Last of two parts
First part is available at thevoice.us/mail-in-voting-not-a-new-method-of-casting-ballots.
Mail-in voting has become a popular topic for the upcoming election. Taryn Simons who wrote, “Laments from Quarantine” and “The Streets of New Orleans Under Quarantine:”
“A deluge of absentee-ballot requests may, paradoxically, put pressure on traditional polling places. In Georgia, not yet a blue state, however, moving to purple, officials were unable to process the backlog of absentee-ballot requests in time for the primary in June. As a consequence, many voters ended up voting in person, but the number of available sites was diminished, due to both the virus and state-sanctioned voter suppression. Sixteen thousand voters were assigned to a single polling location in Atlanta.
“Even in the best of circumstances, voting by mail requires a functional postal service. Donald Trump’s effort to defund and decimate the U.S. Postal Service is a blunt instrument of disenfranchisement. Can it be simply a coincidence that the president replaced a postmaster general committed to facilitating voting by mail with a crony, named Louis DeJoy, who, according to a recent report in the Washington Post, has instructed postal carriers to slow down deliveries. As my colleague, Steve Coll, wrote, in states such as Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, where ballots that are not received by Election Day are automatically tossed out, the directive could be especially crushing.
“The quick pivot to voting by mail will be expensive, and it’s not clear where that money will come from. One estimate by the Brennan Center for Justice puts the price tag at upward of a billion dollars for postage, printing, drop boxes, processing, ballot tracking, and other security measures. The most recent coronavirus stimulus package proposed by Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans allocates zero dollars to shore up the November election. In contrast, a House bill would send nearly four billion dollars to the states, not only to assist with absentee balloting, but to insure the safety of polling places, poll workers, and voters. Unfortunately, it is aspirational.
“A number of nonprofits are attempting to step into the breach. An alliance of youth-empowerment organizations, election-protection groups, and corporations have come together to create Power the Polls, in order to train and dispatch a new generation of poll workers. Other groups have been mounting campaigns to help people negotiate the some times complicated process of getting an absentee ballot, a procedure that has been exacerbated by the pandemic, which has seen many county clerks’ offices closed. One organization has been perfecting a way to insure that ballot signatures and voter-registration signatures match. Still, without a significant infusion of money, most jurisdictions will be left to shoulder the burdens of running elections on their own during the pandemic.
“This is by design. Even prior to a recent tweet, Trump was threatening to cut off funding for states that expanded absentee voting. Yet, even the Republican leadership, which has spent the past three-and-a half years making sure that the states will not have sufficient funds to secure our elections, found itself in the uncomfortable position of having to face Trump’s suggestion to delay the election. Their responses, though, could not be matched by this simple rebuke levelled by the 17-term Democratic congressman, the late John Lewis, who died on July 17. ‘Voting and participating in the democratic process are key,’ he wrote in a valedictory essay, which was published timed to coincide with his funeral. “The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it,”’ Simons wrote.