A new Gallup poll finds that 59% of people in the United States believe that votes for the November election will be cast and counted accurately, matching an all-time low. Only some 44% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters share that view, a record low for either party.
The survey ascribes the lack of confidence among Republicans to the president’s assailing of mail-in voting, which certainly is at least partly true. Perhaps the rise in confidence among Democrats, from 66% in 2018 to 74% this year, is owed to Trump, too, as a kind of defiance of his posturing on mail-in voting.
Whatever Trump’s role, state boards of elections and various courts have only worsened the situation by disregarding existing statutes and making up new rules. Less than a month away from Election Day, the rules are still changing.
North Carolina’s State Board of Elections crafted new rules for amending incomplete ballots. A federal judge has halted the implementation of those rules. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in September that the state could use drop boxes for mail-in ballots, something that state law does not explicitly allow, and it also arbitrarily pushed the receipt-by deadline for those ballots back three days to Nov. 6. Republican petitioners have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse that ruling. It’s possible that the high court takes up the case, considering that on Monday, the Supreme Court reinstated a signature requirement for absentee ballots in South Carolina.
Similar to Pennsylvania, judges have made mail-in ballot deadline changes in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia. On Friday, the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit stayed a previous district court ruling that had ordered Georgia to continue counting absentee ballots received through Nov. 6. State law requires absentee ballots to be received by 7 p.m. on Election Day in order to be counted. With the new appeals court ruling, the statutory deadline is the deadline once again.
All these extra-legislative changes sow doubt and confusion, hurting voter confidence. The 11th Circuit judges made this point exactly: “Arbitrarily extending the deadlines for receiving those absentee ballots will thus result in unnecessary delays in calculating the result of the election and will undermine voters’ confidence in its accuracy.”
