MAIL-IN VOTING HAS SOME RISKS, BUT NOTHING LIKE WHAT PRESIDENT TRUMP IS CLAIMING

…Mail-In Ballots ready to be mailed to the voters

GOP run states are making it hard for minority voters to vote

State and local officials across the country are making difficult decisions about how to enable citizens to vote without jeopardizing their health. One widely discussed approach involves allowing more people to vote by mail, lowering the risk of spreading the novel coronavirus.

Most Americans support that option for this November’s election, and for good reasons.  Those that study mail voting agree that it historically has little negative effect on election results.  That's because it has a marginal impact on the overall turnout and it usually hasn’t given either party an advantage.

But voting by mail, it does increases the number of ballots that are rejected, and are therefore not counted in the final tally.  Ballots from younger and first-time voters are most likely to be thrown out.  Voting by mail may be better for your health, but it does come with some risks of its own.

For instance, mail-in ballots are rejected at a much higher rate than in-person ballots.

According to the US Election Assistance Commission, of the more than 140 million votes cast in the 2016 general election, 23.7% were via mail.  Of the roughly 33.2 million mail ballots that election administrators received and tabulated, approximately 1% were NOT counted.  The reasons for rejection included “the signature on the ballot not matching the signature on the state’s records,” “the ballot not having a signature,” a “problem with the ballot return envelope,” or “they missed the deadline.” By contrast, a third fewer ballots cast in person were rejected in 2016.

Even in states where voters have had several years’ experience in voting by mail, such as in Washington, Oregon and Colorado, mail ballots do get rejected. In the 2016 election, 0.81% of Colorado’s mail ballots were rejected; in Oregon, 0.86%; and in Washington, 0.90%. And that doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands of ballots mailed to voters that were returned as undeliverable.  But it must be noted that in all of those states, they only lost less that 1% of the total votes.

To conduct voting research, a group chose to look at mail ballots cast in Georgia during the 2018 midterm elections. Georgia was once covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required the state to clear in advance any election rule changes with the federal government. The Supreme Court invalidated Section 5 in 2013 in Helby v. Holder.  Although Georgia has allowed anyone to vote by absentee, mail-in ballots since 2006, but it is a different process from the three states that prepared for years to move to all-mail elections. Georgia does not typically have large numbers of mail voters.

In the study, the group used Georgia’s statewide voter file, which has information on each individual voter’s race, age, gender and registration status. They linked the individual-level data with administrative data on mail ballots cast during the 2018 midterm elections, which has information on when a voter’s ballot was received by an election official and whether it was counted or not. In the 2018 midterms.  About 266,000 registered voters in Georgia cast a mail ballot. Election officials rejected more than 7,000 of them, or nearly 3%, either because of an error on the return envelope or because they arrived after Election Day.

Now, I don’t know why Georgia was chosen for the voter study, because it must be noted that the Secretary of State for Georgia in 2016, ran the Georgia election, as in most states, Sec. of State's do run the state’s elections.  But this Secretary also was running for and he did become the Governor of Georgia.  

However, while as the Secretary of State, he closed a number of Georgia’s voting locations that just happened to have been in heavily Black communities.  He also moved a number of the voting locations so that the local Black minority voters had to travel to locations away from their neighborhoods, in order to vote.  Some locations even required the voters to take buses to the voting locations.  Locations where the bus was only able to drop-off the voters where they had to walk across rough access roads that would not allow a wheel chair to travel.  They were very difficult for older voters to deal with, especially those using canes or walkers.  Even with all these issues against the minority voters, the new Governor barely beat his Black, female opponent, Stacey Abrams.

The previous issues are just some of the risks that some GOP run states are doing these horrendous things, just to discourage minority voters from voting. 

On top of all this, Donald Trump is seriously trying to stop all mail-in voting and he is saying that the, “2020 elections could be “fixed" and "rigged" by Democrats, who want universal mail-in voting due to the COVID-19 dangers posed by in-person voting.  He is calling mail-in voting a, "disaster" that will lead to "the greatest ever voting fraud."  He also says, “It will be days, weeks, moths or even years before we know who actually won the election”.

This is all a bunch of B.S..  He is so scared that he is going to lose the election, that he is doing all he can as president to intimidate all American voters.  Especially those that are expected to use the mail-in ballots.

Yes, there are  some minor risks, but with a pandemic in process, mail-in voting just makes good, healthy sense.

My advice is that this is the most important election in my lifetime, and probably in yours.  Everyone should do whatever is needed to make sure they vote, and to make sure the ballot is properly filled out and returned in time to make sure it gets posted.

Yes, this is the most important election in many American’s lifetimes.

Copyright G. Ater 2020