Democrats Should Curb Their Enthusiasm for Mail-in Voting
There’s a giant scheme afoot to disenfranchise voters in November—it’s called mail-in balloting.
*SNIP*
Trump shouldn’t be trying to delegitimize the process, a point that journalists have often made, rightly. Yet there hasn’t been enough focus on the other side of equation: Does it make sense for Democrats to be such fervent boosters of a process that may lead to a historic number of votes cast in a presidential election not counting? Stacey Abrams, call your office.
There are at least three ways that mail-in voting could contribute to a 2020 nightmare. Trump could be winning on election night, and the outcome slowly reverse over time, a dynamic that would undermine confidence in the result even if the president doesn’t scream that he’s been robbed (which he would). Delayed by the volume of mail-in ballots, states could blow past the deadline for finalizing their results, a blow to the legitimacy of the process. And if the margins in battleground states are very close again, rejected mail-in ballots could loom large and lead to protracted, high-stakes court fights that could make Florida 2000 look like a pleasant tiff between friends by comparison.
The primaries have been a mail-in balloting preview. More than a half-million ballots were rejected in the presidential primaries. Ballots are rejected for improper postmarks and signatures, and mail-in voters are also more prone to accidentally vote for more than one candidate or make other elementary errors that are caught and corrected when voting in-person. First-time mail-in voters are most likely to mess it up.
In its primaries, New York state delivered up the perfect storm of ramped-up mail-in voting, inadequate preparation and bureaucratic ineptitude. In the 12th Congressional District, more than half of the votes were absentee. It took weeks to declare a winner and the number of rejected mail ballots was roughly three times Rep. Carolyn Maloney’s 3,700-vote margin of victory over challenger Suraj Patel.
If this had happened in Georgia in a race a Republican narrowly won over a Democrat, it would be it considered a notorious offense against democracy itself.
It’s easy to see how what happened New York easily could preview a close general election. NPR notes that more than 23,000 absentee ballots were rejected in Wisconsin’s primary this year, exceeding Trump’s margin in the state back in 2016. Nearly 40,000 were rejected in Pennsylvania, where Trump won by 44,000 votes in 2016.
In light of all this, it makes sense to try to make available more options for in-person voting. If there are more opportunities for early voting people can go vote with less worry about crowds, and election officials should work to move voting outside and under tents, to the extent possible, and pursue imaginative solutions with civil society. (Old Navy, for instance, has announced they will pay their employees for serving as poll workers as election officials prepare to confront a shortage of such workers due to the pandemic).
States should allow the counting of mail-in ballots prior to Election Day to minimize any swing in the count in the days and weeks after the election. Congress should delay the date that states have to finalize their results, currently December 8. And election officials and the parties should do everything they can to educate voters about how to fill out and mail an absentee ballot—I prefer same-day, in-person voting, but if people are going to vote by mail, they should obviously do so correctly.
What should be intolerable is any attempt to change the rules after the fact, although it’s entirely conceivable that Democrats will feel compelled after November 3 to argue that the mail-in voting that they’ve done so much to promote is desperately flawed and unjust.
[link:https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/09/02/democrats-mail-in-voting-407939?fbclid=IwAR0_EC5_SLDhBW_BlA_POxkJpo4H6LHzoRI2s3Nn4yThJ441QiOHDh2bPHs|
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Please mask up and vote early in person. We need all hands on deck!
= new reply since forum marked as read
It is outright fear-mongering because the issue that is not being discussed is that most "poll workers" are the very definition of "HIGH RISK" people who can contract the virus by sitting in an enclosed location for hours and hours with the hope their locales can get them the proper PPE at the level that a hospital might have (doubtful).
Plus there are states like mine (PA) that have no "early voting" and being in a city (Philadelphia) that for some idiotic reason, decided to purchase ES&S touchscreen machines in 2018, and when I used one for the first time, it took twice as long waiting in line to vote, during a slow time of the day, because of the abject confusion (particularly by the actively-voting 80-somethings) about how to use them. And worse, I can't "touch" the printed ballot with my final selections to examine for correctness, nor could I barely even "see" what was on the printout because the chute was unlit and there was not enough overhead light to illuminate it. I don't trust them as far as I can throw them.
The compromise solution is to make SECURE and MONITORED (yes by "all parties" ) drop boxes available to drop off any "late-to-complete" "mail-in"/"absentee" ballots.
