Indiana official advises voters to go early to polls amid pandemic
Indiana is expecting as many as 1.3 to 1.8 million mail-in ballots for the November election, Secretary of State Connie Lawson said Wednesday. So far, it has gotten 99,000 absentee ballot requests, compared to 53,000 in 2016, she said.
The U.S. Postal Service is helping local counties to design specialized envelopes, Lawson said. They are working to help prioritize applications and ballots, she said.
“My sage advice would be don’t wait,” Lawson said.
Recommended mailing deadlines are Oct. 19 for absentee ballot applications and Oct. 27 for completed ballots to mail back to the county, she said.
Indiana has nearly a dozen qualifying reasons for absentee ballots. Those include the voter is aged 65 and older; or working or being out of town on election day. It doesn’t specify COVID-19 pandemic concerns, but allows for those confined at home due to illness or injury, Lawson said. That would apply if someone was self-isolating, but not if they were out running errands, she said.
Early voting starts Oct. 6 and she recommends hitting the polls as early as possible to avoid lines. Ballots will start going out once the GOP convention is certified, she said.
Last month, Lake County rejected 700 mail-in primary ballots, according to the election board.
The U.S. Postal Service is warning states coast to coast that it cannot guarantee all ballots cast by mail for the November election will arrive in time to be counted, even if mailed by state deadlines, raising the possibility that millions of voters could be disenfranchised.
Voters and lawmakers in several states are also complaining that some curbside mail collection boxes are being removed.
Even as President Donald Trump rails against wide-scale voting by mail, the post office is bracing for an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
Lake County recorded nearly 8,800 COVID-19 positive cases since March, with nearly 300 deaths. Porter County has had more than 1,600 cases with 41 deaths, according to state figures.
Currently, Indiana has hired 680 contact tracers, Indiana Health Commissioner Kristina Box said. About 300 more have been hired by local health departments, while another 300 are expected to be hired in the Indianapolis area, she said. Tracers have been able to reach and interview about 76% of those known to be exposed, she said.
Indiana’s hospitalizations appeared to peak in early May at 1,500 before dipping down to nearly 600 on June 26. More people have been hospitalized since then, currently at 987, Box said. Since March, 75% were discharged, and 7% were “likely” still hospitalized, while 18% died from the virus, she said.
Gov. Eric Holcomb extended Indiana’s mask order Wednesday for another month.
In Hong Kong, researchers said Monday a 33-year-old man caught COVID-19 a second time. The man first had the virus in March and recently traveled to Spain in August where he caught a local strain there, doctors said. With his first bout, he had mild symptoms, while he had no symptoms in the second case. The virus was detected while he was screened coming home at the Hong Kong airport.
One expert saw the report as good news. Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said it’s encouraging the reported reinfection was without symptoms.
“That’s a win as far as I’m concerned” because it suggests a first infection may protect a person from moderate to severe disease the second time around, he said in an interview streamed by the Journal of the American Medical Association.
A mid-May survey by the doctors’ information-sharing site Sermo found that 13% of the 4,173 doctors responding believed that they had treated one or more patients who were reinfected. Among the respondents, 7% of those in the U.S. and 16% in other countries thought they’d seen such a case.