters can be assigned to a precinct. The cap aims to ensure voters do not have prohibitively long wait times to cast a ballot.
Nearly 40 county election offices do not make meeting minutes accessible online. Among those, four make the minutes available upon request or in person at the county election office.

Forty-six counties did not respond to the survey. Spotlight PA and Votebeat turned to publicly available data on the number of drop boxes, voters, and voting precincts in each county to supplement their review.

But information on ballot curing was often unavailable online, meaning the true number of people who weren’t allowed to fix their flawed mail ballots is likely higher than the news organizations could determine.

In Pennsylvania, the governor and legislature broadly set election rules. The last major overhaul of state law came in 2019 when former Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf signed Act 77, which created no-excuse mail voting.

The law, however, does not outline major aspects of mail voting such as drop boxes and ballot curing, a gap that has presented problems for the county officials who create policies and the election workers who must carry them out.

Local election officials have asked the governor and legislature to clarify the law for years. But while Wolf and the formerly GOP-controlled legislature agreed on proposals like allowing pre-canvassing — a policy in which election officials process mail ballots ahead of Election Day — they deadlocked on more contentious issues like expanding voter ID.

Ideally, Pennsylvania counties should make it as easy as possible to vote, said Khalif Ali, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, a group that advocates for expanding public participation in the government and protecting voting rights.

“It’s the beauty and the pain that’s associated with the commonwealth,” Ali said. “We have essentially a number of fiefdoms and each of them has their own budgets, their own way of looking at the law, and applying that law on the ground level.”

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A patchwork of policies

Take Sadsbury Township, Lancaster County, for example. Voters there were not allowed to fix errors on mail ballots such as missing dates, nor could they place those ballots in a drop box.

But their neighbors just over the county line in West Sadsbury Township, Chester County, were allowed to cure their ballots and had access to 13 drop boxes.

The differences in election administration often come down to the makeup of the boards of election. In most cases, those boards are partisan and populated by the county’s elected commissioners. In Lancaster County, the board is majority-Republican and has two members who have consistently questioned the security of drop boxes. Chester County’s board is majority-Democrat.

Overall, 1.7% of mail ballots cast in Lancaster County were rejected because they were mailed without a secrecy envelope, incorrectly dated, or missing a signature or date. In Chester County, that number was 1%.

(Those numbers were provided by the Department of State, whose data may be incomplete.)

Though the legislature acted with wide bipartisan support to allow no-excuse mail voting, some Republican lawmakers have since sought to curtail or eliminate the practice, a push in part due to baseless claims of election fraud spread by former President Donald Trump.

That conflict, as well as gray areas in state law, have resulted in lawsuits over the past two years that target mail voting.

In one, settled just a week before the November 2022 election, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ordered counties not to count mail ballots with incorrectly dated or undated outer envelopes. Months later, in February, the high court reaffirmed that undated mail ballots should not be counted but left it up to individual counties to determine exactly what an incorrect date is.

The state Supreme Court last year was also asked to wade into the question of whether ballot curing should be allowed. An October decision permitted the practice but did not mandate it.

At least a dozen counties went ahead and allowed voters to cure ballots for reasons including a missing signature or date. Some went even further and tried to make voters aware of issues with their ballots.

Six counties — Allegheny, Chester, Erie, Northampton, Philadelphia, and Potter — published lists that named voters whose ballots had errors. These lists were also passed to third-party organizations, such as good-government groups or local political parties, so they could reach out to those voters independently.

Seven counties, including Chester, personally contacted voters with flawed ballots to direct them to their county election office.

“It is heartbreaking when you are canvassing mail-in votes and you can’t count them when there are so many steps to complete and [the voters] mess up one thing and their vote can’t be counted,” Chester County Solicitor Colleen Frens said.

The counties that did not allow voters to cure ballots provided a range of reasons for doing so, from not having enough staff to handle the extra work to believing the state Election Code does not allow for ballot curing.

The availability of drop boxes also varied widely across the state last fall.

Drop boxes were not available in 40 counties, where over 2.8 million registered voters live. Most of these counties are in rural areas where residents already must drive farther to reach a county election office.

Twenty-seven counties did offer drop boxes, though 15 of them only had only one drop box available. The counties that had multiple drop boxes tended to be in more populated areas, such as Philadelphia and its collar counties.

Lisa Schaefer, executive director of the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania, said that while all counties run elections that are consistent with state law, different interpretations of the Election Code and court decisions can lead to a wide array of practices.

“As we’ve seen, everything is kind of subject to interpretation, so the counties are doing their absolute best with what they have, but if we had some help from the state to fix some of these issues that would certainly be helpful,” she said.

In-person access

Access disparities also existed for people who chose to cast their ballot in person last November.

Pennsylvania does not collect data on the amount of time that people have to wait in line to vote. Without that data, voting advocates told Spotlight PA and Votebeat to examine the number of voters assigned to different precincts as a way to gauge possible overcrowding.

Pennsylvania’s Election Code states that each precinct should have between 100 to 1,200 people, though it does not specify how a county should determine the exact number. In practice, election directors told Spotlight PA they have the leeway to make their own choices.

In total, just under a quarter of the 9,155 precincts in Pennsylvania have over 1,200 voters assigned to them and 33.5% have over 2,400, according to a Spotlight PA and Votebeat analysis. Another 57 precincts have over 3,600.

Looking at how many voters are assigned to a precinct isn’t a perfect measure. Some election directors who spoke to Spotlight PA noted that staffing levels vary between precincts to deal with a higher volume of voters.

Pike County, a sprawling northeastern county with relatively few voters, had the highest median of voters per precinct, with over double the recommended number. But Valerie Barbin, a voter and poll watcher for the past two cycles in the county’s most populous precinct, said she hasn’t seen it cause any wait-time issues. That could be because less than 800 of the precinct’s more than 4,700 assigned voters cast a ballot last November.

“What’s also critical to the success of the precinct is that the counties are providing the appropriate resources,” said Jeff Greenburg, senior advisor on election administration to the good-government group Committee of Seventy and a former election director himself.

As part of the review, Spotlight PA and Votebeat also looked at how easy it was to access each county’s board of elections meeting minutes. Those minutes summarize what was discussed by county election officials during public meetings and can include information on contracts with companies to deliver mail ballots, and plans for the number and locations of drop boxes in a county.

Most counties don’t make these minutes easily accessible. Forty do not make them available online, though four of those counties responded in the survey that meeting minutes were available upon request or in person at a county election office.

Changes on the horizon?

Ali of Common Cause said that the different practices across the state favor some voters over others based on where they live. He argued that it violates the spirit of the Pennsylvania Constitution, which states “elections shall be free and equal.”

He emphasized that inconsistencies can discourage voters from participating in the process.

“We need to be able to share information and tell people exactly what’s going on,” Ali said.

Exactly how to change Pennsylvania’s election law to make it fairer has been debated over the past few years.

The Election Law Advisory Board, a group of county commissioners, state lawmakers, and advocates that studies election policies at the behest of the legislature, recently said in a report that “absolute uniformity across all counties would be difficult to achieve and maintain.”

Instead, it recommended that the General Assembly establish minimum requirements for counties that use drop boxes but not mandate their use statewide.

“The goal of this provision is to give counties the flexibility to have drop boxes but at the same time to have them as consistently administered as possible,” the report said.

The report also recommended that the legislature simplify the mail voting process by making secrecy envelopes optional and clarifying that failure to date the ballot should not be the sole reason one is thrown out.

Pennsylvania now has a new governor, Democrat Josh Shapiro, and the legislature is split between Democratic control in the state House and Republican control in the state Senate.

The executive and legislative branches would have to work together to stitch together the patchwork of election policies, but so far they have not committed to any particular actions.

Schaefer said her members are “very eager” for resolution on issues like ballot signatures, drop boxes, and pre-canvassing, and have been since shortly after the 2020 election.

“Unfortunately, I think that the spotlight that is on Pennsylvania because of the narrow distance between our political parties and how close our votes get, that puts a greater scrutiny, I think, on our operation,” she said. “These are things we’d love to be able to address so that every county could feel confident that they are interpreting the law the same way, and that the state would help to provide that clarity to us in the law.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org. Kate Huangpu is a reporter for Spotlight PA. Contact Kate at khuangpu@spotlightpa.org.