“The alarm bells have been going off for months, but
the election fiasco in Georgia on Tuesday
made it clear: America is ill-prepared to hold a fair presidential vote in
November, and is dangerously close to having an election disaster.
“The
Georgia contest offered the most alarming preview to date of what could happen
in November without major overhauls, training and planning. Voters stood in
line to vote for upwards for four hours, saying they never received mail-in
ballots requested weeks ago. Local officials, forced to consolidate polling
locations because of Covid-19, were unable to manage the influx of voters and
struggled to operate new voting equipment.
“Experts worry that poll worker shortages, long
lines and other delays in processing requests for absentee ballots will only
get worse in November, when there will be more voters. Since March, voting
advocates have been calling on states to prepare for an election like no other,
and quickly implement plans that accommodate a surge in voters casting their
ballots by mail for the first time as well as robust turnout at the polls.
“One
estimate places the cost of upgrading vote-by-mail systems across the country
at $4bn. ‘We’re just going to have a catastrophe
in November,’ said Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida
who studies elections. ‘We’ve already passed the point of catastrophic failure.
It doesn’t get any better if we have two to three times the number of people
who are trying to vote in these polling locations.’
“Not every primary in the Covid-19 era has been a
disaster, and there has been strong turnout in many states as Americans have
embraced voting by mail at unprecedented levels. But Georgia was far from
the only place where there have been serious election problems.
“Voters in Nevada waited hours in line to vote in
the state’s primary on Tuesday, even after the state moved to conduct its
election largely by mail. Earlier this month, election officials in Pennsylvania and Washington DC struggled to meet the crush of requests
for absentee ballots and voters in the nation’s capital waited hours to vote.
Voters in Baltimore, Maryland didn’t get ballots and faced long lines. In April, voters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, waited
hours to vote in the state’s primary as the city was forced to condense its
usual 180 polling places into just five.
"Most glaring, voting groups say, has been the disproportionate
impact the election failures have had on communities of color. LaTosha Brown, a
co-founder of Black Voters Matter, told Politico it took her three
hours to vote in her majority African American precinct in Atlanta on Tuesday,
but she saw no line at a polling place in a predominantly white area later in
the day. State officials have launched an investigation into what went wrong in Fulton county,
which includes Atlanta. ‘Black voters in particular appear especially hard-hit,’
said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee
for Civil Rights Under Law, which has closely monitored the primaries. ‘In some
parts of the country, it feels like officials are making reckless decisions
that are a recipe for disaster.’
“Even before Covid-19, there were concerns about
mass disenfranchisement in November; the pandemic has only exacerbated them.
Donald Trump is already making repeated baseless accusations of
voter fraud in what appears to be an effort to lay the foundation for
contesting the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
“Activists
were already deeply concerned about the mass closure of polling places and the
Covid-19 pandemic has given election officials justification for doing so. More
than 1,600 polling places in jurisdictions previously covered by the Voting
Rights Act were closed between 2012 and 2018, according
to a report by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human
Rights. That includes 214 polling places in Georgia.
“Democrats
and voting rights groups are also pushing states across the country to extend
the deadline by which absentee ballots need to arrive to be counted. Many
states require the ballots to arrive by election night, a cutoff that could
leave eligible voters disenfranchised. In Wisconsin, Democrats secured a court order requiring
the state to count ballots as long as they were postmarked before election day
and arrived within six days of the election. More
than 79,000 ballots that normally would have
been thrown out were counted during the extension (Trump won the state in 2016
by just under 23,000 votes).
“There is also growing concern about plummeting
voter registration in recent months and an unprecedented Republican effort to
monitor the polls and challenge the eligibility of voters who appear, something
that could result in voter intimidation. The Republican National Committee,
freed from a decades-old court order prohibiting them from such activity, is
seeking to recruit up to 50,000 volunteers.
“The
window for states to understand the problems from their primaries and implement
solutions for November is rapidly closing. Recommended deadlines for purchasing
necessary equipment and other measures are approaching and in some cases have already passed. Republicans in Congress have
also scaled back funding to help states run elections, allocating just $400m so
far, a small fraction of the billions experts say is needed. The Republican
National Committee also plans to spend at least $20m to oppose efforts to
expand vote by mail. ‘If no one, legislators/advocates/voters/election
officials, listens to what is being said it will be a debacle in November,’
Tammy Patrick, who works on election administration at the Democracy Fund, said
in an email. ‘The primaries have been the canary in the coalmine…” (The Guardian).
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