‘My lobby is just a sea of people and we’re serving them, but in a lot of ways it would be much more efficient to let people mask up and go to the polls, and let’s hope that that happens next year.’
Cape May County Clerk Rita Fulginiti
By CRAIG D. SCHENCK/Sentinel staff
CAPE MAY COURT HOUSE — The Cape May County Clerk’s Office and Board of Elections are working overtime to handle the unprecedented vote-by-mail election balloting forced by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Cape May County Clerk Rita Fulginiti said Oct. 15 that her office is busy dealing with a large number of people seeking information via email and telephone about the voting process, dropping ballots off or requesting replacement ballots.
Under an executive order from Gov. Phil Murphy, every county clerk’s office is responsible for creating and mailing out ballots to every active registered voter this year.
Fulginiti said her office sent out 71,332 ballots for the general election, far exceeding the number in a regular year.
“In a normal year we would be sending out 6,000 vote-by-mail ballots. It would be a small percentage of votes cast and people would be voting at the polls. This is not normal, but this is what it is,” Fulginiti said.
She said she doesn’t think the process is achieving what it was meant to — keeping people away from one another to help stop the spread of the coronavirus.
“My lobby is just a sea of people and we’re serving them, but in a lot of ways it would be much more efficient to let people mask up and go to a poll — and let’s hope that that happens next year,” Fulginiti said.
She also said many people are unhappy with the process and showing it.
“Voters that are upset about the process are verbally taking it out on my staff,” she said. “We are guiding them according to the rules and regs. We didn’t make up the rules and regs, and I get it that people are upset and unhappy about the method of voting and some people want to vote in the machine, and I get that, but we’re here to serve and serve according to the law and it does no good to speak angrily to my staff who are here to do a job.”
Voters, she said, are not familiar with the process, causing confusion and a lot of inquiries.
“It’s just driving people to my office because they are not used to voting by mail. It’s a different process. They spoil a ballot or they seal an envelope before they are ready, so they are coming in here in droves to get replacement envelopes, to get replacement ballots because they spoiled a piece of the process and they want to make sure their vote counts,” Fulginiti said.
The clerk said the process is time-consuming and labor-intensive.
“When you think about mailing 71,000 pieces of mail — in the primary you’ve got more than 250 different ballots, and in this election you’ve got 23 different ballots to mail. You want to make sure that the voter gets the right ballot. There is a lot of labor in that — and then when they come back, of course they are checked in and the signatures are matched against the voter registration system and so the process does take a long time.”
She said workers with the Board of Elections look at the signature on every ballot and check it against the statewide voter registration system.
“They are returned to the Board of Elections and it is their role to check them in and ultimately count them,” Fulginiti said.
Michael Kennedy, Board of Elections Democrat registrar, said his office also is overwhelmed with people seeking information.
“The emails and phone calls haven’t stopped, because a lot of people are confused on the process,” Kennedy said.
And that demand for the office workers’ time is on top of handling the unprecedented number of mail-in ballots.
Kennedy said he and Republican registrar Doug Dunhour, along with their six employees, have been spending 12 to 15 hours a day since the beginning of the month, as well as working Saturdays, trying to keep up with the demand.
“We receive the ballots after they’re mailed out from the Clerk’s Office” Kennedy said. “It’s a long, tedious process to process each mail-in ballot to make sure signatures are correct, they are scanned into the statewide voter registration system, they’re clocked into the office here.
“Then we have to make sure somebody did not receive two ballots because maybe their married name is on record and there is one under their maiden name. It is a long process to make sure that the ballots are counted correctly.”
Kennedy said the office processed just fewer than 24,000 mail-in ballots for the primary election and already had received about 22,000 for the general election.
“There are only six employees here, so you can imagine the workload is quite large,” he said. “We’re anticipating somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 ballots for the general election.”
Kennedy said Oct. 15 that there have been lines of people waiting to drop off their ballots at the Board of Elections office since the previous week.
In addition, he said, workers pick up the contents of 11 drop boxes every day.
“We have to have two workers — one Democrat, one Republican — to pick those up and they come in every day and each ballot box has quite a few ballots,” Kennedy said.
He said major changes would have to be undertaken if elections were to continue to be held in this way.
“If it was something the state was going to decide this is the way they are going to vote in the future, I think not just my office but all county board of elections offices would have to revamp how we do things,” he said. “We would have to have more staff, even if it was part-time staff.”
Kennedy said they do have help, but for security reasons, only he, Dunhour and the six employees have access to the voter registration system, “so we are now the only ones that can actually check and verify those signatures with what we have off the ballot. There are eight of us, so do the math — there are quite a few ballots that we have to check.”
He said they have master poll workers — those who have worked for the office for years — that help process the ballots, such as numbering them and putting them in alphabetical order.
“We have those folks in here doing that for us so that my staff can keep doing what they need to do on the secure statewide voter registration system,” Kennedy said. “They help us deliver supplies, do office work — whatever it is that we need to do here, they assist us.”
Kennedy said it’s important for voters to get their ballots in before Election Day so that the most accurate count can be made as soon as possible.
“If you get your ballots in here, then we can process them and we can get the best number we can on Election Night with the ballots that we have to count,” Kennedy said.
Fulginiti said the potential for fraud exists but that she is confident in the system locally.
“It is a concern of mine. It’s not a concern of mine here in this jurisdiction with the method of the Board of Elections, how they check in ballots and check signatures, but it is a concern of mine nationally — every state has different laws and rules regarding the vote-by-mail ballots. I am concerned about that nationwide but not concerned about it here,” Fulginiti said.
She said 20,915 ballots had been returned to the Board of Elections as of the end of business Wednesday, Oct. 14.
“That’s out of 71,332 ballots that were sent to active registered voters. That’s about a 29 percent voter turnout so far,” Fulginiti said.
During the last presidential election, in 2016, 61 percent of registered voters cast their ballots. That means half of the number already had voted almost three weeks before Election Day, Nov. 3.
Kennedy said the board can start counting votes for individual candidates 10 days prior to Election Day. He said they will start opening ballots Oct. 24 and 25 and start tallying them Oct. 26.
“And we will every day until Election Day, and then Election Night we will be able to post numbers for all of the ballots that we received in the office up until Election Day,” Kennedy said.
He said his office can run ballots through scanners but no one is allowed to print the results nor finish the count.
“The information is in the computer but nobody at the Board of Elections is allowed to view that, and if they do it’s a third-degree crime,” he said.
