As this will be the first time I will be voting by absentee ballot, I found this Buffalo News article informative and a worthwhile read. I am posting it so others not receiving the Buffalo could have the same information available.

To ensure my ballot will be accepted and recorded I paid particular attention to the following advice:

Voters who request absentee ballots will receive a packet including a ballot and two envelopes. They should fill out the ballot, stuff it in to the smaller of the two envelopes, sign that envelope and then insert it into the larger mailing envelope. If that inner envelope isn’t signed, the Board of Elections will contact that voter if possible to ask the voter to come in and sign the outer envelope – but if that voter doesn’t do that, the ballot can’t be counted.


There’s more ways than ever to vote this year: Here’s a primer

Results aren’t likely to be known for days, even weeks
By Jerry Zremski
NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF

Proof that this year’s election will be like none other will arrive in the mailboxes of nearly 60,000 Erie County voters starting this week. They will receive their absentee ballots – and can vote and mail them in as soon as they get them, about six weeks before Election Day.

That’s just one of many changes that, strangely, will make voting in Erie County amid the pandemic both easier in some ways and more complicated in others.

It will be easier because there are more ways to vote than ever. You can mail in your ballot, you can drop off your absentee ballot at a polling place, you can vote at one of the county’s 37 early

voting sites for nine days prior to the election, or you can vote the old-fashioned way at your polling place on Election Day.

But it will be more complicated because tens of thousands of Erie County voters will be voting by mail for the first time, and be using a redesigned ballot that could lead to errors if they’re not careful.

Then there is election night, which, in close races, won’t be the traditional evening of celebrations for winners who just heard from their opponents, who just called to concede. With an anticipated unprecedented number of mail-in ballots – which, under state law, can’t be counted until after the polls close on Election Day – only the blowouts are likely to be decided that night.

That’s true with the presidential election as well, said Nathaniel Persily, an election law expert at Stanford University.

“If the 2020 election is like the 2016 election, in which case everything comes down to Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and we have millions of outstanding absentee ballots that haven’t been counted, and the election is close, then we may need to wait a week or more to find out who the eventual victor is,” Persily said in an online discussion about the election last week sponsored by SciLine, an organization that tries to promote scientific research to the news media.

Despite the partisan tenor of the times, Republicans and Democrats on the Erie County Board of Elections came together to offer voters any number of options for how to cast their ballots this fall.

Central to that plan is a belief in mail-in voting that stands in sharp contrast to President Trump’s claim that such balloting is likely to be rife with fraud.

“In an emergency situation such as the Covid-19, (absentee voting) is a good way of casting ballots and should be encouraged,” said Ralph Mohr, the Republican co-chairman of the county Board of Elections.

Voters in Erie County can request absentee ballots online at elections.erie.gov, they can mail a request to the board, and they can simply call the board at 716-858-7818. Amid the pandemic, about 60,000 people have already made such a request. That’s more than double the number the board sent out before the presidential election four years ago.

Once people in Erie County receive their absentee ballots, they have a number of options for filing them.

First, of course, they can fill them out and mail them. And despite recent postal delays, Mohr said he isn’t worried. “We haven’t seen any issues with the William Street post office and we work with them constantly,” Mohr said. “I would trust the mail.”

But if voters don’t trust the mail, Mohr noted that voters can take their ballots to the Board of Elections offices at 134 W. Eagle St. They can also drop them off at one of those 37 early voting locations during the early voting period or at their polling place on Election Day.

Those early voting locations will be open between Oct. 24 and Nov. 1 from noon to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday and from noon to 6 p.m. on Saturdays. Voters can go to any early voting place in the county and will still be able to vote in person using the ballot they would get at their polling place near their home, elections officials said.

Then there’s the old-fashioned option – albeit in socially distanced, well-sanitized polling places. “The polling places are going to be safe and
secure for early voting and on Election Day,” said Jeremy Zellner, Mohr’s Democratic counterpart, adding that the board has seen a surge in interest in volunteers who want to serve as poll workers. “People should not think twice about coming to vote in person.”

All those voting options make this an inevitably more complicated election, especially for those voting absentee for the first time.

Mohr and Zellner agreed that the best way to make sure your absentee ballot counts is to send it in early. They both advise voters to apply for an absentee ballot as soon as possible, although the deadline for applying is not until Oct. 27, a week before the election. Once voters receive their absentee ballots, they should fill out the ballot and mail it in immediately, they added.

Ballots have to be mailed no later than Election Day to be counted, but those who wait that long will be cutting it close. Some mailed ballots never get postmarked, and under a revision to state law, only those ballots without a postmark that arrive at the Board of Elections by the day after the election will be counted.

Voters who request absentee ballots will receive a packet including a ballot and two envelopes. They should fill out the ballot, stuff it in to the smaller of the two envelopes, sign that envelope and then insert it into the larger mailing envelope. If that inner envelope isn’t signed, the Board of Elections will contact that voter if possible to ask the voter to come in and sign the outer envelope – but if that voter doesn’t do that, the ballot can’t be counted.

Both Mohr and Zellner worry about another possible complication, one that could arise in part because of Trump’s recent suggestions that voters might want to vote twice – by mail and at the polls. Technically, Mohr noted, voters could change their mind about the vote they mailed in and simply show up at the polls on Election Day and vote again. In those cases, the absentee ballot would be discarded and the in-person vote would be counted.

Both Mohr and Zellner discourage that. “It just causes a lot of extra work,” as election workers have to double-check mail-in ballots against the Election Day tally to weed out any double voters, Zellner noted. On top of all that, voters will be seeing a new ballot this year: one that moves the oval that they have to fill in for the candidates of their choice. Previously located to the right of the candidates’ names, under a new state requirement, this year the oval will be on the left.

This, too, can prompt confusion. Several years ago, Mohr noted, Erie County briefly tried moving the ovals to the left on its ballots, only to be met with a disturbing result.

“There was a significant enough number of voters that were coloring in the ‘o’ in a candidate’s name instead of the correct oval,” Mohr noted.

There’s one last big change that voters need to accept, academics and political experts from both parties said. Thanks to the rush of absentee ballots that, in New York and many swing states, won’t be counted until after Election Day, we won’t immediately know the final results of close races either locally or nationally on election night.

For proof, look no further than June’s special congressional election between Republican Chris Jacobs and Democrat Nate McMurray. The race looked like a 42-point Jacobs landslide on the day of the vote, but the final margin narrowed to only 5.3 points after the absentees were counted.

The same sort of misleading election night tally is possible in this fall’s Jacobs-McMurray rematch, close State Legislature races and even the presidential contest, just because Democrats are requesting absentee ballots much more frequently than Republicans.

“I do not believe we will know on election night or at 3 a.m.” who won the presidential election, said former Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds, a Republican. “I think it’ll take days to the settle out across the country.”

Former Rep. John LaFalce, a Democrat, said it might take even longer. “It might take one or two days, or one or two weeks, or even a month or more after the election,” he said.

While the huge number of absentees probably won’t affect the outcome in a deeply blue state like New York, LaFalce said absentees could spell the difference in the swing states that will decide the presidency, such as Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Of those states, only Arizona, Florida and North Carolina count their absentee ballots before Election Day.

That being the case, experts advise voters to approach the election results with patience and caution. “I think it’s important to communicate to the public that different states have different laws and different timelines” for counting absentee ballots, Bridgett King, an associate professor at Auburn University who studies voting and the electoral system, said in that SciLine event on the coming election. “Just because something is taking longer in one state versus another does not mean something nefarious is afoot.”