How to Protect the 2020 Election

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/opinion/how-to-protect-the-2020-election.html

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Whatever his tweets may suggest, President Trump is still scheduled to stand for re-election a mere 83 days from now. But when exactly we’ll know whether he won is anybody’s guess.

As New York Times journalists reported on Saturday, the expected surge in mail-in voting is likely to prolong the ballot counting process well beyond Nov. 3, potentially turning Election Day into a nasty election week or an even nastier election month. “The stormy once-in-a-lifetime Florida recount battle that polarized the nation in 2000 and left the Supreme Court to decide the presidency may soon look like a high school student council election compared with what could be coming after this November’s election,” they wrote.

Against the backdrop of a gravely mismanaged public health crisis and chronic voter suppression efforts, the election was never going to go smoothly. But what should be done to protect it against a complete meltdown? Here’s what people are saying.

Since March, voting experts and legislators have suggested expanding the use of mail-in ballots as an elegant solution to the electoral problems posed by the pandemic. Five states — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington — already have all-mail elections, in which ballots are automatically sent to every registered voter. Despite Mr. Trump’s and Attorney General William Barr’s false or unfounded warnings, voter fraud has been exceedingly rare in those states, even as they’ve seen increased turnout. The Times editorial board continues to call voting by mail “the surest path to a more inclusive, more accurate and more secure election.”

But as with any voting method, voting by mail is not without its drawbacks. Rare as voter fraud is, many experts agree that voting by mail is generally less secure than voting in person because it occurs in private, slightly elevating the risk of manipulation and coercion. While states that already vote by mail have proved that the risk can be almost entirely controlled for, as Audrey Fahlberg writes for The Dispatch, “it’s also true that we are living in an unprecedented time and there are bound to be problems with states having to accommodate unusually high numbers of mailed ballots with no existing framework for doing so.”

If state primaries were any indication, the principal challenge to expanding the use of mail-in ballots in a matter of months won’t be criminal but logistical. As Kim Wyman, the secretary of state in Washington, told The Times, it took five years for Washington to transition completely to voting by mail.

So it’s not entirely surprising that voters in 12 of the 38 jurisdictions that held primaries this year reported never receiving the absentee ballots they had requested, according to FiveThirtyEight. In a New Jersey special election in May, one in 10 mail ballots were thrown out for arriving too late or for other deficiencies. In New York City, the number for the primary election was more than one in five. In two New York congressional districts, it took six weeks for elections to be decided.

[Related: “How Voter-Fraud Hysteria and Partisan Bickering Ate American Election Oversight”]

“The big electoral crisis arises from the prospect of hundreds of thousands of ballots not being counted in decisive states until a week after the election or more,” Richard H. Pildes, a constitutional scholar at New York University School of Law, told The Times. “I have no doubt the situation will be explosive.”

The dysfunction and delays in some primaries only highlight the urgency of ensuring that states extend their window for accepting ballots and have the funds to hire more election workers for November, the editorial board writes. And voters will have to be reminded that a protracted counting process is not proof of fraud.

Along with election workers, mail carriers are also at risk of being overwhelmed by the crush of mail-in ballots. To deal with the influx, the already struggling agency would need emergency funding in the next relief bill that Republicans are blocking in negotiations, as Michael D. Shear, Hailey Fuchs and Kenneth P. Vogel report.

At the same time, they add, the Postal Service is also being undercut by the Trump administration, which has cut costs in ways that seem to have led to slower and less reliable delivery in recent weeks. Since a Trump campaign megadonor was named the postmaster general in May, the service has stopped paying mail carriers and clerks overtime, raising concerns that the agency is being undermined for partisan purposes.

S. David Fineman, a former chairman of the board of governors of the U.S. Postal Service under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, recently wrote in Barron’s that during his tenure, “there was never any interference by the president in the business of the USPS, like there is currently.”

What should be done? Senate Democrats will obviously need to do their best to secure more funding in the next relief bill, Jordan Weissman writes in Slate. But in negotiations over the fine print, they will also need to stipulate that the administration actually use the money to restore delivery to normal. Another increasingly popular idea for reducing the burden on the Postal Service is expanding the use of drop boxes where voters can safely submit their ballots instead of mailing them, as they already do in many states.

In the absence of more funding, extending the eligibility window for ballots that arrive after Election Day, as the editorial board suggests, could help in case of delays. “Many of these states still have not done that, and that is a really important fix,” Vanita Gupta, the former head of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division under President Barack Obama, told The New Yorker. To help transport ballots, some have even suggested enlisting private delivery companies like UPS and FedEx.

Because most poll workers are over 60 years old, the pandemic is expected to create staff shortages that could make it more difficult for people who want or need to vote in person. During the Wisconsin primary in April, for example, the city of Milwaukee cut the number of polling sites to only five from 180, in part because of a lack of poll workers.

Maya Patel, a voting rights activist, has argued in The Los Angeles Times that this problem has a simple solution: recruit young people, who are less likely to require hospitalization or die of the coronavirus, to work at the polls. In some states, including Iowa and Ohio, officials have started campaigns to do just that, targeting people as young as 17. (Minors are permitted to serve as poll workers in 46 states.)

A shortage of polling sites is another reason for concern. As Nathaniel Persily and Charles Stewart, two voting experts, noted in The Atlantic, a third of Americans vote in schools, but many campuses — as well as senior living centers and other community facilities — are now closed to outsiders. If municipalities have to reduce their polling sites, they may risk longer lines and higher risks of infection.

To ensure that school buildings remain available for polling, Dr. Persily and Dr. Stewart suggest states make Election Day a school holiday, which would also free teachers to serve as poll workers. Walmart, Costco and other large retailers could also make their stores available.

Early voting is another way states can ease the strain on the Postal Service while cutting down on long lines. Many states already allow some form of in-person early voting, but the Center for American Progress and the N.A.A.C.P. have called for expanding the option. “Requiring at least 14 days of early voting — and increasing the overall number of polling places — would help to reduce lines by dispersing voters across several days and locations,” they wrote. “Early voting offers benefits in any election, but especially during a public health crisis.”

And as far as voters who want to see Mr. Trump leave office are concerned, the Times columnist Jamelle Bouie argues that casting a ballot in person may be the best way to “to make his defeat as obvious as possible, as early as possible.”

The pandemic has made protecting the election against cyberattacks even more difficult, according to Gowri Ramachandran and Tim Lau of the Brennan Center for Justice. Many steps in the voting process — registering, requesting an absentee ballot and renewing a driver’s license, for example — are now happening remotely, which heightens the probability and risk of technical malfunctions and cyberattacks.

Last week, William Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, publicly confirmed that Russia was using “a range of measures” to denigrate former Vice President Joe Biden in a coordinated effort to disrupt the election. While Mr. Evanina said that it would be difficult for other countries “to interfere with or manipulate voting results at scale,” he warned that they could attempt to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election’s results.

Here, too, the solution is a question of money, which is to say of political will: Congress did provide $400 million for election security in the March relief package, but that is far less than the $4 billion minimum that the Brennan Center estimates is necessary to guarantee every eligible American the right to vote safely and securely. It’s a lot of money, the editorial board writes, but in the context of the trillions already spent, it’s a rounding error.

Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.

“Is the U.S. Ready to Vote by Mail?” [The New York Times]

“With November Approaching, Election Officials Still Face Safety, Security Fears” [NPR]

“Can Our Ballots Be Both Secret and Secure?” [The New Yorker]

“The November Election Is Going to Be a Mess” [The Atlantic]

Here’s what readers had to say about the last edition: Debt, Debt, Goose.

David from North Carolina: “I’ll bet my next 100 paychecks that if tomorrow Trump were to call for another tax cut for the rich each and every one of those supposed deficit hawks would sign on immediately. They never care about the deficit when it is spending they like (on defense) or tax cuts they like (only for the rich any that go to the poor they don’t give a flying fig about).”

Anne from California: “I’m normally a fiscal conservative when it comes to my own finances, but the effects of the coronavirus across the U.S.A. and the rest of the world could be so great that, if nothing is done to help, there may be massive hunger and homelessness. Do we, as a people, really want something so unthinkable on our national conscience? This is truly frightening.”