May 5, 2022

York, Pennsylvania — In response to York County significantly scaling back mail-in ballot drop boxes, less than two weeks before the Pennsylvania primary election, immigrant advocacy organization CASA released the following statement from Mirna Gonzalez, lead organizer for York. Mirna is also a York County voter who is signed up to vote by mail.

“Simply put, scaling back mail-in ballot drop boxes is an attack on how our elections are administered; the latest dropbox policies are intentionally designed to make it harder to vote, especially for Black and brown voters. These actions do nothing to solve voters’ anxieties about not having the time to vote, standing in line for hours, or ensuring mail-in ballots are received and counted.

For voters that do not speak or understand English, the move compounds confusing information about voting in York County, where voters receive some information in both languages but some critical information, including notifications of polling location changes due to redistricting and the ballot itself, only in English. If elections administrators and elected leaders truly care about improving elections, then they would enhance language access to serve the growing number of residents whose first language isn’t English. They would allocate more money to county election offices to support increased language access and better communication with voters and allow same-day voter registration and early in-person voting, rather than pulling out all the stops to disenfranchise voters just weeks before the election.”

CASA’s “get out the vote” program just finished knocking on over 7,600 doors urging Pennsylvania voters to sign up to vote by mail in York, Lancaster, and Harrisburg. The move to restrict ballot drop boxes will make the voting process even more confusing for working-class voters who can’t get to county election offices during business hours to drop off their ballots.