Demand for mail-in absentee ballots for the November election is set to create a strain on election administrators that results in a bureaucratic nightmare on Election Day.
Due both to activists pushing for greater absentee voting and to a general population likely to be wary of going in public even after states lift social distancing restrictions, the sudden desire to change voting methods away from physical polling places creates a logistical challenge that may be insurmountable.
Five states already had total vote-by-mail systems before the coronavirus pandemic: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington. California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order on Friday to send absentee ballots to every registered voter there for the November election, but the state already had high levels of mail-in absentee voting.
Many areas, though, do not have the systems in place, or funds available, to accommodate an increase in absentee voting.
Ballots must be printed, so officials will need to find companies that can print millions more ballots and secure, verified envelopes than they expected to need. Then, election workers will have to process those ballots by verifying the signature on the envelope matches that of the voter. If there are questions about a valid signature, that envelope must go through another verification process. Then, election workers must open each envelope and process each paper ballot.
“There’ll be mistakes all the way along — getting them the ballots, getting them back, verifying their signatures, being able to report the results on election night,” said Bob Stein, a political science professor at Rice University. “You need voting machines, in this case, optical scanning machines that can read the paper ballots, and poll workers are gonna open them up.”
The result: Delayed election results, missing ballots, voters who may be unaware that their ballots were rejected, and arguments about voter suppression.
Pennsylvania, one of the states that recently changed its laws before the coronavirus pandemic to allow absentee, mail-in voting for any reason, demonstrates the spike in demand causing havoc for local administrators.
“We’ve had 160,000 applications for mail-in ballots for the [June 2] primary in the last week,” Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar told New York Times Magazine in April. “For comparison, in 2016, we got 19,000 in the same period.”
Achieving adequate preparations for smooth-going, mass voting by mail at this point, six months before the November election, especially for those states that do not already have robust systems to handle large numbers of absentee votes, is unrealistic, if not impossible.
“It’s hard enough to get bread flour. Where are you going to get a vendor that can print up precinct-appropriate or residentially appropriate ballots?” Stein said.
A trade organization called the National Association of Presort Mailers warned that the companies involved with creating and sorting the mail-in ballots may not have the time to scale up operations to meet all the demand, especially if election officials stall on placing orders due to legal and political battles on what levels of mail-in voting the election administrators should accommodate.
“The machine that folds and inserts the ballot into the envelope can cost up to $1 million,” Richard Gebbie, of Midwest Presort Mailing Services and president of the National Association of Presort Mailers, told New York Times Magazine. “It normally takes 90 days to order one piece of gear. Then you have to get it installed and check everything, because the security and quality control has to be very, very high.”
Those pursuing legal challenges to increase absentee voting and voting by mail do so because they fear disenfranchisement in November due to the coronavirus keeping people from going to the polls.
But ironically, those political and legal fights are making it more difficult for election officials to prepare their systems because it adds uncertainty to the process and prevents them from making decisions.
“There are things that they can do, but they need to know what the rules of the game are,” Stein said.
There are some actions lawmakers can take to ease the burden on election administrators as the process causes a spike in absentee ballots. Allowing administrators to process absentee ballots before the polls close on Election Day, for example, will allow final election results to be tallied and winners to be announced without prolonged delays.
Following the contentious in-person Wisconsin primary and local elections in April, the Milwaukee City Council passed a resolution in late April to send every registered voter an absentee ballot application, hoping to reduce the workload for election administrators.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, is pushing for changes that could ease the burden on election administrators, such as allowing online ballot requests, moving the deadline to request an absentee ballots back to a week before the election, and releasing funds for personnel and equipment to handle the increased absentee ballot load.
Ultimately, Stein said, officials will need to implement changes to in-person voting systems in order to accommodate changes in voting behavior amid the coronavirus pandemic, such as adding additional days and longer hours for early in-person voting locations.
“Spread out the vote just like you spread out the virus,” Stein said.
