Credit: (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

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Frontline workers in New Jersey’s almost all-mail election issued a collective “no mas” Wednesday as waves of late ballots and provisional votes piled up around the state, while anxious voters continued to press concerns about mail-in voting.

Officials said they spent much of the day gathering up tens of thousands of late-arriving mail ballots that had been collected from more than 300 drop boxes scattered across the state’s 21 counties.

Thousands more, they said, poured in, becoming a tsunami of people who chose to drop mail ballots at the limited polling places on Election Day.

“We’ve dedicated 30 phone lines and taken 29,000 phone calls from people asking how to do mail-in voting,” said Patti DiConstanzo, the Superintendent of Elections in Bergen County. “And after all that they still want to come into the polls and drop off their ballots!”

DiCostanzo and other election officials around the state surveyed by NJ Spotlight News described a variety of bureaucratic and technical flaws that continue to flummox workers awash in a record 4 million-plus ballots cast.

Among the workers’ deepest frustration is with the state’s Motor Vehicle Commission, which some residents used to register to vote. The computerized system blinked in and out of operation Tuesday, they said, so workers attempting to upload batches of votes to state computers found the system frozen or gummed up to the point of exasperation.

At other times, votes loaded into the system appeared to disappear, or were never registered, forcing workers to backtrack as ballots piled up. The state’s “Track My Vote” website also proved buggy and confusing to voters who reported trouble signing on and following the progress of their ballots.

“The state voter registration system is a complete mess,” said Richard Ambrosino, a Camden County election official. “We’ve had nothing but trouble with it.”

Scribbles instead of signatures

Other glitches surfaced with electronic signatures from voters who had registered online using a stylus and electronic pad to write their names. In many cases, officials said, they had to send back ballots from these voters because their registered names resembled little more than scribbles.

The result is that many people who registered online or through the Motor Vehicle Commission may effectively end up disenfranchised, officials said.

“Eighty percent of the ballots from people who registered at the DMV had to be sent back for curing,” Ambrosino said. “All of those cure letters did not come back.”

Fixing the ballot-cure process in future elections was high on the wish list of voting changes election officials said they would seek in coming months. The process is essentially a safeguard that gives early mail-in voters a chance to correct their ballot if officials believe signatures do not match existing records.

In practice, the cure has been a huge headache for officials who must gather daily and assess wonky signatures. In many counties, the election board has found itself meeting every night to eyeball chicken-scratched documents.

“We’ve spent far too much time poring over signatures and then trying to chase down voters who need to be cured,” said Lynn Caterson, chair of the elections board in Atlantic County.

Caterson was one of several longtime elections officials who said the state may need to consider new measures to address bugaboos like the  electronic signatures  and mandates that imposed new responsibilities on voting officers. Some officials said they were already working with lawmakers on possible improvements, such as having online registrants send in handwritten signature cards.

Problems, what problems?

The New Jersey state department, which oversees elections, said technical issues involving the vote-tracking website were addressed early on Election Day and users subsequently reported no problems .

Alicia D’Alesaandro, a spokeswoman for the department, declined to comment on the broader technical issues raised by New Jersey counties while the state was still counting ballots. But she praised the efforts of frontline workers in dealing with the historic vote volumes, even as the state also battles a public health crisis.

“The election has been amazingly successful,” she said, adding that the huge numbers of mail-in votes showed that voters overall embraced the new voting scheme. “People got the message.”

Workers will continue to count mail-in ballots received by Nov. 11 if they are postmarked by Nov. 3. State law says all votes must be officially certified by Nov. 20. The large number of outstanding ballots could affect several close races, including the 2nd Congressional District, where incumbent U.S. Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a Republican, holds a small lead over Democrat Amy Kennedy.

“We’ll continue to eyeball signatures and review ballots for days yet,” said DiConstanzo, the Bergen County official. “The one thing we really needed this year was more time.’”

On Wednesday, DiCostanzo spent some of her time fielding calls from voters who remain concerned that their ballots were not counted. She said many people continue to have suspicions that their mail ballot is somehow being trashed and prefer their customary ballot booths.

“People love their voting machines,” she said.