The Barbosa family found out the hard way how contagious the coronavirus can be. One asymptomatic nephew who attended a family surprise birthday party in North Texas spread the virus to seven others of the 25 in attendance. Now 10 additional family members are ill:
Ron Barbosa, who is married to a doctor and refused to attend the May 30 party for his daughter-in-law because of safety concerns amid the COVID-19 pandemic, said those hospitalized included his parents, both in their 80′s, and his sister, who is also battling breast cancer.
Barbosa’s father did not attend, but later contracted COVID-19 and was hospitalized June 17. Barbosa, holding back tears, told Associated Press his father is on life support in the ICU and “hanging on by a thread.”
Already we worry here about waiting in line to vote this fall with people who refuse to wear masks standing in front and behind. Kentucky’s primary last week, Wisconsin’s in April, and Georgia’s “voting meltdown” earlier this month provided a foretaste of how badly the election could go this fall whatever the results.
The goal of increasing voting by mail and early voting sites is to reduce voters’ chances of COVID-19 infection and reduce Election Day congestion at understaffed polling places.
Even with more funding allocated to support additional early voting sites, staffing them will be a challenge. Anchorage, Alaska city clerk testified recently that 95% of the city’s regular election workers (senior citizens, typically, and at elevated risk from the coronavirus) declined to work this year’s local elections. It is a pattern already repeating across the country.
Nathaniel Persily, law professor at Stanford Law School and Charles Stewart III, professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, write at The Atlantic that voting behavior is resistant to change:
In a survey we recently conducted of registered voters in Pennsylvania, roughly half said they would vote in person in the fall. Even among primary voters who cast a mail ballot, 20 percent said they were likely to vote in person in the general election. Most of those who failed to vote in the primary but plan to vote in November said they will do so in person.
Voting in person this fall will come with health risks. But voting by mail or by absentee ballot comes with increased risk that votes will not be counted. As many as 10 percent of vote-by-mail ballots cast recently in New Jersey did not count due to technical deficiencies or because they arrived late. Voters unfamiliar with vote-by-mail or absentee processes are more prone to make errors that cause their ballots to be rejected.
Voters this fall will have to weigh potential pitfalls in voting by mail against the chances of contracting COVID-19 through traditional in-person voting.
It gets better (or worse):
Many of the usual polling locations, too, are taking themselves out of commission. Through our work with the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, some local election officials have told us that half of their polling places might be unavailable in the fall. A third of Americans vote in schools, but many such buildings—along with senior-living centers, firehouses, and other community facilities—are now being closed to outsiders. Other facilities that served as polling stations before the pandemic are unfit because they are too small to ensure social distancing. States are improvising—and when they raise COVID-19 concerns as the explanation for restricting access, the courts are not providing any relief. Before the Kentucky primary, voting-rights advocates sued the state over its plan to open only a single polling place per county. A federal court said doing so did not violate either the Constitution or the Voting Rights Act.
Sanitatizing supplies and procedures may slow the voting process and add cost to operating in-person sites.
Persily and Stewart believe Congress should allocate more resources to meeting this challenge, perhaps five times the $400 provided in the CARES Act for election assistance. A massive effort to recruit poll workers will be necessary as well:
Big-box retailers, such as Walmart and Costco, should make their facilities available for Election Day as well, given that they are uniquely situated to ensure social distancing for the vote. States should make Election Day a school holiday to ensure that those buildings will remain available for polling and to free up teachers to serve as poll workers. Indeed, all federal, state, and local employees should be given paid leave to serve as poll workers, and college students should be excused from class to do the same.
Promotion for absentee voting or vote-by-mail, I’d add, should include a pitch to those voters to assist in the in-person process by serving as election workers in their communities.
Using alternate facilities on Election Day, while potentially safer, will be more confusing to voters accustomed to voting at their traditional polling places. Voters arriving to find them shuttered may give up rather than traveling additional distance to sites prepared for the pandemic. This is especially true for less-mobile communities. Additional monies will be needed to prevent polling place consolidation from depressing the vote.
Finally, election officials will need to do all they can to assure voters that casting a ballot in person will be safe. This includes adopting and publicizing sanitary protocols well before the election. Campaigns and election officials also must be careful about their messaging about voting by mail. Signaling that mail voting is the only safe way to vote will depress turnout, especially among those communities predisposed to polling-place voting.
Campaigns and volunteers are frustrated that the pandemic has taken traditional campaign tactics such as canvassing, public events, and voter registration drives off the table. We will see them doubling down on phone calls and social media ads because that is all they know to do. in a pandemic. Canvassing, public events, and voter registration drives are off the table.
Promoting voting by mail (or absentee) can substitute for some of the tactics above. Instead of calling voters in September and October to ask if they plan to vote for Candidate X on November 3, volunteers might be helping absentee voters lock in votes many weeks ahead of the election. But voters must be appraised of the small risk of their votes not counting so they can weigh them against potential health risks in appearing in person. Here in North Carolina, the absentee rejection rate is much smaller than the New Jersey number cited above. (Working on assembling the latest numbers.) Any way they go, this election poses unique challenges to exercising the franchise.
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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, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.