It’s become clear in recent months that the odds of getting vaccinated against COVID-19 vary dramatically based on where a person lives. But an analysis of 191 countries and territories shows just how unequal the global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines has been — and how tied to a country’s wealth. While rich countries like the United States, Britain, Israel, and the members of the European Union are vaccinating large percentages of their populations, most of the world’s countries are still at or close to zero percent.

Unavoidable constraints on vaccine manufacturing capacity are made worse by vaccine hoarding among rich governments, their pre-purchasing of future supplies at rates poorer countries cannot afford, and their reluctance to share technical know-how with the developing world or allow other countries to copy the recipes for vaccines owned by powerful corporations headquartered in the U.S. and Europe. Oxfam estimates that just 43 percent of global COVID-19 vaccine production capacity is currently being used to produce any one of the several vaccines that are known to be safe and effective.

An analysis by Type Investigations found that countries classified by the World Bank as “high income” have collectively administered 21.1 doses per 100 residents, while countries classified as “low income” have administered just 0.1 doses per 100 residents. Even “upper middle income” countries, home to 2.9 billion people, were far behind “high income” countries with just 4.7 doses per 100 people, which is itself more than double the rate in “lower middle income” countries, home to another 3 billion people. Of 191 countries and territories analyzed, 116 of them (61%) have administered fewer than 3 doses per 100 people. Though 59% of the countries below 3 doses per 100 people are considered “low” or “lower middle” in income, some rich countries also fall into this category like Australia, Japan, and South Korea, where governments were faster to contain outbreaks but slower to order vaccines. 

These findings build on earlier research that found a positive association between GDP per capita and vaccination rates. A coalition of mostly low- and middle-income countries led by South Africa and India have been asking since last year for a temporary suspension of the patent protections that make it illegal for their domestic producers to copy or modify vaccine recipes without the license of the multinational corporations that produced those vaccines using, in part, billions in public, taxpayer money. On March 10, these governments were rebuffed yet again at the WTO by a coalition of rich countries led by the U.S., U.K., and European Union.

The U.S. government has various incentives for allowing poor countries to vaccinate their populations as quickly and cheaply as possible: For one thing, uncontrolled community transmission in poor countries provides a fertile ground for viral mutations that could eventually find their way around the existing vaccines’ protection. Meanwhile, the government’s geopolitical rivals are making their own vaccines available to many poorer countries freely or cheaply. But those incentives seem to pale in comparison to protecting profit for a handful of corporations.

U.S. President Joe Biden has responded to increasing questioning from American media by promising that the U.S. will be sharing vaccines globally once it has vaccinated its own population. Millions of doses of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine, stockpiled by the U.S. but unusable since the FDA has not authorized the vaccine, have started to be shared with Canada and Mexico, where the vaccine is authorized, with an expectation of future repayment.

Talking to the Washington Post in late February, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical advisor on the coronavirus, expressed support for rethinking the U.S. government’s approach to global vaccine access but fell short of rocking the corporate boat. “You can make arrangements with companies that would allow them both to maintain a considerable amount of profit,” he said, “at the same time that areas of the world that don’t have resources can share in a way that would be lifesaving to literally millions of people.”

The post Which Countries are Vaccinating the Most People Against COVID-19—and Which are Getting Left Behind appeared first on Type Investigations.

Donald Trump’s efforts to delegitimize the results of the 2020 presidential election set off a gold rush, allowing prominent lawyers, conservative PACs, Republican lawmakers, and others in the former president’s orbit to raise millions of dollars off false claims of a stolen election.

Among the most successful fundraisers is Matthew Braynard, the former director of data and strategy for Trump’s 2016 campaign. Braynard had launched his fundraising page on the Christian crowdfunding platform GiveSendGo on November 7, promising to use the money to “detect potentially fraudulent ballots.” After a week, donations had surpassed the goal of $590,000 that he had set by tens of thousands of dollars, and by mid-January, the campaign had raised more than $675,000 from nearly 9,000 donations.

Braynard used the funds, he said, to acquire voter data from swing states, analyze records for suspicious voter registrations, and call individuals to confirm whether they had actually cast a ballot. He was assisted in this effort by members of the Trump administration, the Washington Post reported, and he participated in several post-election lawsuits. Braynard received at least $150,000 as an expert witness in those cases.

What’s notable about Braynard’s campaign is less the nuances of his particular effort (there’s now an entire cottage industry around claims of election fraud) than how it demonstrates the power of political crowdfunding outside traditional institutional structures like nonprofits and political action committees.

Braynard had initially launched his campaign on GoFundMe, which bills itself as the world’s largest fundraising platform. But his campaign was shut down for violating the site’s terms of service and attempting to “spread misleading information about the election,” the company told Politico. By contrast, GiveSendGo has been more permissive about the kinds of fundraisers it allows. “The democratic process is upheld by people looking into it,” GiveSendGo co-founder Jacob Wells told GEN and Type Investigations.

The post A Former Trump Operative Used GiveSendGo to Push Claims of Election Fraud and Rake in Hundreds of Thousands appeared first on Type Investigations.

President Donald Trump's post-election litigation was, in legal terms, a flop. In financial terms, however, it was an unparalleled success, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in donations. While a small percentage of that money was spent on doomed legal challenges, much of it went to pay off the campaign’s debts, straight to the Republican Party, or to finance a leadership PAC that Trump can use to fund his future ambitions. More than $2.7 million flowed from the Trump campaign to individuals and firms involved in the January 6 rally in Washington, D.C.

The former president isn’t the only one who cashed in on manufactured voter-fraud panic. Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., have both fundraised off the lie.

Further from the spotlight, a network of small nongovernment groups and right-wing personalities also used the discredited narrative of a stolen election to convince conservative Americans, rich and poor alike, to hand over their money. In some cases, new lawsuits allege, it may have been used to personally enrich the fundraisers themselves. Suits filed against the groups True the Vote and pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell’s Defending the Republic, along with some individuals tied to those enterprises, describe how they turned election fraud allegations into cash.

The fundraising continued long after it became obvious that the election challenges would fail, said Rick Hasen, an election law expert. “At some point, it became clear to any reasonable observer that the lawsuits were not going to change the results of the election,” he said. “The evidence was quite clear within a few weeks of the election that there was no massive fraud that could have affected its results. And so anyone making those claims is either deluding themselves or deluding someone else.”

The post Was Election Denial Just a Get-Rich-Quick Scheme? Donors’ Lawsuits Look for Answers appeared first on Type Investigations.

Updated on Nov. 4, 2020

In-person early voting has been hailed as a massive success, smashing turnout records across the country. With a pandemic raging and a hugely contentious election, it gave voters a way to avoid relying on the beleaguered postal system and dodge an Election Day crush. But exactly how well did it improve access to voting?

To find out where early voting did the most to increase access, Votebeat and Type Investigations tabulated the number of sites, hours, and votes for the nation’s 10 most populous counties plus New York City. Across these jurisdictions, there were huge disparities due to a number of factors, including the locations of polling places, the distribution of machines and people, and the number of hours each polling site is open.

“More hours and days and locations will increase turnout,” says Robert Stein, a political science professor at Rice University who works on elections. “No question.”

New York City, for instance, where voters could for the first time cast early ballots in a general presidential election, had 89 polling sites. But collectively, by Election Day the city offered just over 6,400 hours of early voting, even after extending hours midway through the early voting period and adding an additional polling site. That’s far less than the more than the 18,000 hours residents of Cook County, Illinois, received, or the 34,000 hours for voters in Los Angeles County. Both of those counties also had more locations than New York City, but opportunities to vote in person aren’t just a matter of the number of polling places.

Richard Salame for Type Investigations

San Diego County, California, for instance, provided 235 early voting locations, while Cook County, home to Chicago had just 107. But San Diego offered only three days of early voting, and roughly a third of Cook County’s total hours to vote. Nearby Orange County, California, had 60 fewer locations than San Diego, but stayed open four days for 12 hours each, so it also bested San Diego in terms of total hours.

Similarly, in Riverside County, California, 133 early voting locations were open for a cumulative 3,400 hours. Whereas in Harris County, Texas, 11 fewer locations were open for at least 24,000 hours. 

So it’s no surprise that the jurisdictions also varied widely in terms of total early vote count. Harris County, Texas, home to Houston, and Dallas County, Texas, had an in-person early turnout of over 50 percent of registered voters, compared to New York’s 20 percent. The Texas counties offered roughly an hour of early voting per 100 registered voters, compared to NYC’s overall average of one hour per 860 registered voters. New York offered more opportunities for voters to cast ballots ahead of Election Day than Texas — New York allowed no-excuse absentee voting, while Texas did not for people under age 65 — but Texas created more opportunities for  voting early in-person than New York. 

Harris County also kept eight vote centers open for 24 hours last Thursday into Friday for voters not accommodated by the other times on offer. And Texas allowed people to vote at any polling place in their jurisdiction, while New York City required that voters go to their assigned ones. 

“Part of the reason why early voting is beneficial is that it provides people the opportunity to vote at a time that accommodates their personal schedule or their work schedule,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, deputy director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “But if you just then have early voting during regular work hours and a bunch of other weekdays, the likelihood that you're providing people options is not nearly as great as if you provide hours that extend beyond normal working hours.”

The hours of early voting have been a contentious political issue for years, with state legislators across the country seeking to expand or restrict the times and locations that election administrators are allowed to use. For instance, in 2011, Florida’s Republican-controlled state legislature reduced the days and hours of early voting in that state, in a move that was widely criticized by voting rights advocates as disenfranchising voters. A report by scholars at Dartmouth College and the University of Florida found that the change resulted in 225,000 fewer in-person early votes being cast in the 2012 presidential election. In 2013, then-Governor Rick Scott, a Republican who had supported the 2011 law, shifted gears and endorsed legislation to increase the early voting hours at each polling location from 96 to 168.

But the hours and number of locations are far from the only determinants of how well early voting works. Many election scholars apply queueing theory, the mathematical study of line-formation. Using surveys and other instruments, they analyze voter turnout, location, time of day, the numbers of poll workers, poll books, and voting machines, and the amount of time each transaction takes when modelling why one polling location has a smooth day of voting and another will become massively backed up. 

Richard Salame for Type Investigations

Colin McIntyre, a researcher with the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, recently described this phenomenon on Medium. “Fundamentally, long lines are due to a mismatch between the number of voters who show up and the resources available to accommodate them,” he wrote.

In New York City and elsewhere, early voting was plagued by multi-hour lines. “There is no place in the United States of America where two, three, four hour waits to vote is acceptable,“ Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said at a press conference in late October, calling it a form of voter suppression. A landmark 2014 Presidential Commission on Election Administration report determined that no voter should wait longer than 30 minutes; anything longer is a hurdle to participation.

New York state legislators have already proposed legislation to boost the number of early voting sites in future elections. 

Morales-Doyle of the Brennan Center said this year’s voting experience could have long-lasting implications “I think that this election is sort of changing the way people think about voting in dramatic ways,” he said. “And so I think we can expect that there will be a continuing popularity and continuing demand for more, and more easily accessible, early voting, which I think is a great thing. Because the more options and the easier we make it for people to vote, the more people are going to participate in our democracy.”

Methodology note: Early voting locations and schedules come from the respective counties as of 10/28 with the exception of an update to the NYC data that occured on 10/29. Voter registration data comes from the most recent reports (as of 11/2) of the various secretaries of state. Early vote tallies come from official sources at the city, county, or state level as of 11/4/20. Cook County and the City of Chicago maintain separate boards of election — we used data from both for comparability.

The post Early Voting Was Supposed to Make Our Lives Easier. How Well Did It Work? appeared first on Type Investigations.

Limary Ruiz Torres, a 51-year-old accountant in Lawrenceville, Ga., was eager to vote in this year’s presidential primary. But when Torres, who was raised in Puerto Rico and speaks limited English, received her mail-in ballot application in April, she felt shut out. “I cannot read the absentee ballot request I received this week,” she later told a federal court. Ultimately, she and another plaintiff, Albert Mendez, sued the county and state.

Roughly 11.5 million voting age citizens have limited proficiency in English, and their rights are supposed to be protected by the Voting Rights Act, which requires local election officials to provide language accommodations whenever the population of those who need them reaches certain thresholds. In many counties and cities, and increasingly states, those populations are big enough to swing elections, making language access all the more pressing this November.

There are more than 16,000 Spanish-speaking voters in Gwinnett County, Ga., with limited English proficiency, more than enough to trigger the law’s protections. But Torres and Mendez fell into a gaping loophole. Since this absentee ballot application came from the state, which unlike the county isn’t subject to the language-access portion of the Voting Rights Act, the state and county argued that no law was broken. On October 5, a Trump-appointed district judge agreed.

In the past, this would be the type of case in which the Department of Justice’s civil rights division might intervene. “Taking advantage of this apparent loophole cynically flouts the legislative intent of the VRA language provisions—to ensure that limited-English-proficient voters can cast a fully informed ballot,” Susana Lorenzo-Giguere, who worked on language access cases for the Department of Justice (DOJ) and is now an attorney for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, told me in an e-mail.

But the DOJ is nowhere to be seen. Since January 2017, when President Donald Trump took office, the DOJ civil rights division has not launched a single lawsuit or consent agreement under these language provisions. In that period, the DOJ has filed just one amicus brief upholding the language protection provisions of the VRA.

In response to detailed questions about the lack of lawsuits and briefs filed under language access laws, a spokesperson for the Department of Justice said that the department has continued to send federal observers to monitor compliance. “The department is firmly committed to enforcing all laws, including the Voting Rights Act,” said Alison Kjergaard, a spokesperson for the department, in an e-mail. She did not point to any newly initiated litigation or briefs.

By comparison, between 1975 and 2016, the DOJ initiated 53 lawsuits and consent decrees to enforce the Voting Rights Act’s language protections according to its own data, suing jurisdictions from California to Massachusetts for failing to provide bilingual election materials or to allow voters assistance from people of their choosing.

Some advocates worry that this fall will see more voting rights violations, including language access violations, than in the past. As the country’s Latino and Asian American populations grow and spread into formerly monolingual communities, jurisdictions that never before had to think about this issue now have to accommodate non-English speaking voters.

Much of that growth is happening in the South, in states like Georgia and Florida that are part of the conservative US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. It’s there that new interpretations of language access law are being hashed out by recently appointed justices, according to Juan Cartagena, president of the legal advocacy group Latino Justice. The confluence of migration into the South and a conservative judiciary there is “a real damn kick in the ass,” he said.

John C. Yang, president and executive director of the advocacy group Asian Americans Advancing Justice, has been negotiating with local jurisdictions to protect immigrants’ right to vote in the absence of DOJ enforcement. The Trump DOJ, he told me, “has failed in its mission to protect the people’s right to vote.”

A WELL-ESTABLISHED RIGHT

The right to vote in another language is a cornerstone of the Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965 and significantly amended a decade later. In 1965, the Department of Justice joined its first lawsuit to compel a local jurisdiction to abide by the VRA’s language-minority protections and, until Trump came to power, steadily fought for these rights.

For the most part, once a jurisdiction has more than 10,000 voting-age citizens of a single language minority—or more than 5 percent of its population, whichever comes first—all elections in that jurisdiction must be bilingual in that minority language. This applies not only to ballots, but to nearly all aspects of the election process, including application forms, websites, signs, and official communications.

As of 2016, the most recent round of Census Bureau determinations, 263 counties and county equivalents and three states were covered under such protections. There are also special provisions in place for US citizens educated in American schools where the language of instruction isn’t English, like residents of Puerto Rico, who have the right to bilingual elections anywhere in the country.

Still, millions of Americans with limited proficiency in English fall outside these criteria. Many languages, such as Arabic and Haitian Creole, do not qualify for protection, no matter the size of the population, because they were not included on the original list of language minorities written by Congress in 1975. Attempts to have Congress extend language protections to additional communities have been unsuccessful, despite the growing need.

For these voters, excluded from coverage, there is an additional catch-all protection: Any voter who cannot use the ballot on their own, whether on account of disability, illiteracy, or limited English proficiency, can get help voting from anyone they want, as long as that person isn’t a representative of their employer or union. It’s this last right, advocates say, that is most often trampled upon by poll workers who don’t understand voters’ rights to assistance. It’s also the only one to receive attention from the DOJ since Trump took office.

In 2014, Mallika Das, a native Bengali speaker, tried to vote with the help of her son in Williamson county, Tex. State law, contrary to the Voting Rights Act, stipulated that she could not receive interpretation from anyone who wasn’t a registered voter in the same county, disqualifying her son. The DOJ expressed an early interest in the case during the Obama era. Then, after years of inaction, it filed a brief on February 6, 2017—17 days after Trump’s inauguration—affirming that the state’s law violated the VRA. “All of a sudden it was just entered onto the docket,” said Jerry Vattamala from the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, who was the lead attorney for the plaintiffs on the case. “It was in the very early, early stages of the Sessions DOJ so it seems like somebody was able to slip that in before other people were able to put a stop to it.” It would be the last time the DOJ took a public stand on language access.

MISSING IN ACTION

As the DOJ remains silent on the issue of language access in elections, problems are cropping up around the country, leaving private organizations to fill the gaps.

Election Protection, a coalition of advocacy organizations that provide a suite of voter assistance hotlines, says it received language access complaints from voters in Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, and California during the 2018 midterms. According to an estimate from DOJ attorneys, the Civil Rights Division receives roughly 3,000 complaints per year regarding voting. Though it does not release the breakdown of problems raised, advocates say that language access issues are common.

One of those complaints came from Dona Kim Murphey. In 2018, she and fellow Korean Americans tried to offer Korean-language interpretation in Harris County, Tex., but were told by poll workers that they were too close to the polling place. Though campaign volunteers typically need to stay outside of a 100-foot electioneering boundary, Murphey told me that she finds it “laughable” that interpreters are treated the same way. “The ADA folks, they’re there, they offer people help at the door,” she said. “I feel like translators should have the same opportunity.”

Murphey said she called the DOJ’s hotline and was called back with a promise of an investigation, but that she had no further interactions with them. The Department of Justice declined to comment on the case.

Since then, Murphey said, the community and the county have reached a mutual understanding—the volunteer interpreters will approach voters only outside the 100-foot boundary, and the county will not try to stop them from accompanying voters inside the polling sites to interpret. The county has also hired two bilingual Korean-speaking poll workers. “We didn’t push it any further,” she said, “because at the time we were just glad to get that.”

Other examples are easy to find. Like thousands of other Puerto Ricans, Marta Valentina Rivera Madera, 69, fled the damage from Hurricane Maria in October 2017 and relocated to Florida. Her new home, Alachua County, conducted elections entirely in English, which worried her. “I want to be able to vote in the language I speak best because I take voting very seriously and have always educated myself about the candidates and issues before casting my ballot,” she said in a statement to advocates at the time.

Less than a year after arriving in Florida, she became the class representative in a lawsuit trying to force 32 Florida counties with large populations of Puerto Rican residents with limited English proficiency to conduct bilingual elections. The judge in Rivera Madera’s case, an Obama appointee, was baffled. “It is remarkable that it takes a coalition of voting rights organizations and individuals to sue in federal court to seek minimal compliance with the plain language of a venerable 53-year-old law,” he wrote in his scathing ruling. More than two years later, there are accommodations in place, but private negotiations between plaintiffs and the counties over a permanent arrangement are ongoing. Critics say private lawsuits like this have become the norm.

“Since Trump was elected, the private voting rights bar has had to shoulder all the burdens of litigation,” said Gerry Hebert, a voting rights attorney who worked for the DOJ for 21 years. “Previously you had the DOJ, which had more resources than any of us, would be out there enforcing the act.”

Without DOJ resources being deployed to protect voters, the situation has become akin to a game of “whack-a-mole,” Vattamala told me. “It’s back to pre-VRA where you’re just constantly litigating these voter suppression tactics in a lot of the formerly covered jurisdictions.… It’s too little too late in a lot of places.”

INSIDE THE DEPARTMENT

Several former employees of the voting section as well as outside advocates who litigate voting rights cases attribute the slowdown to Trump’s political appointees at the department. The voting section has a large staff of civil servants, and is led by a career civil servant, Chris Herren, but it can bring cases only with the approval of the assistant attorney general for civil rights, a political appointee. The current officeholder, Eric Dreiband, was a tendentious choice for the role, not least because of his track record defending corporations against employment discrimination claims brought, in some cases, by the federal government itself. In 2016 he represented the University of North Carolina as a defendant in an Obama-era DOJ civil rights lawsuit over the right of trans people to use the bathroom corresponding with their gender identity.

Career attorneys conduct investigations and create memos detailing why the DOJ should intervene in a violation of someone’s voting rights, and those memos are reviewed by higher-level political appointees. Historically, political appointees at the department have allowed civil servants to enforce voting rights largely as they see fit, even under Republican presidents. During the Reagan administration, former employees say, career civil servants were able to bring cases. Hebert, the former staffer, said Reagan appointees rarely, if ever, turned down a request for enforcement from the career staff.

The Voting Section became more politicized under President George W. Bush, whose administration staffed the Civil Rights Division with controversial lawyers such as Hans von Spakovsky and J. Christian Adams. Von Spakovsky has since risen to prominence in Republican circles for promoting the discredited notion that voter fraud is a widespread problem in the United States. At the time, many inside the department saw his appointment as a conservative power grab. During his tenure, more than half of the members of the Voting Section quit in protest. The partisan hiring practices of Bush-appointed civil rights head Bradley Schlozman sparked a highly critical 2008 report from the DOJ Office of the Inspector General that called him “unsuitable for federal service.” Schlozman’s lawyer at the time called the report “inaccurate” and “biased.”

Still, even Bush’s DOJ continued enforcement of the language-minority provisions of the Voting Rights Act. During the George W. Bush administration, the DOJ launched 31 actions to enforce language-minority rights. “That was done out of a political belief that Republicans could win Hispanic votes,” said William Yeomans, who spent two decades at the Civil Rights Division, including as the former acting assistant attorney general for civil rights. “I don’t think that Republican push exists anymore.” (A 2013 Inspector General’s report was unable to substantiate the notion that Bush’s DOJ based its actions on political calculations).

Today, department veterans suspect, the political appointees have created a bottleneck through which few, if any, cases can pass. Advocates accustomed to working closely with the DOJ prior to 2016 say that under Trump, it’s been near-total radio silence.

Perhaps, some say, that’s better than the alternative, given the current administration. They point to a Texas voter ID case, where the DOJ reversed the position it had held under the Obama administration that the voter ID law was racially discriminatory. For the voting rights community, it was shocking. When asked if they would welcome DOJ involvement in ongoing cases, some advocates told me, remarkably, they’re not sure which side the DOJ would be on. “Do you welcome DOJ in general?” Cartagena mused. “First, I want to know what they’re going to say.”

The post If You Can’t Speak English, Good Luck Voting in Trump’s America appeared first on Type Investigations.

President Donald Trump's campaign, ordered by a federal court judge in Pennsylvania to back up its claims of fraud in the state’s vote-by-mail system, has documented only a handful of cases of election fraud in recent years — none of which involved mail-in ballots. The revelation, which came in the form of a partially redacted 524-page document produced by the Trump campaign last week, undermines the claim by Trump team operatives that mail-in ballot fraud is a grave risk to Pennsylvania voters.

The post Trump Comes Up Empty When Pressed for Evidence of Election Fraud in Court appeared first on Type Investigations.

Maria Fallon Romo grew up in a family that talked politics at the dinner table. At 53, the North Dakota special education teacher has been an active voter for about 30 years and, until recently, had never experienced a problem casting her ballot. In 2018, she decided to cast a mail-in ballot for the first time, thinking it would be more convenient than her usual in-person vote.

This year, as politicians, voting rights advocates, and elections experts call for a sharp increase in the use of mail-in ballots to prevent the spread of Covid-19, many more voters could find, like Romo, that their votes don’t count. That’s because significantly expanding vote-by-mail also expands the universe of ballots that get scrutinized by officials, and past experience shows that more scrutiny means more ballots get discarded, sometimes for good reason but sometimes by mistake.

“Just by the sheer volume — and just assuming there’s a constant error rate — we’re going to get a significant increase in just the number, the absolute number of rejections,” said University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald, who specializes in U.S. elections. “There are going to be many thousands, if not millions, of people who are going to be having problems with their mail ballots.”

Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

An election worker sorting by-mail ballots in California.

Inconsistent signature matching rules are just one risk that accompanies voting by mail in the United States. Unlike regular ballots cast at a polling location, ballots cast by mail are inspected before being counted. They can be rejected by election officials for a number of reasons: lateness, errors on the attached form, lack of signature, and a lack of witnesses, among others. Voters who might otherwise have asked a poll worker for help might make mistakes on the ballot they fill out at home, causing their vote not to count.

Key Findings

• The risk of rejection varies widely by state. Some of the most populous states in the country had the highest ratio of rejected ballots compared to the size of their voting population.

According to a new calculation by The Intercept and Type Investigations, over 950,000 votes were rejected by officials in the last presidential election, based on data released by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. This includes more than 300,000 domestic mail-in ballots and more than 600,000 provisional ballots cast at the polls. The risk of rejection varies widely by state. In the 2016 election, the mail-in ballot rejection rate in Georgia was roughly 30 times higher than the mail-in rejection rate in Wisconsin. This figure includes both domestic absentee ballots and ballots from military personnel and citizens abroad.

The five states that currently hold all-mail elections — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington — didn’t count between 0.7 and 0.9 percent of mail-in ballots received. New York, on the other hand, which received far fewer mail-in ballots relative to its voter turnout, didn’t count ballots it received at a rate up to almost eight times higher than those other states.

Key Findings

• Research has also shown that voters of color and language-minority voters are more likely to have their mail-in ballots rejected by elections officials.

Some of the most populous states in the country also had the highest ratio of rejected ballots compared to the size of their voting population, the analysis by The Intercept and Type Investigations of rejected ballots in 2016 across all relevant ballot types — provisional, absentee, and overseas military and civilian — found. A recent lawsuit in New York, where 2016 vote-by-mail ballots were rejected at nearly five times the median rate for the country as a whole, shows some of the pitfalls that may await.

The hurdles that accompany vote-by-mail logistics are not insurmountable. The states that vote entirely by mail have carried out elections for years without major problems. Research shows that states where vote-by-mail has expanded have seen a modest increase in voter turnout, and voting rights advocates are unanimous about the benefits of giving voters more options to cast their ballot.But with potentially millions voting by mail for the first time, especially amid the coronavirus pandemic, jurisdictions accustomed to a trickle of mail-in ballots will get a flood. Over half of U.S. states received fewer than 10 percent of their 2018 votes by mail, including populous states like New York and Texas, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice. Several of the country’s largest jurisdictions will be among the many trying to quickly scale up their vote-by-mail infrastructure to emulate systems that took other states, like Washington, years or even decades to create. Voters who don’t receive absentee ballots in time — like many in Georgia last week — may still show up in person, meaning that the existing in-person infrastructure cannot be abandoned or aggressively consolidated. As the New York Times pointed out, administrators will, in essence, have to conduct two simultaneous elections.

Reducing the risk of valid votes being thrown out will require heroic efforts on the part of election administrators, who will be tasked with reviewing far more votes than ever before. Already, teams of experts and advocates have formed to safeguard the process, but they will need to work quickly, and receive political support, to be successful.

Denise Roberts headed to her Tioga County, New York, polling place early on November 8, 2016, to avoid the lines. But her name wasn’t listed in the poll book. It didn’t make sense, she recalled in an interview with The Intercept and Type Investigations. She had moved to the area several years ago and voted at the same fire station just 12 months before. She even had a paper card from the county Board of Elections confirming that she was registered at her current address.

The poll workers told Roberts that her registration was inactive, and she would have to vote using an affidavit ballot, known in other states as a provisional ballot. Rather than being counted automatically, the ballot would, like Romo’s, be scrutinized after Election Day by elections officials, who would determine whether her vote was legitimate.

JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images

An election worker prepares to load vote-by-mail ballots into a sorting machine at King County Elections in Renton, Washington on March 10, 2020.

Roberts wondered if the fact that she was a black woman in a 95 percent white, rural county had come into play. “It was humiliating,” she said. “I didn’t believe what had just happened.” Then the same thing happened to Roberts’s daughter-in-law Angela, who lived with her. Despite being properly registered at the address where they lived, the Robertses had no confidence that their affidavit ballots would be counted. Their suspicions were correct.

The Robertses were later deposed in a voting rights lawsuit that John Powers of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who represented the plaintiffs, called a “canary in the coal mine” for efforts to expand vote-by-mail in the 2020 election. It revolved around the state’s practice of moving people from an “active” registration list to an “inactive” registration list if certain trigger events occurred. One of those events, crucially, is the return of a single piece of election mail as undeliverable.

At the time, the names of “inactive” registrants in New York weren’t sent to the polling place, and these voters were required to cast provisional ballots. This year, they will be provided to poll workers, per a federal court order, but they will still be required to vote provisionally. That means their votes can be rejected due to errors on the ballot or, occasionally, for no clear reason whatsoever. That was the case with the Robertses, whom officials ultimately admitted had been wrongly disenfranchised due to administrative error. The state’s apology was little comfort for Denise Roberts. “I never expected to experience that my voting rights would be taken away by somebody making a decision,” she said.

Marc Meredith, a University of Pennsylvania political scientist who was an expert witness in the case, calculated at the time that New York had a higher rate of rejected provisional ballots compared to the total number of votes than any other state in the U.S. In addition to tens of thousands of people who relocated within the state, in 2016 roughly 45,000 people cast provisional ballots with their registered addresses, suggesting that they had very likely been improperly deemed “inactive” by the state. Tens of thousands of erroneously deactivated voters were thus funneled into an administrative process in which their votes had a good chance of being discarded. In the 2016 general election, only about 51 percent of the provisional ballots cast in New York were ultimately counted.

Relying on undeliverable mail as a way to maintain accurate address lists can be highly problematic. “We have uncovered, over the course of time, significant issues with the consistency of the information that we get from the post office vis-à-vis who’s at this location and who is not at the location,” testified New York City Board of Elections Executive Director Michael Ryan, the top election official in the city. He told lawyers in the case that quotidian problems can have disastrous results, especially in urban areas: If the center lock is broken in the bank of mailboxes of a large apartment building, for instance, the postal worker won’t be able to leave the mail there, causing everyone in the building to become “inactive” unless they go to the post office in person to collect their mail within 14 days.

“Quite frankly, it has caused us to have little faith in the overall reliability of the quality of information that we get from the post office,” Ryan said, adding that the moves to inactive status disproportionately affect people who live in multiunit buildings. Ryan complained that to avoid this “unintended consequence” of New York’s registration laws, he tries not to send mailings unless they are critical. Missing virtually any piece of mail — even a letter confirming a voter has been moved back to “active” status — can cause a voter to be kicked off the “active” list if the post office cannot deliver it. In her opinion, Judge Alison Nathan found “the central proxy that the State uses to determine whether a voter has moved has serious problems with its reliability.”

New York’s mail delivery problems bode poorly for the state’s ability to ramp up vote-by-mail in time for the November election, experts said. Some voters won’t receive mail-in ballots to which they are entitled, and other ballots will likely end up in the wrong voters’ hands.

The same is true for other states unaccustomed to regularly interacting with voters that way, said Charles Stewart III, an elections expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The vote-by-mail states are doing a lot of mail business with their voters; they’re sending a ballot every election, they’re sending voter information guides every election, they’re interacting with their votes a lot by mail. And one consequence of that is that their voter rolls are very clean,” he said. “Whereas the purpose of the voter roll in New York is not to do a lot of mail transactions with voters, that’s not why it was constructed. And so you’re suddenly putting a burden on the voter list that it wasn’t designed to bear.”

Joe Amon/The Denver Post via Getty Images

This machine, used in Colorado, can automatically verify some signatures, but not all of them. And many election offices don't have such time-saving machines.

Mail-in and provisional ballots can be rejected for legitimate reasons, such as a would-be voter lacking eligibility. They can also be rejected for more contentious reasons, many of which involve human error: failing to sign the ballot, failing to have a witness where required, or making a mistake on the form that goes alongside the ballot.

The most common reason in 2016 was the one that invalidated Maria Fallon Romo’s ballot: a perceived mismatch in the signature between the ballot and the voter registration, according to a report by the Election Assistance Commission. In many states, the criteria used to reject those ballots are poorly defined and left to the discretion of untrained election workers.

It is a fraught effort: Signatures can vary depending on age, health, disability, writing utensil, and even noise and stress levels. Though signature matching helps election officials confirm the identity of someone casting a ballot from home, rather than from a polling place, election experts said the effectiveness — and accuracy — of signature checks vary widely by state. Some states, like Colorado, have detailed guidance on how to examine a voter’s signature, based on scientific principles of forensic document examination. Other states do not. Research has shown that laypeople are three and a half times more likely than trained forensic document examiners to incorrectly identify signatures as nonmatching. Laypeople are also more likely to reject authentic signatures than to make the opposite error and accept forged signatures.

Research has also shown that voters of color and language-minority voters are more likely to have their mail-in ballots rejected by elections officials. Voters whose native language uses non-Latin characters display greater signature variability, which officials might interpret as attempted forgery. Voters of color might also have less information about how to cast a valid ballot; a 2014 study found that election officials were less likely to answer Latinx voters’ questions compared to white voters’ questions.

• In the 2016 general election, only about 51 percent of the provisional ballots cast in New York were ultimately counted.

In recent years, the lax standards around signature matching have been subject to repeated legal challenges. In 2019, the 11th Circuit Court lambasted Florida’s signature-matching law on the grounds that it subjected vote-by-mail and provisional voters to “the risk of disenfranchisement.” The state lacked uniform standards for what counted as a signature match and didn’t require any training or qualifications for ballot inspectors. By allowing each county to apply its own procedures, the court’s majority wrote, Florida is “virtually guaranteeing a crazy quilt of enforcement.” Florida has since enacted legislation requiring formal signature-matching training for elections supervisors as part of a reform package.

Florida has an appeal process to defend against unfairly discarded ballots, but notifications for rejected ballots come far too late to take part in it. The problem can affect even sophisticated voters like former Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Fla., whose ballot was rejected and who didn’t get a chance to appeal. The court therefore found the appeals process to be “illusory” in some circumstances.

Experts say that’s why it’s better to count votes the first time around. “People aren’t going to go back after an election to fight for their ballot to count given everything they have going on in their lives and given the fact that the election was already decided,” Powers said. “They have too much on their plate to play election lawyer and track this down when it seems like an academic exercise.”

The National Vote at Home Institute, an organization that advocates for policy changes to make it easier to vote by mail, encourages all states to adopt modern, flexible, and voter-friendly appeals processes.

“There are risks on both sides here,” said Stewart, the elections expert at MIT. “I think the right way to think about this is to think about the risks on both sides and to try to mitigate both the health risks of voting in person and to mitigate the risks of having ballots rejected.”

In March, as deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic began to mount, election officials and advocates gathered by phone to plot a solution. Clearly, many thousands of people would not want to vote in person in upcoming primaries or in November’s general election, but most states weren’t ready for a huge surge in vote-by-mail. For Amber McReynolds, CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute, this is a critical moment. Her group has developed a plan calling for centralized or regionalized mail operations, tighter coordination with the post office, and improved signature verification processes.

Election officials are working quickly, she said: “They’re trying to find solutions to very difficult problems. [But] in many ways, they have one hand tied behind their back because of outdated laws and policies.”

Expanding vote-by-mail is popular among voters from both parties, and both Republican and Democratic governors and secretaries of state have mailed millions of voters absentee ballot applications, allowing them to apply to vote by mail in the primaries. It would not only reduce the risk of disease transmission between voters, but it could also help protect poll workers, 56 percent of whom were older than 60 in the 2016 election, according to a survey of over half of poll workers nationwide, and many of whom interact with hundreds of people on Election Day. Apparent elections-related transmission of the virus has been observed in Wisconsin and Florida after they held in-person elections this spring.

Many states are already planning for a large vote-by-mail component in November and the first half of 2020 has seen a flurry of legislative activity around the moves. In some states, voters need a valid excuse for voting by mail, though in some cases the requirement is being waived in light of the pandemic. (Seven Republican-led states have expanded no-excuse vote-by-mail for elderly voters only, a demographic that often favors Republicans.) But, the charge for a massive increase in voting by mail isn’t being led by lawmakers themselves, McReynolds said. “Voters are choosing in exponential numbers to sign up to get a ballot at home this year,” she said. Officials need to be prepared.

Kim Wyman, Washington’s Republican secretary of state, and her elections director have spoken with top election officials from all 50 states and Puerto Rico in order to share lessons from Washington’s successful all-mail elections. The Center for Tech and Civic Life, Center for Civic Design, Brennan Center, National Vote at Home Institute, and other nongovernmental organizations drew up detailed road maps for election administrators to scale up vote-by-mail in their states. Academics from Stanford and MIT launched a joint project to identify and disseminate best practices. And task forces of experts and political functionaries are putting forward plans, hosting webinars, and convening conference calls.

Many of the plans involve reducing existing barriers to voting by mail, such as the demand that voters have an excuse or allowing Covid-19-related excuses and removing the requirements in some states for a witness or notary to sign the ballot. Experts are also calling for less error-prone signature-matching procedures, improved appeal processes, expanded ballot return options, prepaid return postage, and acceptance of ballots postmarked by Election Day. Administrators may be able to implement some of these fixes without changes to state law and within existing budgets, but others may require legislative action, and the apportionment of additional funds.

In April, the Brennan Center for Justice recommended that Congress allocate “at least $4 billion to ensure all elections between now and November are free, fair, safe, and secure.” In March, the center had estimated that prepaid postage alone would cost roughly $500 million. There is scant indication that the Republican-controlled Senate will appropriate anywhere near the amount being requested by Democrats. And if Congress does appropriate that money, the National Vote at Home Institute’s McReynolds is doubtful that it could even be used to fund expanded capacity. State and county budgets have been devastated by the coronavirus pandemic, she said, and in many cases they will need federal relief just to implement the election plans they developed pre-coronavirus, to say nothing of expanding their existing infrastructure.

If and when states receive the money, the supply chain will need to be activated: Companies that print bulk mail for existing vote-by-mail states like Colorado have said they will need financial commitments months in advance of November in order to expand their production capacity. A machine to automatically insert ballots into envelopes can cost up to $1 million, for instance, and vendors won’t purchase extras without guarantees that states will contract them to produce bulk mail. Vendors and officials will need to design and deploy systems to track, monitor, and sort the massive volumes of paper. “This three-month period, we’re really in a critical time,” said McReynolds.

• Some states, like Colorado, have detailed guidance on how to examine a voter’s signature, based on scientific principles of forensic document examination. Other states do not.

There is also the question of whether the underfunded and overworked U.S. Postal Service can handle millions of additional pieces of election mail without errors; though it is not clear yet whether mail services or election administrators were responsible, there were problems this spring when people who requested mail-in ballots in Georgia and several other states did not receive them in time. In Wisconsin, for instance, boxes full of undelivered absentee ballots were discovered after the election, potentially thousands of voters did not receive their ballots in time to vote, and other ballots were mailed but never postmarked, thus potentially becoming invalid.

In an email, a spokesperson for the U.S. Postal services told The Intercept and Type Investigations that the agency will be ready in November. “The U.S. Mail serves as a secure, efficient and effective means for citizens and campaigns to participate in the electoral process, and the Postal Service is committed to delivering Election Mail in a timely manner,” she wrote. Knowing that Covid-19 will prompt more people to vote by mail, she added, “we are conducting … outreach with state and local election officials and Secretaries of State so that they can make informed decisions and educate the public about what they can expect when using the mail to vote.”

This fall will be a stress test of the U.S. election system, as administrators working with decimated budgets attempt to handle a massive increase in voting by mail while maintaining in-person voting options. With many state legislatures prohibiting officials from processing absentee ballots before Election Day, delays in generating results are likely. There is concern that irregularities and delays could undermine public confidence in the outcome of the election, a problem made worse by Trumpian allegations of widespread fraud.

Throwing out too many ballots may be just as dangerous as throwing out too few, experts said. As Marc Meredith noted in the New York lawsuit, “Making potential voters less certain that their ballots will count makes it less likely that they will vote.”

The post As States Struggle With Vote-by-Mail, “Many Thousands, If Not Millions” of Ballots Could Go Uncounted in November appeared first on Type Investigations.

As states across the country move to increase access to mail-in and absentee voting during the COVID-19 pandemic, a lawsuit in Georgia highlights a potential obstacle for millions of voters. The suit, filed this week, alleges that Gwinnett County elections officials and the Georgia secretary of state violated the federal Voting Rights Act by not sending voters in the county a Spanish-English bilingual version of the absentee ballot application for the state's upcoming primary.

“This policy risks disenfranchising scores of minority voters in upcoming elections and discouraging eligible citizens from participating in the democratic process,” said John Powers, counsel for the Voting Rights Project of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which brought the suit on behalf of five nonprofit organizations.

Gwinnett County is one of more than 250 counties around the country that are required, under Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act, to conduct elections entirely bilingually in both English and one or more other languages. Cities, counties, and states fall under this requirement whenever the number of voting-age citizens who speak the same minority language and are not fully literate in English reaches 10,000, or 5 percent of the population. In Gwinnett, 21 percent of the total population (nearly 200,000 people) are Hispanic and, according to the lawsuit, almost 14,000 people who speak Spanish and have limited English proficiency are eligible to vote.

Inadequate language access has long been a problem in American elections. Millions participate in bilingual elections every year, but millions are also excluded. In 2018, Type Investigations and The Nation calculated that, out of over 11 million voting-age citizens with limited English proficiency, 5.78 million lived in jurisdictions without a federal language accommodation, a pool of voters large enough to swing close Congressional races.

Gwinnett County fell under the federal mandate in December 2016, when the Census Bureau determined that the numerical threshold had been reached. Jerry Gonzalez, executive director of the advocacy group Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials (GALEO), which is a plaintiff in the current lawsuit, said his group had pushed for voluntary inclusion of Spanish prior to 2016 but was told by county officials that “it’s going to have to be mandated federally, or you’re going to have to sue us, or it’s not going to happen.” In 2016, a Gwinnett County poll worker was fired for telling a community member, “If they can’t speak English, we don’t want them here.” Activists said it’s indicative of a culture of animosity toward minority voters.

The latest controversy came after Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger used federal stimulus money to send English-only absentee ballot applications to all of Georgia’s 6.9 million active voters late last month, as a means of encouraging them to vote by mail due to the public health risk posed by in-person elections.

The lawsuit, brought on behalf of GALEO, Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, Asian Americans Advancing Justice - Atlanta, New Georgia Project, and Common Cause, argues that Gwinnett County is required to provide a Spanish-English bilingual version of the absentee ballot application to Spanish-speaking voters in time for them to vote absentee in the June 9 primary. The suit states there is also no bilingual absentee ballot application on the secretary of state’s website and the machine-translation on the Gwinnett County website is difficult to access and use.

The plaintiffs cite federal regulations that make it incumbent on a covered county to “insure compliance” with bilingual requirements in “all aspects of the election,” even though the mailing came from the state, which is not required to operate elections in Spanish under Section 203. The suit argues that the state is compelled to provide translated absentee ballot applications under a different section of the Voting Rights Act.

The suit notes that, in the past, Gwinnett County produced and printed its own bilingual version of a statewide election notice in order to comply with Section 203.

The county’s attorney, Bryan Tyson, argues that, in this instance, because the absentee ballot applications came from the state, the county was not required to do so. “The fact that the Secretary of State chose to mail voting materials to all active voters does not create a duty on the Gwinnett BORE [Board of Registration and Elections] to also send materials to all voters (or a subset of voters) in the county,” he wrote in an April 8 letter prior to the lawsuit being filed. A spokesperson for the county declined to comment on ongoing litigation but pointed us to a section of the lawsuit that says the mailing came from the state. The secretary of state’s office also declined to comment.

The controversy raises questions that will become increasingly urgent as states overhaul their election procedures in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Many states are anticipating a massive expansion in vote-by-mail, which will present logistical and financial challenges for producing, distributing, collecting, and counting thousands of unique ballot designs that some states are ill-equipped to handle. Elections experts warn that, without stringent safeguards, vote-by-mail could have a negative impact on voters with limited English proficiency, minority voters, and populations that change addresses frequently, such as young people and low-income people.

The decentralized nature of election administration in the US, where elections are often conducted at the county or even municipal level, make it all the more likely that the response to COVID-19 will be a patchwork of regulations subject to inter-governmental finger-pointing like what’s now on display in Georgia.  And when that happens, Powers notes, it’s the voters who lose out. “Limited English proficient voters are among the voters most likely to be left behind as states move towards increased mail-in voting,” Powers said. “Sending English-only absentee ballot applications in Section 203-covered jurisdictions like Gwinnett County sends a message that Spanish-speaking voters’ voices do not matter.”

The post Georgia Lawsuit Raises Concerns About Voters’ Language Access During Primary Season — And Come November appeared first on Type Investigations.

Amid the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak, which by some counts has  infected more than 50 thousand people in the US, shops and restaurants are not the only operations shutting down. Across the country, local, state, and federal agencies have slowed their responses to public records requests to a crawl. While some agencies face tricky logistical challenges because of how records are kept, others have added new barriers that don’t seem directly related to the pandemic.

The FBI has stopped processing electronic records requests, reported BuzzFeed News; now, the bureau requires that requests be sent via postal mail. “Due to the emerging COVID-19 situation,” the agency wrote in a message posted to its FOIA website, “the FBI is not accepting electronic Freedom of Information/Privacy Act requests or sending out electronic responses through the eFOIPA portal at this time. You may still submit a FOIPA request via standard mail. We apologize for this inconvenience and appreciate your understanding.” The message did not explain the relationship between the pandemic and the restriction to postal requests only.

The State Department has gone further, reporter Jason Leopold found, suspending FOIA operations entirely until further notice.

Journalist Emma Best, who has filed more than 1,600 FOIA requests with the FBI,  is concerned that the FBI and other agencies are using the virus “as an obstructive step.” Last week, Best FOIA’d 27 federal departments and agencies for their COVID-19 freedom of information request policies, in an effort to track to what extent the government’s transparency programs are faltering. The Defense Intelligence Agency told Best it couldn’t provide a timetable to process Best’s request for information about the impact of COVID-19 on its records response processes, because of COVID-19’s impact on its records response processes.

Additional reporting by Maha Ahmed.

The post Public Access to Information Suffers Under Coronavirus appeared first on Type Investigations.

The New York City Council approved a long-debated proposal last week to break up the city into at least 20 zones for commercial waste collection. The passage comes after six years of sustained pressure from a coalition of labor and environmental groups seeking to replace the current system in which garbage trucks from competing companies traverse the city each night to pick up garbage from businesses. That system, they say, results in trucks driving 18 million extra miles a year, with harmful impacts on air quality, the environment, pedestrian safety, and workers.

Labor conditions in New York’s commercial waste industry have come under increasing scrutiny following a joint investigation by Type Investigations and ProPublica in January 2018. The investigation, by reporter Kiera Feldman, found that private sanitation trucks are far more deadly both for workers and pedestrians than the municipal sanitation trucks that pick up residential garbage. Pay, benefits, and safety standards were all found to be substandard: fifty-three percent of government safety inspections of the trucks of the 50 biggest companies resulted in the vehicle being declared unsafe to drive. Private carter employees often work 10-14 hour overnight shifts, driving dozens of miles back and forth on routes that sprawl across the city.

Following the investigation, a federal grand jury launched an investigation into the LIFE 890 union, which represents workers at several major garbage companies, and the City Council opened an investigation into one of the city’s regulatory agencies, the Business Integrity Commission. Now, advocates believe they have struck a final blow against the old system of commercial waste collection with the bill, which POLITICO calls “the most significant reform of the city’s commercial waste industry” since the 1990s.

In addition to creating zones, the legislation would allow no more than three companies to operate in each zone, chosen through a competitive bidding process that would take into account a host of factors including price, labor standards, and environmental sustainability. It could be difficult under this new system for some of the city’s smaller private carters to win bids under the zoning system. But for labor advocates, restricting the number of carters operating in each area of the city and granting contracts through a holistic process is a boon: “Instead of a race to the bottom, with bad companies undercutting good companies, all private carters will be held to the same high standard,” said Sean Campbell, President of Teamsters Local 813, one of the groups pushing for the bill. In order to protect smaller carters, the city will not allow any one company to operate in more than 15 zones.

A handful of councilmembers spoke against the proposal on Wednesday, alleging that it would increase waste removal costs for small businesses and kill jobs. “City council should not be regulating jobs and opportunity out of existence, especially for our city’s most vulnerable workers,” said Councilmember Robert E. Cornegy, Jr. In 2018 Cornegy and a colleague introduced legislation that would have blocked commercial waste zones; emails obtained via public records request suggest the legislation was drafted by industry lobbyists, according to reporting by Kiera Feldman. In June of this year, New Yorkers for Responsible Waste Management, a trade group made up of over a dozen of the city’s waste carters, testified against the waste zone proposal, saying that smaller carters “are going to be swallowed up and they are going to be not able to employ workers.”

The Department of Sanitation has said of its own 2018 waste zoning proposal—which allowed up to five vendors in each zone, rather than three—that there would not be significant job losses associated with commercial waste zones. The council bill’s lead sponsor Councilmember Antonio Reynoso has said that companies that remain competitive by jeopardizing worker safety shouldn’t stay in business. Under the new law the sanitation commissioner would have regulatory oversight over almost all aspects of the vendors’ performance, and the authority to impose fines.

With Mayor de Blasio in favor of the policy, commercial waste zones are set to become law, signaling the end of a bloody chapter in the history of the industry.

The post New York City Council Approves Commercial Waste Zones appeared first on Type Investigations.