"New York State is interesting in that it allows in-person voting irrespective of what you did or didn't do with your absentee ballot," Lerner said. "If you requested an absentee ballot, didn't get one, or decided not to cast it, you are able to vote in person on a regular ballot. If you got your absentee ballot and mailed it back, and decided that you still want to vote in person, you go into your polling place and you're able to vote on a regular ballot. In-person voting overrides absentee in New York State. The voter has options."
These state-by-state variations are not widely known. However, they could become critical in the fall's general election. Nobody knows what percentage of at-home voters are not receiving ballots. If Lerner's figures about New York City are a guide, it could be a few percentage points. In 2016, Trump's margin over Hillary Clinton in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania was less than 1 percent.
Questions of how and when voters get their mail-in ballots in the fall, and what ballot cancellation or ballot surrender rules are in play at in-person voting sites, are at the juncture where pre-existing state laws, new pandemic policy and other factors could create or diminish roadblocks for voters and election officials.
"There are peculiar approaches that some states have followed this season, including in some places like Georgia that chose to outsource the handling of its vote-by-mail process to an out-of-state vendor that made big mistakes," Clarke said. "Like sending the ballot to the home address of the voter and not the requested mailing address that was provided on the application."
"Those are the kinds of issues that we must fine-tune in order to get voting by mail right in advance of the November general election," she said. "Getting vote by mail right is critical, because that means that we alleviate the burdens that officials otherwise face on Election Day."
Getting the administrative procedures behind vote by mail right also would deflate Trump's escalating attacks on the process. The rapid shift to voting from home has left some people trying to vote by mail and at precincts, in the hope that they will cast one ballot that counts. That's voting once, not many times over.
This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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