Tens of thousands of Pa. mail ballots will be thrown out in the 2024 presidential election
The single biggest reason that votes have been rejected in recent elections wasn’t in effect in 2020
Tens of thousands of Pennsylvania ballots will be thrown out in next year’s presidential election as mail voting continues to evolve.
And those rejected votes — coming disproportionately from Democrats, older voters, and Black, Latino, and low-income neighborhoods — can be hugely impactful in a tightly contested swing state.
Voting behaviors have begun to settle since the mass expansion of mail voting in 2020, and data from recent elections are clear: Ballots of thousands of voters continue to be rejected in every election because of errors such as not properly signing and dating the envelope.
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In Philadelphia alone, more than 5% of mail voters saw their ballots thrown out in last month’s election, and those reasons continue to shift. The most common error in recent elections, undated ballots, didn’t cause ballots to be thrown out in 2020. But the second-biggest issue, ballots arriving late, has been a prominent issue for years.
And the likelihood of voting by mail — and of being rejected — is unequal across different groups of voters, according to an Inquirer analysis. In Philadelphia:
One out of every three to four votes in recent elections is cast by mail, and nearly all mail voters have voted by mail in a previous election.
Older voters are significantly more likely to vote by mail than younger voters. They are also disproportionately likely to see their votes thrown out.
Whiter, higher-income, better-educated neighborhoods have higher mail voting rates than other neighborhoods but have lower rejection rates.
People who are new to voting by mail and who are less frequent voters are also particularly likely to make errors that lead their votes to be thrown out.
Some voting requirements can be well intentioned but become “just an added complication,” said Enrijeta Shino, an election administration expert and professor at the University of Alabama. “Instead of helping with secrecy and integrity, it is disenfranchising some voters.”
“Mail voting is a very self-driven process,” she said. “It takes a lot of effort on the part of the voter to make sure that they follow the rules.”
“Undated” mail ballots are the biggest rejection category
The single biggest reason that mail ballots were rejected in Pennsylvania was because the outer envelope was not dated.
Pennsylvania election law requires voters to sign and date the outer envelope when returning a mail ballot.
More than 1,600 mail ballots in Philadelphia alone were rejected in this election because they were undated, more than all of the other rejection reasons combined. And nearly additional 300 ballots were thrown out because the handwritten date was incorrect.
With higher turnout in next year’s presidential election, Pennsylvania will likely have tens of thousands of voters who submit undated or incorrectly dated ballots, which were counted in 2020.
That requirement that ballots be properly dated has been the subject of prolonged political and legal dispute, with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling just before last fall’s midterms that counties cannot count ballots with missing or incorrect dates.
But the legal battle continues, with ongoing lawsuits from Democrats and voting rights groups arguing that federal civil rights law protects voters from having undated ballots rejected.
Thousands of mail ballots arrive late
Pennsylvania doesn’t accept ballots received after 8 p.m. on election day — regardless of when the voters actually mail them.
Thousands of ballots arrive after that deadline each election, including more than 1,300 Philadelphia ballots in May’s primary.
The issue is well known to election officials. Pennsylvania’s mail-voting deadlines can be very tight, and voters who request their ballots close to election day are particularly likely to have their ballots returned after the deadline.
Those deadlines have repeatedly caught Pat Fecile, 32, of South Philadelphia.
He mails his ballot on election day, but that makes it unlikely to arrive by 8 p.m. that night. Voter records show his vote as being counted only once in the last seven elections.
Fecile had no idea his votes hadn’t been counted until told by The Inquirer, saying he was “extremely disappointed and angry that my vote wasn’t counted.”
“They don’t want to count my vote,” Fecile said. “They want to get me on a technicality.”
Thousands of additional ballots were rejected for other reasons
Other reasons lead to thousands more ballots getting rejected each election.
Last month, “naked ballots” — ballots not enclosed in both an inner secrecy envelope and the larger mailing envelope — made up nearly one-third of all reported rejections statewide, with more than 500 in Philly alone.
Geraldine Scott, a 69-year-old Democrat from Germantown, was surprised to learn she had submitted a naked ballot. She’s repeatedly voted by mail — finding a ride to the polls can be a hassle — and knows the rules.
Now she’s unsure whether she’ll continue voting by mail. If she does, she plans to “be more cautious” and “get someone to work with me” to ensure she doesn’t make a mistake when filling out her ballot.
Additional reasons ballots were rejected include voters not signing the outer envelope and not having valid identification on file.
Few people are correcting errors on their ballot
Most voters don’t correct, or “cure,” errors on their ballots, though some counties — including Philadelphia — allow them to do so. Some counties try to notify voters of their errors.
In Philadelphia, which publicly posts lists of voters with flawed ballots, less than 5% of those voters corrected their ballots.
And an additional 5% of people voted with provisional ballots on election day.
That means less than 1 in 10 Philadelphia voters who submitted flawed mail ballots ultimately successfully voted.
Elections officials often have a difficult time reaching voters whose ballots are rejected, Shino said. Some voters “have concerns about their privacy” and don’t submit phone numbers and email addresses when registering to vote, she said.
Many mail ballots are also returned in the final days before election day, leaving little time to correct any issues.
Democrats vote by mail at a much higher rate than Republicans, leading more Democratic votes to be thrown out
Democrats are much more likely to vote by mail than Republicans, a partisan divide fueled by former President Donald Trump’s lies about mail-voting fraud and conspiracies.
Many voters have returned to voting in-person since 2020, but the voters who’ve kept voting by mail continue to skew heavily Democratic.
In this year’s primary, more Democrats than Republicans voted by mail in 65 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties.
Republicans who did vote by mail appeared slightly more likely to have their votes rejected. But the number of Democrats voting by mail so outnumbered Republicans that Democrats made up 90% of mail ballots rejected in Philadelphia and 70% in the rest of the state.
Most likely to vote by mail: Older voters, people who’ve previously voted by mail, and white neighborhoods
Older voters, voters who’ve cast mail ballots in the past, and areas with greater numbers of white people are most likely to vote by mail.
Philadelphia voters over age 65 voted by mail last month at more than double the rate of younger voters, and nearly all Philadelphians — 97% — who used mail ballots this year had previously voted by mail in the past three years.
Mail voting rates are also highest in the city’s wealthiest, whitest, and most highly educated neighborhoods, such as Center City, Mount Airy, and Chestnut Hill.
In a highly segregated city, the patterns in the data are clear. People living in majority-white precincts are nearly 20% more likely to vote by mail than those in majority-Black precincts and 65% more likely than those in majority-Latino precincts.
Older voters and people new to mail voting are more likely to see their ballots thrown out
Older voters are disproportionately likely to see their ballots rejected, with rejection rates rising after age 50.
Voters over 50 comprise 72% of mail ballots in Philadelphia and 81% of rejections.
One exception is that the youngest voters are also rejected at a higher rate. But the data suggest a specific reason: These voters are new to voting by mail, and people new to voting by mail last month were more than twice as likely to see their mail ballots rejected.
“Super voters” — who vote in even the lowest-turnout races — are less likely to see their mail ballots rejected.
Voters from poorer, less educated, and Black and Latino neighborhoods are more likely to see their mail ballots rejected
The neighborhoods that have the lowest rates of mail ballot usage — North Philadelphia, Southwest Philadelphia — also have the highest rejection rates. These neighborhoods are home to some of the city’s most marginalized communities and have high numbers of Black and Latino voters and low-income and less-educated residents.
Voters from majority-Latino precincts saw their ballots rejected at three times the rate of voters from majority-white precincts. Majority-Black precincts were nearly twice as likely to have their ballots rejected as majority-white precincts.
Voters in neighborhoods with median household incomes below $75,000 were two-thirds more likely to have their ballots rejected than voters in higher-income areas.
More than two-thirds of mail voters come from precincts where greater than a quarter of people have a bachelor’s degree. But only about half — 54% — of rejections come from these same precincts.