Once again, voters are preparing to be treated as though they are the least important part of an election. With the Erie County Board of Elections facing a likely avalanche of write-in votes in next week’s mayoral contest, leaders there say they won’t even begin counting those votes for another two weeks. Why? For the sake of “efficiency.”
The result of the hotly contested fight between Democratic nominee India Walton and four-term incumbent Mayor Byron Brown may be in doubt for weeks.
Efficiency isn’t a bad thing, of course, but democracy is inefficient by design. With three coequal branches of government – and the legislative one of them frequently split into two sub-branches – along with public hearings, checks, balances, vetoes and endless litigation, this form of government is anything but efficient. No one said democracy was cheap.
Governments can surely work to create efficiencies where possible, but not at the expense of a fundamental concept: They need to keep the main thing the main thing. In a democracy, the main thing is elections, and in elections, the main thing is the votes. It’s preposterous, in the name of efficiency, for the Board of Elections to delay counting the write-in votes until all absentee and military ballots have been returned.
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That might work in another election, where write-in voting constitutes only a small fraction of the total. But that’s not the case as Buffalo’s four-term mayor, Byron W. Brown, works to survive a general-election challenge like no other in Western New York memory: He has mounted a write-in campaign against democratic socialist India Walton, who trounced him in June’s low-turnout Democratic primary.
With Walton’s name the only one on the mayoral ballot, Brown has marshaled broad enough support that election officials expect tens of thousands of write-in votes they will have to count by hand.
Eventually.
When they get around to it.
Jeremy J. Zellner, the Democratic elections commissioner, said it will be business as usual in a election that is anything but.
“It’s basically going to be the same exact process as it always is,” he said. “We will be hand-counting the ballots for mayor, and we’ll be doing it in a bipartisan fashion. We don’t want to get started counting without everything in. It’s just not a good practice.”
And why is it not good practice? Republican Elections Commissioner Ralph M. Mohr clarified: “Because we’re doing other stuff.”
Certainly, the other stuff isn’t inconsequential. The office will be researching the provisional ballots, checking names and addresses, ensuring that people aren’t voting twice.
“Believe me,” Mohr said. “We’re very busy.”
But provisional ballots rarely determine the outcome of an election and, in any case, busy isn’t the point. Office efficiency isn’t the point. Counting votes quickly and accurately is the point. To assign any other task higher priority is to unnecessarily frustrate voters, candidates and campaign staffs. And, as the delays in counting last year’s presidential votes demonstrated, it can prompt suspicions, even where they’re the stuff of conspiracy theory.
It’s possible but not at all certain that voters will have a good sense of who won before Tuesday ticks away. If notably more than half the total votes cast favor Walton, residents can be pretty sure she will win. If write-in votes dominate, then the likelihood will be that Brown has prevailed.
But if the totals for Walton and those contained in write-in ballots are close, everything will be put on hold while elections officials keep busy with other stuff.
This is a matter not just for the Erie County Board of Elections, but for Albany, as well. Antiquated state policies on counting absentee ballots delayed election results for weeks last year in both the 2020 primary for the 27th Congressional District and in special elections. The state had more than a year to address those issues, but simply ignored them.
It needs to fix those problems, and it can begin by looking to states such as Colorado for their useful examples. But it also needs to address one-offs such as what Buffalo is now experiencing. It needs to remind itself and elections boards around the state that they need to keep the main thing the main thing.
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