New York will allow voters to check “sickness” as a reason to request an absentee ballot this year. Gov Cuomo is being pressed by some groups to go to a vote-by-mail system this year for everyone, which would entail ballots being mailed to all registered voters. There are huge problems for either response.
“….There is bipartisan consensus that mail-in ballots are the form of voting most vulnerable to fraud. A 2005 commission led by President Jimmy Carter and James A. Baker III — George W. Bush’s secretary of state — concluded that these ballots “remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” Ballot harvesting scandals, in which political operatives tamper with absentee ballots that voters have entrusted to them, have marred recent elections in North Carolina and Texas.
...In some cities with diverse populations, hundreds of types of ballots in multiple languages must be designed and directed to the appropriate voters in the correct precincts. Envelopes must be thick enough to protect voter privacy, and the paper thickness must be appropriate for scanners used to count ballots. When ballots are received, machines often open the envelopes and sort and tabulate the votes. These machines are expensive, and they generally take several months to order.
...Rodriguez said requests for absentee ballots have already skyrocketed, with more than 15,000 applications awaiting approval. Workers must open each emailed request, verify the voter’s identity and then manually enter the information before any absentee ballot can be generated. ...“It’s a serious struggle,” she said, adding that there have been supply shortages for paper and envelopes across the state. “All of the normal suppliers we have are completely out of stock.”
HTTPS://WWW.PROPUBLICA.ORG/ARTICLE/VOTING-BY-MAIL-WOULD-REDUCE-CORONAVIRUS-TRANSMISSION-BUT-IT-HAS-OTHER-RISKS
Voting by Mail Would Reduce Coronavirus Transmission but It Has Other Risks
by Jessica Huseman March 24, 5 a.m. EDT
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Because of a rise in its Latino population, Gwinnett County in suburban Atlanta had to mail out absentee ballots with information in both English and Spanish in 2018. The result was chaos. The county accommodated the increased text by printing it in 6.5-point font, making each letter smaller than a sesame seed. Many voters were confused by the instructions — in particular, that they had to sign the back of the yellow envelope before returning it or their votes wouldn’t count. Gwinnett rejected 595 absentee ballots, a third of all those tossed in Georgia, often without notifying the spurned voters. Only a hurried lawsuit by the ACLU forced the county to reexamine the discarded ballots.
The debacle caused in Gwinnett by this relatively minor tweak presents a cautionary lesson for election administrators amid a pandemic-driven flurry of calls for a massive expansion of voting by mail. Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., introduced legislation this month to promote and help fund mail-in ballot efforts, and several states that have delayed primaries are mulling whether to conduct them by mail.
“In light of the threats that this virus poses, every American should be able to cast a ballot by mail without excuse,” Klobuchar and Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., wrote Friday, urging Congress to include funding for elections in emergency packages. “That means states will have to scale their vote-by-mail processes in a way that hasn’t been done before.”
While mail-in ballots seem like an elegant solution as the United States grapples with containing COVID-19, experts say slow-moving state and county governments, inconsistent state rules and limited resources to buy essentials such as envelopes and scanners could make it difficult to ramp up nationally to reach more than 200 million registered voters in the November general election. Among the possible downsides of a quick transition are increased voter fraud, logistical snafus and reduced turnout among voters who move frequently or lack a mailing address.
There is bipartisan consensus that mail-in ballots are the form of voting most vulnerable to fraud. A 2005 commission led by President Jimmy Carter and James A. Baker III — George W. Bush’s secretary of state — concluded that these ballots “remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” Ballot harvesting scandals, in which political operatives tamper with absentee ballots that voters have entrusted to them, have marred recent elections in North Carolina and Texas.
Mail-in technology is also far more complex than a poll worker stuffing ballots into envelopes and opening them on return. In some cities with diverse populations, hundreds of types of ballots in multiple languages must be designed and directed to the appropriate voters in the correct precincts. Envelopes must be thick enough to protect voter privacy, and the paper thickness must be appropriate for scanners used to count ballots. When ballots are received, machines often open the envelopes and sort and tabulate the votes. These machines are expensive, and they generally take several months to order.
Jurisdictions like the states of Washington and Utah took several years to make a smooth transition from polling places to voting by mail. Quick turnarounds after rule changes — as in Gwinnett County — have generally led to more problems.
“You can’t just wave a magic wand and have this happen,” said Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida who studies voting. “If we want to do this for the November elections, we need to start making preparations now.”
States with upcoming Democratic primaries have even less time to adjust. Jordan Fuchs, deputy secretary of state for Georgia, which recently postponed its primary from March 24 to May 19, said that in the early days of the pandemic local officials were eager to adopt mail-in ballots. Then, she said, they realized all of the hurdles. “There is a lot more to this than instantly mailing people a ballot,” said Fuchs, who previously worked in direct mail campaigns.
Fuchs said that the state will likely mail absentee ballot applications to all voters over the age of 65 and give younger people the option of applying for a mail-in ballot. “Our goal is to make people aware of their options and empower them as to their choices,” she said.
Washington, where every voter has an opportunity to cast a ballot by mail, took about six years to ramp up its process. “We don’t have six years,” Fuchs said. “Quickly trying to set up a program like this is very costly and there are growing pains associated with this.”
While about a quarter of Americans vote by mail today, the idea of mailing ballots was initially resisted in the United States, emerging only as it became necessary for soldiers to vote from the battlefield. It progressed as states began to allow people who were seriously ill or away from their homes on Election Day to mail ballots. It wasn’t until the 1980s that California became the first state to allow citizens to request absentee ballots for any reason. In 1998, Oregon voters passed an initiative making it the first state to send ballots to all registered voters by mail. Washington, Colorado, Hawaii and Utah followed. In-person voting locations are generally available in these states, along with drop-off boxes for voters to turn in ballots themselves. These states also have same-day or automatic voter registration, which fosters turnout in general and can also enable transients who have not registered or received a ballot by mail to vote.
Experts say that, given enough preparation time, all votes could be safely cast by mail not only in Washington, Colorado, Hawaii and Utah but also in about 25 other states where voters can already request an absentee ballot for each election for any reason. Especially primed are five of these states — Arizona, California, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey — where voters can join a “permanent absentee” list. But in 18 states where voting by mail is rare and only allowed under limited circumstances, election administrators have a hard road ahead.
“To move from a couple of thousand to a couple of million requires an entirely different infrastructure,” said Tammy Patrick, a former county election official who is now a senior adviser at the nonprofit Democracy Fund in Washington, D.C. “It’s going to be a different logistical lift for them to even ramp up the printing of the ballots, let alone ordering a million envelopes that are the right size and compatible with” the U.S. Postal Service’s method of sorting mail automatically.
Some states use paperless voting machines or touch-screen devices that mark ballots for voters and print them out. These states, Patrick says, likely have no agreement with vendors to print ballots and would have to start entirely from scratch.
In Kentucky, where most counties use paperless systems and ballot marking devices, only 2% of voters mailed in ballots in 2018, according to data collected by the Election Assistance Commission. Few counties have scanners to tabulate paper ballots.
Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams is wary of the state’s ability to switch to voting by mail. “It’s not something to be done at the drop of a hat,” he said, adding that the move could cost millions of dollars and still be flawed. “This is a very expensive approach and it’s also risky. But it might be the best of a lot of bad options.”
Kentucky has delayed its primaries from May 19 to June 23, allowing more time for planning. “Either we’ll have a normal election because the worst will have passed or we’ll come back with recommendations,” he said.
Amber McReynolds is the CEO of Vote at Home, which helps policymakers and election officials improve their vote by mail processes and policies. “The unprecedented public health crisis” calls for localities to “be extraoirdinarily creative with our solutions,” she said.
Yet there are states, like Texas, where McReynolds thinks it may be very difficult to implement a robust and universal vote by mail system. Texas’ election administration is almost entirely controlled by counties, which each set their own voting processes. Rural counties frequently use machines that produce no paper backup and have no infrastructure to store it, while larger counties have more sophisticated systems that keep a printed record of ballots. The state has little authority to change local election administration decisions.
“I don’t think I can say, ‘Yes, by the general election this can be in place everywhere,’" she said. While it’s possible to send a ballot to every voter in the state, that “does not mean it can be processed correctly on the back end.”