750,000 mail-in ballots were rejected in 2016 and 2018. Here's why that matters.
How coronavirus has made mail-in voting and the general election more complicated in 2020.Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
While the vast majority of mail-in ballots will be cast without issue this year, as has been the case in the past, a small, but growing percentage of votes have been rejected.An ABC News analysis of the last two election cycles , found that more than 750,000 mail-in ballots were rejected, about 1.2% of the total ballots returned, mainly for not having valid signatures and being sent in on time.
Jennifer Morrell, a member of the National Task Force on Election Crises and a partner at election consulting firm Elections Group, told ABC News that election officials are rapidly adapting to accommodate voters in light of the pandemic and many have not conducted elections with such a high level of mail-in vote.
Particularly of note were the tens of thousands of rejected ballots in New York City in 2018 -- in three New York City boroughs, at least one out of every four mailed ballots were tossed in2018. That happened again in the 2020 primary, when thousands more were. In the general election, New York sent out 100,000 ballots with incorrect names and addresses, adding to the confusion and frustration there.
Signature issues account for about 57% of the more than 500,000 mail-in ballots with “identifiable” reasons for rejection in 2016 and 2018, followed by voters missing the deadline to return ballots, which accounted for about 37% of rejections. Detailed data for this year is minimal, so we focused on the states that provided it. Experts also noted that ballot status trends shown in this year’s state-released data are murky because rejected ballots can usually be fixed and accepted until Election Day, unlike 2016 and 2018 rejections, which have been finalized.California seeing signature mismatches, but they have a system for that
California officials – who have been mass-mailing ballots for years – try to compare the mandatory signature on the back of the ballot envelope to the signature in a resident’s voter registration file. "It was because ballots came late to us... we just can't count them because they didn't meet the deadline with the postmark," said John Arntz of the San Francisco Department of Elections.This year, in North Carolina, more than 1.
Roughly 530 ballots, or about 0.1% of the returned ballots, were rejected for having “incomplete witness information,” suggesting that the North Carolina election law that requires a person over the age of 18 to sign the ballot as a witness has been a hurdle for some voters. In particular, Robeson County, which voted for Trump in 2016, has rejected more than 10% of its ballots this year. It's also one of the poorest and least white counties in the state, with a particularly large Native American population.In Georgia, a state with a rejection rate considerably higher than the national average in 2016, of the 1.7 million mail-in ballots that have been requested for this year's general election, roughly 675,000 have been returned.
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