San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
States scrambling to adjust election plans amid pandemic
WASHINGTON — Evelina Reese has been a poll worker for 40 years. And for the last 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 this past week.
But this year, out of concern about the coronavirus, Reese, 79, skipped her routine of visiting an early voting 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 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 had only 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, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of WisconsinMadison. “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 percent 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 voting was largely problem-free, 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:
November’s election money is almost spent.
In Georgia, the MaconBibb County elections board complained Tuesday that it already was short of cash, with an August runoff and the November general election still to come. 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. County officials still could cut spending 20 percent, she said, but “I’m not buying for November yet.”
And turnout in November, she said, could be almost four times the 22 percent turnout in the primary election.
Another reason: There aren’t enough 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.
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, said Burden of the Elections Research Center, is a push to recruit young poll workers who often have computer and language skills that modern polls need.
Another reason: There could be a paper shortage.
“If you were to walk into my office today,” said Tina Barton, the city clerk in Rochester Hills, Mich., “I’d bet I have one and a half walls that are stacked 6 feet high with nothing but secrecy sleeves.” Those are 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 be prepared only by specialty printers. During Michigan’s primary, Barton 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.
And that was when states’ primary elections were spaced out over nearly six months. Now, one state election official said, “we’re all starting to turn to what November looks like, and we’re saying, ‘You used the same vendor I did, and they barely got it done for the primary. How are they going to get it done for the general election?’”
No one appears to have studied whether printing capacity will be a bottleneck in November, but election officials say they are deeply concerned.