35
down. When Republican Governor Mike DeWine
sought to delay the primary, some candidates sued,
and courts ruled he didn’t have the power to do so.
Finally, at 4 a.m. on Election Day, with workers
already starting to set up for balloting, the Ohio Su-
preme Court ruled that the state’s health director
could order the polls closed as an emergency mea-
sure. But the GOP- controlled legislature wouldn’t
go along with DeWine’s proposal to move the vote to
June, so a mail-only election with an April 28 dead-
line was held instead.
Other states soon had their own experiences
with the logistical, constitutional and political com-
plexities of pandemic voting. In Wisconsin’s April 7
primary—held on schedule after a last- minute stand-
off between its Democratic governor and Republi-
can legislature— hundreds of polling locations were
forced to close when poll workers fearful for their
safety declined to show up. Hundreds of thousands of
voters still turned out, standing in socially distanced
lines for hours to cast their ballots. (One scientific
study later tied the election to a surge in COVID-19
cases, though other researchers disagreed with that
assessment.) Georgia’s June 9 primary melted down
amid short staffing and technical problems, leading
to endless lines and significant disenfranchisement
that Democrats charged was an intentional bid by GOP officials to sup-
press the vote. In New York, a state that normally votes almost entirely in
person, election officials blame an unprecedented flood of absentee bal-
lots for the fact that more than a month after the June 23 election, they
still haven’t declared a winner in some contests.
In each case, the coronavirus struck at a system that was already frag-
ile. “It is a mistake to think of the pandemic as something separate from
other problems with our election systems,” says Rick Hasen, an election-
law expert at the University of California, Irvine. “It interacts with the ex-
isting pathologies to make things worse.” Hasen’s most recent book, Elec-
tion Meltdown, was published on Feb. 4, the day after the calamitous Iowa
Democratic caucuses, whose delayed results illustrated the problems balky
election infrastructure can produce even without a worldwide epidemic.
Many states that have been administering elections in person for de-
cades are now attempting to pivot to mail voting, allowing people to vote
absentee without an excuse or by citing COVID-19 as a legitimate medi-
cal reason. But not all. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a Demo-
cratic lawsuit that sought to allow all Texas voters to choose mail ballots.
In Georgia, the GOP secretary of state mailed every voter a ballot applica-
tion for the primary but will not do so for the general election. “I think it’s
because there was historic turnout, particularly among Democratic pri-
mary voters, and [Republicans] don’t want to encourage that in the general
election,” says Nse Ufot, executive director of the New Georgia Project.
Some states, including California, Nevada and Vermont, will mail bal-
lots to all voters, joining five existing states with universal mail voting.
Many others will send all voters an absentee-ballot application, but ex-
perts warn they may not be prepared for the flood that is coming. Postage,
postmark and notarization or witness requirements vary widely from state
to state. States facing pandemic-induced budget crunches aren’t necessar-
ily in a position to pay for protective equipment and millions of stamps,
but Congress has allocated only a fraction of the election funding they’ve
requested. The U.S. Postal Service, itself teetering on the brink of insol-
vency, is ill equipped to handle the surge, and Democrats allege the popular
agency, recently entrusted to a Trump ally, may be intentionally slowing
the mail in urban areas in order to help the President. States’ voting pro-
cedures continue to shift as the vote nears, making it difficult for voters
to keep track of what’s required.
What worries election experts the most is that all these challenges
and changes could throw the result into doubt. Barring a blowout, elec-
tion night is likely to end without a clear win-
ner, and it could take weeks or months to count
all the votes. “What we didn’t see in the pri-
mary, even where there was confusion or it took
weeks to count, was someone calling the election
rigged or stolen,” says Aditi Juneja, an attorney
who staffs the bipartisan National Task Force
on Election Crises. “We want to make sure that
happens in the general election. If the outcome
is unclear or uncertain, that leaves space for bad
actors to make wild claims.”
That, of course, is exactly what Trump has been doing. Continuing the
drumbeat he began in 2016, the President has repeatedly cast doubt on
the legitimacy of the vote, wrongly insisting that mail voting is not secure
and that the election will be “rigged.” Trump claims there is a difference
between vote by mail, which generally refers to ballots mailed to all voters,
and absentee voting, when voters typically must request a ballot. But ex-
perts say there’s no difference in terms of security. Trump attacked Jocelyn
BARRING
A BLOWOUT,
ELECTION
NIGHT IS
LIKELY TO END
WITHOUT A
CLEAR WINNER
PETER VAN AGTMAEL—MAGNUM FOR TIME
