Tomorrow night, New Yorkers will find out shortly after 9 p.m. how they voted for president and other public offices and what they decided on ballot questions. This is how things should be and it will be much better than four years ago, when many results were not announced until a week after Election Day.
In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many New Yorkers voted by mail for the first time, the vote counting process in the state was maddeningly slow. This aroused distrust and conspiracy theories proliferated. Confidence in the validity of electoral integrity has been shaken.
The problem was not with the Post Office, which delivered the ballots to the local election board. The delay was due to New York state law that required anything that arrived by mail could not begin to be tabulated until seven days after Election Day.
The law, in effect 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 examined to see if any registered voter had indeed voted in person.
If a person had actually appeared in the flesh and voted on the machine, any absentee ballot would be declared invalid and rejected, having never been opened.
Only if it was determined that a citizen had not exercised their right to vote at the polling location would their absentee ballot be opened and the paper ballot fed into the machine. This worked well when there were only a relative handful of mail-in ballots.
However, the rise of COVID resulted in millions of mail-in ballots being cast and the system collapsed as ballots had to be cast up to a week after polls closed and then cross-checked with the register of those who had voted in person.
That has changed, thanks to a 2021 state law promoted by state Sen. Mike Gianaris. And last Thursday, in a Halloween decision, the highest in New York State, the Court of Appeals unanimously upheld the final element of the new law, allowing for a faster count.
Today, the presumption is overturned. Any voter requesting an absentee ballot is assumed to have completed it and mailed it back to be counted. And that’s what happened. Postal ballots, once received at the Board of Elections, are opened and counted and the tallies are not made public until the polls close on Tuesday evening.
If an absentee ballot applicant also shows up at a polling location, the computerized voter list will indicate that an absentee ballot was sent and the person will not be allowed to vote on the machine.
A sworn ballot, what is called a provisional ballot in other states, will be offered to the citizen. These affidavit ballots will be retained for up to seven days after Election Day and will only be counted if a valid mail-in ballot has never been returned.
This means that almost all the ballots will be counted and the results published tomorrow evening. Only mail-in ballots (which were postmarked on Election Day and received seven days later) will not be included immediately and will be added later.
But for the vast majority of ballots, the results will be known shortly after 9 p.m. Imagine that.
