to embrace the option for the Nov. 3 presidential
election, up from one in four in the 2018 contest.
But running a vote-by-mail election is
surprisingly complicated, and there’s a lot of
room for things to go wrong. Validating and
counting a deluge of posted ballots in an
open and accountable way presents a major
challenge, one that only about a half dozen
states are fully prepared for.
It doesn’t help that President Donald Trump has
waged a vigorous offensive against the idea
via a barrage of baseless tweets alleging the
imminence of massive voting fraud. Turmoil
in the U.S. Postal Service has only heightened
concerns surrounding the ability of the
nation’s myriad election systems to manage a
presidential vote.
Oregon, Colorado and Washington have held
successful all-mail elections for years and others
including Florida and California expanded
capacity long before the pandemic. Nearly
everywhere else, the technical and logistical
challenges loom large for budget-squeezed
election officials with limited experience.
Chaotic events during this year’s primaries
did not instill confidence. Untold thousands
of absentee ballot requests went unfulfilled,
and tens of thousands of mailed ballots were
rejected for multiple reasons including arriving
too late to be counted.
“The system is buckling under the weight of
the dramatic surge and demand for absentee
mail ballots,” said Wendy Weiser, director of the
democracy program at the Brennan Center for
Justice. “It hasn’t been built to withstand that
high of a volume.”