Dear John,
The NYC Board of Elections and their mail vendor mailed absentee ballots with the wrong return envelopes to many voters who requested them. The issue appears to be widespread, but primarily affected voters in Brooklyn.
If you received an absentee ballot with the wrong name on the return envelope, the BOE says you should reach out to them via email at [email protected] or call 1-866-VOTE-NYC (you may have to wait a bit if you call this morning, the lines are busy). The BOE will send you a new ballot, which you can use to vote.
A design flaw left off the “/” between military/absentee on the ballot, causing some additional confusion, but that will not affect the counting of your vote.
Another option is to vote early in person: In-person early voting will be from Oct. 24 - Nov. 1st, and is a good and relatively safe option. During the primaries in June, early voting was very uncrowded, so social distancing really was possible and there were many safety precautions in place. More information and your early voting poll-site can be found here.
Requesting one, or even two absentee ballots and still deciding to vote in person is fine, so long as you still only vote once!
The deadline to register to vote is October 9, so you have just a week or so to register or update your registration if you’ve moved. It is always a good idea to check your registration to make sure everything is correct. You can only apply online if you have a DMV-issued state ID already, otherwise you should get the application in the mail ASAP! More details about how to register are here.
This snafu is very distressing, especially at a time when our anxiety about democracy is already so high. And once again points out how urgent it is for the State Legislature to reform the NYC Board of Elections. If it helps, Susan Lerner from Common Cause NY tells me that in the swing states, they have been doing mail-in ballots a lot longer, and are better at it than we are. There is enough time to repair the confusion and turn out voters in New York, and reason to believe that more long-standing and robust mail-in ballot systems in other states will see fewer problems.
Brad
