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We think that voting actually is not just a private vote for the person who gets the vote, but a public good, and that the more people who vote, the more legitimate the elected officials are, and that they represent the actual values of the electorate.
– Former Colorado Senate Majority Leader Ken Gordon (D-Denver), 2012.
With Republicans still in control of the state legislature, North Carolina cannot expect universal vote-by-mail this November. But the state does allow “no-excuse” absentee voting. An investigation of a Republican-funded effort to manipulate absentee ballots in the Ninth District in 2018 led to a new election and made that national news.
Nonetheless, voters in North Carolina and elsewhere will need to utilize alternates to in-person voting this fall. Vote-by-mail (all voters receive their ballots in the mail) or absentee-by-mail (voters may request a ballot to mail in) can both help minimize voters’ chances of exposure to COVID-19 and reduce systemic strain on election day. Boards of Elections expect the pandemic will make it difficult to staff polling places on Nov. 3.
A USA Today/Suffolk Poll shows two-thirds of voters support voting by mail as an alternative to standing masked in Wisconsin-long lines during a pandemic:
The poll found even greater support for absentee voting as an alternative during the pandemic –74% of Americans in favor and 21% in opposition – and in-person early voting, 74%-24%. Americans are split on online voting, with 48% opposing and 47% supporting.
Four political scientists writing in the New York Times this week found that the advent of universal vote-by-mail boosted turnout in Colorado by over 9 percent. “Historically disenfranchised” voters benefited most: young people, voters of color, less-educated people and blue-collar workers.
But vote-by-mail did not hold an advantage for either major political party. They found, “Looking at voters by political party, we find that Democrats and Republicans benefit about the same amount: around 8 percentage points.”
Contrary to Republicans’ objections:
As election security experts have pointed out, fraud is exceptionally rare, hard to commit without getting caught and nearly impossible to do on the scale necessary to affect election results. And because mail voting leaves behind a paper trail — which election officials can audit to verify that votes were counted as cast — it may actually be even more secure than in-person voting.
(The North Carolina case proves the rule: Leslie McCrae Dowless got caught and faces prison. Adjudication of the election fraud case against him is still in progress. Federal officials added Social Security fraud to the list in April.)
The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin adds:
Nevertheless, many Republicans, who are overwhelmingly white, are convinced that the bigger the electorate, the more it will resemble an increasingly diverse electorate — and therefore disadvantage them. It is quite an admission of their inability to win elections in a truly representative democracy, but it also fails to recognize that many older, traditionally Republican voters may not make it to the polls for fear of contracting the coronavirus. The negative take on voting by mail also ignores how prevalent voting by mail already is. Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington already conduct all-mail voting; Arizona, California and Montana conduct elections primarily using voting by mail. Thirty-four states (including most of the battleground states) use no-excuse absentee voting (which still requires that ballots be requested).
Legal efforts are underway, Rubin notes, to pressure states to ease restrictions on voting by mail.
Still, voting by mail is not without potential pitfalls. In my county, absentee-by-mail is complicated by the cost-cutting closure of the local postal processing center in 2015. Mail sent from here to here gets trucked first to South Carolina for processing. The extra turnaround time leaves a fractional percentage of voters’ ballots uncounted. Even ballots mailed by the legal deadline can miss the cutoff date for receipt by the Board of Elections. Plus, some arrive after election day with no postmarks, rendering them uncountable. These are issues voter education and/or legislative action can overcome. Hand delivery and drop boxes are a failsafe.
Postal delivery issues also make it worrisome that the acting president has made businessman Louis DeJoy, a top GOP fundraiser from North Carolina (with no postal experience, naturally), the new head of the Postal Service. DeJoy’s wife, Aldona Wos, headed the state’s Department of Health and Human Services during Republican Gov. Pat McCrory’s administration. She resigned in 2015 under federal investigation of contracting practices at her department. Authorities found no criminal wrongdoing. Watch this space … and your mailboxes.
Nonetheless, Allison Riggs, chief counsel on voting rights and interim executive director at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, recommends spreading out votes this fall across every avenue for voting. Riggs argued North Carolina’s partisan gerrymandering case before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019.
Conducting an election under COVID-19 will be challenging. Riggs says, “[T]he more we can spread out the flow through each of those three mechanisms [absentee by mail, in-person early voting, and election day voting], the less stress we put on any one of those inputs.”
If you are a North Carolina DMV customer with a N.C. driver’s license or DMV-issued ID, you may now register to vote or change certain parts of your registration online. Having a Democratic governor and a state voting director appointed by a Democrat-led state elections board has advantages, and not only during a pandemic.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.