Atlantic board counts 24 VBM ballots held hostage by post office

Twenty-four Atlantic County voters whose cured vote-by-mail ballots sat undelivered at a U.S. Postal Service facility because of a disputed $66,000 bill from 2020 will have their votes counted after the county Board of Elections unanimously rejected the state’s legal advice to throw them out.

The board voted to open and count the ballots, overruling a directive from Deputy Attorney General Drew Hedin, who argued that the ballots arrived after the statutory cure deadline and that New Jersey election law provides no exception.

“These ballots were not received until well after this deadline had passed, and there is no stated exception to the deadline under Title 19,” Hedin wrote in a letter to the Board of Elections. “There is no basis to process the cure forms in question.”

The 24 voters had corrected technical defects in their vote-by-mail ballots, which were postmarked between May 18 and June 10, well before the ballot cure deadline. But the cure forms were never delivered to Atlantic County election officials after the Postal Service withheld them, claiming the county owed $66,000 dating back to 2020.



https://newjerseyglobe.com/local/atlantic-board-counts-24-vbm-ballots-held-hostage-by-post-office/