The US election is in 100 days: what are the biggest threats to it?
The 2020 election is shaping up to be a presidential contest unlike any other in American history.
Even before the pandemic, there were deep concerns over how voter suppression would shut significant numbers of Americans out of the ballot box. Covid-19 has exacerbated those fears as states rapidly ramp up their vote by mail apparatus to curb long lines and crowds at the polls.
The presidential race will be determined by the outcome of just a handful of swing states, including Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, which typically do not see large numbers of people vote by mail (less than 7% of people voted by mail in each of the three states in 2018). Other swing states, like Florida and Ohio, have more experience with widespread vote by mail, but also face unprecedented challenges such as recruiting poll workers and finding facilities willing to host voters amid the pandemic.
Election administrators around the country are in an extremely difficult position as they prepare for an election where high turnout is expected. Here’s a look at some of the biggest threats to the November election:
Support for mail-in voting
Since March, states across the country have been in a mad dash to change their election rules to make it easier for voters to cast a ballot by mail. While voters have responded in record numbers during primary elections, it’s been a huge switch for many states that don’t yet have adequate infrastructure.
Voters in many states have seen severe delays in getting voters their absentee ballots. Local election offices, staffed in some places by just a handful of employees, have struggled to keep up with increased requests for mailin ballots. Having seen election offices buckle during the primary, experts are worried about what will happen this fall, when turnout will be even higher. It will cost roughly $4bn to make the necessary upgrades to vote by mail, according to one estimate from the Brennan Center for Justice. Congress has allocated just $400m so far.
“Unfortunately the primaries have shown we’ve seen a huge capacity challenge to get ready for November,” said Edward Foley, a law professor at the Ohio State University who studies elections.
Mail could also be slower this year as the United States Postal Service faces pressure to save money. Those delays are significant because most states require ballots to arrive by election day in order to count. Many Americans could be disenfranchised through no fault of their own.
“I am concerned about how long it will take to process and count the ballots,” said Scott McDonell, an election official in Dane county Wisconsin, a state that saw mail delays during its April election. “I think it is important to prepare the public for the likelihood of having to wait for results.”
Donald Trump
Donald Trump has already laid the groundwork for contesting the election results in November. Trump, who votes by mail, has falsely claimed that absentee voting will lead to “massive fraud and abuse” and that mail-in ballots will be stolen from mailboxes. Asked whether he would accept the results of the election, Trump told Fox News Sunday “I have to see. No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no.”
Experts are alarmed about Trump’s rhetoric and say there could be ample opportunity for the president and his supporters to wreak havoc this fall. Americans are unlikely to know the winner of the presidential race on election night as election officials continue to count and verify absentee ballots in the days after. Trump could seize on shifting vote totals to claim the election has been tainted by fraud or malfeasance.
“Election day and election week really could lay the groundwork for just a rhetorical dumpster fire coming, to name it, from Donald Trump,” said Charles Stewart III, a professor at MIT who is an expert in election administration. “The thing that I really do worry about is that we’re not going to be able to convince the public to hold tight, be patient and eventually all the votes will get counted.”
There have been disputed US presidential elections before, but there are potentially toxic circumstances this year because neither Trump nor Joe Biden appears likely to give a traditional concession speech.
“Neither side wants to concede defeat because both sides believe that if the opponents win, the country as they know it is gone forever,” said Foley, who has urged Congress to revisit a 133 yearold-law to clarify how to deal with a contested election.
Fewer polling stations
Alongside mail-in voting, election officials face an enormous challenge in figuring out how to offer sufficient in-person voting. Poll-workers tend to skew older – 58% were at least 61 years old in the 2018 general election – and have been dropping out over concerns they could contract Covid-19. Some places that typically hold voting – schools, churches, nursing homes – are also declining to serve in that capacity this year.
In Rochester Hills, Michigan, poll workers who had signed up to work in the state’s August primary are dropping out daily, said Tina Barton, the clerk there. “We are begging people to work, no joke,” she said, adding that she had just spent $2,000 on a newspaper ad to get poll workers to sign up.
In Milwaukee, home to a sizable portion of Wisconsin’s African American population, officials closed 175 out of 180 polling stations for the state’s April statewide election. Turnout in the city dropped by 8.6 percentage points compared to voters outside the city, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice. Turnout among black voters in the city dropped by 10.2 percentage points.
In Georgia, where a record 1.1 million people voted by mail in the June primary, there were hours-long waits at some polling stations, as 10% of polling locations were relocated. In Kentucky, there was just one location for in-person voting in some of the state during the June primary and voters faced hours long waits. Some voters in Jefferson county, the state’s most populous county, pounded on the doors of one polling station demanding to be let in before a judge agreed to let them enter.
“We do not have enough poll workers, we do not have enough polling places, and we do not have enough of the material we need to run this election,” said Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Stanford who is an expert in election administration. “If people are used to voting in person, they’re very likely to do so.”
Kentucky secretary of state Michael Adams, a Republican, issued an “SOS” for poll workers this fall. “If you’re a Republican who doesn’t want a vote-bymail election in November, you need to step up and be a poll worker,” he said in a statement. “If you’re a Democrat concerned about unintentional voter suppression caused by a paucity of voting locations, you need to step up and be a poll worker.”
Ballot rejections
Tens of thousands of votes were rejected during the primaries this year, often because of small technicalities.
There are a number of reasons a mail-in ballot can be rejected: it might arrive too late, without a signature, be unsealed, or election officials might determine the signature on it doesn’t match the one they have on file. In a typical election, these rejections affect such a small percentage of ballots cast (just 1% of mail-in ballots were rejected in the 2016 general election). But as more people vote by mail this year more votes could be left uncounted.
In California, 102,000 ballots were rejected in the state’s March primary – a small fraction of the 7m mail-in ballots returned – but an increase from the 69,000 that were rejected in the state’s 2016 primary, according to NBC News. In Wisconsin, 20,000 ballots were rejected in April and just over 79,000 latearriving ballots were only counted because of a court order. And in New York, which is still counting mail-in votes from its 23 June primary, there are reports that about a quarter of mail-in votes were rejected in some parts of New York City.
Most alarming, is that young, firsttime and minority voters are more vulnerable – an analysis of the 18,500 votes rejected in Florida’s March primary found that those groups were about twice as likely to have their ballots rejected.
“If you’re unfamiliar with the process of mail balloting, then you are more likely to make errors, particularly forgetting to put your signature on the exterior of the envelope,” Persily said. “We’re seeing racial variation. That’s something that should be really concerning.”
Voting groups are pushing states to require election officials to contact and alert a voter before ejecting their ballot – currently, fewer than 20 US states do so.
Voter registration
Since the onset of the pandemic, DMV offices, usually hubs of voter registration activity, have been closed. Third-party voter registration drives have been unable to register voters by standing on street corners and knocking on doors.
That all means that significantly fewer people have registered to vote than would in a typical election year. One study of 13 states found there was at least a 50% dropoff in voter registration in April compared to the same point in 2016.
A lack of voter registration could have severe consequences down the line. An unregistered person won’t just be unable to cast a ballot, but will also not receive automatically mailed applications for mail-in ballots or instructions on how to fill them out. Fewer than half of US states allow voters to register on election day.
The US supreme court
The 2020 election is already shaping up to be one of the most litigated in US history. There have been at least 163 lawsuits filed in 41 states and the District of Columbia so far, according to Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. The lawsuits have a range of election practices, including ones that require voters to pay the postage on their ballots, give an excuse to vote absentee, and require mail-in ballots to arrive by election day.
A handful of those disputes have already come before the US supreme court, which has upheld voting restrictions in every voting case that has come before it this year. The court shortened the deadline to return mail-in ballots in Wisconsin and declined to lift restrictions on voting by mail in Texas and Alabama, even amid the Covid-19 pandemic. It also refused to step in and override an unusual lower court order and allow people with felony convictions to vote in Florida’s primary.
Those decisions have only continued the court’s long trend in favor of upholding voting restrictions in recent years, leading to fears that as America faces a voting emergency, the court is unlikely to do anything to make it easier to vote.