New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his office reportedly argued against a plan to send nearly 100,000 Brooklyn voters who received mismarked return envelopes for their absentee ballots entirely new ballots, The New York Post reports.
Voters raised concerns that their votes may not count if the signature they put on their ballot didn’t match the envelope. The New York City’s Board of Elections said it would send out new ballots.
But the state Board of Elections co-chair Doug Kellner told the New York Post that Cuomo “wants to take a different approach.”
The governor’s office commented that sending new ballots was unnecessary because the problem was with the envelopes, not the actual ballots.
"We don’t control the board of elections but our recommendation was that sending corrected envelopes will ensure that any person that got an erroneous envelope can still vote,” senior Cuomo adviser Richard Azzopardi told the Post. “There is nothing wrong with the actual ballots and sending 100,000 duplicate ballots seems to be an overcorrection.”
According to the Post, Cuomo was worried that if voters were sent new ballots, President Donald Trump would claim voters were submitting multiple ballots. Trump took to Twitter to slam the mail-in ballot mess up in New York City on Wednesday.
Fred Umane, secretary of the state Board of Elections, told the Post that Cuomo’s concern did come up when they were deciding how to address the situation. Ultimately, he said the small risk of voter fraud did not outweigh the benefit of sending out new ballots.
One state official told the newspaper that only sending new envelopes would result in "massive disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of Brooklynites."
State Sen. Zellnor Myrie said only sending the envelopes would be "straight up disenfranchisement and an affront to our democracy."
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