This column, from the weekly opinion piece MATTER OF FACT, first appeared on BrooklynReporter.com, the Home Reporter and Spectator dated November 12, 2021
If you are reading this column during the weekend of Friday, November 12 when it is published, then the district 43 City Council race between Justin Brannan and Brian Fox is still undecided. If you are instead reading this after the weekend, the contest for the seat may have just been decided.
Absentee ballots postmarked by Tuesday, November 2 could be received by the Board of elections for up to a week after Election Day. While poll site results from all in-person voting had Brian Fox with a lead of 255 votes, as of Tuesday, November 9, 1,834 absentee ballots had been received. Of those, 1,399 were from voters registered with a party affiliation of Democrat or Working Families Party, while 280 were from registered Republicans or Conservatives, a difference of 1,554 in favor of ballots from voters registered with left-wing parties.
There were an additional 155 more ballots from voters that are not registered with any of those four major parties. This tracks similarly to the makeup of absentee ballots last year, as well as to other council districts this year. Even with the potential for some number of absentee voters crossing party lines and a few ballots having issues that invalidate them, the data is overwhelming that Councilman Brannan will win reelection once all votes are counted.
Unfortunately, by law, none of the nearly 2,000 absentee ballots received up to one week after Election Day can be counted until November 15. Even though two-thirds of the absentee ballots received were in-hand by Election Night, they cannot be counted until thirteen days later, at the earliest, along with ballots received seven days after polls closed.
Just weeks before this year’s June primary election, a bill from State Senator Mike Gianaris to improve how quickly absentee ballots are counted passed the upper house of the state legislature. After it was sent to the Assembly, a different version of the bill passed that house and it has sat there ever since. It is time the State Senate and Assembly reconcile their two versions and send the bill to the governor to sign into law.
“Based on the party registration of the absentee ballots received by Election Day, all indications are that Brannan would have likely then have led by about as many votes as he was behind before any absentee ballots were counted.”
Gianaris’s legislation would have Board of Elections workers begin processing absentee ballots during the period they are received, including prior to Election Day, determining if they are valid, invalid, or need follow-up with the registered voter to resolve an issue in order to validate it. This would then allow the vast majority of absentee ballots received to be counted and added to vote totals on Election Night.
In the case of the district 43 City Council race, this means that over a thousand votes would have been included in results within hours of the polls closing on November 2. Based on the party registration of the absentee ballots received by Election Day, all indications are that Brannan would have likely then have led by about as many votes as he was behind before any absentee ballots were counted.
Through rampant disinformation campaigns, there is widespread belief among a large percentage of Republicans that elections are rigged, particularly if a Democrat wins. This is untrue, but the delayed process of counting absentee ballots that are quite often determinative in the result of close elections and add far more votes to Democratic candidates totals than to Republicans due to the makeup of those who tend to vote by mail, is an unnecessary cause of further distrust in election results. This can be fixed.
Hopefully, Democrats, who control both houses in Albany, finally pass the legislation they have already agreed upon in most part that will begin to fix this problem. There were three ballot proposals on this year’s ballot that aimed to fix issues with voting and elections, including one specifically related to absentee voting. Sadly, the state democratic party did absolutely nothing to inform voters about the ballot propositions and urge them to vote yes on them.
Conservatives, on the other hand, expended a lot of resources on telling voters to vote no on the proposals and it worked. New York Democrats need a state party that does a much better job at getting behind Democratic proposals and candidates.
