About 300 voters in Bergen County are at risk of their votes not being counted because they didn’t place their ballot inside an inner envelope before returning it to county election officials, the New Jersey Globe has learned.
These are commonly known as Naked Ballots: voters place the ballot in the outer envelope, which has a pre-printed address of the Board of Elections, rather than putting it in an inner secrecy envelope.
One option to prevent disenfranchisement is to notify the affected voters, who would have the option of visiting their polling location today or on Tuesday and casting a provisional ballot.
A vote by the Bergen County Board of Elections to notify a handful of voters who returned primary ballots in the general election envelope was deadlocked, 3-3, along party lines. Democrats want to tell the voters; Republicans opposed it. No action has been taken on the 300 ballots.
Richard Miller, a Republican election commissioner, stated that this would create too much work for an already overburdened office staff, according to an individual familiar with the meeting who was not authorized to speak on behalf of the board.
A short hearing was held today by Superior Court Judge Marc Ramundo, who is being asked to break the tie. Ramundo has not ruled.
It’s not clear what the party registration of the 300 naked ballots is.
Naked Ballots are not subject to a state law that allows voters to cure technical deficiencies in mail-in ballots. Voters would not be notified that their vote was not counted until after the election was certified.
Because the ballots aren’t officially rejected until Election Day. The list of affected voters will not be available until after Election Day, since their votes will not be rejected until Tuesday.
New Jersey election law requires vote-by-mail ballots to be placed in a secrecy envelope before they are submitted for counting.
Naked ballots were an issue in last year’s presidential election, and the U.S. Supreme Court permitted Pennsylvania voters to submit provisional ballots if their VBMs were found to be defective.
As of Friday morning, over 69,000 vote-by-mail ballots had been marked as received by the Bergen County Board of Elections. Democrats have an edge of roughly 3-1 on returned ballots.
