NEW YORK — Voting rights advocates are pushing for the state Assembly to approve a bill that would ensure voters who cast affidavit ballots at e wrong polling place don’t have their votes entirely invalidated.
Under current state law, if a voter casts an affidavit ballot at a polling place that they haven’t been assigned to, the entire ballot is thrown out — even when, as is often the case, a poll worker has instructed them to submit the ballot then and there.
Nearly 14,000 ballots in New York State were voided over such so-called “wrong church” ballot cases during the 2020 general election, a study conducted by VoteEarlyNY found.
“We’re saying count the votes,” said Jarret Berg, voting rights counsel for VoteEarlyNY. “It shouldn’t be controversial.”
To change current state law on the matter, state Sen. Zellnor Myrie, a Democrat, sponsored a bill in May that won Senate passage and would allow ballots to be counted even if they were cast at the wrong polling place.
In such cases, only part of the ballot might be invalidated depending on whether the votes cast applied to a race outside the district the voter lives in.
But the bill has remained stalled in the Assembly, prompting people like Berg to renew their calls for its passage.
“The fix,” he said, “is pretty simple.”
Democratic Assemblyman Robert Carroll is leading the charge in the Legislature’s lower house to get the bill passed. He said one of the arguments that opponents of the measure have floated is that it’s too logistically challenging, but he noted that performing any additional work far outweighs the alternative, which amounts to disenfranchising voters.
“The logistics argument is very weak,” he said. “This is patent disenfranchisement, and it’s something I feel really deeply about. I’m really hopeful we can pass this in the Assembly.”
Carroll said he plans to renew his efforts to pass the bill there once the next legislative session starts Jan. 5.
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