Sixty percent of voters — nearly 70 million people — are projected to vote by mail nationwide during the coronavirus pandemic. Those who study absentee rejection rates estimate that 1 percent to 2 percent of those votes — potentially more than 1 million — won't count, which could make a difference in battleground states.
"The vote-by-mail ballot rejections are going to be the hanging chads of 2000," said Daniel Smith, a professor of political science at the University of Florida.
The risk of ballot rejection varies by demographics and geography. The rate of rejection tends to be higher for Black, Hispanic, female and younger voters, as well as for people who don't usually vote by mail.
Experts say it also tends to be higher in states that don't normally have a lot of absentee ballots — a category that includes the battleground states of Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. All five had less than 10 percent of turnout by mail in 2016, and they will see huge increases in mail votes this fall.
The problem, experts say, is that experience matters when it comes to counting mail-in ballots. And while tight vote margins are nothing new for purple states, many have never experienced an election in which such a high percentage of votes will arrive by mail. Amid round-the-clock efforts by election officials to expand access to mail ballots, rejection rates in past elections raise concerns that in some tightly contested states, the number of rejected ballots could be larger than the winning candidate's margin of victory.
Donald Trump's surprise 2016 victory was the result of razor-thin victories in three states — Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. In two of those states, the numbers of rejected mail ballots from this year's primary elections were bigger than his margins of victory four years ago.
In its statewide primary in August, Michigan counted about 1.6 million absentee ballots, with over 13,500 of them rejected. If the tally of absentee ballots roughly doubles in November, as expected, the number of lost votes will likely be greater than Trump's 10,704-vote margin of victory in 2016.
In Wisconsin's April primary, over 23,000 absentee ballots were rejected. In 2016, Trump won Wisconsin by 22,748 votes.
In Pennsylvania, which Trump won four years ago by 44,292 votes, nearly 20,000 ballots were rejected in this year's primary as about 1.5 million people voted by absentee or mail ballots. An estimated 3 million people are expected to vote by mail in the general election.
More than 34 million absentee votes have been cast already, according to NBC News Decision Desk/Target Smart.
In all but five states this election cycle, any voter is eligible to receive an absentee ballot, largely because of changes made in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
As a result, some battleground states have seen seismic shifts in the way people vote. Some are expecting a tenfold or more increase in mail ballots as people decide that they don't want to go to polling places during the pandemic.
"When you're in a scenario like we are in Michigan ... where so many citizens are going to be voting by mail for the first time, there are going to be mistakes made," Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said last month, noting that absentee voters don't get immediate indications as to whether their votes are counted. "That will lead to potential challenges, in my view, or difficulties in making sure that every valid vote is counted."
To meet this need, election officials have mobilized over the last seven months to hire more staff, redesign ballots and envelopes, invest in new technology, educate voters and loosen the rules about when ballots are disqualified.
In many states, primary elections in the spring and summer served as learning experiences for how to handle unprecedented rates of absentee voting. About 2 percent of absentee ballots were rejected during the primaries, based on data from 25 states, according to Michael McDonald, a professor of political science at the University of Florida.
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