John Minchillo/AP Photo
A social-distancing information poster is displayed on a window outside a polling station at the Brooklyn Museum, as early voting continues in New York City, June 16, 2020.
New York City became the coronavirus epicenter when the disease hit the United States. Then, it became a protesting focal point after the police murder of George Floyd. And now, on Tuesday, New York City is putting its election system to the test, managing primary elections amid both of these disruptions.
Fortunately, New York elections will not run this year with the confusing and disenfranchising rules of the past. For the first time, New Yorkers will have three possible ways to cast their ballots, relieving some obstacles to participating this election cycle. Thanks to a law passed in 2019, early voting is now available, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo expanded the absentee mail option to everyone, adding fear of contracting coronavirus to the list of valid reasons to want to vote by mail.
However, this does not mean New York City will be without voting troubles on Election Day. With each new procedure and voting option comes confusion for voters, and often the responsibility to help people get to the polls falls on campaigns and their volunteers. This is especially true for insurgent candidates, or anyone running in a competitive race, of which there are many in the five boroughs.
New York’s most-watched race will be in the Bronx and Westchester, where middle school principal Jamaal Bowman is challenging 31-year incumbent Eliot Engel to represent the 16th Congressional District. Bowman’s campaign manager Luke Hayes says that all the campaign can do is be diligent about informing supporters about the rules and if there are any changes.
“We’re monitoring it closely and trying to get information as soon as possible from the Board of Elections. Anytime we take on the establishment we’re always on guard,” Hayes said in an interview with the Prospect. Dedicated volunteers are key to this approach, added Hayes, who also worked on the Tiffany Cabán campaign last year.
For fellow insurgent candidate Samelys López, running for Congress in the 15th District in Brooklyn, this means her team trains volunteers before every volunteer session. Campaign manager Jenny Zhang says the key to helping voters is being nimble, changing their trainings as laws change or deadlines for particular voting alternatives pass.
“What we’re doing right now is a lot of voter education because the rules have been changing,” Zhang says, of the unique circumstances. “For some people, they still think [the only way to vote is] in-person voting.”
Early in-person voting was first available in last year’s city elections, but those elections typically have lower turnout than a presidential year, meaning that many voters might have never had the option before. New York City voters may also have not known about the absentee ballot expansion, because at first the website instructions were only available in English.
The López campaign knew that wouldn’t help all of the voters they were trying to reach, and it took up the responsibility to translate the instructions into Spanish, and put them on the campaign website, which can be auto-translated into seven different languages. Eventually, the Board of Elections caught up and was also able to translate its instructions on the official website.
“I think you’re seeing now that … the way our government is set up, [it] isn’t able to respond to a lot of crisis, so they’re actually not even able to respond as quickly to voter education needs as we can in some situations,” Zhang says.
New York’s absentee ballot is not the most difficult to navigate in the country, but there are still several ways someone’s ballot could get thrown out. Mail-in ballots are commonly rejected because of a missing voter signature, sometimes called the voter’s oath, which is signed on the return envelope. And voters who do remember to sign their ballot may have their ballot not count because of signature matching, meaning that the signature on the envelope must match their signature on file at the Board of Elections. Both will be a risk for New Yorkers voting by mail this June.
“We’re trying to be diligent with our supporters, trying to make sure they do everything correctly,” Hayes says. “I think the voting by mail [system] was made unnecessarily complex in the state. And it’s frustrating to see a fundamental right become such a bureaucratic process. We’ve seen in the past absentee ballots getting thrown out for not checking a box, or not signing something correctly, so obviously we’re trying to work with our supporters so their vote doesn’t get disqualified on a technicality.”
So whether it’s a question of getting caught in bureaucratic technicalities or simply being informed about voting options, the campaigns themselves are acting as the outreach coordinators for state laws.
For the first time, New Yorkers will have three possible ways to cast their ballots, relieving some obstacles to participating this election cycle.
This is part of the reason why voting rights advocates are asking Congress for more money for election operations in future coronavirus relief bills. As states expand voting options, like New York is doing for this primary, they’ll need money not only for personal protective equipment, but also for public-education campaigns and for paying well-trained poll workers both at early-polling sites and on Election Day.
New York City has been trying to assist voters. The NYC Board of Elections’ offices are open and training poll workers and polling site leaders, and even responding to voter questions and giving them updates on their mail-in ballots via its Twitter account.
However, there were still reports of almost half the voters in the city having not received their requested absentee ballots, as of the end of May. The delay was attributed to a late court decision—which ruled that the Democratic presidential primary should remain on the ballot—but it’s possible that more staff to process ballot requests would have helped reduce delays, especially as there are also concerns about Postal Service delays causing problems when it comes to having enough time to return an absentee ballot.
Without adequate funding—estimated at $2 billion for the country—and investment in the logistics of elections, there’ll be almost no way to avoid delays in processing absentee ballots, or even long lines at in-person polling locations.
At the Bowman campaign headquarters, Hayes says it can take up to 30 minutes to train volunteers on the voting procedures, which he admits can be “tedious.” But if the campaign won’t do it, there’s no certainty that anyone else will.
“The process for voting in America, in a lot of states, is more complicated than it needs to be,” Hayes says. “There are better ways to do it, and if more elections were properly funded and really got the resources they need, we could have elections that run smoothly, without long lines or questions about how to fill out a form to properly vote.”
