Why the botched N.Y.C. primary has become the November nightmare
Election officials in New York City widely distributed mail-in ballots for the primary on June 23, which featured dozens of hard-fought races. The officials had hoped to make voting much easier, but they did not seem prepared for the response: more than 10 times the number of absentee ballots received in recent elections in the city.
Now, nearly six weeks later, two closely watched congressional races remain undecided, and major delays in counting a deluge of 400,000 mail-in ballots and other problems are being cited as examples of the challenges facing the nation as it looks toward conducting the November general election during the pandemic.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other officials are trading blame for the botched counting in the city, and the Postal Service is coming under criticism over whether it is equipped to handle the sharp increase in absentee ballots.
Election lawyers said one area of concern in New York City was that mail-in ballots have prepaid return envelopes. The Postal Service apparently had difficulty processing some of them correctly and, as a result, an unknown number of votes — perhaps thousands — may have been wrongfully disqualified because of a lack of a postmark.
Thousands more ballots in the city were discarded by election officials for minor errors, or not even sent to voters until the day before the primary, making it all but impossible for the ballots to be returned in time…
“This election is a canary in the coal mine,” said Suraj Patel, a Democrat running for Congress in a district that includes parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, who has filed a federal lawsuit over the primary.
Mr. Patel trails the incumbent, Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, by some 3,700 votes, though more than 12,000 ballots have been disqualified, including about 1,200 that were missing postmarks, he said.
He is among the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed in July that is asking a federal court to order election officials to count disqualified ballots. The lawsuit included testimony that election officials had mailed out more than 34,000 ballots one day before the June 23 primary.
A winner has also not been declared in a congressional district in the Bronx, where Ritchie Torres, a Democratic city councilman, holds a comfortable lead over several other contenders.
Other states and localities had vote-by-mail primaries during the pandemic, with some scattered reports of problems — though nothing on the scale of New York City’s weekslong process. Even before the outbreak, the city’s Board of Elections had a reputation as a troubled agency that ran elections rife with problems.
