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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsNorth Carolina Is Already Rejecting Black Voters' Mail-In Ballots More Often Than White Voters'
In every election, a small percentage of mail-in ballots get rejected. But this election is likely to have a whole lot of mail-in ballots. And in an election where a record number of voters are expected to cast their ballots by mail, youre likely to hear a whole lot about ballots that dont count, especially because voters of color have ballots rejected at a higher rate than white voters.
Its already happening. In North Carolina, absentee ballots have already been sent back and the state has been updating statistics on those ballots daily. As of September 17, Black voters ballots are being rejected at more than four times the rate of white voters, according to the states numbers. 1 Black voters have mailed in 13,747 ballots, with 642 rejected, or 4.7 percent. White voters have cast 60,954 mail-in ballots, with 681 or 1.1 percent rejected. In addition, 434 ballots cast by white voters and 127 ballots cast by Black voters were marked spoiled, which can mean literally spoiled or something as simple as a voter informing the election office that the address they had requested a ballot to is wrong. (These are a tiny portion of the votes from one state, so obviously we have a long way to go before we know the full landscape of ballot rejection rates.)
The vast majority of these ballots were rejected because voters made a mistake or failed to fill out the witness information, 2 according to state records. A rejected ballot does not necessarily mean the voter is denied his or her vote: North Carolina allows for a process called vote curing, where voters are notified that theres a mistake and given a chance to fix their ballot. But thats not an option in every state: only 19 states currently allow some form of ballot curing. And even that isnt foolproof. In Nevadas statewide primary in June, for example, 12,366 ballots had a missing or mismatched signature, but even after voters were notified to fix it, only 45 percent were successfully cured.
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Black voters and other voters of color frequently have their ballots rejected at a higher rate than white votes (so do younger voters, on average). In Floridas 2018 midterm elections, ballots cast by Black voters, Hispanic voters and voters from other racial and ethnic minorities were rejected at twice the rate of ballots cast by white voters, according to a report from the Florida ACLU. A team of university researchers found a similar pattern in Georgia that year, where ballots from Black voters were rejected at a higher rate than those from white voters, even when accounting for county-level differences in rejection rates.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/north-carolina-is-already-rejecting-black-voters-mail-in-ballots-more-often-than-white-voters/amp/
msongs
(67,462 posts)NewDayOranges
(693 posts)LisaL
(44,974 posts)correct the issue.
JonLP24
(29,322 posts)It also mentions just 45% of voters after notified in Nevada's primary corrected the issue.
LisaL
(44,974 posts)NT