The concurrence of primary voting for the 2020 voting and the onset of a global pandemic caused many to worry about whether the pandemic would disrupt not only primaries but the November elections. One answer seems to be to ramp up balloting by mail.
Veteran journalist Stephen Rosenfeld warns that absentee and mail-in balloting is rife with problems.
Why nationwide voting by mail isn’t a silver bullet in a pandemic
Rosenfeld writes:
“Before the COVID-19 virus upended the 2020 election—where several states delayed presidential primaries, sparking fears that the Trump White House could seek to postpone the November election—Michigan was seeing absentee voting increase in its primary after passing election reforms via a 2018 ballot measure.
“It is a success,” said Roz Kimbrough, Detroit Department of Elections senior training specialist. “We have seven satellite offices for the Detroit municipality that we opened up to accommodate this overflow beyond just going out to the precincts and voting directly in their area—giving them availability to vote absentee.”
“Kimbrough was at a command center in a cavernous downtown convention center hall where she and others were supervising 800 workers who were processing the last of 141,000 absentee ballots that had been cast in the March 10 primary. Thirty-six percent of the city of Detroit had voted absentee, compared to a 27 percent nationwide average in November 2019.
“However, shifting broadly to absentee ballots—which arrive by mail and can be dropped off or mailed back—as congressional Democrats, election law scholars, party officials, campaign lawyers and activists have been saying is the best way to ensure voting next fall amid the pandemic, is not a simple task.
“Before the COVID-19 virus upended the 2020 election—where several states delayed presidential primaries, sparking fears that the Trump White House could seek to postpone the November election—Michigan was seeing absentee voting increase in its primary after passing election reforms via a 2018 ballot measure.
“It is a success,” said Roz Kimbrough, Detroit Department of Elections senior training specialist. “We have seven satellite offices for the Detroit municipality that we opened up to accommodate this overflow beyond just going out to the precincts and voting directly in their area—giving them availability to vote absentee.”
“Kimbrough was at a command center in a cavernous downtown convention center hall where she and others were supervising 800 workers who were processing the last of 141,000 absentee ballots that had been cast in the March 10 primary. Thirty-six percent of the city of Detroit had voted absentee, compared to a 27 percent nationwide average in November 2019.
“However, shifting broadly to absentee ballots—which arrive by mail and can be dropped off or mailed back—as congressional Democrats, election law scholars, party officials, campaign lawyers and activists have been saying is the best way to ensure voting next fall amid the pandemic, is not a simple task.
“Rushing to an all-mail voting system nationwide, without guaranteeing the reasonable availability of in-person polling sites as an alternative, thus risks inadvertently—but profoundly—changing the makeup of the electorate,” writes David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and former Justice Department voting section attorney, in the Washington Post.
“A switch to all-mail, or mostly mail, voting would also be a massive administrative undertaking,” he continues. “It requires planning, training, procurement of new technology and education of the electorate, particularly if in-person voting is being limited.”
”There are formidable legal, technical and logistical hurdles that must be addressed if a shift to absentee and more early voting options emerges—starting with the fact that one-third of states limit absentee voting, and some even criminalize efforts to assist absentee voters. Before the pandemic broke, Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature was “advancing a bill that would prohibit people from helping with or returning any mail ballots outside their own family if they received any ‘benefit’ for doing so,” noted Marc Elias, who filed two-dozen voting rights suits on behalf of Democrats this cycle.
”There are other challenges beyond the legal issues. These issues include the Postal Service’s ability to deliver ballots amid ongoing budget and workforce cuts, how the public will adapt to new voting regimens (March 17 primaries saw confusion and consternation as precincts closed and moved), and ensuring that voters are not disenfranchised.”
It appears that there is no ideal solution to voting in the age of a plague and a GOP party that doesn’t want too many people voting. The GOP believes in limited (crippled) government and limited voting. They should extend the voting period over a week or even more, whether it is voting by mail or in person, so that the voters and the polling station workers don’t have to be packed together too densely?
Well, if one wants to see something that is “problematic”, one need look no further than the current voting system, which is actually a patchwork of many different systems, each of which is problematic.
Oregon has done mail in voting successfully for about 20 years. We can learn from their experience.
Utah has done mail in voting for about five years now. It’s pretty slick. But it was prepared well in advance. The percentage of people voting in every election went way up, too. Utah had one of the lowest percentages of voters in the country before mail-in ballots. That’s one of the reasons it was proposed.
The only disadvantage is that it often takes a couple of weeks before we know who won in tight races.
We do still have in person voting. And some people truly prefer that. The first major election with mail in ballots, a lot of polling places closed, and the ones that were open were packed. They had to open up more in-person voting for future elections.
But it runs pretty smoothly now. But Utah is tiny–about 3 million people–so it’s not like Utah is necessarily an exemplar for other areas. But it does work here.
There’s plenty of time for mail-in ballots. In California, I think we have to mail them in a couple of weeks before the election. That means they’d have to be in around the middle of October and the country has all the way into January before the Oath Ceremony on the 20th, I think.
Post Office probably can handle delivery just fine. Just did it for the census.
It will take some time but utimately online voting using an unhackable blockchain system solves the problems and ends the voter suppression crimes. Because blockchain accounting is distributed and can’t be hacked it does not depend on trusting centralized systems of any kind. Companies like IBM, and every other tech company, are building these systems so the roll outs can be rapid and reliable.
Ask states who already have mail-in voting. It works well in Oregon.
Repugnicans throughout the country, but particularly in the states of Georgia and Flor-uh-duah, have made a fine art of suppressing the vote by a) losing the mail-in or absentee ballots of Democrats, b) sending those ballots too late for people to vote, c) closing polling places in poor and minority communities, d) gerrymandering, e) manipulating registered voter lists, f) introducing identification schemes meant to be difficult for poor and minority voters, g) opposing universal registration, h) inventing reasons for rejecting voter registrations, and other means. And so the very foundation of democratic government has been completely undermined.
Why? Well, they know, these Repugnicans, that if the turnout is big, they lose.
And so here we are, with a voting system that looks like that used for pseudo-elections in dictatorial countries.
Have you ever read anything by Greg Palast, an investigative journalist? He is persona non grata to our mainstream media. He writes for independent and overseas media. He claims that one of the worst example of voter suppression was the governor’s race in Georgia. With good reason he is very concerned about the 2020 election and any system that will allow red states to manipulate results. https://www.gregpalast.com/
States have a lot of discretion in accepting or rejecting voter signatures on absentee ballots. They can purge many thousands of voters from the rolls by simply rejecting signatures.
Since in a national election the voting procedure for each state, as enumerated in the US Constitution, are controlled legally by each state I doubt if anything other then a recommendation would be constitutional. Anyway allowing people to vote electronically and in person and ALLOWING everyone who wants to vote the right to vote would be better time spent.
Ensuring that voters are not disenfranchised is a “must”.
How can there be salvation if there’s no in-person voting?
How can there be salvation if there’s no sin?
Therefore, mail-in voting is a SIN
The well-funded political arm of the Catholic church and the evangelical compounds will turn out the vote for Trump.
This week, Donald offended Chinese Americans, so with luck, those among them who thought they were the special minority and voted for Trump may wise up for the 2020 election. Latinx and black people won’t won’t for Trump. Voters who believe in democracy won’t vote for him. Millennials don’t like him.
Biden could take a bold step and publicly praise the “factions” within the Catholic church who stand on issues in opposition to their Bishops (and state Catholic Conferences), something a person who wants to win would do, but he won’t.
The Democratic strategy is to pretend religious leaders don’t steer votes to Republicans.
It’s the same pretense in the “saving public education” movement. Pretend Bellwether didn’t advise reformers to reach out to churches to achieve their goals.
Focusing on process for the disenfranchised potential voter seems less productive for Dems than addressing the committed voter who is steered by religious leaders to vote for Republican candidates?
In 2018, 67.70% of the voters in California used absentee ballots.
4,834,975 voters cast their votes in person and 7,141,987 mailed their ballots in.
https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/historical-absentee/
California permits online voter registration, early voting, and no-excuse absentee voting.
https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_in_California
It depends what state you live in. In IL, there was a recent workshop pushing inclusive mail-in voting (& no other method). Because IL is not the kind of state (like GA & FL) where this would be advisable, it is a worrisome method. Very familiar w/Greg Palast and Verified Voting and other groups & people trying to protect our votes. In fact, Congress has not yet been able to–& will not, since McConnell has effectively stalled it–pass the Secure Elections Act (I believe it was co-sponsored by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who is in the following documentary).
Just yesterday, HBO premiered the excellent doc, Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections**, made by the same people who produced the 2006 award-winning doc *Hacking Democracy. Both are definitely worth seeing: if you have HBO OnDemand, they keep their docs on for at least a year.
The new machines bought & in use by most of the states have been proven to be as hackable as the old ones. See this documentary!