4 challenges to voting during virus pandemic
WASHINGTON >> Evelina Reese has been a poll worker for 40 years. And for the past six decades, she says, she has never missed a chance to vote.
“We’re all dedicated citizens as far as voting goes,” Reese, a retired social services worker from the Atlanta suburb of Riverdale, said last week.
But this year, out of concern about the coronavirus, Reese, 79, skipped her routine of visiting an earlyvoting site and instead requested one of the absentee ballots that the state promised to all who wanted one. Georgia’s June 9 primary came and went, the ballot never arrived, and Reese’s 60-year streak was broken.
After Tuesday’s votes in New York and Kentucky, 46 states and the District of Columbia have completed primary elections or party caucuses, facing the ferocious challenge not just of voting during a pandemic, but voting by mail in historic numbers.
The task for November is not just to avoid the errors that disenfranchised Reeves and many others, but to apply lessons learned since the Iowa caucuses ended in chaos on Feb. 3.
Despite debacles in some states, votes have been counted and winners chosen largely without incident — a feat, some say, given that many states only had weeks to scrap decades of in-person voting habits for voting by mail.
But the challenges and the stakes will be exponentially higher in November when Americans choose a president and much of Congress.
Postal and election workers overwhelmed by 55 million-plus primary election voters now face triple that turnout in November. States must recruit armies of poll workers to replace older ones deterred from working because of the virus.
Election offices will have to process millions of ballots packed in millions more envelopes — that only a handful of companies are capable of printing.
And they will have to do it all with enough skill and transparency to reassure Republicans told by President Donald Trump that mailed-in votes will be rigged, and Democrats convinced that their votes are being suppressed.
“We were fortunate that the pandemic hit during the primaries rather than the general election,” said Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-madison. “It provided a sort of training ground for states to turn the corner on voting by mail.”
November, he said, could be like the pandemic itself: manageable if done right, but vulnerable to unpredictable hot spots. “And we only need it to go badly in a few places for the whole election to feel like it’s in trouble,” he said.
Kentucky would seem to be one of those places. On average, only about 1.5% of the state’s voters cast absentee ballots in past elections. Yet Kentucky’s primary last Tuesday might be a template for success in November.
Backed by Republicans and Democrats, election officials effectively held two elections at once — a massive mail vote of perhaps 760,000 mail ballots, and a smaller 270,000-ballot vote at a reduced number of polling places.
Officials eased pressure on in-person polling places by making absentee ballots easy to apply for and get. A crash effort sent counties mailing labels for ballots the day after voters requested them. In the state’s two major cities, local officials designed large-scale voting centers that handled heavy in-person voting with a minimum of delay.
One consolidated voting center experienced some lines, but Election Day voting was largely problemfree, and turnout is expected to smash the 2008 record for a Kentucky primary election. Ninety percent of the 848,000 ballots sent out are likely to be returned. And voting in Louisville’s predominantly Black West End, which some feared would drop, appears to have been robust.
Yet what worked well in Kentucky may not be easy to replicate in November. Here’s why:
Lack of money
In Georgia, the Macon-bibb County elections board complained Tuesday that it already was short of cash, with an August runoff and the November general election still to come.
The pandemic has pinched the board at both ends, Georgia Public Broadcasting reported: A flood of absentee ballot requests raised election expenses, but the budget has shrunk as COVID-19 has slashed county tax revenues.
In Wapakoneta, Ohio, the Auglaize County elections board faces similar problems. “We already used November’s election money for March,” said the board’s director, Michelle Wilcox, referring to the state’s all-mail primary. County officials still could cut spending 20%, she said, but “I’m not buying for November yet.”
And turnout in November, she said, could be almost four times the 22% turnout in the primary election.
Too few poll workers
Although mail voting will surge this fall, many voters will still cast their votes in person, experts say. But poll workers are in critically short supply.
Nearly 6 in 10 poll workers were 61 or older in 2018, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center. In Kentucky, almost 9 in 10 refused to work in this month’s pandemic-plagued primary, the major reason polling places were slashed to a handful.
The District of Columbia lost 1,700 of its 2,000-odd poll workers for its June primary, according to a postelection report, and poor planning led to hourslong lines.
The number of in-person voters in November is anyone’s guess, but it could be substantial. In Georgia, for instance, about half of primary votes were not absentees.
Accommodating tens of millions of voters with a skeletal staff of experienced poll workers could lead to long lines that discourage voters and raise charges of voter suppression.
One solution, Burden said, is a push to recruit young poll workers who often have computer and language skills that modern polls need. Some states like North Carolina already are taking that tack.
Paper shortage
“If you were to walk into my office today,” said Tina Barton, the city clerk in Rochester Hills, Michigan, “I’d bet I have one and a half walls that are stacked 6 feet high with nothing but secrecy sleeves” — the paper covers into which absentee ballots are inserted before being sealed in envelopes.
Those envelopes then are sealed in other envelopes, again for security, before being sent to election offices.
And that is just part of the forest of paper that accompanies an absentee ballot, much of which can only be prepared by specialty printers.
During Michigan’s primary, she said, printers often pushed deadlines to the last minute. Before the
Ohio primary, said Wilcox of Auglaize County, election officials “were actually borrowing off each other” to secure enough envelopes to mail ballots to voters.
Russians are coming
Among election experts, the prospect that voters will be gulled by misinformation to dismiss November’s results as invalid or rigged is a top concern. Increasingly, Americans, not foreigners, are seen as the greatest threat. Trump and some Republicans have ratcheted up baseless charges that voting by mail is riddled with fraud, and many on the left assume voter suppression is baked into every element of voting.
Experts worry that delays in counting mail ballots will encourage some people to sow charges of fraud and suppression that are amplified by foreign adversaries.
Experts are especially concerned that Americans accustomed to getting election results before bedtime will embrace conspiracy theories and disinformation if the November vote takes days to sort out, as seems likely.
President Donald Trump is entering the final fourmonth stretch before Election Day presiding over a country that faces a public health crisis, mass unemployment and a reckoning over racism. His Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, is raking in cash. And a series of national and battleground polls suggests growing obstacles to Trump’s reelection.
But the election is far from locked in.
Biden and his leading supporters are stepping up warnings to Democrats to avoid becoming complacent. Former President Barack Obama and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer insist that plenty could change between now and Nov. 3 and that the party must be vigilant against Trump, who knows few boundaries when it comes to his political foes.
“We understand that what happens five months before the election and what happens at the election can be very different things,” Whitmer said.
Michigan was one of the Midwestern states that Trump carried by a razorthin margin in 2016, helping him win the Electoral College even as he lost the popular vote. Other Democrats in the state say the strength of the president’s support shouldn’t be underestimated.
“If the election were held today, I think Biden would win Michigan,” said Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell. “But the Trump supporters are out there, and they’re still intense.”
Obama underscored that point last week during his first joint fundraiser with Biden.
“We can’t be complacent or smug or suggest that somehow it’s so obvious that this president hasn’t done a good job,” Obama told thousands of donors who gathered online. “He won once, and it’s not like we didn’t have a good clue as to how he was going to operate the last time.”
Democrats have reason to be cautious. Four years ago, Hillary Clinton was leading by wide margins nationally and in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — the very states that ultimately put Trump over the top. But in the final weeks before the election, Republicans coalesced around their nominee, leading to his upset win.
Trump is aiming for a repeat this year. He is stoking culture wars on health care and race relations. After warning that the 2016 election would be “rigged” against him, Trump said without evidence last week that the fall campaign would be the “most corrupt election ever.”
Trump and many of his
GOP allies, meanwhile, are working to squelch the expansion of absentee voting, which they worry would hand Democrats an advantage, despite no evidence supporting that.
Many Republicans are quietly grim about the trends. But some are comforted by the same factors that give Democrats pause.
“I’ve always thought it was going to be razor-thin in Wisconsin, and in turn, across the nation,” said former Gov. Scott Walker, who survived a bitter 2012 recall election and 2014 reelection before losing a third nailbiter in 2018.
Trump’s fundraising and organizing still dwarfs those of Biden, who has named state-based staff in just three battlegrounds: Wisconsin, Arizona and North Carolina. When Biden announced his Wisconsin team Wednesday, Trump’s campaign retorted that its 2016 operation there never closed and already this year has trained 3,200 volunteers, staged 750 “MAGA Meet-ups” and made 6 million voter contacts, which means their targets have been reached multiple times already.
Still, the current dynamics don’t fit seamlessly with 2016.
Trump benefited four years ago from Clinton being almost as unpopular as he was. And as a first-time candidate, Trump took advantage of his disruptive brand. It’s harder to be the anti-establishment outsider from the Oval Office.
Trump’s Gallup job approval rating stands at 39% this month, putting him in dangerous territory historically.
Since World War II, all incumbent presidents who lost were at 45% or lower in Gallup polls conducted in June of their reelection year. Only Harry Truman, at 40% in 1948, managed a comeback win. Trump’s ahead of one-term presidents Jimmy Carter (32% in 1980) and George H.W. Bush (37% in 1992). But he’s behind Obama’s 46% in 2012 and George W. Bush’s 49% in 2004.
Trump has broken precedent before. Still, in Biden, Trump faces an opponent with a stronger standing among some groups of voters, especially independents, than Clinton had.
Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez pointed to the 2018 midterms and special elections since Trump’s inauguration as proof that voters are “fired up” to oust Trump and “take nothing for granted.”
Ohio Democratic Chair David Pepper, whose state went for Trump by a surprisingly wide margin in 2016, said Democrats are better organized this year. He described 2016 as “top down,” with Clinton’s national lieutenants dictating details regardless of DNC or state parties.
Pepper noted Biden’s first campaign manager, Greg Schultz, is now based at the DNC. Pepper described a recent call Schultz held with state party chairs nationwide. The theme from Schultz, he said: “What do you need? What lessons are there from 2016?”
Still, Dingell noted Biden hasn’t yet installed a state director in Michigan, where she described Democratic “factions” as difficult to corral. Though Trump animates the left, Dingell warned Democrats haven’t closed the deal with alienated moderates and can unwittingly help Trump expand his white base.
“This ‘defund the police’ stuff is not the answer,” she said, referring to the rallying cry of activists who want to shift resources and responsibilities away from armed law enforcement after police killings of Black men. Biden doesn’t back “defunding” efforts, but Dingell said Trump can exploit the sloganeering.
Walker hinged a Trump comeback less on campaign tactics and more on “people’s health and the health of the economy and the stability of the country.” If that improves, Walker said, “I think the president’s in a good position.”
That’s the way top Democrats want their voters to see it, too.
“In any scenario, ignore the polls and assume this is going to be super close,” said David Plouffe, an architect of Obama’s two campaigns. And if that caution yields a wider Biden win, Plouffe said, then it means more Democrats in Congress and statehouses around the country: “Let’s win by every vote we can.”