18 BriefingAmerica’s presidential election The EconomistSeptember 5th 2020
21victor was unclear. In all four scenarios the
role playing produced levels of gamesman-
ship and tumult beyond anything seen in
recent American elections. In the narrow-
Biden-victory scenario the Secret Service
escorted Mr Trump from the White House
on inauguration day. It is hard to overesti-
mate what such a sight would mean to
Americans—and to the rest of the world.More, not merrier
In principle, an election is a fairly simple
thing. Identify the people entitled to vote;
provide them with the means to vote; accu-
rately count their votes; after that, just
abide by the results in the way the constitu-
tion requires.
As far as the first step goes, America’s
constitution says that only citizens can
vote, and that those over the age of 18 can-
not be barred from doing so on the basis of
their race or their sex. The Voting Rights Act
of 1965 took aim at the legal requirements,
such as literacy tests and poll taxes, by
which Democrats in southern states had
contrived to maintain race-based disen-
franchisement. Those changes saw conser-
vative whites in the south switch their alle-
giance from Democratic to Republican.
In the decades since, conservative
whites have become increasingly central to
Republican fortunes and an increasingly
smaller share of the American electorate.
The party has thus developed an interest in
limiting electoral participation, rather
than increasing it. As Mr Trump put it earli-
er this year, discussing a proposal greatly to
expand postal ballots, “They had things,
levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to
it, you’d never have a Republican elected in
this country again.”
Erecting barriers to voting has grown
easier to do since the Supreme Court in 2013
struck down a provision of the Voting
Rights Act that required jurisdictions with
a history of racial discrimination to “pre-
clear” any electoral changes with the Jus-
tice Department. In 2016 a federal court
struck down a voter-idlaw in North Caroli-
na because it “target[ed] African-Ameri-
cans with almost surgical precision”. The
fact that courts have ruled in this way is
heartening; the fact that they have to is not.
America’s electorate is becoming ever
more diverse regardless. This year non-
whites comprise one-third of eligible vot-
ers, an all-time high, with Hispanics out-
numbering African-Americans for the first
time. The electorate is also younger than in
recent times—another factor that favours
Democrats. Most analysts predict a high
turnout in November. As much as 70% of
the 240m-strong electorate is expected to
vote, compared with 60% in the 2016 elec-
tion and 50% in the 2018 midterms.
They will not all find it easy. The Leader-
ship Conference on Civil and Human
Rights, an umbrella group, has found thatnearly 1,700 polling places were closed be-
tween 2012 and 2018 in states formerly cov-
ered by the pre-clearance rule. The largest
numbers have been in Texas, Arizona and
Georgia—three battleground states this
year. Many of the closures are in areas
where the population is disproportion-
ately black or Hispanic.
Polling-place closures can be expected
to lead to queues elsewhere, and queues are
already a problem. The Bipartisan Policy
Centre, a think-tank, found that in 2016
over 560,000 voters failed to cast a ballot
because of polling-place management pro-
blems, including queues. Predictably, a
study of the 2018 midterms from the Bren-
nan Centre for Justice, another think-tank,
found that black and Latino voters were
markedly more likely than white voters to
find themselves waiting more than 30 min-
utes to vote. Such delays can be expected to
discourage voting at the best of times.
And this is not the best of times. Co-
vid-19 makes standing in a long November
queue particularly unappealing. It may
also make the queues, and the time taken
to vote, longer. The epidemic meant that
Wisconsin had trouble recruiting enough
poll workers for its primary election in
April; as a result, the state’s biggest city,
Milwaukee, had just five polling places,
down from 180 in 2016. There has been
more time for planning since then, which
will doubtless improve things, but America
remains grievously short of poll workers.
With local governments already cash-
strapped, private enterprise has begun to
step in: the National Basketball Associa-
tion, for instance, says it will convert many
of its arenas into polling places.
Coronaviruses are not the only invisible
threat such places need to take account of.
Computer viruses, ransomware and other
hacks and attacks are also a worry. The Sen-
ate Intelligence Committee, which is
chaired by a Republican, Marco Rubio, con-
cluded in 2019 that Russian hackers probed
all 50 states’ electoral systems in 2016,looking for vulnerabilities. Congress’s abil-
ity to look into what is happening this time,
though, may be circumscribed. John Rat-
cliffe, a three-term congressman with no
previous intelligence experience who was
recently installed as the administration’s
Director of National Intelligence, has
stopped providing personal briefings to
the Democratic-led House Intelligence
Committee. He argues that written brief-
ings will somehow reduce the chance of
leaks; they will also eliminate committee
members’ opportunity to question him.
According to Mr Rubio, Mr Ratcliffe will
continue in-person briefings for the Senate
committee.
At the state level, according to Marian
Schneider, president of Verified Voting, a
non-partisan group focused on election
technology, “There have been significant
improvements” since 2016. Many states
have got rid of voting machines that do not
produce paper trails for validation, thus in-
viting fraud. But Ms Schneider sees much
more to be done: “America has woefully
underfunded election infrastructure for-
ever.” And new support does not always get
to where it can do the most good. Accord-
ing to Mac Warner, who as secretary of state
is West Virginia’s chief election official,
“The most vulnerable piece is the county.
They may not have [an] information offi-
cer, and even if they knew the problem,
they might not have the money to fix it.”Boggling the mind
There is little risk of any hackers, even
those with the support of nation states,
changing a meaningful number of votes on
the national scale. But hacking into a cru-
cial county in a swing state is a much less
onerous task, as is taking a state election
system down for a few hours on election
day, thereby increasing voter wait times
and sapping public confidence. That Amer-
icans are even having such conversations
is, in a sense, a victory for bad actors. As Ms
Schneider explains, “The destructive nar-
rative that our elections are rigged and
someone is going to hack into them is al-
most as bad as actually doing it.”
It is hardly the only such destructive
narrative around. Mr Trump is doing his
best to undermine trust in one of the key
responses on which states and individuals
are relying in order to ease elections at a
time of contagion: voting by mail.
In 34 states any voter may now request
an absentee ballot for any reason. Nearly
every swing state falls into this category,
and fear of covid may see more voters than
ever take up the opportunity. In a number
of states the opportunity to vote by mail
has been, or is being, widened specifically
to respond to covid (see chart 2). It allows
voters to feel more secure and reduces the
pressures on polling places. Four states,
along with Washington, dc, will swell theUnhealthydistrust
“Howmuchconfidencedoyouhavethatthe
2020 presidentialelectionwillbeheldfairly?”
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