Could absentee ballots preserve the outcome of the election in New York?

 Could absentee ballots preserve the outcome of the election in New York? According to the race.

voting on Primary Day at M.S. 136 in Brooklyn's Sunset Park district. Many New Yorkers choose to cast absentee ballots. Credit...

In an August election, New Yorkers will cast a second ballot this summer, choosing the winner of a significant special election as well as the candidates for Congress and the State Senate.

As it is August, many New Yorkers are taking advantage of the last few weeks of summer by choosing to cast their votes absentee. According to the New York State Board of Elections, 210,000 absentee ballots have been sought in contests around the state. Only 37% of those had been received by Friday. The number is anticipated to increase through Tuesday, when the ballots must be mailed, and into the next week.

Thanks to a new state rule designed to speed up election results, many of the ballots that have already been cast will be counted on Tuesday night. According to these regulations, counties must start processing absentee ballots four days after receiving them and may start tallying them an hour before polls close, which they do on Tuesday at 9 p.m. Eastern time. Many municipal election boards in 2020 waited until the week following election day to even start counting absentee ballots, with some waiting for almost two weeks.

However, because to the likelihood that postal votes may continue to arrive for days, it may take some time to declare a winner in close contests and those with higher-than-expected turnout.

The most notable examples of this are the hotly contested elections in New York's 10th and 12th congressional districts, when the number of requests for absentee ballots greatly outstripped those from other districts in New York City.

Only 7,192 of the nearly 21,000 absentee ballots sought in the free-for-all race to fill New York's 10th Congressional District have been sent to the New York City Board of Elections as of Tuesday morning.

More than twice as many absentee ballots were requested and returned in Manhattan's 12th Congressional District, where Representatives Jerrold Nadler and Carolyn B. Maloney are battling it out alongside a third challenger, Suraj Patel. Nearly 35,000 absentee ballots were requested and about 16,000 were returned.

A special election was held in the Hudson Valley to decide if Antonio Delgado's former seat would remain Democratic. According to local officials, more than 15,000 absentee votes were sought for the election.

Some undecided voters may have difficulties as a result of the new rules designed to expedite the vote count.

Before, persons who had requested an absentee vote may still use a voting machine to cast their ballot in person. The act is now against the law. Voters who have requested a postal ballot instead have the choice to complete an affidavit ballot, which will only be taken into consideration if the voter's absentee ballot is not received.

Soon after the polls close on Tuesday, results for the whole state will start to be reported on the state Board of Elections website.