How easy is it for voters to safely cast ballots amid the global pandemic? That depends — like many things in election administration — on where they live.
“I’m really worried about these small rural jurisdictions out there, whether or not you’re gonna be able to execute this.”
–Florida elections expert
Whereas I’m worried about those large urban districts out there, and how many of their voters will die if forced to go to the polls.
A major hurdle; mail-in ballots insure a paper trail. How can Diebold be expected to cheat under these conditions?
/snark
Over 6 months til the election, plenty of time, what’s stopping them?
Oh yeah, the dying Republican party…
“Any state where you’re in the single digits, which is roughly half the states, are in a position where they need to be planning now to expand,”
Approximately a dozen states are currently ruled by minority-elected governments protected by warped voting systems. They will not move to vote by mail unless they can guarantee their continued rule.
But let’s be fair about analyzing the absentee ballot scenario in Wisconsin.
These ballots are available in plenty of time when normal filing is held. I’ve been doing it this way for five years and haven’t missed a one.
These ballots, I believe, can be requested on line, but even if not, at some point the places to file in person (as I do) will be open again. There’s not a single reason for Wisconsin voters to miss filing for an absentee ballot for November.
The confusion came because of the poor performance of the State Legislature in the timing of refusing the delay. That occurred, I believe, less than a week before the polls opened. The State did what it could, the local voting authorities did what they could. 1.1 million ballots had to get mailed and returned in about a week’s time. That 80% of them were returned is epic.
So now the move has to be to confirm your absentee ballot registration in plenty of time. No excuses. That system works, whether Trump likes it or not.
And then, next year, the full court press has to be made for vote by mail in as many States as possible. This can never happen again.
Republicans love election chaos. They are already planning the “voter fraud” accusations to overturn results they don’t like.
That’s something they haven’t had much success with in the past. Yeah, they can try, but if the vote can be verified, all they’ve done is delayed the inevitable.
I can think of nothing more important, except keeping our country healthy and safe, than ensuring we’ll have an election (and a Democracy) in November.
If your state does not allow or have a provision for absentee/mail-in voting, GET MOVING! Call your state Senator or House member (not those in DC) and put a burr under their saddles. If they claim to not have the time, ask what ELSE are they doing.
trump will escalate. He’ll blame the WHO as a scapegoat to dodge responsibility and to avoid critizing GOP governors. He’s seizing ventilators that states’ order, then doles them out as political favors- playing Caesar with American lives. Only Julius trump can give the thumbs up or down.
So do you really think he won’t try to void our Election?
GET MOVING!
(btw, I do live in a state with mail-in voting and I think the only fraud we’ve seen was from a Republican)
All six of the swing states that both sides see as the most probable tipping points allow their residents to vote by mail for any reason, and there’s virtually no chance that any of them will retrench their existing laws this year. That means that, however much Trump rages, the legal structure is in place for a mail-voting surge in those decisive states: Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona in the Sun Belt and Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in the Rust Belt.
We will still need to ensure the GOP doesn’t try and ratfvck the ability to cast mail-in ballots and to ensure enough ballots are ready for every person that wants to vote, but this is good to know going in.
I’m in one of those states that’s trying to scale up to vote-by-mail in a very short period of time. As noted, that’s not a simple task even in ideal circumstances. Concerns about virus transmission have made it enormously more complicated in several ways.
First, to avoid disenfranchising anyone, a certain number of in-person voting centers must be set up. Who will staff them? Not me, despite all my election experience; like many other seasoned pollworkers, I’m in a high-risk category now.
Second, how will mail-in ballots be processed and counted? Normally the canvass is done by many small teams consisting of two people from different parties, with in-person oversight by the local elections board along with members of the media and general public. (Remember watching Florida’s hanging chad debacle in 2000?) Because of the virus, my state has decided instead to have all ballots examined by single individuals who are overseen remotely via live-streaming. What could possibly go wrong?
Closer to 5 1/2 months. But I expect that the Covid thing will be pretty much over by then.
Edit: (That should be 6 1/2 months)
They moved Easter to Halloween?
Note to Trump: Urgent: Don’t let them undermine our decades-long efforts to suppress voter turnout in urban districts using time-consuming voter-id requirements.
P.S. And please do not post this to the internet.
The examining part only happens if the scanner decides it’s a bad ballot, right? Otherwise it’s counted without being touched by human hands. And then I’m guessing that if a human also rejects it, the ballot would go to another layer of checking.
Oops. Missed a finger or two. Anyway, that’s even longer, and I’m pretty sure it will be really over by then.
For more see
Mail-in ballots are a cure for those ridiculously long lines due to oddly malfunctioning voting machines that seem to plague voting in democratic urban areas. And that explains why Trump so unequivocally claimed that mail-in voting would kill the Republican party.
This article from last August covers the voting machine topic pretty well: