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By design.
Those official looking non government organizations that want to help and encourage people to vote need to back off the fake government format and just be honest with voters. I’m not a PA resident, but have also received a stack of confusing voter information to the point that I bagged the vote by mail option and will vote early in person so as to ensure my vote counts.
And those ballots that were actually issued by Pennsylvania can only be deposited in the GOP ballot “harvesting” boxes in California…
So obvious the GOP is losing.
Yep…
Why couldn’t this be changed, now that the state has at least had a Democratic governor for 4+ years?
Governments need to seriously invite in and invest in non partisan, process improvement professionals with solid track records to get this kind of garbage under control. NY, one of the bluest states in the union is still a mess, shaming even some R controlled states in miasmas of laws and regulations when it comes to their elections.
Here in Cumberland County voting early seems to running well.
Our Election Board extended drop off times.
We dropped off our ballots, at Carlisle, a few days ago where we were greeted by a Deputy Sheriff who made sure we had signed the outside envelope.
Unbelievable for Republican Cumberland County but nice.
Some folks in New York just waiting on Donald and he knows it.Two in particular Cy Vance and Letitia James
James AG of New York,Vance Manhattan DA.
Good to hear.
I’m as suspicious of GOP fuckery as anyone but this kind of thing happens all. the. time. A municipality closes a bridge to rebuild it and everyone yells and they say we put it in the newsletter, we sent postcards to everyone’s house, we put a notice in the paper, we sent out e-mails to all residents, and the answer is always well I didn’t see anything. I got an e-mail from the PA Dept. of State saying hey you voted in the primary and checked the box so sit tight we’ll send you a ballot for the general you don’t have to apply. And in due course it came. This article is just a tiny bit clickbaity if you ask me.
PA resident here. Tracking your ballot when it’s on your way to you is confusing as all hell. But my experience in the primary was that it registered receipt of my submitted ballot immediately.
The alarm in the headline is not warranted. As the article says, 90% of those “rejected applications” were because voters had applied for a primary ballot in the spring and already checked off that they wanted one for the general.
Agree. But I was denied as a duplicate, without explanation.
I called the county election office, got a recording that said almost immediately that if you received a duplicate rejection notice, then it was probably because I checked the box for a general ballot during the primary, and wait for the official general ballot. Got my ballot and voted.
With duplicates at “More than 90% of those applications”, this is not much of a story.
Voter in PA here. I had my application rejected because it was a duplicate from the primary. I then received my ballot and turned it in. This has been a mess, but the headline is misleading because people like me were not disenfranchised.
Yes.
Its similar to articles that the Miami Herald ran in 2018 citing huge number of VBM ballots not being counted. Turns out, roughly 90% of that huge number was from undeliverable VBM ballots being returned to sender. Wrong addresses, dead voter, etc.
For what its worth, we have been all over those type of ballots since the primary. Turns out, once again, the vast majority of “return to sender” are voters who have actually moved out of state/country, died, etc. But we are tracking down EVERY potential problem ballot proactively this cycle anyway.
If you were denied as a duplicate and don’t know why, it could be a software glitch. After years of buying licenses to drive and fish online, and buying liquor at the state store, it’s my perception that their IT work tends to be pretty clunky and inelegant, what the kids call “janky,” meaning it works but certainly not perfectly or especially well.
Decades ago a friend was posted to Harrisburg by his Big 8 employer for a few years doing IT “consulting” for the state government. What he described was a mess then, and I doubt it’s gotten all that much better. Not generally full-scale disasters, just endless low-level lousy work.
That’s been my experience. A long time ago I found I had problems buying fishing licenses online because their system didn’t play well with Macs. I had to try again and do everything in as PC-like a way as I could, use Internet Explorer, all that. It’s somewhat better these days, but still kind of clunky and old-fashioned.
Seems like PA election boards brought a lot of this on themselves. If someone sends in a duplicate application, especially in the first year where they have this check box, why do they have to send a declination email? Why not just send the ballot as they were going to do anyway and not bother to mention the duplication? What is the voter supposed to do with this duplication information anyway? They’ve created a lot of unnecessary confusion.
Or they could have sent something that said “Your ballot is already in the pipeline, don’t worry.” If I saw a duplication notice declining my application, my first thought would be that the duplicate had somehow cancelled the original request, and now I was back at square one or worse.