C2 eZ re the washington post.monday, july 27 , 2020
just get our ballots counted,” Patel
said. “It’s just a terrible canary in
the coal mine for anyone looking
at the November election.”the candidates
This race is actually a rematch.
Patel (who pronounces his first
name like “surge”) challenged
maloney in 2018, and he got 40
percent of the vote by campaign-the BoE with creating “an elec-
tion law snafu.” maloney is not
part of the lawsuit, but she did
sign a joint statement with Patel
and the other two candidates in
their race demanding that all
votes be counted.
“Never in my wildest dreams
did I think that after tripling the
electorate turnout, we would
then be fighting weeks later toBy comparison, in Wisconsin
and Georgia, two primaries con-
sidered to be chaotic, the mail-in
ballot rejection rates were 1.8 and
3 percent, respectively.
on July 17, Patel joined a feder-
al lawsuit along with State As-
sembly candidate Emily Gallagh-
er (who just won her race) and
more than a dozen voters charg-
ing Gov. Andrew m. Cuomo andPHoTos bY WiLLiaM MebaNe for THe WasHiNgToN PosT
FRoM toP: a New York City board of Elections employee organizes opened mail-in ballots at a
canvassing site. both Democratic candidates in the 12th District primary estimate that about 2 0, 000
out of 45, 000 mail-in ballots have been counted in Manhattan so far. officials wheel ballots to a secure
location where they will be electronically scanned. suraj Patel, a former obama campaign staffer and
attorney, is challenging Rep. Carolyn b. Maloney, who has been in Congress since 19 93.In his Tuesday news confer-
ence, Cuomo punted the issue to
the state legislature.
What Patel argues is that the
law isn’t taking into account how
much the pandemic changed the
election. In t he midst of the state’s
shutdown in April, Cuomo signed
an executive order mandating
that the BoE send an absentee
ballot application to every New
Yorker, who in the past could only
obtain an absentee ballot for nar-
row reasons, such as illness or
disability.
The BoE, with limited staff
allowed in its offices, sprung to
action, setting up an online portal
and a phone line for absentee
ballot requests and preparing a
mailing for the city’s 3 million
registered primary voters. That
didn’t go out until mid-may.
Every ballot request needed to
be approved by a bipartisan set of
staffers, then entered into the
voter rolls. Then a court dispute
about the presidential primary
delayed the finalization of the
ballot, which the BoE didn’t be-
gin sending out until three weeks
before the election.
That’s where the U.S. Postal
Service comes in. mail-in ballots
are in the hands of a federal
agency on the brink of bankrupt-
cy that had to sideline 17,000
workers on quarantine because of
exposure to the virus. Louis De-
Joy, a Trump donor recently ap-
pointed as postmaster general,
has announced cost-cutting
changes that will probably fur-
ther slow mail delivery.At every turn, the governor’s
executive orders and the BoE’s
deadlines were out of touch
with the Postal Service’s abili-
ties. The final date for voters to
send in absentee applications
was June 16, an impossible sev-
en-day turnaround for the ap-
plication to get to the B oE a nd a
ballot to get to the voter in time
to cast it.
But in New York, there was
another issue. The governor’s ex-
ecutive order called for the bal-
lots to have business-class post-
age-paid return envelopes. In a
normal year, voters provide their
own stamp, which is considered
first-class mail and always post-
marked. The USPS said it is also
its policy to postmark all ballots.
It is not standard, however, as
voter advocacy groups have said,
to postmark the type of business-
class mail used in New York’s
primary election. If you drop it off
in a mailbox it is simply sent to its
destination. It seems as though
the postage class created confu-
sion among some USPS employ-
ees.
The only way for a voter to
guarantee a postmark would
have been to stand in line at a p ost
office and watch a teller do it,
rather than drop it in a box, which
defeats the public health benefit
of mail-in ballots.
Upon review of what happened
in New York, USPS spokeswoman
martha Johnson said, “We are
aware that some ballots may not
have been postmarked and have
taken actions to resolve the issue
going forward.”
on Wednesday night, Cuomo
and New York Attorney General
Letitia James responded to the
lawsuit Patel joined by saying
that allowing un-postmarked bal-
lots was “not in the public inter-
est because it would upend the
rules... after the election has
already taken place.”
Patel quickly looked into a new
legal strategy and has secured an
expedited hearing that may hap-
pen as early as Thursday.
“This is not the fault of vote-by-
mail,” he said. “I’ve always been
an advocate of vote by mail. It
increased participation to astro-
nomical rates for a congressional
primary. But, man, is New York
unprepared to have the pro-
cedures in place to count these
ballots in a timely fashion.”
of course, he still wants to
know the outcome.
“It might be that we open up
those ballots and they all go to
maloney. It’s not my job to decide
who gets to vote,” he said. “A t least
we’d know what the actual inten-
tion of New York- 12 was.”
[email protected]Michelle Ye Hee Lee and elise
Viebeck contributed to this report.ing with then-candidate Alexan-
dria ocasio-Cortez and running
as a progressive. It’s exactly the
same percentage he got of the
in-person vote this time, though
with the pandemic and two dem-
ocratic socialist candidates in the
race, Patel decided to run more as
an obama-hope-and-change can-
didate to the left side of the
middle.
Election Day was on June 23.
The BoE, by law, waited a week
for all the mail-in ballots to ar-
rive, and then waited until July 8
to start the count because of the
sheer volume of ballots to sort
through and fourth of July week-
end. A week after that, no absen-
tee ballots had been counted in
the 12th District.
“I’ve waited three years for this
result, so another three weeks
isn’t that bad,” said Patel at the
time.
But around the month mark,
his chipper attitude started to
wane. “Literally nothing is hap-
pening, and that’s in Brooklyn.
manhattan is even more of a
disaster,” he said.
It’s sometimes hard to remem-
ber that these candidates had
platforms and positions and that
people like and dislike them,
before their election turned into
“Waiting for Godot.” maloney is
Upper East Side, through and
through. It’s where she lived and
where she stayed during the
shutdown, holding Zoom town
halls. She is known as a hard-
charging feminist and a prolific
author of legislation who has
championed funding for rape
kits and the permanent authori-
zation of the 9/11 Victim Com-
pensation fund. She recently
said t hat, as head of the oversight
Committee, she will shoot down
“the Trump Administration’s cra-
ven attempt to add a citizen
question to the Census.”
At a time of protests and pan-
demics, Patel’s main attacks on
her were about her long record of
“tough on crime” stances and that
she is an anti-vaxxer, based on her
repeated public queries about the
link between vaccines and au-
tism. maloney has responded
that b oth she and her children are
vaccinated.
Patel, who lives with his Er
doctor brother, got the coronavi-
rus in march and has positioned
himself as the pro-science candi-
date, even writing a universal
testing plan. After his recovery, h e
could be seen at Black Lives mat-
ter protests outside the mayor’s
residence of Gracie mansion in
the 12th District. He claims that
once the shutdown happened, his
campaign helped people set up
unemployment claims, apply for
small-business loans, get toilet
paper.
maloney’s main knocks on him
are calling into question his big
campaign donations from the
midwest and that he is a creep
with women. There’s even an ad
her campaign approved on a web-
site called nocreepsforcon-
gress.com. He said that maloney
was vicious and that her cam-
paign had misinterpreted a joke.
All the action in their contest is
focused on the count, and it is
something out of a dystopian
thriller about office tedium. At
the manhattan canvassing spot,
numbered folding tables are scat-
tered throughout a cavernous
space. Two BoE employees sit on
one side of a plexiglass sneeze
guard.
on the other side are the
watchers. Each campaign gets
one watcher at each table. The
BoE employees open the enve-
lopes and show the ballots
through the sneeze guard so the
watchers can contest a ballot’s
validity and compile chicken-
scratch tallies. The pace is equiva-
lent to watching a sloth eat bark.‘We are constrained’
Back in his office, Patel is wor-
rying over “the postmark issue.” It
was all he could think about: the
13,000 invalid ballots across
three boroughs in his race. Based
on photocopies of envelopes his
campaign received from the BoE,
he estimated half of those were
not counted because of a missing
postmark.
These are ballots that fell into a
kind of black hole of election law.
Ballots that arrived to the BoE
before or on June 23, Election
Day, with or without a postmark
are valid. Ballots that arrived by
the cutoff of June 30 with a
postmark of June 23 or earlier are
valid. Ballots that arrived before
June 30 but have no postmark or
a postmark of the 24 th, which
many had, probably due to what
the BoE called “USPS error,” Patel
said — those are invalid, automat-
ically.
“It’s a question of timeliness.
We are constrained,” said Valerie
Vazquez-Diaz, the BoE’s spokes-
woman.
That third category of ballots
has the ones Patel is fighting to
have counted. The lawsuit he filed
calls on Cuomo to fix the issue
with an executive order.were invalidated for technicali-
ties like a missing signature or a
missing postmark on the en-
velope.
This isn’t t he only primary race
in New York still up in the air. The
15th Congressional District in the
Bronx, where New York City
Council member ritchie To rres
holds a healthy lead, still hasn’t
been called. Two other primaries
in the Bronx and Westchester,
won by Jamaal Bowman and
mondaire Jones, were not decid-
ed for three weeks.
None of this bodes well for
November’s federal election in
which President Trump has re-
fused to say whether he will
accept the results. Turnout is
expected to skyrocket because of
the presidential race. Another
coronavirus spike in the fall could
lead to more mail-in ballots from
people who fear crowded polling
places. Add in slowed mail deliv-
ery because of the pandemic,
while Trump constantly threat-
ens to dismantle the U.S. Postal
Service. meanwhile, Trump and
his republican allies have repeat-
edly attacked the integrity of
mail-in voting, making unfound-
ed claims that the method is
susceptible to widespread fraud.
Enter New York’s 12th District
as an extreme, but not isolated,
case study. Last week, the race
even caught the eye of White
House press secretary Kayleigh
mcEnany, w ho cited “the absolute
catastrophe for New York City” in
her news briefing while answer-
ing a question on election secu-
rity.
“It’s a dark omen for Novem-
ber,” said a Wall Street Journal
op-ed about the race, warning
against voter fraud.
“Let’s fix this dumpster fire
before it burns down the country
in November,” t he New York Daily
News, a liberal tabloid, wrote in
its op-ed on the race, warning
about voter disenfranchisement
through ballots that are invalidat-
ed because of missing postmarks.
meanwhile, the actual humans
stuck in the purgatory of the
undecided election in the 12th
District have almost become sec-
ondary characters to the
D.r.A.m.A. unfurling around
them.
maloney and Patel’s electoral
fates hang in the balance of those
mail-in ballots. This is the only
district in New York in which the
absentees made up well over 50
percent of the vote, largely be-
cause it is one of the wealthiest
districts in the city and so many
residents fled to their second or
third homes in the Hamptons or
the Adirondacks.
Both NY-12 candidates esti-
mate that around 20,000 out of
45,000 mail-in ballots have been
counted in manhattan so far. Ac-
cording to Patel’s campaign, he
was up by 1,000 when the smaller
portions of the district (but the
larger percentage of invalid
votes) in western Queens and
northwestern Brooklyn finished
tallying. But with maloney’s base
of the Upper East Side being
counted, he’s down by 2,000. Ac-
cording to an email sent by Patel’s
field director late friday, t he cam-
paign is no longer sending staff-
ers and volunteers to monitor the
count in manhattan. Unless
something happened with the
invalidated ballots in the race, the
email read, “our path to victory
becomes much narrower.” Patel’s
spokeswoman, Cassie moreno,
said they had decided to stop
going to the count because they
felt it was slowing down the
process and they would rather
focus on efforts to get the invali-
dated ballots counted. “our focus
will shift this week to fighting for
those invalidated ballots and
working to make sure every sin-
gle vote is counted, no matter
who they were cast for,” she said.
maloney, w ho provided a state-
ment but declined to be inter-
viewed for this article, called for
patience. Her team had been at
the counting sites every day, she
said, while thanking the Board of
Elections (BoE) for its hard work.
“While everyone wants the re-
sults to be certified, we can’t
sacrifice accuracy for speed when
it comes to something as critical
as people’s vote,” she wrote.
But the invalidation rate is
concerning to many who are
watching the race. According to
data from the BoE first published
by the Intercept, up to 1 in 5
mail-in ballots were declared in-
valid before even being opened,
based on mistakes with their ex-
terior envelopes. The majority of
mistakes are due to missing or
late postmarks, and missing sig-
natures. Preliminary numbers
from the BoE show an invalida-
tion rate of 19 percent in both
manhattan and Queens and 28
percent in Brooklyn, just in this
district. That rate, if applied to all
of Brooklyn, would equate to
34,000 ballots thrown out, in a
borough with the city’s largest
population of black residents.
ballots from C1
A month later, this New York primary is still up in the air
“Never in my wildest
dreams did I think that
after tripling the
electorate turnout, we
would then be fighting
weeks later to just get
our ballots counted.”
Suraj Patel, a Democratic
candidate in New York’s 12th
Congressional District