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.
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….