How COVID-19 Is Affecting 2020 Elections

JB: That's worrisome. Then, what happened?

SR: Then came election day in Wisconsin. About 1.3 million people applied for an absentee ballot. More than 10,000 were never sent out. Time ran out. Another 185,000 were not returned in time to be counted: either they didn't get delivered or their postmark was too late. They had to be postmarked by Election Day. So the federal district court ruling extending that timeline for a week was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. (Although it did agree to adding a week for correctly postmarked ballots to arrive.)

At polling places, most notoriously in Milwaukee, the state's largest and most diverse city, they went from something like 200 polling places to less than a dozen. Long lines ensued. People stood for hours. The Milwaukee health commissioner this week said one poll worker and a half-dozen voters contracted the virus as a result.

This is a catalog of what not to do with voting by mail. The Democratic governor dawdled. Had the same litigation unfolded two weeks earlier, voters and officials could have been better prepared. The fact that hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites voted by mail for the first time is a testament to their grit. But there was little or no public education. How could there be, as events kept changing? The last-minute paperwork processing was monumental. Reports are coming out now about people not getting ballots, getting empty envelopes--the ballots weren't there, etc. What can you expect with such a frenzy? And 185,000 votes weren't counted. Remember Trump beat Clinton by 22,000 or so votes in the state in 2016. That's what happened in Wisconsin. And Ohio, next Tuesday, the 28th, will likely be differently messy.

JB: What a grim report, Steven. Before we talk about what we can expect elsewhere for primaries and then the general election, amazingly, something positive did come out of the Wisconsin primary. Would you care to talk about that?

SR: You might say it was positive that the state went from roughly 169,000 absentee voters in 2018 (the U.S. Election Assistance Commission's figures) to 1.3 million trying to vote by mail and 1.1 million succeeding. The problem with that remarkable last-minute change of behavior falls under the broad question of 'how good is good enough' when it comes to elections? The unfortunate reality is states like Wisconsin are tightly divided along partisan lines. Why else would the RNC intervene? They're looking at the fall turnout, not the primary. So it's not a laudable precedent when 185,000 votes are not counted, when who knows how many individuals stayed home even if they wanted to vote. If we weren't heading into a very competitive general election, we could say 'Great. They'll do better next time.' But...

JB: I hear you. But what I was referring to was the race for the state Supreme Court. One candidate was endorsed by President Trump. Did that save him?

SR: Yes, I overlooked that. I was looking at the voting, not the political results. Yes, the liberal candidate won. That will have a big impact for one case before the court, where it had been tied before the election (with recusals). Now, there is a liberal majority that will likely block an intentionally sloppy, massive statewide voter purge pushed by right-wing litigators.

But the problem with just focusing on the outcome, especially if your side wins, is that it ignores the systemic problems in the process. We can say, great, the efforts to suppress the vote were beaten back. That's encouraging for the fall. We can say great, a liberal justice has been put on a court to stop its rightward drift in a purple state. That's also encouraging. But my focus is about whether we can have legitimate, transparent and accountable elections--so the losing side can accept evidence of their defeat. Wisconsin is not encouraging in that regard.

JB: I get what you're saying. However, it's also important to look at positive things too, even if there are many mitigating circumstances and the picture is light years from rosy. With that caveat in place, now we can move on to vote purging and other methods of limiting voters' access to the polls.

SR: The purging issue is not as big a deal, magnitude-wise, as the volumes of people who may be disenfranchised by the unfriendly fine print details of absentee ballot laws, and the additional problem of undelivered or uncounted ballots. With purges, only a few states, with Wisconsin and Georgia at the top, have seen nasty steps by partisan right-wingers. They've used intentionally sloppy data protocols to remove voters. In other states in 2018, namely Missouri and Arizona, several hundred thousand people who thought they had registered at their motor vehicle office were not added to voter rolls before the general election. That's a variant on this tactic.

But compare the scale here. In 2008, reputable academics (Charles Stewart, MIT) estimated that 7.6 million, or one-in-five votes cast in the US's vote-by-mail system were lost or weren't counted. The procedures and landscape haven't changed that much since then, with the big exception that the postal service is now being attacked by the president, after years of being underfunded. The RNC knows that voting by mail increases turnout where it has been done well. These are mostly western states, by the way, where they've fine-tuned it over years.

What I'm saying here is there's a great potential for disenfranchising multitudes of voters, much more than in voter purges, if states rapidly and chaotically shift to mostly voting by mail. Laws and procedures governing voting by mail vary from state to state. It can be easy or hard. There can be many steps along the way that are done for voters by officials, or voters have to figure them out. The states with longest histories of opposing voting rights have the most arcane rules. Take North Carolina, for example, where an absentee voter must have two witnesses or a notary sign their ballot return envelope. The finish line is also complicated. Ballots can be rejected for all kinds of technicalities. Voters might not even know or have few options to fix mistakes--like typos. This is not every state. But it's enough.

JB: So, the obvious next question is, what can people do? What are you recommending? While things are not looking good, I, for one, am not willing to throw in the towel. What have you got for us?

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