More than 534,000 mail ballots were rejected in this year’s primaries across 23 states, according to a Sunday report by The Washington Post. That was a 67% increase over the 319,000 mail and absentee ballots that were thrown out nationwide in the 2016 general election.
A similar analysis by NPR tracked 558,032 ballots that were rejected in 30 states – including nearly 12,000 in Georgia. Tennessee was not listed in NPR’s roundup – probably because the Tennessee Secretary of State’s website has not posted rejections. The Post didn’t list a state-by-state breakdown.
“Nearly a quarter were in key battlegrounds for the fall,” The Post wrote, “illustrating how missed delivery deadlines, inadvertent mistakes and uneven enforcement of the rules could disenfranchise voters and affect the outcome of the presidential election.”
The rates of rejection could make a difference in the fall if the presidential contest is decided by a close margin, as it was in 2016 when Donald Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by roughly 80,000 votes. This year, according to the tally by The Post, election officials in those three states tossed out more than 60,480 ballots just during primaries, which saw lower voter turnout than what is expected in November.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, told the Post that the number of rejected ballots in her state could double in November compared with this month’s primary, when 10,694 votes were disqualified, with higher rates of rejection in Black, brown and Asian American communities. For context, Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes in 2016.