More than issues, access to ballot is even up for debate

The ballot is deployed to replace the bullet, to decide peacefully who will lead, to resolve divi- sive issues and to empower individual citizens.

Whether by voice or shards of pottery in ancient Greece, by ball, by corn and beans, lever and gear machines or touch screens, ballots were often cast in public until the United States and many other nations adopted the Austra- lian model and allowed people to vote in private.

The ballot seals the cove- nant of democracy.

Now that civic ritual of casting a ballot has been disrupted by a pandemic and dramatically animated by social unrest. If the results of a frustrating, chaotic primary in Georgia this month are a measure, the notion of democracy itself will also be on the ballot in the November election.

Congress is now consid- ering sending $3.6 billion to states to help facilitate safe and fair elections as part of another round of relief funds to recover from the coronavi- rus pandemic. The measure adds urgency to the issue of who gets to cast a ballot, and by what means, a debate that has been ongoing since the nation was founded.

One impediment to that provision: Republicans and Democrats cannot agree on a common set of facts, whether there should be expanded access to voting remotely in the name of safety.

Over two centuries, access to the ballot has expanded and contracted in repetitive cycles. This latest version is largely a debate over whether to allow mail-in voting in part as a response to the coronavirus pandemic. President Donald Trump has repeatedly said — without citing evidence — that mail-in balloting could make the election subject to broadbased fraud.

“It is under imm e nse threat,” said Julian Zelizer, a Princeton history professor. “There is the threat, pre-pandemic, of voting restrictions that have been imposed in the states. Now there is the threat of an Election Day where people can’t vote because of fear of actual danger. Without universal mail-in voting we risk low turnout.

“The combination of the two makes this a perilous time for the basic element of our system,” he said.

A federal appeals panel recently rejected a lower court’s ruling that would have allowed any Texas voter who feared contracting coronavirus to use a mail-in ballot. That ruling will almost certainly be challenged before the full court of appeals, and the issue may well end up before the Supreme Court.

“The right to vote is a core sacred American right,” said Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice in New York. “But from the country’s beginning, we’ve had fierce fights over who can vote, how, and whether those votes will be counted.”

He noted that half of all states have passed new laws to make it harder to vote in the past two decades.