And there is a large asterisk to that figure of 1.2 million total absentee ballot requests statewide that will make it grow even more: There is still a month to go before the deadline to request an application for an absentee ballot that can be mailed or dropped off at early voting locations and election day polling places.
With four weeks left before that deadline, Erie County has gotten 66,644 absentee ballot applications so far, according to county Board of Elections spokesman Derek Murphy. In 2016, the last presidential election year, just under 30,000 total votes were cast by absentee ballots in the county.
In all of New York, a heavily Democratic state not in play in the presidential election between President Trump and former Vice President Joseph Biden, the state elections board has received 280,032 online absentee ballot applications. When all absentee request sources are included, such as online portals run directly by many counties, the number of applications totaled more than 1.2 million as of Sunday night, according to state elections board spokesman John Conklin.
In 2016, 495,520 absentee requests were received statewide for the entire general election season, Conklin said. Just over 400,000 New Yorkers ended up voting that year by absentee ballot.
The surge in absentee ballot requests has not been without problems. In Brooklyn this week, residents complained about mislabeled ballot return envelopes – mistakes that will force local election officials to try to figure out how to get corrected paperwork to the voters before the absentee voting deadline. State officials Tuesday said it affected about 100,000 ballots.
The state GOP used the Brooklyn snafu as what it called the latest reason to vote in person in November.
"If you vote in person, your vote is secure and can't be stolen on a technicality," the GOP tweeted out Tuesday afternoon.
Absentee ballot requests must be received by Oct. 27 this year.
In a bow to Covid-19, the state this year relaxed the legal excuses for which someone can vote via absentee ballot to include a catch-all “due to risk of contracting or spreading a communicable disease like Covid-19” provision. It is also much easier to obtain an absentee ballot this year. Ballots with a postmark showing they were mailed on or before election day on Nov. 3 will be counted if received by Nov. 10.
“There’s tremendous interest in the presidential election coupled with the fact that the Covid pandemic still has a number of people concerned about going to polls on election day,” said Erie County Republican Elections Commissioner Ralph Mohr.
“Mail-in balloting is a lot easier than going to the polls. You’re able to vote early and get it out of the way and do your civic duty and I think people are taking advantage of that," Mohr added.
Jeremy Zellner, the Democratic commissioner of the Erie County elections board, thought the absentee ballot applications requests – the most ever – would have been even higher.
President Trump has repeatedly sought to sow doubts about the absentee ballot process in the United States in what has become a partisan fight over the U.S. Postal Service and the alternative to in-person voting.
Zellner said “folks are questioning whether it’s good to put the ballot in the mail” considering all the negative press the process has received, especially in the swing states in the presidential election. Zellner stressed that voters do not have to mail in absentee ballots, but can hand deliver them, including to one of three dozen early voting locations around the county. Early voting in New York State starts this year on Oct. 24.
Though absentee ballots already are being received by local elections boards across the state, they will not be opened or counted until at least election day. In Erie County, Mohr said the paper absentee ballots won’t be opened for 13 days after election day to, in part, give time for election officials to ensure that someone who voted by absentee ballot did not also vote in-person on election day.
Mohr, an elections commissioner for 27 years, said absentee ballots typically track the same way as votes cast in-person. This year, given the numbers of people voting by absentee ballots, Mohr said some races will likely end up seeing different outcomes than might be apparent after in-person votes are counted starting at 9 p.m. on election day.
©2020 The Buffalo News (Buffalo, N.Y.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
