Brace yourselves for Naked Ballot November.
As the pandemic has pushed some states to dramatically change their election protocols with just months to go before the presidential election, expanded mail-in voting has become a popular tool deployed by governors and state election officials. While some states, including Florida and Colorado, have tested tried-and-true mail-in voting systems, other states have been putting together large-scale absentee ballot programs on the fly.
For the moment, it is Republicans who are the biggest critics of mail-in voting, while Democrats have more often embraced and championed it. In many states, it is Democratic operatives and allies who have pushed for expanded absentee voting, while Republicans have sought to limit it or intimated (without much evidence) that it creates more opportunity for voter fraud.
Since the start of the pandemic, the partisan gap on support for mail-in voting has grown very large, with far more Democrats being for it. But it is likely that if the potential problems with mail-in voting in many key states come to pass, it will be Democrats rather than Republicans who will feel unfavorably toward mail-in voting after the election.
In over a dozen states, ballots that are mailed come with more envelopes than a fancy wedding invitation, including a privacy envelope in which the returned ballot must be enclosed before being placed into the outer envelope with signatures and other identifying information about the voter.
Last week, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that ballots that are not returned in a privacy envelope must be thrown out. These “naked ballots” were allowed to be counted in past Pennsylvania elections, and estimates suggest that around 5% to 6% of ballots cast by mail will be discarded under this ruling.
Add this onto the list of other mounting issues facing mail-in voting, such as postal delays, missing postmarks, and ballot counting that seems to occur at a glacial pace, and you have a recipe for disaster. States like New York saw thousands of mail-in ballots disqualified in their primaries. One hopes states have worked out the kinks since then, but there’s no guarantee.
This, more than the specter of “shy Trump voters” or the reality of low response rates, is what keeps me as a pollster up at night as we head toward November. Because if this goes sideways, it isn’t just the polls that will be wrong — it will be our democratic system itself being stress-tested.
There are things states can do or should have done to make things work more smoothly. But I expect we are also about to see a massive about-face from Democrats, who spent the spring and summer championing these expanded mail-in voting systems only to now see the challenges (not from fraud, but from logistical mayhem) threatening their prospects at the ballot box.
The evidence continues to mount that mail-in voting is not something that is being participated in evenly from both sides of the aisle. According to the latest Quinnipiac national poll, while President Trump wins, 57% to 35%, among voters who say they plan to vote in person on Election Day, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden holds a massive lead with 68% among those who say they plan to vote by mail. Democrats continue to be much more likely than Republicans to expect disruptions in the election as a result of the pandemic and are adjusting their expected voting behavior accordingly. However, they are doing so in ways that may be pushing more of them to a voting method that creates a higher chance that their ballots will be tossed.
This massive gap is going to supercharge any post-election legal wrangling. While in the 2000 election, every election lawyer in the country descended upon Florida to argue over for whom voters intended to vote, this time, the fights will be over what questionable ballots to count at all. And if the assumption is that any mailed-in ballot is more likely than not to be a Democratic ballot, the battle lines for each party are clear.
Voting by mail used to be reasonably nonpartisan. There was no evidence that it generally helped one party or the other in states where it was introduced in elections past, and Republicans and Democrats used to hold mail-in voting at similar levels of esteem. But Democrats went all-in on mail-in voting this spring and summer. Now, the large partisan imbalances around mail-in voting paired with the potential for a massive logistical debacle that could be on the horizon may have Democrats changing their tune on the whole enterprise come November.
