Protect our free elections by enhancing mail, early voting
Governments are exploiting the coronavirus crisis to curtail democracy. Ethiopia, for one, has postponed what would have been its first fair election. Hungary has banned voting altogether.
We like to think that can’t happen in the United States because our Constitution and institutions are strong. After all, the 1864 election went on despite the Civil War, until now our greatest national crisis.
“We cannot have free government without elections,” Abraham Lincoln said afterward, “and if the rebellion could force us to forego or postpone a national election, it might fairly have claimed to have already conquered and ruined us.”
An election in which people are afraid to vote would be almost as ruinous as one that’s cancelled.
Already, 14 states and one territory have postponed their primaries on account of Covid-19. Only 30 percent of those eligible voted in Florida’s presidential primary, the lowest turnout since 2004.
Postponements can buy only so much time and there’s no telling when the epidemic will abate. Social distancing may remain necessary not only for Florida’s August primary, but for the November election, too. Even with that precaution, many people may be fearful of voting in person. And most poll workers are elderly.
Everything possible must be done to enable Americans to vote by mail and guarantee their votes will be counted.
Early voting, when queues are often shorter than on Election Day, should be enhanced as well. Florida needs to do more on both counts.
The state’s mail voting law sets traps for the unwary. As for early voting, some election supervisors — including those in
Broward and Palm Beach Counties — provided only the minimum of eight days in last month’s presidential primary, rather than the 14 that state law allows. They also opened the polls for only eight hours a day, rather than the maximum 12.
If the Legislature reconvenes to cope with the epidemic’s financial impact, safeguarding the election should also be on the agenda. It will cost more than normal election budgets provide.
Floridians can also look to Congress and encourage our representatives to support two critically important measures:
— The $2 billion that Congressional Democrats are seeking to assist state and local election offices. The $400 million voted so far will help, but not by enough to cope with an increased demand for absentee ballots. Congress could easily address that by requiring the Postal Service to deliver election mail free and draw the cost from the Treasury.
— Legislation proposed by Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, the “National Disaster Emergency Ballot Act,’ to bolster mail and early voting opportunities in federal elections.
Although Wyden’s state and four others now vote almost entirely by mail, it’s too soon, in our view, for Florida to adopt that as a permanent replacement for going to the polls on Election Day or to an early voting site.
Poll workers can fix problems, such as unregistered address changes, that can’t be corrected on mail ballots.
But key deadlines in Florida are unrealistically tight. We give voters only 48 hours — too short for fair notice — to fix, in person, issues such as absent or mismatched signatures, for which election officials have set their ballots aside.
Also, ballots that arrive after 7 p.m. on Election Day also cannot be counted. Nearly 3,400 late-arriving ballots went to waste in Broward during the 2018 general election, 4,472 in November 2016, and 863 in the recent presidential primary.
“There is no cure for an absentee ballot that comes in late even though it was mailed well before Election Day,” explains Daniel A. Smith, a University of Florida political science professor who is an authority on Florida voting laws.
Contrary to assumptions, it’s not older people whose signatures cause the most mail ballots to be rejected. In the 2018 general election, rates were vastly higher, Smith says, for younger people, and for minorities.
Statewide, 1.2 percent of mail ballots, some 32,400, were rejected in 2018. But there was a dramatic variation among counties — more than 2.5 percent in Broward, less than 1.5 in Palm Beach and only a tenth of one percent in Pinellas, which also has the highest ratio of mail to in-person voting. Says Smith, “They know what they’re doing” in PInellas.
The biggest problems in Broward, according to Steve Vancore, a spokesman for Broward’s election supervisor, Peter Antonacci, are late-arriving ballot envelopes and those that voters forgot to sign or marked only with an “x.” Of the relatively few mismatches, “it appears that it is usually a spouse signing for a spouse and the wrong name is on the signature line.”
The Wyden-Klobuchar legislation would fix the late-arriving problem, among others. States would be required to accept ballots postmarked before the polls close, so long as they arrive within the next 10 days. And officials who question a voter’s signature would have to notify the voter by at least two methods — phone, e-mail, text or regular mail — and let the voter cure the problem by mail or electronic signature, up to the day the results are certified.
It also would require at least 20 days of early in-person voting, including at least one weekend.
The senators also would require each state to provide a self-sealing, postage-paid return envelope to every voter who seeks a voter registration application, absentee ballot application or absentee ballot.
These essential reforms face a hard slog against the prevailing Republican opposition to broadening the vote. President Trump let slip the partisan argument the other day in a Fox and Friends interview, in which he denounced Democratic efforts to influence the emergency spending legislation.
“They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it,
he said. (Emphasis added.)
That’s not how the first and greatest Republican president saw his duty.
Lincoln encouraged voting in an election he expected to lose. Then, the threat to our democracy was a civil war. Today, it is an epidemic. The stakes are the same.