New Jersey Allows Voting By Email And Fax For Hurricane Victims
Wow. Registered voters in New Jersey displaced by Hurricane Sandy will be permitted to vote by fax or email in the upcoming election. New Jersey, along with about a dozen other states, already permit overseas and military voters …
Context & Ripple Effects
New Jersey already allows overseas and military voters to return ballots electronically, alongside roughly a dozen other states; the Sandy order stretches that existing channel to any registered voter displaced by the storm, days before Election Day. It is the most aggressive expansion yet in a slow arc of state experiments with electronic ballot delivery, following Connecticut's high-tech voting lessons in 2007 and Oregon's 2011 iPad voting pilot for U.S. House races.
The pickup was unusually broad for an administrative order — Reuters, The Atlantic, The Verge and VentureBeat all carried it, with the governor's office distributing it directly — reflecting how contested email-based ballot return remains among election-security observers.
First-order effects
- Displaced New Jersey voters can cast ballots in the November 6 election by fax or email instead of traveling to a polling place or waiting for a provisional paper process.
- County election officials must now receive, authenticate and hand-process ballots arriving over insecure consumer channels, with no established chain-of-custody procedure for this voter class.
Second-order effects
- Other states hit by Sandy face immediate pressure to match the order or explain why their displaced voters have no equivalent option, making emergency electronic return a de facto benchmark for disaster response.
- Election-security advocates gain a concrete case study to argue against widening email ballot return, since the secrecy and integrity guarantees of the military/overseas channel do not obviously transfer to a mass displaced population.
Third-order effects
- If emergency expansions become the template, electronic ballot return stops being a narrow accommodation for overseas and military voters and becomes a general-purpose fallback invoked whenever normal infrastructure fails — a structural shift adopted faster than verification technology matures.
The trend: US states are incrementally extending electronic ballot delivery from overseas and military voters toward the broader electorate, with disasters accelerating adoption ahead of security review.