From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject Will Americans Lose Their Right to Vote in the Pandemic?
Date May 18, 2020 3:29 AM
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[The safest way to cast a ballot will very likely be by mail. But
with opposition from the president, limited funding and time running
out, will that option be available?] [[link removed]]

WILL AMERICANS LOSE THEIR RIGHT TO VOTE IN THE PANDEMIC?  
[[link removed]]


 

Emily Bazelon
May 5, 2020
New York Times
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_ The safest way to cast a ballot will very likely be by mail. But
with opposition from the president, limited funding and time running
out, will that option be available? _

, Illustration by Pablo Delcan and Lisa Sheehan

 

In March, as a wave of states began delaying their spring primaries
because of the coronavirus, Wisconsin’s election, scheduled for
April 7, loomed. The ballot for that day included the presidential
primary, thousands of local offices and four judgeships, including a
key seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. On March 17, the day after
Ohio postponed its spring election, voting rights groups asked
Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, to do the same. “No
one wanted the election to happen more than us, but it felt like this
wave was about to hit our communities,” Angela Lang, the founder and
executive director of the Milwaukee group Black Leaders Organizing for
Community, a nonprofit organization, told me.

While Evers weighed the idea of postponement, BLOC encouraged
residents to apply for absentee ballots, which any registered
Wisconsin voter can do by requesting one online. But some voters were
struggling to figure out how to upload their identification from their
phones to the state’s MyVote website. City officials reported that
they couldn’t keep up with the overwhelming demand for absentee
ballots; applications in Milwaukee rose from a typical daily count of
100 or so to between 7,000 and 8,000. “People were waiting on their
ballots and asking where they were,” Lang said. “We needed a plan.
But we knew the governor was in a tough position with the
Legislature.”

The Wisconsin Assembly and Senate are firmly in the hands of
Republicans, who drew a gerrymandered map a decade ago
[[link removed]] that
has allowed them to retain a majority in the State Assembly even
though they won only 47 percent of the vote in 2012 and less than 45
percent in 2018. Lang, who is 30, grew up in the city and started BLOC
to increase political engagement — and power — in Milwaukee’s
mostly black and low-income neighborhoods. And Evers won in 2018
(defeating Scott Walker, a Republican seeking a third term) thanks in
part to larger-than-usual turnout by black and Latino voters.
[[link removed]]

It wasn’t clear whether the governor had the legal authority to
suspend the election, and at the end of March, rather than calling for
a postponement, Evers asked the Legislature to send mail-in ballots to
every registered voter, regardless of whether they had applied for
one. The Senate majority leader, Scott Fitzgerald, ridiculed the idea
as a “complete fantasy.”

On March 26, BLOC and several other groups joined a lawsuit that
argued for postponing the election because local officials would find
it “functionally impossible” to conduct it properly. The suit was
one of three election-related cases in Wisconsin that were
consolidated before U.S. District Judge William Conley. On April
2, Conley ruled
[[link removed]] that
while he recognized that an election on April 7 would create
“unprecedented burdens” for voters, poll workers and the state,
the court could not change the date in lieu of the governor and the
Legislature. Instead, Judge Conley extended the deadline for voters to
return their absentee ballots to April 13, citing the testimony of
local officials that otherwise there would be no way for all the
voters asking to vote by mail to receive and return their ballots in
time.

The State Legislature, the state Republican Party and the Republican
National Committee immediately appealed Conley’s ruling. The next
day, April 3, Evers called the Legislature into special session. The
governor said he didn’t have the power to postpone the election on
his own, demanding instead that lawmakers cancel in-person voting and
extend the mail-in deadline to late May. The governor’s political
opponents rejected his request.

As the days ticked by, Milwaukee announced that it could open only
five of its 180 polling places, as poll workers — many of whom were
over the age of 60 and at heightened risk from the virus — pulled
out of staffing them. Green Bay said it could open two of its 31
polling sites. Election officials rushed out absentee ballots with
instructions about the new April 13 deadline set by Judge Conley, and
BLOC reached out to voters by phone and text, explaining that they
would have six extra days to turn in their ballots.

On April 6, the day before the election, Evers issued an executive
order postponing it for two months, despite his earlier statement that
he lacked this authority. That day, the Wisconsin Supreme
Court blocked the governor’s order by a 4-to-2 vote.
[[link removed]] (The seventh
justice, whose seat was up for election, recused himself.) The
conservative majority said that the governor’s authority by law to
issue orders “he or she deems necessary for the security of persons
and property” didn’t mean he could override other valid laws,
including those governing elections.

Later that evening, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 along
ideological lines and reversed Judge Conley’s decision to extend the
deadline to return mail-in ballots, changing the date back to April 7.
The court’s unsigned majority opinion
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no provision for the extraordinary circumstances of the coronavirus.
It didn’t mention the people who hadn’t yet received their
ballots, or those who had received instructions with the April 13
return date. That meant voters still awaiting ballots on April 7 —
more than 12,000 statewide, according to preliminary data — had to
choose between braving their polling places or sitting out the
election.

Voting in a time of masks and social distancing in
Milwaukee.Credit...Kamil Krzaczynski/Agence France-Presse, via Getty
Images

On Election Day, people stood in lines that wrapped around the block,
trying to keep their distance from one another. Robin Vos, the
Republican leader of the State Assembly, went on Facebook Live
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mask, gloves and full-body protective gear and assured voters that it
was “incredibly safe” to go to the polls. One voter tweeted about
her sister, a cancer survivor who was afraid to go out and expose
herself to the virus but whose absentee ballot hadn’t arrived.
“The hardest was hearing from people who said they marched in the
civil rights era and now they couldn’t vote,” Lang said. For days
after the election, Milwaukee residents continued to take their
ballots to library drop-off sites, following the instructions they
received that extended the deadline to April 13. They would not be
counted.

In the end, the liberal candidates won in the three judicial races on
the ballot in which BLOC took a position. Lang didn’t feel like
celebrating, though — she was worried that people who went to the
polls would wind up getting sick. In the weeks after the election,
Milwaukee health officials traced at least 40 cases
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the virus to in-person voting.

The election in Wisconsin shows that the coronavirus can block access
to the ballot just as it has closed stores and schools and so much
other civic activity. “Ultimately there were no provisions, no
accommodations in state law for the pandemic when it came to our
administration of this election,” says Neil Albrecht, executive
director of the Milwaukee Election Commission. If states and the
federal government don’t do more to help voters in November —
starting now, with urgency — the barriers for some of them may be
insurmountable. “A lot of people suffered because of the
government’s lack of responsiveness,” Albrecht adds. “What I
mean is, they lost their right to vote.”

A NATIONAL ELECTION is a giant pop-up event, larger in scale and
significance than any other private or public occasion. Two-thirds of
Americans expect the Covid-19 outbreak to disrupt voting in November,
according to a late-April survey by the Pew Research Center.
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successful election will require some Covid-era changes. The main one
is enabling tens of millions more people to vote by mail (also called
absentee balloting — the terms are synonymous) than have ever done
so before. It’s also important to make adjustments to keep polling
places open for people who don’t have stable mailing addresses — a
group that increases as people are uprooted during an economic
downturn — or whose disabilities, like blindness, make it hard to
fill out a ballot unassisted.

The outcome of the presidential contest will most likely be decided in
a handful of swing states. This year, the likeliest prospects are
Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina and
Arizona. All of them, along with 23 other states and the District of
Columbia, already have laws on the books that give voters the right to
request an absentee ballot without an excuse. But only one swing state
is already set up for most people to vote by mail — Arizona, where
79 percent did so in 2018. In Florida and Michigan, about 25 to 30
percent voted by mail that year. In Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and North
Carolina, very few voters have voted absentee in a general election;
in 2018, the range was from 3 to 6 percent, according to The Brennan
Center for Justice at New York University Law School. 
[[link removed]](A
total of 27 states fell below 10 percent, including Georgia and New
Hampshire, which also may see close presidential results.)

To fundamentally change the way voting has been done in those states,
they will have to move quickly to sign contracts with vendors and then
order supplies, like specially certified paper for envelopes and
ballots, high-speed scanners to count votes and secure drop-off boxes.
If they wait, they’ll risk running into shortages like the ones that
have troubled the country’s efforts to fight the virus. In Wisconsin
in April, when voting by mail rose to more than 70 percent, totaling
over a million, from around 6 percent in previous elections, many
people didn’t get to vote because counties ran out of envelopes for
a time and then couldn’t fill all the applications for absentee
ballots fast enough. “Wisconsin shows that you can’t adopt
vote-by-mail overnight,” says Nathaniel Persily, a Stanford law
professor and the head of the Healthy Elections Project, a new effort
by Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to address
the threat of Covid-19. “It’s not as easy as people think. The
boring stuff matters — the scut work of supply chain and logistics
and management is crucial."

Significantly changing how elections are carried out will cost money,
and all states face a giant funding gap as they scramble to prepare
for the unknowns of November. The Brennan Center for Justice
estimates
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pandemic-associated costs of properly running the 2020 elections
(including the primaries as well as the general) at $4 billion. So
far, Congress has promised $400 million, with Democrats pushing for
more and Republicans blocking their bills. The debate over funding the
Postal Service, which warns it could run out of operating funds at
the end of September
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similarly split.

In a different world, preparation for the election and its
accompanying costs would be nonpolitical. Five states currently have
universal vote-by-mail [[link removed]], the system of
sending all registered voters a ballot without requiring them to
request one first: Utah, dominated by Republicans; Hawaii, Oregon and
Washington, where Democrats tend to win; and Colorado, where members
of both parties hold major statewide offices. A Reuters poll in April
found
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72 percent of Americans want the government to require mail-in ballots
in November to protect voters if the coronavirus continues to pose a
threat, including 65 percent support among Republicans. Some
Republican officials share the majority view: In Ohio, Gov. Mike
DeWine and Secretary of State Frank LaRose made a video promoting the
state’s first primary by mail in June.
[[link removed]] “I
wanted to see as much participation as we could get,” LaRose told
me. Chris Sununu, the Republican governor of New Hampshire, promised
voting by mail for all in November
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if the coronavirus is still an issue, despite the state’s usual rule
that voters can only receive an absentee ballot if they have an excuse
like travel or illness.

Researchers have found that vote-by-mail hasn’t obviously helped one
party or the other. Nationwide, about the same share of Republicans
and Democrats voted by mail in 2016, Charles Stewart III, a
political-science professor at M.I.T., found. In partisan terms, “it
is remarkably neutral,” wrote Andrew Hall
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political-science professor at Stanford University and an author of a
2020 study
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hasn’t yet been published) on voting by mail. Hall’s study found
that shifting to mailed ballots has modestly increased turnout — by
about 2 percent — for each party; a 2013 study
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similar results.

Dunn, Wis.Credit...John Hart/Wisconsin State Journal, via Associated
Press

But even if vote-by-mail hasn’t hurt them
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conservatives have long focused on increased turnout as a threat and
have worked to minimize it. In the days of Jim Crow, conservatives in
the South (who were then generally Democrats) used the blunt tools of
poll taxes and literacy tests to prevent African-Americans from
voting. In the decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 stamped out
those forms of overt suppression, newly elected black legislators and
their allies increased registration
[[link removed]] with
state laws that let people register at the Department of Motor
Vehicles and public-assistance offices, or register at the polls on
the same day they voted. They also increased access by opening polling
sites in the weeks before Election Day.

Republicans generally opposed these efforts. “I don’t want
everybody to vote,” Paul Weyrich, the conservative activist and
co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, said at a meeting in Dallas in
1980. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite
candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” In the
2000s, Republicans began passing strict voter-identification laws
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which could be justified as a way to prevent fraud — though
in-person voting fraud is extremely rare. In 2010, after taking
control of most state legislatures, Republicans eliminated early
voting and same-day registration where they could. Since the Supreme
Court effectively gutted
[[link removed]] a key
provision
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the Voting Rights Act in 2013, more than 1,600 polling places have
been closed
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the country.

Trump benefited from decreased turnout in 2016, especially in the
vital swing states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, where
participation by black and Democratic voters declined from the
historic levels that lifted Barack Obama. Wisconsin’s voter-ID law
accounted for some of the decline in turnout in Milwaukee, according
to Neil Albrecht
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the city election director.

In March, Trump announced his opposition to a Democratic bid to
include at least $2 billion for state election preparation in the $2
trillion coronavirus relief bill. Republicans usually don’t talk
openly about suppressing turnout in the way that Paul Weyrich did 40
years ago. Trump broke that rule, saying at a news briefing that he
thought his party would lose if more people voted. The Democrats’
proposals, he said, “had things — levels of voting that, if you
ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this
country again.”

In the weeks that followed, Trump shifted to the preferred Republican
justification for making it harder to vote — preventing fraud. With
the threat of the pandemic rising, he called voting by mail
“corrupt,” imagining “thousands of votes are gathered, and they
come in, and they’re dumped in a location, and then, all of a
sudden, you lose elections you think you’re going to win.” In some
states, Republicans following Trump’s messaging have denounced
vote-by-mail
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“devastating to Republicans” (David Ralston, the Republican
speaker of the Georgia House), “the apocalypse” (Jennifer
Carnahan, chairwoman of the Minnesota Republican Party
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and “the end of our republic as we know it” (Representative Thomas
Massie of Kentucky
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In February, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee
announced
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would spend $10 million on litigation and election monitoring in the
2020 cycle. Soon after, legal attacks on expanding vote-by-mail began.
In March, the Republican Party in New Mexico sued
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prevent 27 county clerks from shifting to vote-by-mail for the June
primary. In April, three voters affiliated with the conservative
group True the Vote filed a lawsuit to stop Nevada
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conducting an all-mail primary election planned by the secretary of
state. (A federal court rejected the suit at the end of the month
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calling its claim of voter fraud “without any factual basis.”) In
Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton interpreted the state law
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requires an excuse like illness for absentee voting to mean that a
voter must actually be sick rather than simply be concerned about
becoming infected. Paxton threatened “criminal sanctions” for
anyone advising voters to apply for a mail-in ballot based “solely
on fear of contracting Covid-19.” When a state judge ruled in April
that all Texas registered voters could qualify for an absentee ballot
because of the pandemic, Paxton appealed the ruling, leaving the
matter in limbo.

Before the coronavirus, the 2020 election was already vulnerable to
disinformation campaigns, foreign interference and the country’s
increasing polarization. The pandemic creates other challenges. In a
nightmare scenario, officials could use the virus as an excuse to shut
the polls selectively, to the benefit of their party. Or state
legislatures could invoke the power the Constitution gives them to
choose the electors who cast votes in the Electoral College, and thus
actually select the president. (The states turned this power over to
the voters in the 19th century, but they could try to take it back.)
Any move like that would surely land in the Supreme Court, which has
its own deepening groove of ideological division — and the dubious
history of Bush v. Gore, the case in which the court intervened to
effectively decide the outcome of the 2000 election.

With six months to go until the election (the date, the Tuesday after
the first Monday in November, is set by an 1845 law
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and both houses of Congress would have to agree to change it) the
chances of a breakdown in its administration seem high. And this is a
year when accusations of a stolen or broken election have more
potential than they’ve had for decades to rip the country apart.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of seeing the election done
right. “It’s this simple: A disputed election in this environment
poses an existential threat to American democracy,” Persily says.
“It is that serious.”

WISCONSIN SHOWS HOW politically divisive basic access to voting could
be in November. Three other swing states — Michi­gan, Pennsylvania
and North Carolina — have the same kind of divided government, with
Democratic governors and Republican-led legislatures wrestling for
control, the dynamic that caused so much trouble in April. Wisconsin,
Michigan and Pennsylvania also have major cities (Milwaukee, Detroit
and Philadelphia) where African-Americans could play a decisive role
in the election and have also suffered disproportionate Covid-19
infections and deaths. The combination could especially imperil their
constitutional right to vote.

‘The hardest was hearing from people who said they marched in the
civil rights era and now they couldn’t vote’

The cities and counties of Wisconsin are learning from their
experience in April. State officials can advise them on preparing for
the pandemic, but it’s the local clerks and commissioners who have
to make the logistics work. In Milwaukee, the City Council responded
to the chaos and disenfranchisement by passing a resolution asking
Albrecht, the election director, to send Milwaukee’s 300,000
registered voters an application for a mail-in ballot for November.
Albrecht told me he would spend the summer overhauling operations.
“I’m talking about all of it,” he said. He has submitted a
request to the Postal Service for an investigation. Many Milwaukee
voters who applied for absentee ballots on two particular dates, March
22 and 23, did not receive them. “Our forensic review shows we
responded and sent them out,” Albrecht said. “Did the post office
mess up? We don’t know.” Albrecht is also making sure he has the
supplies of paper for added ballots and envelopes that he needs.
Finally, Albrecht said, he is concentrating on voter education. People
who were accustomed to going to the polls made mistakes, like dropping
ballots through the book-drop slot at the library without the
certified envelope, which disqualified their votes.

In Pennsylvania, the presidential primary scheduled for June 2 will be
the first test of whether large numbers of people can successfully
vote by mail. The Legislature last year passed a law
[[link removed]] that
provides for absentee ballots for anyone who requests it without
requiring an excuse. “We’ve had 160,000 applications for mail-in
ballots for the primary in the last week,” Secretary of the
Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar said when I spoke to her in mid-April.
“For comparison, in 2016, we got 19,000 in the same period.” She
stressed that federal funding would be crucial for preparing for
November. In the long run, voting by mail can be less expensive.
Counties that adopted it in Colorado, one of five states that sends
ballots by mail to every registered voter, spent less than $10 per
voter in 2014 
[[link removed]]compared
with about $16 per voter six years earlier. But in the present, states
need help to make the switch.

Three elected city commissioners are responsible for directing the
logistics in Philadelphia. “To be honest, everything we were
planning to do for November is on hold as we navigate through the
virus,” Lisa Deeley, one of the three commissioners and the
commission’s chairwoman, said when I called her in April. “All our
focus right now is on the primary.”

A few days later, the National Association of Presort Mailers held a
teleconference for vendors across the country that are in the niche
business of printing and packaging bulk mail, including mail-in
ballots. They specialize in details like ensuring that the paper for
the ballots and envelopes is certified so the ink printed on it will
scan correctly.

On the call, according to the news site Talking Points Memo
[[link removed]],
companies warned that they were already at capacity for November,
filling orders from longtime vote-by-mail states like California and
Colorado. They could expand, but they would need to buy costly
equipment that takes several months to obtain, a step they would only
take with orders from states and counties in hand. “For example, the
machine that folds and inserts the ballot into the envelope can cost
up to $1 million,” Richard Gebbie, chief executive of Midwest
Presort Mailing Services and president of the national association,
told me. “It normally takes 90 days to order one piece of gear. Then
you have to get it installed and check everything, because the
security and quality control has to be very, very high.” Gebbie’s
company has been contacting county boards of election in the region,
including in Pennsylvania, but he says so far it has received a cool
response. “I think with the Covid, they’re not sure what they can
do. We have one county in Pennsylvania, Mercer, that said, Let’s get
a quote. The others said, Call us back in a month. The Catch-22 is:
That could be too late.”

Deeley called me back later in April to assure me that Philadelphia
would be ready for the fall election but gave few specifics. “Her
heart is in the right place, but this is just a huge challenge,”
says David Thornburgh, the president and C.E.O. of the Committee of
Seventy, a good-government group in Philadelphia founded in 1904.
“We are at the house-is-burning level of alarm in some cities,”
says another voting rights advocate, who didn’t want to be
identified criticizing local election officials. As of the end of
April, Philadelphia had a backlog of almost 9,000 absentee
applications waiting to be processed for the June primary. Voting
rights advocates have filed a lawsuit asking the Pennsylvania Supreme
Court to require the state to let all absentee ballots sent or
postmarked by Election Day in June and November to be counted if they
are received within seven days of each election.

In Michigan, where voters passed a 2018 referendum that allows voting
by mail without an excuse, a big increase is also expected. “We are
planning for 70 to 90 percent voting by mail in Detroit,” Secretary
of State Jocelyn Benson, who lives in the city, told me. “That means
allocating resources, ordering supplies, developing educational
materials.”

For a set of local elections throughout the state in May, Benson’s
office is mailing applications for absentee ballots to all registered
voters, with return postage prepaid by the state. But Michigan
doesn’t pay return postage for voters’ ballots for either the
primary or general election. Stamps are a particular barrier for young
people who have grown up communicating digitally, elections officials
say. Most other states — including Florida and Pennsylvania —
don’t pay return postage for applications or ballots. Mailing costs
and other Covid-19-related expenses for the general election (and
another election in August) would cost Michigan $40 million, Benson
estimates. The state has so far only received $11 million for all
election expenses related to the pandemic.

 

A coalition of more than 200 public-interest groups are pushing hard
for Congress to include $3.6 billion for the 2020 election cycle in
the next coronavirus relief bill. They also want all states to offer
online and same-day voter registration and to extend in-person early
voting to avoid crowding on Election Day. Chuck Schumer, the Senate
majority leader, called the funding a top priority on an April
conference call with 20 civil rights groups. Some Republican
secretaries of state, like LaRose from Ohio, support additional
funding, but don’t want the federal government to tell them how to
run their elections. Some Republican senators continue to see the
funding proposal as an effort to give Democrats an advantage.
 

Voters in Milwaukee.Credit...Daniel Acker/Reuters

In the coming months, in the swing states and elsewhere, partisan
fights could break out over whether to allow voters to request an
absentee ballot online instead of by mail (many states currently
don’t allow this), or waive the requirement that voters obtain
witness signatures before returning their ballots (as North Carolina
and Wisconsin, among others, mandate) because some voters are
self-isolating during the pandemic.

Absentee-ballot fraud, the recent focus of Republicans, has
occasionally taken place in isolated instances in states where low
numbers of people typically vote by mail. “There’s a history of
tampering with absentee ballots, mostly in pockets in Appalachia
(including Kentucky), South Texas and sometimes in cities with party
machines,” says Richard Hasen, author of the recent book “Election
Meltdown” and a law and political-science professor at the
University of California, Irvine. The most prominent modern-day case
of absentee fraud occurred in rural Bladen County, N.C., in 2018.
North Carolina, like a lot of states, bars people from collecting and
turning in absentee ballots of voters outside their family. (Other
states cap the number that people can collect.) Nonetheless, in Bladen
County, after Mark Harris, a Republican candidate for Congress, won
his election by 905 votes, evidence emerged that a political operative
working for him may have collected as many as 800 absentee votes, many
from African-American voters, filled some of them in for Harris and
perhaps tossed others away. The bipartisan state Board of Elections
threw out the results and ordered a new election.

States that have adopted universal vote-by-mail have shown it can be
done securely. “They have very strong track records,” Hasen says.
Election officials create a clear, unhackable paper trail for ballots,
sending them to voters with a bar code that can be tracked. Voters
must sign the ballots, which means signatures can be checked, and send
them back in a certified inner envelope, also signed and also with a
bar code. “The claim of fraud is a distraction,” Jena Griswold,
the secretary of state in Colorado, where 95 percent of people voted
by mail in 2018, told me. “We have a history of clean elections.
When we think there is the _possibility_ of double voting, we send
every case to the attorney general. Our number for 2018 was 0.0027
percent.”

One big question for 2020 is how states will verify absentee ballots
to guard against fraud while also ensuring that voters are treated
fairly. Many states lack uniform criteria or training for matching the
signature on a ballot with the copy of the voter’s signature that
the state has on file. As a result, rejection rates can vary a great
deal from county to county. States including Pennsylvania and Michigan
don’t require election officials to notify voters if their
signatures are missing or have been rejected, so those voters don’t
have a chance to fix the problem. The gaps in the law leave the
decision up to county and local officials.

There are certain best practices. It’s better for counties to use
databases that chart the evolution of voters’ signatures over time
rather than relying on a registration file that may be decades old. In
Washington, which instituted universal vote-by-mail in 2011
[[link removed]],
state patrol officers who investigate fraud train election workers on
evaluating signatures, according to Kim Wyman, the secretary of state.
“They teach us to look at the slant of the letters or the path of
how the signer moves the pen,” she says. “After the training, you
have more confidence that a signature can be a match even if it’s
not identical.” If a signature fails a first check, it goes through
another round of review and then to a three-member elected canvassing
board, which examines any flagged ballots in a public session. “You
have to be open and transparent about how you’re verifying, or
people will think you’re just throwing out Democratic or Republican
votes to win,” Wyman says.

It’s also important to give voters clear instructions about filling
out mail-in ballots. “We had to educate the voters, and we also had
graphic designers come in and help us,” Wyman says. “A lot is in
the design — for example, putting a big red X with ‘sign here’
next to the signature line.” The fate of thousands of ballots —
and the outcome of a close election — can depend on the choices
states make. “The problem of uniform standards can be easily
overcome,” says Nathaniel Persily, the Stanford election expert.
“But if states don’t address it ahead of time, you can imagine
absentee signatures being the hanging chads of 2020.”

BEFORE THE PANDEMIC, candidates rarely focused on vote-by-mail in
their campaigns. One exception is Stacey Abrams, the Democratic
candidate for governor of Georgia in 2018. Her campaign sent 1.6
million applications for absentee ballots to registered voters who
signaled they supported her. “I think we were the first modern
Democratic campaign to run a really aggressive vote-by-mail
operation,” says Lauren Groh-Wargo, who was Abrams’s campaign
manager. “It was integrated with our voter education, our ads, our
field operation. We could track the delivery of the absentee ballots
and also whether they’d been returned. We staffed a hotline to walk
people through any issues they had filling them out.”

Abrams won the absentee-ballot count by about 53,000 votes. But in the
end, her opponent, Brian Kemp, who was the Georgia secretary of state
responsible for managing elections during the race, defeated her by
close to 55,000 votes.

After the election, Abrams founded a voting rights group, Fair Fight
Action, which sued the state later that November, along with a
domestic-worker advocacy group, for suppressing the vote in several
ways. One of them involved absentee ballots. Election officials had
rejected thousands of them, often for errors like writing the date of
the election in the field for a birth date. Daniel Smith, a
political-science professor at the University of Florida, analyzed
Georgia’s absentee-ballot data as an expert for Fair Fight Action in
the lawsuit. He found a higher rate of rejection for voters of color,
who tended to support Abrams, than for white voters.
 

Poll workers in Kenosha recognized the danger on Election Day — but
showed up regardless.Credit...Derek R. Henkle/Agence France-Presse,
via Getty Images

Georgia now has a new secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a
Republican who has raised the specter of fraud by announcing an
“Absentee-Ballot Fraud Task Force” for 2020 that prosecutors will
help lead. The task force, nine of whose 12 members are Republican,
would investigate, among other things, “every signature mismatch”
on a mail-in ballot, Raffensperger said in a news conference.
Groh-Wargo of Fair Fight Action called the task force “a submission
to the Trump voter-suppression machine.” In her view,
Raffensperger’s intention is clear: Intimidate and deter voters.

Republican officials have also increasingly pursued a practice that
will matter in November no matter how voters cast their ballots,
because it affects eligibility to vote by mail as well as in person
— mass cuts to the voter-registration rolls. “Purges in and of
themselves aren’t bad,” Kevin Morris and Myrna Pérez of the
Brennan Center wrote in a 2018 analysis.
[[link removed]] “They’re
commonly used to clean up voter lists when someone has moved, passed
away and more. But too often, names identified for removal are
determined by faulty criteria that wrongly suggests a voter be deleted
from the rolls.” Purging often disproportionally shaves away black
and Latino voters.

Before she ran for governor, Abrams worked for years to register
hundreds of thousands of new voters, many of them African-American and
Latino, hoping to make Georgia (where people of color make up 40
percent of the population) more competitive for Democrats. Between
2016 and 2018, Kemp purged more than 700,000 registered voters, more
than 10 percent of the state total. Most people Kemp cut hadn’t
responded to a notice sent by the state after they didn’t vote in
the last few elections. The state presumed the voters it cut from the
rolls had moved away or died, but in 2019, an investigation by APM
Reports
[[link removed]] from
Ameri­can Public Media estimated that at least 107,000 of them
remained eligible to vote. Like many states, Georgia does not permit
same-day registration, so people who show up to vote and find they
can’t are not simply allowed back on the rolls.

Secretary Raffensperger purged another 309,000 voters in December (and
then restored 22,000 of them, saying they were eliminated in error).
Last year, Ohio took the unusual step of releasing to advocacy groups
in advance a list of 235,000 voters it planned to purge. A watchdog
group called the Ohio Voter Project discovered
[[link removed]] that
about 40,000 voters were being cut in error, about half of them from a
heavily Democratic county with one of the highest percentages of
people of color in the state.

If the 2020 election is close, purges in swing states could shape the
results. According to the Brennan Center
[[link removed]],
in the two years leading up to the 2018 election, North Carolina,
which has a Republican Legislature and at the time had a Republican
governor, purged 11.7 percent of its voters; and Florida, also a
Republican-controlled state, purged more than 7 percent, compared with
0.2 percent from 2008 to 2010. (In 2000, Florida’s wrongful purge of
thousands of voters, a disproportionate number of whom were black,
probably contributed to George W. Bush’s presidential victory,
according to the general counsel of the U.S. Commission on Civil
Rights at the time, in a 2015 article in The Nation
[[link removed]].)
In Wisconsin, a legal battle over purging voter rolls is continuing.
Concerned about errors, state election officials tried to delay
cutting 234,000 voters they identified as having changed addresses
until after the November election. But a conservative group, the
Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, sued to force the state to
make the cuts before voting takes place. The Wisconsin Supreme Court
deadlocked 3 to 3 over the case in March, with the seventh justice
declining to participate because he was the one who was running in the
April election. After he lost, he wrote that it appeared that the
reason for his recusal “no longer obtains,” signaling that he
would rejoin the case, which could then be decided before the newly
elected liberal justice takes her seat on August 1.

ON THE DAY of Wisconsin’s April election, photos of people lining
up at the Milwaukee polls, many of them African-American, streamed
through social media feeds and were featured in press reports. The
images reminded people that voting matters, that it’s a right so
precious that your political opponents will try to prevent you from
exercising it. Three years ago in Alabama, after a divisive Senate
campaign, African-American voters turned out for the Democratic
candidate, Doug Jones, and achieved a higher share of the vote than
they did for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. When Jones won, activists
took pride with social media posts like “#BlackVotesMatter and
don’t anyone tell you different.” Regrouping with her organization
in Milwaukee, Angela Lang said she was hearing simi­lar
determination. “We talked to an older woman, in her 70s, and I think
she ended up not voting, but she said, No matter what, I’m voting in
November. People can see how important it is to have a say in how
decisions are made.”

When the results were announced several days later, they showed that
encouraging voting by mail could in fact help Democrats. The liberal
State Supreme Court candidate beat her conservative opponent by a
margin of 10 percentage points more in the absentee-ballot count than
at polling places.

A conservative advocacy group, the Honest Elections Project, responded
to the Wisconsin election by spending $250,000 on an online ad that
blasted “record absentee voting.” The ad showed photos of long
lines of masked voters with the line, “It’s wrong,” and then
pivoted to a “responsible solution,” with a photo of elderly white
people in a sunny room: “Vulnerable people protected with expanded
absentee voting. Fraud, prevented.” The mixed messages illustrate
the difficulty of railing against voting-by-mail while also promoting
it among the party’s supporters.

It is possible to hold a successful and orderly election during the
pandemic. In April, South Korea recorded the highest turnout, 66
percent, for a parliamentary election in 28 years. The government’s
handling of the coronavirus — far more successful than that of the
United States in reducing deaths and infections — dominated the
political discourse. But on Election Day, people in masks calmly lined
up at the polls, moving step by step between lines of tape marking off
one-meter distances. Poll workers took their temperatures, and those
with a fever went to a separate area to vote. Voters received hand
sanitizer and disposable gloves before entering the booths. People who
were self-quarantining received a text from the government permitting
them to leave their homes for 1 hour 40 minutes to vote at 6 p.m.,
when the polls were closed to everyone else. Only about 40 percent of
voters cast their ballots early or by mail.

The United States prides itself on its democracy in theory — but
this year, not necessarily in practice. What if Philadelphia runs out
of absentee ballots? What if a swing state can’t count its avalanche
of mail-in ballots on election night, and the media races to call a
winner, and then the final tabulation changes it — and then
there’s a dispute over signature-matching? The 2020 results may well
be too early to call for days. A candidate who warns now about fraud
and chaos, as Trump is ceaselessly doing, is sowing the seeds for his
supporters to distrust the results if he loses.

“You’ve heard the election administrator’s prayer, right?”
Persily asked me. “Whatever happens, dear Lord, please let it not be
close.”

CORRECTION: May 12, 2020

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to one aspect
of judicial elections in Wisconsin. Only one — not four — of the
judicial seats up for election was statewide.

_Emily Bazelon is a staff writer for the magazine and the Truman
Capote fellow for creative writing and law at Yale Law School. Her
book “Charged” won The Los Angeles Times Book Prize for 2020 in
the current-interest category._

_Before joining the Times Magazine, Ms. Bazelon was a writer and
editor for nine years at Slate, where she co-founded the women’s
section DoubleX. She has previously been a Soros media fellow and has
worked as an editor and writer at Legal Affairs magazine and as a law
clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit. She has
appeared on TV shows including “The Colbert Report” and “PBS
NewsHour” and radio programs including “Fresh Air,” “Morning
Edition,” “All Things Considered,” “This American Life,” and
“Here and Now.” Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Vogue,
and the Washington Post, among other publications. Emily is a graduate
of Yale College and Yale Law School._

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