Tomorrow night, New Yorkers will know shortly after 9 p.m. how they voted for president and other public offices and what they decided on the ballot questions. That’s how it should be and it will be much better than four years ago, when many of the results weren’t promulgated until a week after Election Day.
In 2020, during COVID, when many New Yorkers cast their ballots by mail for the first time, the vote counting process in this state was maddeningly slow. It caused mistrust and conspiracy theories grew. Confidence in the validity of electoral integrity was damaged.
The problem wasn’t the Post Office, which delivered the ballots just fine back to the local Board of Elections. The delay was caused by New York State law that required that nothing coming in by mail could even start to be tabulated until seven days after Election Day.
The law, on the books for many years, had been written to assume that everyone would vote in person and so all the Election Day data, as to who had actually voted on the machine, had to be reviewed to see if a registered voter had indeed voted in person.
If a person had indeed appeared in the flesh and voted on the machine, any such mail ballots would be ruled void and discarded, having never been opened.
Only if it was determined that a citizen had not exercised the franchise at the poll site, would the person’s mail ballot be opened and the paper ballot fed into the machine. That worked fine when there were just a relative handful of absentee ballots.
The rise of COVID, however, brought in millions of mail ballots and the system buckled as the ballots had to be held until a week after the polls closed and then cross checked against the register of those who had voted in person.
That has changed, thanks to a 2021 state law pushed by the state Sen. Mike Gianaris. And just last Thursday, in a Halloween decision, the highest in New York State, the Court of Appeals, unanimously upheld the last piece of the new law, allowing for a speedier count.
Now the presumption has been reversed. Any voter requesting a mail ballot is assumed to have filled it out and mailed it back to be counted. And that’s what happened. Mail ballots, once received back at the Board of Elections, are opened and counted and the tallies only made public once polls close on Tuesday night.
If a mail ballot requester also appears at a poll site, the computerized voter list will indicate that a mail ballot was sent out and the person will not be allowed to vote on the machine.
An affidavit ballot, what they call a provisional ballot in other states, will be offered to the citizen. Those affidavit ballots will be held until seven days after Election Day and only counted if a valid mail ballot was never returned.
What it means is that almost all the ballots will be counted and the results published tomorrow night. Only arriving mail ballots (having been postmarked by Election Day and received seven days later) will not be included immediately and be added in later.
But for the large bulk of ballots, the results will be known shortly after 9 p.m. Imagine that.
