PHILADELPHIA — When Joyce King turned 18, it would still be four years before the passage of the Voting Rights Act broke down barriers to voting for Black Americans.
Now 81 years old, King’s vote almost wasn’t counted this year.
King, a Black woman who lives in a nursing facility in South Philadelphia, filled out a mail-in ballot. She cast her vote for Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman of color to be a major-party nominee for president. King sealed her ballot inside a secrecy envelope and placed that inside an outer envelope. She put it in the mail believing she had voted.
But King didn’t sign the outer envelope. In Pennsylvania, that mistake meant her vote wouldn’t be counted.
Republicans have sued in court to prevent voters like King from getting a do-over. But the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday cleared the way for voters who make mistakes with their mail ballots to have a second chance. Now, in the final days of the presidential campaign across this critical swing state, an exhaustive volunteer-led effort is underway to locate the thousands of voters like King whose ballot has been nullified.
The volunteers are motivated by the belief that everyone who wants to participate in the democratic process should have their vote counted. But volunteers also know that in a state like Pennsylvania, where polls show Harris and former president Donald Trump effectively tied, the disqualified ballots could make a difference.
“Nobody should have their ballot thrown out on a technicality,” said Shoshanna Israel, Mid-Atlantic elections director for the Working Families Party. “This is going to be an incredibly close election, and we want to make sure that every vote is counted.” Israel has organized nearly 2,000 volunteers to reach out to voters who need to cast a new ballot.
Nearly 9,000 voters’ ballots were tossed out over envelope issues in Pennsylvania. In some cases it’s because of a missing signature or a wrong date on the outer envelope. Others didn’t include the secrecy envelope. The state leaves it up to the 67 counties to decide whether to notify voters and let them fix a defective ballot, creating a confusing patchwork of different rules. A little more than a third of counties do not allow voters to cure their ballot.
Larger counties, like Philadelphia, publish a list of all the voters who need to “cure” their ballot, which involves going in person to an elections office to cast a replacement or going to a polling place on Election Day to vote with a provisional ballot. But some voters, like King, who moves slowly with the aid of a walker, aren’t mobile enough or don’t have the help to go in person.
The rejected ballots have been the subject of intense litigation. Voting rights groups have argued that technical mistakes should not cost someone their right to vote. Republicans have insisted that ballots with these errors must be thrown out.
Weeks before the election, the Republican National Committee filed a lawsuit to forbid all Pennsylvania counties from allowing voters to fix their ballots if they made a mistake. The Republicans also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take away the right to cast a provisional ballot if a voter forgets the secrecy envelope. Courts rejected both efforts.
But Republicans were successful in getting otherwise valid Pennsylvania ballots thrown out over a missing or wrong date on the outer envelope. They point to state law that says a voter “shall” sign and date the envelope.
They have also argued in court that the varied rules in different counties “threaten to unleash disuniformity, uncertainty, chaos, and an erosion of public confidence in the imminent 2024 general election” and asked the court not to allow any Pennsylvanians to fix ballots with errors.
Democrats and voting rights groups say punishing voters for clerical mistakes has nothing to do with protecting election integrity and infringes on citizens’ rights.
“The date is absolutely meaningless, and so for people to be fighting to continue to disenfranchise those individuals is voter suppression pure and simple,” said Vic Walczak, legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania.
Many voters might never know that their vote wasn’t counted if not for volunteers like Elizabeth Reingold, 62, and her husband, Matthew Martin, 63, who drove from Manhattan last week to knock on the doors of voters who need to cure their ballots.
Walking through South Philadelphia, guided by a list of names and addresses on Reingold’s phone that Israel’s group had supplied, they came to one rowhome where a woman told them the voter they were looking for wasn’t home and would be away for a long time.
Reingold sighed. The hardest part of this work was knowing this person left home, maybe for a vacation or a business trip, thinking they had voted and may never know their ballot wasn’t counted.
Down a narrow street of rowhomes, Reingold met Nacho Perez, a 74-year-old who had lived on the same street since 1957. He and his wife always go to their local polling place to vote, he said, but she was recently diagnosed with cancer and their daughter urged her to vote by mail. Reingold told him his wife had not included the secrecy envelope and that her vote wouldn’t be counted unless she went to the local elections office to get a new ballot. She was inside resting, but Perez said he’d take her.
“We vote,” he said. “That’s just the way we are.”
Reingold’s next visit was to St. Monica Center, the nursing facility where King lives. King, who was born in Philadelphia and lived for over two decades in North Carolina with her husband, a church deacon, was alone in her room, sitting in a chair watching television. Reingold introduced herself as a “voter protection volunteer” and explained that there was a mistake with King’s ballot and she would need a new one for her vote to count.
“So the way to fix it is to go to the board of elections. Do you have somebody, a family member, who can help you with it?” Reingold asked.
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King shook her head no.
“If you’d like, I can be your designated agent and go down to the board of elections. They’ll cancel your old ballot. I’ll bring you back a new ballot. You’ll vote it, and I’ll bring it back to them,” Reingold said. “Will that be okay?”
“I’ve always voted as much as I could,” King said, when asked what it would mean to not have her vote count. “It would be like giving up my rights.”
“She deserves to vote,” Reingold said as she left the room, a form in hand designating her as King’s agent.
The next morning, Reingold arrived at the neighborhood elections office before it opened. She handed over the form, and an official issued King a new ballot. Reingold took the new ballot back to the nursing facility and brought it to King. She filled in the new ballot, and Reingold secured it inside the secrecy envelope. She then made sure King signed and dated the outer envelope.
Reingold got back in the car, and her husband drove her back to the elections office. She slipped the ballot in the drop box.
King’s vote would be counted.