The coronavirus pandemic has given Democrats a new opportunity to expand mail-in voting across the country amid the objections of Republicans, who fear it will lead to fraud.
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Tuesday found that a strong majority of voters, 58%, favor a permanent federal change to allow mail-in ballots, with 68% saying the rules should be changed for just the general election in November.
Just five states, Colorado, Washington, Hawaii, Utah, and Washington, conduct their elections entirely by mail. Over half of all states allow voters to participate in elections via absentee ballots without needing an explanation.
But many Democrats, and some Republicans, want to see these types of electoral programs dramatically expanded, raising long-held concerns about security and fraud from critics in the GOP. At least 32 states say they will use federal funds from the CARES Act to strengthen vote-by-mail programs, with many Democrats saying those initiatives don’t go far enough.
Local Democrats have filed lawsuits in Texas asking that the state increase its mail-in voting program before a new round of primaries in July. A state judge has ruled in favor of the Democrats, with Republicans promising to appeal.
The Texas attorney general, a Republican who opposes the Democrats’ request, said that only voters who are sick with the coronavirus can use mail-in voting. Texas law currently requires a written excuse to receive a ballot, but people 65 and older can get one with no questions asked.
Democrats point to the outbreak of the coronavirus in Wisconsin following a state Supreme Court ruling that the governor did not have the authority to delay the April 7 primary election. A report from the Milwaukee Health Commissioner released this week found that at least seven new cases of the coronavirus could be linked to election-related activity.
“As you recall, there were people that were in line for a very long time to get their vote in, so if you figure out around a range of time when someone was there or in the polling sites or in the line, connect to someone who was an actual case, that’s when we would do notifications,” said Commissioner Jeanette Kowalik in reference to the state’s plan to trace and alert other potential voters or poll staffers who may have gotten sick.
In Georgia, where the current governor is a Republican, the secretary of state announced he would provide all of the state’s 6.9 million registered voters with an absentee ballot request form.
“We’re just concerned about the transmission of COVID-19,” said Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican. “So by putting voters first and also our poll workers, we thought the best solution would be sending out absentee ballot applications to our active voters.”
That decision drew condemnation from the Republican David Ralston, the state’s House speaker, who said in an interview that the move could be “extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia.”
Those sentiments are shared by President Trump, who tweeted earlier this month that mail-in voting has “tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.”
Many Republicans point to the practice of “ballot harvesting” as evidence that mail-in voting programs have the potential for abuse. In states such as California, volunteers or ballot workers can collect absentee ballots from voters on election day. Democrats have been accused of doing some version of the practice in states such as North Carolina, where it is illegal.
In the 2018 midterms, late ballots delivered by a third party broke to Democrats in California by the thousands, which many Republicans said was a statistical impossibility.
