Senior Vice President, Employment Policy Division, U.S. Chamber of Commerce
A new report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce calls out the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for its continued use of mail ballots over its long-standing preference for in-person secret ballot elections when workers vote on forming a union. As the report notes, the National Labor Relations Act specifies that the method to be used for union representation elections is the in-person secret ballot.
Over the years, the NLRB has, despite the statutory language, allowed for the use of mail ballots, but only in specific and limited circumstances, such as when workers in a proposed bargaining unit are scattered in different areas, or when unusual shift schedules make in-person voting impractical, or in undefined “extraordinary” circumstances. The Covid-19 pandemic, most people would agree, clearly qualified as an “extraordinary” circumstance. As a result, the NLRB, after initially suspending all elections early in 2020, began using primarily mail ballots.
There is a reason the NLRB has historically been leery of mail ballots, aside from the statutory language. Over the years, a number of flaws have been identified with this process, such as ballots being lost in the mail, failure of voters to properly sign ballots, sample ballots being sent in mistakenly instead of the actual ballot, and misplacement of ballots by NLRB staff, among others. And these flaws have shown up in turnout data. For example, in...
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