It’s a virtual certainty that some dead people will vote in this fall’s general election all over New Jersey, according to the Atlantic County Board of Elections.
And it won’t be some kind of fraud, it’s just a happenstance of timing.
Gov. Phil Murphy has ordered that this year’s election be conducted mostly by mail, to minimize person-to-person contact during the COVID-19 pandemic. He is allowing election officials to begin counting ballots 10 days ahead of Election Day on Nov. 3.
That means the ballots will be separated from their envelopes, so all hope of matching a ballot to a particular person will be gone. If someone dies in the last 10 days of election season, there will be little hope of disqualifying the person’s ballot, as required by law.
“We find two to three ballots every election (from people who die just before Election Day),” said Board Chair Lynn Caterson at the elections board meeting Tuesday night.
On Wednesday, she said the number was actually five to six each election.
“Because in the past, the mail-in ballots have gone out 45 days ahead of the election,” Caterson said, allowing more time. This year, they are going out just 29 days ahead, leaving less time for deaths to occur.
Caterson said the board gets its information on those who have died from municipal clerks and from the Superintendent of Elections.
“If someone dies between the time we open the ballot and Election Day, it shouldn’t count. But it is what it is,” Caterson said.
“The late Gov. Brendan Byrne often got a laugh with crowds by talking about how he wanted to be buried in Hudson County so he could remain active in politics,” said Ben Dworkin, director of the Rowan Institute for Public Policy & Citizenship at Rowan University. “So the joke still applies, in Hudson County and all other places around the state.”
Atlantic County Deputy Clerk Mike Sommers said Wednesday that the county’s ballots were at the post office and would go out starting Thursday in two large batches. So ballots could begin arriving in mailboxes this weekend.
There are just under 200,000 registered voters in Atlantic County, according to state data.
The Atlantic County board alone estimates it will process about 120,000 to 140,000 paper votes this election.
On Wednesday, one of two scanning machines Atlantic County will use to tabulate votes was tested using an actual ballot, to make sure it can be read accurately.
“All the folds were perfect,” Caterson said, referring to how the ballot is folded. In the July primary election, folds on some municipalities’ ballots fell on the balloons that voters must fill in to vote, causing the machine to not register votes properly. That should not be a problem in this election, she said.
The machine was also tested to make sure it can read both sides of the ballot at once. Candidates are listed on one side, and the state’s three public questions are on the other.
In past elections, ballots could not be opened until just after midnight on Election Day, giving more time to update death lists and pull now-disqualified votes.
“How would you catch that (this year)?” Commissioner M.J. Couts asked Tuesday night. “It’s nuts.”
“The way I read it, if I vote 10 days before and die before Election Day, my vote will be counted,” said Democrat Commissioner John Mooney.
“It will be — because it will be zipped and stripped already,” said Republican Clerk to the elections board Sue Sandman.
Zipping and stripping refers to the action of opening a returned ballot and removing the signed certificate from it, after checking the signature on the certificate against the voter’s historical signature.
While the numbers are tiny and aren’t likely to sway any results, the issue points to another complication of running an election in which the vast majority of votes will be cast on paper, which are labor- and time-intensive to process and count.
The bottom line is under this year’s rules, there is not much chance of voting records being updated with death information in time to catch those last-minute deaths.
“Everything befuddles what we normally would do,” Mooney said of the processes for this election.
