A flawed state system, they said, hampered mail-in voting
JEFF PILLETS | NOVEMBER 5, 2020 | NJ DECIDES 2020
Editor’s Note: This coverage is made possible through Votebeat, a nonpartisan reporting project covering local election integrity and voting access. The article is available for reprint under the terms of Votebeat’s republishing policy.
Frontline workers in New Jersey’s almost all-mail election issued a collective “no mas” Wednesday as waves of late ballots and provisional votes piled up around the state, while anxious voters continued to press concerns about mail-in voting.
Officials said they spent much of the day gathering up tens of thousands of late-arriving mail ballots that had been collected from more than 300 drop boxes scattered across the state’s 21 counties.
Thousands more, they said, poured in, becoming a tsunami of people who chose to drop mail ballots at the limited polling places on Election Day.
“We’ve dedicated 30 phone lines and taken 29,000 phone calls from people asking how to do mail-in voting,” said Patti DiConstanzo, the Superintendent of Elections in Bergen County. “And after all that they still want to come into the polls and drop off their ballots!”
DiCostanzo and other election officials around the state surveyed by NJ Spotlight News described a variety of bureaucratic and technical flaws that continue to flummox workers awash in a record 4 million-plus ballots cast.
Among the workers’ deepest frustration is with the state’s Motor Vehicle Commission, which some residents used to register to vote. The computerized system blinked in and out of operation Tuesday, they said, so workers attempting to upload batches of votes to state computers found the system frozen or gummed up to the point of exasperation.
At other times, votes loaded into the system appeared to disappear, or were never registered, forcing workers to backtrack as ballots piled up. The state’s “Track My Vote” website also proved buggy and confusing to voters who reported trouble signing on and following the progress of their ballots.
“The state voter registration system is a complete mess,” said Richard Ambrosino, a Camden County election official. “We’ve had nothing but trouble with it.”
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