Tipsheet

CO Secretary of State Had an Election Message to Non-Citizens and Dead People

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  September 29, 2020 6:00 AM

 The Colorado secretary of state sent postcards to non-citizens and dead people urging them to vote. In North Carolina and Virginia, we’re seeing people again receiving multiple ballots. In Pennsylvania, they’re going to accept ballots whose voter signatures don’t match. In New Jersey, Paterson’s municipal election results were trashed by a judge over rampant fraud. Twenty percent of the ballots were fraudulent. New York’s primaries were a total fiasco, and now we have voters there receiving ballots with the wrong information on them (via The Hill):

Voters in New York City said they received their mail-in ballots this week but were surprised to find they were printed with the wrong names and voter IDs and included incorrect return labels. 

Some voters said they received absentee ballots mislabeled as the official ballot for military members, while others said the envelope meant to return their ballot did not bear their name or address. 

According to the New York Post, the ballots labeled as military ballots were misprinted in Queens and experts say it will not change how those votes are tallied.

“There’s just mass confusion about these ballots and what people are supposed to do with them,” City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer told the Post. "People were already not trusting this process and they were already not trusting the Board of Elections to count the ballot right."

[…]

Voters are required to sign their names on their ballot to return it to be counted, meaning the mislabeled return envelopes would likely be voided if mailed in because the names and signatures would not match. 

Some voters said they had contacted the New York City Board of Elections (BOE) and had been told they would receive a corrected replacement ballot.  

Michael Ryan, the BOE’s executive director, told Gothamist that the problem was an error made by the vendor who printed the ballots. Around 140,000 ballots in the area have already been mailed. It is not yet clear how many are affected by the error.

And yes, New York voters have been tweeting all the screw-ups here. With these issues, plus rejected ballots and the fact that in-person voting is safe—there’s been a quiet shift from Democrats in backing folks to just go to their polling locations and cast their ballots the old-fashioned way if possible. 

After months of pushing this vote-by-mail nonsense, Democrats are shifting course. It’s no shock. This process is ripe for fraud. You can read a Democratic operative’s tell-all piece about it. But also, the notion that this process is a total nightmare, and that people’s ballots may not even be counted. Some 28 million ballots were lost via mail in the past four elections.