CORONAVIRUS THREATENS 2020 ELECTIONS

…Workers wear gloves for handling ballots from Washington state primary election.

Can the US go to all mail-in ballots for a national election?

We have seen how the coronavirus has upset every thing from travel to sporting events to going to school or work.

Now it is starting to get involved with the one thing that really hits home for a democratic nation.  That is, to attack our free elections.

Now there have been issues for years in dealing with keeping elections open and free.  The idea of a free election for every American has seen problems such as the issues of keeping certain minorities from voting, to stuffing ballot boxes, to purging voting rolls, and even to closing polling places.

Now we have a pandemic virus that is attacking our nation in an election year.

Elections officials have already started stocking up on hand sanitizers and disinfecting wipes. Many are urging voters to cast absentee ballots or to vote early to avoid crowds.

But as the coronavirus pandemic worsens, local and state officials are attempting to identify other options including mail-in ballots.  If public health leaders ultimately determine that there are risks to visiting polling places, that is a situation that could change the basic mechanics of running an election.  And this is in the middle of a presidential campaign year.

“If you’re talking about something on that level, then we’re clearly facing a crisis and not just an emergency.  In addition, the public health and safety will have to dictate whatever we do,” said Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose.  LaRose said he would be following the advice of public health officials and law enforcement.

“One of the very few things that would take precedent over a free and fair election is public health and safety, right?” LaRose said, adding that such a move would be an absolute last resort.

The increasing coronavirus pandemic has affected the global economy and has changed millions of Americans’ routines in the past month.  It has over the past week become an unprecedented challenge for elections officials already dealing with a number of threats including online disinformation from US and foreign influences and for online security issues.

Many districts have emergency plans in cases of natural disasters or power grid failures.  But there has been little planning for a virus pandemic that could keep the public staying inside their homes..

“I don’t think we’ve really considered a scenario like this. I haven’t seen anything on this scope and scale,” said Jennifer Morrell, a former election official in Utah and Colorado.

For now, health officials have not declared polling sites off-limits. But elections officials in states holding primaries on Tuesday.  Ohio, Florida, Arizona and Illinois are developing on-the-fly contingency plans to deal with the risks to voters.  Other states may be included with these as the issues may require.

Hours after Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) declared a state of emergency related to the virus earlier this week, LaRose announced that at least 128 polling places in nursing homes would be relocated. He also ordered county election officials to establish curbside drop-off points for absentee ballots on Election Day and has encouraged young people to enlist as poll workers in the likelihood that older people opt out over health concerns,

“It’s not a time to mince words and sort of dance around the issue,” LaRose said. “You need to be very clear and up front with people and also based in facts, not fear.”

Officials around the country are encouraging early and absentee voting, some of the few immediate options available to the roughly two-dozen states that will hold their contests in the upcoming weeks and months.

The need for a plan is already acute in Westchester County, N.Y., where Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) imposed a one-mile containment zone in the city of New Rochelle, the center of the state’s outbreak.  People are free to enter and exit, but public gathering places such as schools and houses of worship are required to close for 14 days beginning Thursday.

New York’s presidential primaries are not scheduled to take place until April 28. However, county officials are already discussing what to do if quarantine-like procedures are in place on that date.

Reginald A. LaFayette, a Westchester County election commissioner, said officials are studying the location of polling places inside the containment zone.  They are considering allowing voters who are not showing symptoms to cast ballots as usual. Those who are quarantined inside their homes might need to receive ballots by mail, he said, emphasizing that no final decisions have been made.

“Of course, this is unexpected, so we wouldn’t have had a plan. . . . It’s not a quick fix and not a quick answer,” LaFayette said.

Ahead of the US general election in November, some advocates are encouraging states to add expanded mail-in voting to their existing contingency plans as a way to safeguard the franchise in case of an ongoing public health crisis.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), whose home state has voted entirely by mail since the 1990s, introduced US legislation to give all Americans the right to vote by mail during a widespread emergency; it would provide states with $500 million to fund the effort.

Yet, while voting by mail is seen as an attractive alternative in the face of a public health crisis, some experts said creating and operating such a system on a large scale before November could be difficult in the coming months.  Some Americans waited in line for 6-7 hours to vote in the preliminary elections, voting by mail would be a positive alternative and needs to be considered.

Election administrators would have to contract with the vendors responsible for printing up to thousands of ballot styles, placing them in envelopes and making sure each voter receives the correct one.

But the Postal Service would be burdened in a new way. Officials would have to develop policies to address issues like non-matching signatures. Some jurisdictions require mail and absentee voters to provide signatures to verify their identity.

States that have adopted a full vote-by mail system, such as Colorado, took years to progress from no-excuse absentee voting to a permanent absentee list to the full electorate casting ballots by mail.

It is also unclear whether voters would trust such a system if it were rapidly put in place, experts said.

“If you have a pandemic and you require this, I think that’s a little bit of a question mark. Will certain communities respond to that favorably, and trust it and feel confident about it?” Morrell said. “If you talk to my good friends in Massachusetts or somewhere on the East Coast, they’re going to tell you, ‘That’s just not how we do things around here.’ ”

Matthew Weil, director of the Elections Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said such a massive mail effort could overwhelm the postal system in the current environment.

“I’m no expert in coronavirus, but if everything is shutting down, I don’t know why we all assume that the mail service is going to be working perfectly,” he said. “One-hundred million ballots through the mail? That’s going to tax the system in the best of times, let alone when we have a pandemic.”

But advocates say they believe some progress toward broader voting by mail is possible this year.

“I go back to my time in the military, particularly serving in a Special Operations unit. One of the things we learned to do is to be flexible and adapt to emerging threats,” Ohio’s  LaRose said.

Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, urged election officials to review “unnecessary restrictions” on absentee or mail-in voting in their states.

“Election officials should no doubt be instilling confidence in the electorate right now,” she said on a conference call with reporters during recent primaries. “They should not be feeding into anxieties . . . This is an important moment for outreach.”

The possibility of a coronavirus crisis is uncharted territory for the total election administration community.

Copyright G. Ater 2020