President Trump and his Republican allies have trashed Democratic efforts to make voting by mail easier in the United States amid the COVID-19 pandemic, but some Democrats are also questioning the push.
With voter access lawsuits piling up before November’s elections, Trump and the GOP argue more mailed-in ballots during the outbreak means more opportunities for fraud. Yet what worries Democrats is whether their vote will be counted at all.
A John Zogby Strategies poll of 1,001 likely voters nationwide found, in late May, a majority of respondents believed their ballots cast by mail would be included in the final tally, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points. Almost a quarter didn’t, and another fifth weren’t sure. When the results were broken down by party affiliation, 70% of Democratic respondents agreed. Three in ten disagreed or didn’t know.
“By and large, Democrats have been calling for mail-in voting more so because it’s more convenient. Secondly, they appear to be more conscious of the dangers of being in line and being in crowds,” John Zogby told the Washington Examiner. “But if you look at 30% of Democrats with reservations, that’s pretty large.”
Zogby found younger voters especially didn’t trust the process due to Trump. They were also concerned election officials, and the United States Postal Service would be crushed by the uptick in demand if it didn’t have adequate staff or the right technology.
“And if they vote, they are on a path to giving Democrats a wide margin,” he said.
Marquette Law School Poll Director Charles Franklin hadn’t fielded a survey, yet said he understood the sentiment after the Supreme Court intervened in partisan bickering over voting by mail in Wisconsin’s spring contests.
In April, about three-fifths of Wisconsin’s ballots were submitted via mail, roughly 10 times that of previous cycles, according to Franklin. Of the 1.3 million ballots sent to voters, 23,000 or almost 2% were returned after the deadline or rejected on some other basis. Another 129,000, or approximately 9%, of ballots weren’t returned for an unknown reason.
“Some may have not gotten it in time or not at all,” he said. “So somewhere between as little as 2% or as much as 11% of those who were mailed ballots didn’t have their vote counted.”
Pepperdine University’s Pete Peterson predicted the issue would be exacerbated in the fall by voters mailing ballots for the first time. Potential snafus could involve unverifiable signatures or marking their preferences incorrectly.
“Both of these problems are eliminated with in-person voting as a voter signs in at a registration table, and most voters see their ballot scanned in front of them,” Peterson said.
The academic, who focuses on public engagement and civic leadership, added voter rolls could create challenges if officials don’t have current or valid addresses.
Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat, president of nonprofit organization U.S. Vote Foundation, explained there were anonymous procedures to “cure” signatures on ballots that don’t match what’s on file. And she described the fear that votes won’t be counted if the race has been called “a long-term myth” because a contest can’t be certified until all ballots have been tallied.
“There’s a lot of worry about the U.S. Postal Service delays slowing down ballots arriving. I think those are reasonable worries, but they can be overcome in a number of ways,” she said. “In the U.S., they can do ballot drop boxes, which are secure boxes.”
Dzieduszycka-Suinat detailed how the situation’s more complicated for domestic voters compared to Americans abroad since there’s a two-step application to register to vote and request a mail-in ballot. She implored lawmakers to open more polling places for longer and to expand the Uniformed and Absentee Voting Act that covers military personnel and Americans overseas. That legislation permits emergency ballots to be dispatched online if paperwork gets held up in the mail.
“I’m just sitting here waiting for the equal protection class-action lawsuit,” she said. “The idea that we’re not going to be extending the known, existing framework in use across all 50 states for emergency ballots to domestic voters in the year 2020 when we have a pandemic is pure pigheadedness.”
David Becker, head of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, agreed with Dzieduszycka-Suinat that voting by mail wasn’t the panacea to all coronavirus-related ballot access issues.
For Becker, Republican claims regarding fraud were “a laughable endeavor,” given the integrity checks and balances in place across the different jurisdictions.
“The biggest misconception from the Left is that mail voting is going to magically fix the problems of the pandemic and that it’s for everybody,” Becker said.
Instead, Becker advised candidates, campaigns, news outlets, and other political observers to expect to wait to learn the outcomes of many Nov. 3 races. Particularly in battleground states such as Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, which are “relatively new to mail voting.”
Becker encouraged voters to have a plan as well.
“It might be legal to request a mail ballot a week before the election. But that’s not a good plan because the likelihood is you’re going to get your mail ballot very late and have a very big challenge trying to return it,” he said.
