New York Times: Beyond Georgia: A Warning for November as States Scramble to Expand Vote-by-Mail

The 16 statewide primary elections held during the pandemic reached a glaring nadir on Tuesday as Georgia saw a full-scale meltdown of new voting systems compounded by the state’s rapid expansion of vote-by-mail.

But around the country, elections that have been held over the past two months reveal a wildly mixed picture, dominated by different states’ experiences with a huge increase in voting by mail.

Over all, turnout in the 15 states and Washington, D.C., which rapidly expanded vote-by-mail over the past few months, remained high, sometimes at near record levels, even as the Democratic presidential primary was all but wrapped.

The good news was millions were able to vote safely, without risking their health. The bad news was a host of infrastructure and logistical issues that could have cost thousands their opportunity to vote: ballots lost in the mail; some printed on the wrong paper, with the wrong date or the wrong language; others arriving weeks after they were requested or never arriving at all. …

Few cities faced more issues with voting by mail than Baltimore. Voters across the city complained of a lack of information on changes to the election process, and they were among the last in the state to receive their ballots because of a vendor error. A ballot alignment error in a City Council district made the ballots uncountable by the scanner machines.

And for reasons as yet unexplained, some voters who had ballots returned by the Post Office as undeliverable were recorded in polls books as having voted and returned a complete ballot.

“If we have to conduct our elections by mail again there are a lot of glitches that clearly need to be addressed, and a lot more investment needs to be made in voter education,” said Joanne Antoine, the executive director of Common Cause Maryland.