November election logistics may be reshaped by virus

As the coronavirus upends virtually every part of the country’s culture, politicians and election officials are beginning to contemplate the unthinkable: How do you hold a presidential election if people aren’t allowed to leave their homes?

With President Trump warning that the virus crisis could last through the summer and perhaps even longer, there already are signs for concern.

In Ohio, the governor postponed Tuesday’s primary because of coronavirus concerns, despite a court’s refusal to allow him to cancel the statewide vote.

In Florida’s Palm Beach County, some polling places were unable to open Tuesday when 800 volunteer election workers backed out because of virus worries.

Louisiana, Georgia, Maryland, Kentucky and Puerto Rico already have postponed their scheduled primaries, with more states likely to follow.

But those aren’t solutions for the November election. While states can reschedule primaries, the Constitution specifies the date for a presidential election, requires Congress to be sworn in on Jan. 3 and sets the president’s inauguration for Jan. 20.

Sens. Amy Klobuchar, DMinn., and Ron Wyden, DOre., have an answer that will be familiar to Californians: Vote by mail.

The senators plan to introduce a bill next week that would require every state to expand early voting and allow noexcuse absentee voting, with states providing prepaid envelopes and counting every ballot that’s postmarked by election day.

“Without federal action, vulnerable Americans are going to have to choose between casting a ballot and protecting their health,” Wyden said in a news release. “Vote by mail is a timetested reliable way for Americans to to exercise their constitutional rights and the right answer to respond to the crisis.”

But a mailonly vote would be a huge change for the country, and there are plenty of questions whether that shift would even be possible.

“I don’t think all mail balloting across the country is realistic for November,” said Rick Hasan, an election law expert at UC Irvine who has written on the question. “It requires too much change and work and testing.”

About onethird of the states still don’t provide an absentee ballot to voters who don’t provide a reason or excuse, such as travel, medical conditions or advanced age.

According to the National Vote at Home Institute, a nonpartisan group pushing for more mail balloting, only four states — Oregon, Washington, Utah and Colorado — now run full, votebymail elections, although California is moving in that direction.

But even in California, only 15 of the state’s 58 counties, including San Mateo and Santa Clara in the Bay Area, send mail ballots to all registered voters and have replaced the traditional polling places with a much smaller number of fullservice voting centers.

Secretary of State Alex Padilla put the best face on the state’s readiness to deal with virusfueled election problems.

“Fortunately, California has the elections infrastructure to provide all eligible citizens the option to vote from home should the COVID19 pandemic continue,” Padilla said in a statement last week, adding that there was time to prepare before the Nov. 3 vote.

It’s not that easy, local election directors say.

Orange County is one of the counties that used the new vote center model. But Registrar Neal Kelley has his doubts that a mailonly election could be in place in California by November, much less in states that would be starting from scratch.

“I could (run an allmail election) tomorrow, but we’ve been prepping for that for four or five years,” Kelley said. But for counties and state without that experience, “the change would be huge. We’re talking about putting a whole new infrastructure in place.”

California voters already have shown how much they like voting by mail. In the 2018 general election, more than 65% of the voters cast ballots by mail and 63% of the state’s then 19 million registered voters had signed up as permanent absentees.

But voting by mail doesn’t always mean the ballot goes into the mailbox. In the March 3 election, there were more than 2.3 million votebymail ballots uncounted after election day, with the vast majority handed in at polling places on election day.

John Arntz, San Francisco’s elections director, asked: What happens to those ballots if there aren’t any polling places?

“What about people who need to cast provisional ballots or those who want to register on election day?” Arntz said. “The law requires that we provide those services to the public, so how can that be done without some public contact?”