Helen Wu, a 21-year-old senior at the University of Chicago, requested a mail-in ballot from her home in Montgomery County, Pa., on Sept. 10.
It never arrived. For nearly two months, she went back and forth with election officials in Pennsylvania in increasing desperation, filing additional requests, until this Monday, when she spent hundreds of dollars on a last-minute plane ticket to Pennsylvania to cast her vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.
She is not alone. The New York Times spoke with two other voters in Montgomery County, and a third in Philadelphia, who had similar experiences and had to rush back to Pennsylvania at the last minute to vote.
Ms. Wu provided 12 emails documenting her efforts to obtain a mail-in ballot, as well as screenshots from Pennsylvania’s voter portal. They show that she requested her ballot on Sept. 10, that it was marked as sent, and then that it was marked as “CANC – UNDELIVERABLE.”
She requested another one, but the request was rejected because she had already requested the first, “undeliverable” one. That happened multiple times. After several attempts to contact the Montgomery County voter services offices, she heard back from someone who told her she needed to file a form to cancel the first request. She did that on Oct. 28 — less than five hours after being told to — but did not receive confirmation that the cancellation form had been received until Oct. 30.
On Monday, Nov. 4, now thoroughly panicked, she tried to contact the county voter services office again. This time, she received a response that her ballot would arrive within “24 to 48 hours” — too late for her to return it in time.
She went and bought the plane ticket.
A friend of hers, Malana Li, 23, lives in Philadelphia but often travels to New York for work, and she is in New York now. She requested a mail-in ballot on Sept. 24 and received an email on Sept. 25, which she provided to The Times, confirming that her application had been approved; she then received another on Sept. 27 saying her ballot was about to be mailed. Nonetheless, like Ms. Wu’s ballot, Ms. Li’s never arrived.
“To the best of our knowledge these were isolated incidents,” Kevin Feeley, a representative for the Philadelphia City Commissioners, said in an email.
Montgomery County officials did not comment. The Pennsylvania Secretary of State’s office also did not comment.
A third woman, Tara Mehta, 23, also splits her time between her home in Montgomery County and New York and had a similar experience to Ms. Li’s. For her, returning to Pennsylvania to vote in person wasn’t a major inconvenience, but there was “just a lot of uncertainty and unnecessary panic it created,” she said.
Ms. Wu’s, Ms. Li’s and Ms. Mehta’s accounts follow an account earlier on Tuesday from Lexi Harder, who is registered to vote in Montgomery County but is studying in Berlin. Ms. Harder told The Times that she had paid more than $1,100 to fly home on Tuesday after the absentee ballot she had submitted was returned to her on Saturday.
Multiple other people posted about similar experiences on social media, including in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Iowa, though The Times has not independently verified their accounts as it did Ms. Wu’s, Ms. Li’s and Ms. Mehta’s.
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