About 200 Arlington voters who followed the rules to the letter still found themselves out of luck during the June Democratic and Republican primaries. And if state leaders don’t step in with changes, the situation of legally cast ballots’ being invalidated seems likely to repeat, year after year.
When it comes to mail-in ballots, Virginia law sets a deadline of Friday at noon three days following an election for their receipt by local election officials. Ballots arriving later, even by a few minutes, cannot be counted.
Around 3 p.m. on June 21 – the Friday after this year’s June 18 primary – a U.S. Postal Service carrier delivered approximately 200 ballots to the Arlington government headquarters. As a result, those who had cast those ballots, either in the Democratic primary for County Board or Republican primary for U.S. Senate, were disenfranchised.
All had met the requirement that ballots be postmarked by 7 p.m. on the date of the election, and county election officials say local postal officials had been made aware that a game of beat-the-clock was being played with mail deliveries on June 21.
“They should have been able to meet the [noon] deadline,” said Electoral Board chairman Richard Samp, who called the late-arriving ballots “the biggest glitch” of an otherwise relatively smooth election.
Arlington was not alone; several jurisdictions across the commonwealth had similar problems. Issues seem centered on Richmond, but election officials across the commonwealth are trying to raise the matter.
“I have notified anybody who will listen,” county elections chief Gretchen Reinemeyer said.
Several years ago, the General Assembly moved the state primary from its traditional second Tuesday in June to the third week, largely at the behest of school systems that didn’t want voting taking place in their facilities on what typically is the chaotic last week of classes.
But starting in 2021, having primary elections the third week of June began to conflict with the newly approved federal Juneteenth holiday. The Postal Service does not deliver mail on the holiday (June 19), which causes a backlog that ultimately can impact the arrival of ballots at election offices.
There are a number of possible remedies, the simplest perhaps being changing the statutory deadline for receipt of ballots from noon on the Friday after election to the close of business that day.
Doing so would require General Assembly action, and state Sen. Barbara Favola (D-Arlington) told the GazetteLeader she could get behind it.
“I think moving the time to 5 p.m. is a reasonable change,” she said.
As for returning primary elections to the second week in June, Favola viewed that as a non-starter, citing school districts’ having “fairly aggressively” pushed for the change to the third week.
“Many voting locations are held in school buildings, and concerns were voiced over safety issues associated with allowing so many strangers – voters and workers – to enter school buildings,” she said.
Another option would be to revert to past practice, when mail-in ballots only were counted if they arrived in the hands of election officials by 7 p.m. on the date of the election, the same time polling places close. But that, too, seems a non-starter in Richmond.
Reinemeyer suggested voters holding mail ballots until late in any election cycle should take them to voting government-operated dropboxes, which are accessible in multiple locations in the days leading up to elections and at every voting precinct on the day of the election. As long as they are dropped in by 7 p.m. on Election Day, they will be counted, she said.
