AUGUST

**10, 2020**

Kuttner on TAP

Postal Traumatic Stress

****

Last week, I wrote a blog item

concluding that with the pandemic, voter suppression, and the cynical
Trump attack on an already underfunded Postal Service, maybe going all
in for postal voting was a mistake.

That was too glib. Mail-in voting works well in many states, and it's
what we have. The challenge is to make it work under awful,
unanticipated conditions.

For guidance, I consulted Miles Rapoport, former Connecticut secretary
of the state and stalwart

**Prospect** board member, now at Harvard's Ash Center for Democratic
Governance . Miles knows
more about this than any six people I know.

For starters, Miles reminds me to differentiate three different
challenges:

* Making mail-in voting work as well as possible

* Optimizing early voting, which is not the same as mail-in voting

* Improving Election Day operations

Some of this can be done administratively. Some of it takes legislation.
In some (but not all) states controlled by Republicans, enhancing the
right to vote will be sabotaged, and then litigated.

Mail-in voting will work better if registered citizens need not send in
applications, but simply receive ballots by mail automatically. It will
work better with the allocation of more personnel to begin tabulating
mail-in ballots as they arrive, and not waiting for Election Day.
Authorization of on-site drop boxes for mail ballots can also take the
pressure off the Postal Service.

Greater reliance on early voting can alleviate Election Day bottlenecks.
With early voting, a citizen can stop by a polling place well before
Election Day. Those ballots can be tabulated in advance. Thirty-seven
states have early voting, with pre-election windows that range from five
days to 25 days.

And Election Day need not be the mess that it has been in the last
several elections. That means a lot more poll workers, polling places,
and backup systems.

Even with all possible improvements, we can count on snafus, some of
them deliberate. My friend Miles, who understands the pitfalls as well
as anyone, sent in his application for an absentee ballot for
Connecticut's August 11 primary election on August 2. As of today, it
hasn't arrived.

"What will you do?" I asked him. "Put on a mask and vote," said he.

Many of us may have to do likewise.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter

Robert Kuttner's latest book is
The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy
.

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