[music]

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Here's a story that a Manhattan listener wrote in describing their early voting experience yesterday on the Upper West Side. These are some excerpts from the listener's email. "As prologue," this person writes, "During the June primary when COVID was more at its height, I skeptically opted to do early voting to try it out. I was literally the only one voter in the entire early polling site at 102nd Street. On primary day when I voted, there were numerous voting stations and machines there, the most amazingly easy experience I ever had with voting." That was about the June primary.

"Now," the listen writes, "For the general election, scared of Trump and courts invalidating mail ballots, so didn't want to mail in eagerly anticipated early personal voting and touted it to friends. On the Upper West Side, there were only two early voting sites, one at Broadway in 62nd Street and the one I went to at 102nd and Amsterdam, the second largest in the city covering 112,000 voters. I don't have the exact figure, but must cover at least 40 city blocks with 112,000 voters, " writes the listener. "Arrived approximately 4:30 PM. Was told by personnel it was taking many hours. Gritted my teeth and decided to check it out for a bit.

After an hour or so, I realized I was in it for the long haul and decided to definitely endure it today," that was yesterday, "Now that I started." The person writes, "My line started at the school on 102nd and Amsterdam, snaked south to 100th and Amsterdam, east of Columbus Avenue, then north on Columbus Avenue a couple of blocks, left through the center courtyard of the Douglas NYCHA houses back to Amsterdam Avenue, north on Amsterdam to 104th Street, east on 104th to Columbus, down Columbus to a separate pathway through Douglas houses, back over to Amsterdam, south on Amsterdam to west 101st Street, left on 101st to rear entrance of school."

Wow. The person continues, "The line went smoothly, all fellow voters cooperative and uncomplaining. None dropped out along the way, all endured. Everyone wore a mask and didn't crowd in. Board of Elections personnel every 30 yards or so, very cooperative and friendly. Also allowed people to step offline to neighborhood stores for snacks or bathroom, answered inquiries responsively. Along the way, there was an amazing busker singer named, I believe, Dijon with Al Green, Author Price sock-type voice, and a microphone singing Motown and popping soul songs, kept everyone engaged. Got inside the polling place a little after 8:00 PM."

Remember this, the email started with the person going around 4:00. "Once inside the school, easy to recognize the reason for delay, only eight machines for these thousands of voters." Folks, thanks to that listener for that early voting experience from yesterday, and good morning to all of you listening right now whose heads are nodding vigorously because something similar happened to you. Did you notice that part of that story I read, including this voter somehow knowing how many people were assigned to their one polling site with eight machines was central? The number they cited was 112,000 people.

I didn't verify it, we'll take it as a claim, but we'll take it as a jumping-off point for our first guest, WNYC City Hall and politics reporter, Brigid Bergin, who happens to have a story on the radio and on Gothamist right now called About That Long Early Voting Line: Find Out How Many People Were Assigned to Your Poll Site. Hi, Brigid, Thanks for being on it.

Brigid: Good morning, Brian.

Brian: The writer's story about the line snaking up this block, down that block, through this courtyard, around that corner, do you think a lot of people can relate this morning?

Brigid: Oh, Brian, we have heard stories like that since Saturday. I think what has changed most about the stories, people on Saturday are those people who wanted to be there on the first day of early voting, and they, I think, anticipated some of the lines. So they went in with the mentality that, okay, we're going to do this. I want to be there on the first day. Then on the second day, they were still excited, they wanted to be there on the first weekend. Then yes, on Monday, there was like, "Wait, I thought if I came during the week, maybe there wouldn't be a line." Then yesterday, it was like, "What is going on here?"

We have heard those types of experiences that people waiting for upwards of an hour plus, and then we've heard some stories of people who went to voting and just got in and out. We were really trying to understand, well, what is going on here? Why are some people waiting what feels like an enormous amount of time, and other people are snapping a selfie outside of their early voting site saying, "I was in and out in 15 minutes"?

Brian: The mayor, by the way, also waited hours, right?

Brigid: He did, he waited hours, he threw a pizza party. He went to vote at his early voting site in Park Slope, and got in a line with all the rest of his neighborhood and just waited it out and made the best of it. I think that's a good sign for New Yorkers to see the mayor taking it with the rest of them, but it's also a sign that there's some other things going on here. There's some issues a little bit deeper.

Brian: Listeners, we'll open up the phones on this as we get into those deeper issues with WNYC's Brigid Burgin. Tell us your early voting story from any day this week. Was it like the person who wrote in? Is your head bobbing up and down saying, "Me too, please, somebody set match to the current New York City Board of Elections structure and start over"? To those of you going, "It was really quick at my polling place. I took one of those selfies and went in and out." You can call in too if you're in the city or not.

I'm gathering that the rules are different in different counties in New York State, so it may be easier outside the five boroughs, as well as disparate within the five boroughs, but listeners in Nassau and Suffolk, Westchester and Rockland, Putnam and orange, Duchess, you tell us too, 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280. They don't have a similar system, by the way in New Jersey or Connecticut, so this is for New York State voters, this segment. Brigid, the writer said 112,000 people assigned to their polling place at 102nd in Amsterdam. Your headline addresses this; About That Long Early Voting Line: Find Out How Many People Are Assigned to Your Polling Site. Why do you key on that as your headline angle?

Brigid: One of the things that, as I was saying, we were trying to figure out is why were some people waiting for a much longer time at some early voting sites and what seemed like no time at all at others? I started to talk to a lot of folks who work on elections issues across the city. I had gotten some data that told me how many election districts, those are those tiny units that makeup assembly districts, were assigned to every early voting site, but I didn't know exactly how many voters were in each election district. They're roughly the same size, they're not exactly the same size.

What I really wanted was to find out if someone had figured out exactly how many voters were assigned to each of these early voting sites. As it would have it, the city's campaign finance board, which has a unit that does a lot of data analysis had done this merge of the city's voter file with this list that had all of the early voting sites in the election districts so that we could actually count how many voters were assigned to each early voting site.

Then we sorted it and my colleagues over Gothamist, Jake Dobkin, made this map, and we were able to share this information with listeners, but also, it really informed a lot of the reporting and a lot of what we had been hearing from voters since the very first day of early voting. The site with the most voters assigned to it across the city, according to this analysis is the Robert Wagner Middle School on the Upper East Side. If you were on Twitter at all yesterday afternoon, we saw tons of photos of people who were still waiting in line yesterday afternoon. There's actually someone who was standing at the end of the line with a sign saying, "This is the end of the line."

A similar situation is what the listener who emailed you described, it was snaking all around the neighborhood. It was actually at one point getting caught tangling with a line of shoppers who were trying to go into the Citeralla on 3rd Avenue. If you think about what it's like to get into a public school, that's a smaller space, and then these sites as they are configured, the board does face constraints. They have ADA requirements that they have to make sure they meet in terms of the layout of the equipment and they're therefore limited with the amount of equipment that they can put in these sites, they also have technical limitations.

We have these electronic poll pads which allow voters to sign in, the check-in points, and from everyone who I talked to you yesterday, that appears to be what has become the bottleneck. While the Board of Elections sent out these little key fobs that are supposed to help speed that process along, you can show that to the person at the check-in desk to help them pull up your name and you can sign in faster. There's only so many of these poll pads that they can set up.

Brian: The iPads, the listener who wrote in said they were just eight at that little space but big population voting site on the Upper West Side. Somebody says the problem is the routers which can only handle a limited number. Do you know about that or if that's verified?

Brigid: Yes, they use cradle point routers and based on things that the Board of Elections has said publicly in the past, and what State Board of Elections commissioner, Doug Kellner, was telling me yesterday, those cradle points have a max of eight poll pads that can be connected to them, and so that builds in a limitation to the number of check-in tables that you can have.

He was just talking about if you do some math and you think about what does that mean in terms of your capacity, how long is it taking someone to sign in, and therefore, based on that number of check-ins, how many people can you take an hour, that begins to explain why it's taking so much longer for people at these sites that have more voters assigned to them to actually get in and cast their ballots.

Brian: Let's take a caller. Let's see. Stuart in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Stuart.

Stuart: Yes, hi. My wife and son and I went to vote on Saturday and we got there a little after 11 o'clock in the morning. We looked at the line, we looked at each other and said, 'Okay." We got on the line, it snaked down a city block, then it turned the corner. It went to the end of the next block, and then we realized the line we were going to go in was going snake around itself, so we'd go up. It looked like we were halfway there and then go back, but to our surprise, the line moved continually and we made it up there in, I guess, a little under two hours. The mood was extremely collegial.

There were no arguments, there were no incidents, the volunteers that kept the line from getting crazy and we got in. Once we got in, it was very organized, people could not have been nicer. I really felt the whole experience was we had a sense of purpose to doing this. I have to say, no matter how big it was that people got discouraged, I'm sorry for that, but democracy worked, and we did what we set out to do, and I felt really good about it.

Brian: It worked for those of you who got in. Which polling place was this, by the way?

Stuart: This was the Adams Street place up in Brooklyn near Adams Tillary. It was a Polytech school, I believe. All I can say is that they handled it really well. They handled the crowd well and I felt really good about the experience and my wife and son did as well.

Brian: When you say the line snaked around this way and that way, did it look like a salamander, like your congressional district? No, I'm kidding, but Stuart,-

Stuart: [laughs] That's good.

Brian: - thank you very much for your call. Before we even go on to another call, Brigid, Stuart is celebrating as kind of a feel-good victory for democracy, but seriously, can you estimate how many people have been disenfranchised by not being able to wait for all those hours, many people's work or family or health situations we know just won't allow it?

Brigid: I don't think at this point we could give any estimate to how many people have been disenfranchised. The good thing about early voting is that it goes on until Sunday and the board, because of concerns that have been raised by voters, by elected officials, did make some adjustments and the commissioners voted yesterday to extend the hours.

Now, they gave a caveat that if the site owners were unwilling to do that, that could prevent them from extending them in every location. However, state law requires them if they are going to extend them in one place, they need to extend them everywhere.

I think it is very likely that we will see these hours extended starting on Friday. They're adding two hours to the end of the day. Polls will be open until 5:00 PM on both Friday and Saturday, and then on Sunday, they were going to open up at 7:00 AM. Altogether it'll be nine more hours of early voting. That's a good thing that hopefully will give some voters who maybe saw a line and thought, "I just can't do this, I just don't have the time to do this." Another opportunity to go and vote. Of course, there's also still election day and if voters continue to see these lines and feel like maybe for health reasons that that's just not the right option for them, voters have until October 27th, is that today?

My dates are getting screwed up on me.

Brian: That was yesterday.

Brigid: October 27th, is that yesterday?

Brian: Yes.

Brigid: Voters can still go in person to the Board of Elections to apply for an absentee ballot until November 2nd. There are options for people who see that line and feel like that is not the right option for them.

Brian: Gordon in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Gordon, thanks for calling in.

Gordon: Hi. My wife and I voted on Monday at that location on Tillary at J, the New York Technical College. When we got there, we asked someone how long they had been waiting in line, the front of the line and he said about 40 minutes, so the is moving fast. We walked down Tillary. It was looking like about three or four blocks along the line, and then one of the poll watchers stopped us and said, "Oh, are you here to vote?" We said, "Yes," and she said, "You're senior citizens," we're both in our early '70s, "You can just go to the front of the line and go right in." That's what we did, took us about 10 minutes to vote, and everyone inside was terrific. We were very pleased and much relieved.

Brian: Were you more relieved or more insulted that she walked up to you and said, "You look like a senior citizen." Gordon, I'm kidding.

Gordon: As I said to my wife, it's a good thing we don't die out here.

[laughter]

Brian: Gordon, thank you very much. I think that's really important to point out and make sure everybody knows, Brigid, right?

Brigid: Absolutely.

Brian: There are people who by age or other potential, age is not a disability, but people by age or certain disabilities will be jumped to the front of the line, correct?

Brigid: That's true and one of the good things that the Board of Elections did do for this cycle of early voting is they created a new position called the line manager. Normally, poll workers are really inside of the poll site and that's their main focus, but given everything that people are dealing with with this particular election, social distancing, and some people have showed up to drop off their absentee ballot, which they can do at an early voting site, they have people outside who are trying to help speed that line along and to find people who maybe are senior citizens who they don't want to keep waiting in that line, or people with disabilities who can be moved up to the front of the line.

That's something that the board is reminding their poll workers to do. We've heard some really wonderful stories about poll workers who've kept people's spirits up, tried to really keep the energy outside very positive. Poll workers are everyday New Yorkers who have signed up to do this job for this particular period of time and will go back to whatever else they do. They're not necessarily employees of the Board of Elections 365 days of the year. Yet these are the people who are helping our democracy function as well as it can under these circumstances.

Brian: Before we take another call, a practical thing, as voters are deciding what to do, I know one

family where one spouse waited three hours early voting yesterday. The other spouse is considering just waiting till election day itself because on that day, the person figures at least there will be many, many more polling places open, but the early voting spouse was skeptical of gaming it out that way because of the history of lines on election day. Do you have any basis for advice on whether in certain neighborhoods election day lines, because there are so many more polling places on election day, might actually be shorter than the early voting lines?

Brigid: This is a question that I'm going to explore today. Facts that we know, there are absolutely many more poll sites that will be open on election day, that we know. We know their hours, 6:00 AM to 9:00 PM, and that is an option for any person who wants to vote in person and has waited until that point. I was having this conversation with Ben max from Gotham Gazette, a regular guest of yours, on Twitter last night because he was trying to make this decision.

Then my guidance based on how I'm thinking about it is I would think about trying to pick a time to go for early voting because in the event that there is a problem, or you can't wait for however long you need to wait, at least you then also have election day as a backup. If you decide to just skip early voting altogether, well, then you've boxed yourself in. If there are lines on election day, well, then you're waiting in them if you plan to vote, but if you try to go for early voting and there's still some lines and you don't feel like waiting, then you still have that option.

One of the things that I will be talking to some folks about today is early voting is still relatively new in New York and the only elections that we have with data to compare what's happening now, we're lower turnout elections. The general election in 2019 when we were voting on city charter ballot changes and the public advocate's race, which was not exactly a race, and then the June, 2020 primary, which was really at the height of the pandemic.

When we look at the numbers of people who voted early, they're not a point of comparison for what we're seeing now, but I do want to know if in other parts of the country where they've had early voting longer and through potentially a presidential election, how do we see the numbers shift? Does the early voting turnout really lighten the load on election day? We hope that it does, or is this just an election with incredibly high enthusiasm and we're going to just continue to see numbers turn out and turn out? I have been amazed looking at the data coming in for New York City, our early voting numbers just continue to increase each day.

You would have thought maybe in midweek when people are working that those numbers would go down yesterday, today, these numbers just keep going up. That holds true when I look at the data for counties across New York State. There are only a handful of counties across the state where the early voting numbers between each of the days that's been available have not continued to go up, and when they went down yesterday, it was just by a small amount. There's something happening in terms of turnout that extends beyond New York City.

Brian: We should say that beyond New York City, at least in New York State, there are different rules in different counties. In New York with these disparate numbers of voters assigned to each polling place causing long lines at some, much shorter lines at others, I understand that in Suffolk County, for example, and I don't know every county, but I know

that in Suffolk County, for example, you can choose your early voting site from among all the ones that exist throughout the county.

Brigid: That's right. In fact, you can choose your early voting site in every other county in the state of New York, except for the five boroughs.

Brian: Really?

Brigid: Every other county has county-wide early voting sites and that is something that there was a lot of talk about for New York City ahead of this election. It was part of the debrief from the 2019 general election. A lot of people were urging the board to consider county-wide early voting sites. One of the limitations the board had pointed to was the number of different ballots that would be needed to be available at a county-wide site.

Brian: Right, different local races.

Brigid: Exactly, but then on the flip side of that, people say, well, if you're printing ballots on demand, well, why is that an issue? I think there are probably some technical limitations, but I think there will also be more pressure on the board to reimagine how they do some of these things. One of the things that I learned yesterday as I was reporting this story about how voters were assigned to early voting sites that I thought was fascinating, here in New York State and upstate in the town of Greenburgh in Westchester County, the town supervisor there set up a webcam that shows voters the town hall and the parking lot.

You can go online and look and see like how busy is it so that if you don't want to wait and you see that the parking lot is full, you can choose another time to go vote. In Travis County in Texas, which is where Austin is located, they actually have a map that has real-time data on wait times for every early voting site.

Brian: That makes so much sense.

Brigid: I know.

Brian: It's also not that hard. There are these apps, the traffic apps that can tell you what roads to avoid, and in this case, they could be programmed to tell you which polling sites are the most crowded. It's not actually that complicated.

Brigid: No.

Brian: Travis County, Texas has it and Manhattan does it. Lawrence in Bayside, you're on WNYC with WNYC and Gothamist City Hall and politics reporter, Brigid Burgen. Hi, Lawrence.

Lawrence: Hi, folks. I tried to vote yesterday and I rode my bike over to the 32nd Avenue and 203rd Street Korean Center, which is the 26th assembly and election district, early voting site. There was a long line coming out the door and I started to go down and follow it, and after four and a half blocks, I decided to go back to the--

Brian: Whoops, did we lose Lawrence's line? Lawrence, are you there? Let me try to click them back on here. Sorry, folks.

Lawrence: Hello.

Brian: Hi, Lawrence, somehow we lost you, go ahead. So you went to, right, 203rd Street [crosstalk].

Lawrence: I was discouraged from voting by the length of the line. I went to the front of the line and found out that it was not moving. I started to have a conversation with someone, which went on for 10 minutes and we moved about a foot and a half, so I decided that probably they don't have enough voting machines or enough people, or they're having problems verifying registrations. So I thought I'd go back another day and I'm following the same rationale that Brigid was talking about, which is that there'll be so many more voting sites open on election day and the PS 169 is usually set up where all the election districts are handled by different tables and it moves much faster.

The model I was looking at was the midterm elections, which had an incredible turnout and my voting time then was about a half an hour, but the gymnasium was very crowded so that's that's really a problem. I'm going to try to go back Friday and try to see if the line is better by then, but also, if half of all New Yorkers vote early, I'm assuming election day will have not half as big an actual turnout. I'm amazed at the Gothamist could figure out by doing some statistical analysis how many people are being assigned to voting sites but the New York Board of Elections can't.

They're not using any modern statistical analysis to figure out, well, we shouldn't actually put 30,000 voters in this site and 130,000 at another site.

Brigid: Lawrence, I'll just jump in and say, for one, the analysis that we are reporting on was done by the New York City Campaign Finance Board using data from the New York City Board of Elections, both their information about the number of election districts assigned to each early voting site and then looking at the voter rolls, which tells us where that voter lives and being able to come up with a count for the number of voters assigned to each early voting site. Now, I am certain that the Board of Elections did do that math. I will tell you, I've done a lot of reporting on the Board of Elections.

I do know that getting locations to agree to be early voting sites and poll sites, in general, has been a perennial problem that the Board of Elections has faced. One of the things that we reported earlier this year was about dozens of cultural institutions across the city. Some of the big-name ones that are not-for-profit but also benefit from huge tax breaks, they don't pay property taxes, they get other public funds that the board had asked to be early voting sites or poll sites on election day, and those institutions wrote letters saying, frankly, "No, thank you. That would be a burden on our operations. We have events planned," et cetera.

They said no. That is the struggle that the board faces. At the same time, the only buildings they can use under state law without that site being able to say no are public schools. When they used them in the first go-round with early voting in November of 2019, they faced a lot of pushback from angry parents, educators, principals who said, "You can't take our gymnasium and cafeteria for 11 days, 9 days of voting, 2 days to set up and take down because we need that space for our kids. These kids are going to be stuck in classrooms." Now we have a pandemic, it becomes a different kind of issue.

The idea of bringing people from outside of a school into a school. The school's chancellor, Richard Carranza, really tried to push back, wrote a letter to the Board of Elections saying, "Please, we don't want you using schools for early voting." Now, obviously, they still are using some schools, but that, again, limited the number of options that they had. Then for some of these locations that are new that were announced with some fanfare, places like MSG and Barclays, it's unclear if any of the site owners for any of these locations might have imposed some limits on the board about just how many people they would allow to come into their site.

I definitely think that probably there are better ways to do this, but I want to give a little context to the challenges that I know exist when it comes to assigning people to these locations.

Brian: That's so interesting.

Lawrence: I appreciate the nuance.

Brian: Now, Lawrence, you said that you're polling place is at 203rd Street and 32nd Avenue, do you live right there? Do you know the shops around there?

Lawrence: That's not a commercial district right there. There's no place to go get coffee, you have to walk further down. You can go a few blocks down 32nd Avenue.

Brian: I'm thinking of the little Omega Diner right around there where I ate last year and they had this like $14 dinner special that included dessert and a glass of wine. I'm just curious if that little Omega Diner is surviving the pandemic, but it sounds like you don't know.

Lawrence: Most of those stores are not actually open, there's some takeout, but the number of people that were lined up, if you were trying to get coffee or something, that would be amazing. It's just overwhelmed. You could process that number of people if you had a much more efficient operation. I appreciate Brigid's explanation of the nuances of how difficult this has been, so it's not just incompetence, but it is a problem that we're going to have and a better solution obviously is required.

Brian: I appreciate you, Lawrence, I'm going to leave it there for time. Thank you so much for your call and your story and keying on the nuances as well. Brigid, you mentioned the Barclays Center, MSG, some of the rules they might have had, the ability to impose, and schools under the chancellor saying, "No, not us, not here." Some of the non-profit institutions, cultural institution facilities that get city funding I gather also said no, but how much, if you know, does that account for the situation?

Where like, for example, the mayor voted, where he voted in Brooklyn yesterday had like a three-hour wait when he was there and that was his beloved Park Slope Y where he used to take a chauffeured ride from Gracie Mansion on the Upper East Side every day while touting that people should live a low carbon lifestyle, but that's another show. The little Parks Slope, why three hours? The Barclays Center, as you reported, a huge arena, not so bad.

Brigid: Exactly. That is one of the questions, and we wanted to have a more in-depth conversation with the board, but they pointed to this thing that's going on, the election, for why they can't field every question that comes at them at this point. It should and will likely be part of the post-mortem, so to speak, of how some of these decisions were made. Throughout the past year and even the previous year, the debate over how many early voting sites the city should have is one that has been ongoing between the Board of Elections and the mayor's office. The mayor had called for 200 sites in 2019, and then a hundred sites and had proposed different locations to the board that they could use.

The board faces some of its own challenges when it comes to ensuring that those sites meet all the ADA requirements that they need. There are some real specifications in terms of how much space needs to be around each voting machine. When you walk into a poll site and you just see everything set up, that's because the poll workers who are there have had to follow some very specific guidance about where things are going to be positioned to meet some of these requirements. They have limitations about how big they can make a certain site, why the site with the most voters assigned to it in Brooklyn is in Gravesend.

That's a good question. Why the Brooklyn Museum has so many more voters assigned to it than the Barclays arena? I'm interested in finding that out.

Brian: That's interesting.

Brigid: That's information that we're going to have to get, I think, post-election.

Brian: By the way, as we begin to wrap up, quick correction. I'm told that the Y where the mayor voted in Park Slope yesterday was the Park Slope Armory Y which is not actually the one that he goes to to work out, which is the Prospect Park Y which is pretty close like 10 blocks or something like that away. Before you go, Brigid, just to remind everybody on the practical logistics of going forward with this for those of you who haven't voted yet and want to in New York City, early voting last through Sunday. There's no early voting on Monday, just a heads up, it's now through Sunday, or then election day itself next Tuesday.

We should say one more time that seniors and people with disabilities are brought to the head of the line and that the Board of Elections had now announced expanded hours for some of the remaining early voting days coming up because of these lines we've been talking about. Would you just remind people what the expanded hours are?

Brigid: Absolutely. Our expansion doesn't start until Friday, and so Friday polls will be open from 7:00 to 5:00, that's up from the 7:00 to 3:00 PM. On Saturday, they're going to be open 7:00 to 5:00. They were supposed to only be open from 10:00 to 4:00, and then on Sunday, 7:00 to 4:00, and they weren't supposed to open until 10:00 on Sunday. Nine extra hours of early voting that hopefully will take some pressure off some of these locations that just have so many voters that need to cast their ballots there. If voters have absentee ballots that they wanted to drop off at the early voting sites, it's another thing.

They're not supposed to have to wait in the line because that there is a box where you can just drop it off. I understand that Robert Wagner Middle School yesterday, they actually brought the box outside because there were people who were waiting in the line just to drop off an absentee ballot. They didn't want people to have to wait to get in to do that. Hopefully, some of those things will speed things up.

Brian: We didn't mention that other option earlier, so I'm glad you brought that up, and let's just put a little exclamation point on that because that is yet another option in this year of many options. If you have an absentee ballot but you don't trust the mail for whatever reason, you can take an absentee ballot, go to any of the early voting sites and just drop it off and you're not going to have that voting line, right?

Brigid: Absolutely, and a quick note on that too, absentee ballots in this general election, if you are mailing them, require postage, it doesn't say how much postage. We've been suggesting folks use two Forever stamps on those ballots. The Post Office is supposed to deliver them postage or not, but you are better off putting the postage on if you are using the mail system. Why postage is required this time as opposed to in the primary when it wasn't required, well, postage is generally always required in absentee ballots.

It was actually the primary that was the exception, but since so many people voted by absentee ballot in the primary, I think there was a lot of confusion out there, but if you are just dropping your ballot off at a poll site, you're obviously not using the postal system, and therefore, you do not need to use postage.

Brian: I will mention though, New Jersey listeners, you don't need postage for your absentee ballots in New Jersey. New York and New Jersey are different that way. A note to Louis DeJoy, the Trump-appointed postmaster general, Forever stamps doesn't mean that's how long you're allowed to take to deliver them.

Brigid: [laughs]

Brian: WNYC and Gothamist City Hall and politics reporter, Brigid Bergin, thanks for your reporting. Thanks for coming on.

Brigid: Thanks, Brian.

 

Copyright © 2020 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.