NEW YORK, NY (04/20/2020) (readMedia)-- In response to news that Governor Cuomo might issue an executive order mandating vote by mail in New York, Susan Lerner, Executive Director of Common Cause/NY, issued the following statement:
"Jumping to an entire vote by mail system in New York state is setting up our elections for failure. States with vote by mail have spent years building up the infrastructure to sustain it from updating their voter rolls, to setting up secure dropoff locations, to creating protocols to compile and count every ballot. New York needs to expand absentee voting and early voting now to guarantee success in November, let alone June. We're hopeful that in a few years, we'll be able to transition to a vote by mail model, but right now in the middle of a pandemic New Yorkers do not need to be experimenting with a complete overhaul of our elections against the advice of all experts."
In an April 15th New York Times interview the Secretary of State of Washington, Kim Wyman, stated in no uncertain terms that, "you can't just flip a switch and go from real low absentee ballots to 100 percent vote-by-mail. I mean, as we sit here right now, in April, with a November election deadline, I'm not sure you could do it in states across the country."
She continued:
"In Washington State, we started by letting anyone do an absentee ballot for every election. And that was in 1993. By the late '90s, many counties like mine and here in Olympia, Thurston County, we're up to about 60 percent of our voters getting a ballot every election by mail. We would have some elections where 90 percent of our ballots were cast by mail, even in a poll site election. That continued until 2005, when we had a really close governor's race in '04, and our legislature allowed counties to move to vote-by-mail. And that really happened because that close governor's race showed that you couldn't do both elections well. You can't do a full-blown absentee ballot to every voter and set up all your polling places well because you're stretched too thin resource-wise. So essentially, our state wanted to move to vote-by-mail in 2005. It took five years to get all 39 of our counties to move to vote-by-mail."
Strictly vote by mail, without in-person sites, is a reach for New York since a successful program is dependent on the accuracy of the voter file. Common Cause/NY does not believe that the 58 Boards of Election (BOEs) have maintained up-to-date voter rolls. For example, in 2016, thousands of active Democratic voters were improperly moved to inactive status. If New York hastily institutes a vote by mail system, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers may never receive a ballot. Even in full vote by mail states, there remain in-person options for voters who require language assistance or voters with disabilities who require ballot marking devices.
Common Cause/NY's recommendations: