Assemblyman Benjie Wimberly (D-Passaic) dutifully dropped off his ballot at Paterson’s main post office off Federal Plaza with plenty of time to spare for the May 12 municipal elections.
Then he learned that the ballots cast by his family of four were among the 800 rejected in his ward by the Passaic County Board of Elections. He has yet to receive an explanation. It could be a signature verification issue, or it might have been delivered too late to be counted. And that was hardly the only problem in Paterson.
“Weeks before the governor said we’d have all vote-by-mail elections, I warned them that VBM is not good for Paterson,” Wimberly said. “We had had major issues with the postal system and a lot of fear of the virus among our mail carriers — vacations, early retirement, they were getting out. It was a formula for disaster.”
The 32 municipal elections held in May were supposed to be an exclusive vote-by-mail dress rehearsal for the July 7 primary, and as launches go, this was the ’62 Mets.
There were reports about ballots being delayed, lost, mishandled, and even stolen. Paterson alone has 3 ward elections being challenged in court, and accusations of fraud has led Mayor Andre Sayegh to lament “an election tragedy — the last thing we need is Donald Trump tweeting about Paterson.”
Federal investigators are now in Paterson, which is good, but that’s not going to help New Jersey fix the chronic ballot delivery blundering with the primary just two weeks away.
First we must admit we have a problem: The once-reliable US Postal Service, which reportedly could be bankrupt by September, clearly is no longer reliable.
The delivery issues weren’t just in Paterson, Orange and Montclair: The deputy superintendent for elections in Bergen County, Theresa O’Connor, told an Assembly hearing Thursday that the USPS “did not appreciate the significance of the vote-by-mail ballots” during the municipal elections, and that “in several towns, we saw instances of undelivered ballots left in stacks on the ground, in apartment buildings or outside or on top of mail boxes.”
The only solution is to bypass the USPS wherever practical. Voter behavior expert Patrick Murray, the Monmouth University pollster, points out that “the states that do vote-by-mail well do not rely on the postal service. The vast majority are actually deposited in special drop boxes or at local government offices” such as police stations.
These boxes are supervised, secured, and serviced by the state, not by the local letter carrier. Use them.
But in his executive orders that mandated New Jersey’s transition to the vote-by-mail model, Gov. Murphy called for only five ballot drop boxes in each of our 21 counties. Clearly, that number is inadequate, so Murray and other advocates endorses a sizable increase, and election officials agree that it would reinforce the chain of ballot custody.
“More than five are necessary,” agreed Union County clerk Joanne Rajoppi, who had sent out 205,000 primary ballots at the start of last week. “But some counties. . . .will not have them installed until next week. Installing boxes less than two weeks before an election isn’t going to work, not when I started sending out ballots at the end of May.”
We must do better. The Legislature could help by moving a bill from Sen. Paul Sarlo that allows municipal clerks to collect hand-delivered mail-in ballots — a handy option if the local Town Hall is a shorter trip than the nearest drop box.
The state has made many mistakes in its VBM rollout. With 3.6 million ballots being mailed in the middle of a pandemic, that was predictable. Public outreach, for example, has been poor: The mail-in ballot has a learning curve, and tutorials are rare - the governor himself didn’t launch one until Friday. People also need to know that local polling stations are only for voters who did not receive a mail-in ballot.
There will be more growing pains during the primary, but hopefully it is part of a process that makes VBM the standard in our state. Wimberly said it right: “The integrity of our elections is at stake, so we better get this right by November. I hope we can.” If a son of Paterson can have faith in elections, anybody can.
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