First of two parts
Mail-in voting has become a popular topic for the November 3 elections. Sue Halperin, staff writer for The New Yorker Magazine, submitted the following article to the magazine.
“Recently Donald Trump casually suggested on Twitter that the November election should be delayed because universal mail-in voting would make it “the most inaccurate & fraudulent election in history.” He was either setting the stage to contest the outcome, or to explain away his impending defeat, or both. The president should know by now, in-person voting during the coronavirus pandemic is dangerous, especially for older Americans and those with underlying health conditions. Yet, he and his chorus of enablers have made a habit of trash-talking voting by mail, claiming, erroneously, that it promotes fraud. It’s no accident that Trump’s tweet specifically assailed universal mail-in voting, because the word universal is triggering for anyone who is afraid of the will of the people.
“So far, only five states have nearly universal mail-in balloting. For most of them, it took years of legislative wrangling before it was adopted, and years of preparation before it was deployed. Additionally, 34 states and the District of Columbia have no-excuse absentee balloting, meaning that anyone can request an absentee ballot for any reason. Every state has the infrastructure to enable military and overseas voters to cast ballots from afar. Inexplicably, according to Trump’s tweet, he believes that absentee ballots are good and mail-in ballots are bad, even though they are the same thing. All told, nearly 80% of the electorate would be able to vote by mail in November.
“Past primaries have offered a preview of the problems that can arise when significant numbers of voters choose this option. Hint: the issue isn’t voter fraud. Take California, a blue state, where more than four million persons voted by mail in February 2008. The deluge was so great that election officials were still counting ballots weeks after the election. One unexpected wrinkle: They had to iron thousands of ballots that had gotten crumpled in the mail, before they could feed them into the tabulator. In New Jersey, another blue state, some voters found their ballots returned to them, and thus not counted, because the Postal Service scanned the wrong addresses; other citizens received hastily-assembled ballots with the wrong slate of candidates. In New York City, where more than 400,000 ballots were cast by mail in the June primary, election officials do not expect to have a final vote tally for some jurisdictions until August. One hundred thousand already have been invalidated, some because they arrived too late, others because they weren’t signed, or had signatures that didn’t match the signatures on file.
“These are some of the typical, non-malicious, ways that voters may find themselves disenfranchised. When there is an exponential increase in the number of absentee ballots, many of which will be cast by those likely to make mistakes because they’re unfamiliar with the process, the number of rejections will rise, too. So will the number of lawsuits challenging the results.
“But voting by mail can be used as a tool for voter suppression. In 2016, for example, mailed ballots cast by black and Latinos in Florida were rejected more than two-and-half times as often as those cast by white voters. In states with intentionally-restrictive exact-match voter-registration requirements, signature rejections are an easy way to cull legitimate voters,” Halperin wrote.
Continued at thevoice.us/mail-in-vote-to-test-state-capacities-financially-processing