Poll volunteers count absentee ballots.
Some of the most consequential primaries of the 2020 election are on deck next week.
But don’t wait up Tuesday night expecting all the results.
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Voting in Kentucky and New York, where progressives are trying to score big victories, will be chaotic. Many voters will likely vote by mail, but in-person voting could be plagued by shuttered polling places, long lines and other impediments created as a result of social distancing guidelines.
It all means that final results will be delayed for days — if not weeks — as both states grapple with how to hold an election in pandemic. Some of Kentucky’s largest counties — which will only have one voting center open on Tuesday — are going to the extreme step of locking down their totals of in-person votes for a week, until they can tally the mail ballots as well.
Tuesday’s most important races — a handful of Democratic House incumbents in New York are facing stiff opposition from liberal challengers, and Amy McGrath is trying to fend off a late surge from progressive Charles Booker in Kentucky’s Senate race — could remain undecided long after all the votes have been cast. The contests will serve as a test run for November, when many of the closest races won’t be resolved on Election Night, including perhaps the Electoral College.
Absentee ballots in the Empire State won’t even start to be counted until a week after the election. In New York, ballots postmarked by Election Day that are received by June 30 are still valid. The state doesn’t start counting until all absentee ballots are in: It's a security measure to make sure nobody voted in-person and also submitted an absentee ballot, Common Cause New York Executive Director Susan Lerner said.
“People need to change their expectations and adjust to the realities of our current elections,” Lerner said. “If that means taking a little extra time, better to be efficient and accurate than to be fast and raise questions.”
In New York, a number of incumbent Democratic members of Congress, most notably House Foreign Affairs Chair Eliot Engel, are facing spirited battles for renomination from progressive opponents. And there are two open, solidly Democratic House seats — one in the Bronx, and one in the Lower Hudson Valley — where the Democratic primaries will likely be decided by a small number of votes.
For a state that usually has a low number of mail ballots — in the 2018 midterms, 4 percent of New Yorkers voted via a mail-in ballot (and needed an excuse to request one), according to the Brennan Center — that usually wouldn’t delay a call in a race unless it has the tightest of margins.
But at least 1.6 million people had requested absentee ballots as of a week before the election, said John Conklin, the Republican spokesperson for the New York Board of Elections. That is about half of the total turnout — in-person or absentee — in the 2016 presidential primaries.
“Our campaign had that realization a few weeks ago. We don't know how many will actually be returned, but if there are 50,000 absentee applications (so far) we're expecting an overwhelming percentage of the vote to take place by mail, not on election day,” said Jacob Sarkozi, the campaign manager for Democrat Nancy Goroff, who is running in a competitive primary to challenge Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin in New York’s 1st District, in an email.
“It's definitely going to be into July before we officially have a winner. We've definitely pushed supporters to vote safely by absentee,” he said.
And all evidence suggests that in-person participation will be far less than in the past — in the first three days of early voting, turnout was less than a fifth of a percent.
“I think the in-person vote totals from early voting and Election Day may be as low as 30 percent of the overall totals,” said Dustin Czarny, the Democratic commissioner of the Syracuse-area Onondaga County Board of Elections. “My guess is we’re going to be waiting at least a week or two after the primary to know who the winners are, and it may be longer. ... If somebody’s in a tight race, and they want to have their lawyer there supervising the count, that could slow things down even more.”
Several Democratic strategists in New York said they expected litigation to pile up in the state, in part due to the expected slow vote-counting.
And in Kentucky, the state’s two largest counties — Jefferson and Fayette — are not releasing results until June 30, after all absentee ballots have been counted.
“I just feel like it is misleading to the public to do partial results to the public every day,” said Don Blevins Jr., the county clerk in Fayette County, which includes Lexington. “When we know the totals, we’ll produce the totals.”
Blevins said he talked to election officials in Colorado, who warned that anywhere from 25 percent to 40 percent of ballots could come in on Election Day or later. “That’s a lot to count and will dramatically affect the numbers” in close races, he said. A spokesperson for the Jefferson county clerk’s office in Louisville also said their office wouldn’t release totals on election night, either.
In primaries upended by the pandemic, other states have released results after Election Day. Due to a court order, Wisconsin’s spring election results weren’t announced until nearly a week after people voted in person in a disastrous primary. But in most states, late-arriving mail ballots were added to existing totals of in-person and early mail votes in the days following Election Day.
Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams said that his office will still release results as they receive them, as some counties are expected to release partial results.
“For these big counties, what they want to avoid is allegations of fraud or corruption,” Adams said. “[What happens] if candidate A appears to be up when they announce the in-person votes, and then they count the absentee votes — and suddenly candidate B wins, right?” Adams also noted that some smaller counties are making the same decision to not release results until absentee ballots are counted, noting technological hurdles they face to doing so.
Late-counted ballots have already swung several close primaries this year. The Associated Press, which for decades has been the authority on calling elections for newsrooms across the country, was forced to un-call two Democratic congressional primaries in Georgia that the wire service originally projected were headed to runoffs. In both cases, a candidate eked across the majority threshold required to win a nomination outright after all the votes were counted.
The extended count for these elections is only the latest challenge facing election administrators across the country. Election officials have grappled with hourslong lines and voters who requested absentee ballots but didn’t ultimately receive them. It could also be a preview of November, where the winner of the presidency or control of Congress may not be known for days.
In Kentucky, fewer than 200 polling places will be open statewide, down from the usual 3,700, Adams said. That could lead to long lines for in-person Senate primary voters in Louisville and Lexington, the two Democratic hubs of the state.
The primary will be the first major election as secretary of state for Adams, who was elected last year. He defeated Democrat Heather French Henry, a former Miss America, in a close race.
“I feel confident about reelection, if only because I don't think anyone else will want the job,” Adams joked on Twitter Thursday.
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June 19, 2020 at 04:01PM
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Results not expected for days in tight primaries next week - Politico
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