A Senate panel is set to review legislation Monday that would direct the secretary of state to tell New Jersey voters they could be disenfranchised if they wait until the last minute to send in their mail-in ballots.
The bill before the Senate’s state government committee would order the launch of a $100,000 public awareness campaign to warn of changes at the United States Postal Service that are likely to delay the postmarking of some timely delivered mail-in ballots beyond Election Day.
The Postal Service in December finalized a rule that reduced the number of times per day that mail flows from post offices to processing facilities where postmarks are applied, meaning some mail won’t reach those facilities and receive a postmark the same day a person sends it.
“Now, the postmark is whenever it’s processed at the facility. That could be the day of. That could be two days later. There’s no way of knowing,” said Nuzhat Chowdhury, director of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice’s democracy and justice program. “But of course, if that postmark does show up after Election Day, then that ballot will be invalidated.”
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Senate President Nicholas Scutari (D-Union), the bill’s prime sponsor, did not return a request for comment.
In New Jersey, election officials must count valid mail-in ballots that reach them up to six days after Election Day as long as they are postmarked before polls close.
The Postal Service maintains the changes — and the postmarks themselves — are purely operational and not meant to show the date the service accepts a piece of mail. Rather, they are meant to show that a piece of mail was in the agency’s possession on a given date, it said in a January response to outcry over the changes.
The Postal Service is self-funded and loses money each year because the cost of its operations outstrips its revenue. The agency posted a net loss of $542 million in the federal fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, and officials have said making less frequent, more distant trips to a smaller number processing centers will save the agency money.
To avoid missing deadlines that key off the date of a postmark, senders can request a postmark be manually applied at a post office, rather than at a processing facility.
Those who cannot reach a post office — because they have a disability, for example — can simply send their mail earlier, the agency said in a rulemaking notice.
That advice aligns with that given by voting activists. The Institute for Social Justice, Chowdhury said, is recommending that mail voters send their ballots in at least a week ahead of the election or deliver the ballots themselves, whether through a ballot drop box or by a hand delivery to their county Board of Elections.
The public awareness campaign envisioned by the legislation to be heard Monday at the Trenton Statehouse must “assure them that their votes will still be counted, but they just have to be a little bit more organized ahead of time,” she said, adding New Jersey should add more secure ballot drop boxes.
The bill would require the secretary of state to assess the placement and number of ballot drop boxes and recommend whether the law should be changed to require more of them.
Mail voting has long been a target of President Donald Trump. The president has repeatedly claimed the practice is rife with fraud — though he himself has voted by mail — and partially blamed it for his 2020 election loss.
He’s launched new offensives against mail voting, including an order purporting to end grace periods for late arriving mail-in ballots, and has expressed a desire to end no-excuse mail voting altogether.
“No more crooked mail-in ballots except for illness, disability, military, or travel,” he said during his state of the union address. “None.”
Though voters of both major parties return mail-in ballots at similar rates, Democrats are far more likely to vote by mail, partly because Trump’s repeated and baseless fraud claims have pushed Republicans away from the practice.
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