Some ties are merely anticlimactic: Think a 0-0 soccer match or a chess stalemate. The ties that would become possible under new legislation pushed forward by Republican leaders in North Carolina’s General Assembly could prove much more consequential.

For over 120 years, the North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) has consisted of five members, all appointed by the governor, with no more than three from a given political party. County elections boards have the same partisan composition. Those bodies oversee just about every step of the democratic process, and their odd-numbered makeup means they must reach a decision in any vote they take.

State Republicans are close to upending that longstanding system. Senate Bill 749, which is nearing its final vote in the legislature, would instead give all of those boards an even number of members, expanding the state board to eight members while shrinking county boards to four. 

Because Democrats currently control the governor’s mansion, they also hold a majority on these election boards heading into the 2024 elections. This bill would deprive them of that edge; instead, all boards would be equally split between Republicans and Democrats. 

The bill would also shift power to appoint members of the state elections board from the governor to the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate. The changes could lead to tie votes along party lines on both local and state election boards, and the bill is largely silent about how such deadlocks would be resolved.

With North Carolina again poised to be an important swing state in next year’s presidential race, the bill could complicate local election boards that oversee a wide swath of administrative decisions. 

From the appointment of precinct judges to the final certification of election results, there is no clear mechanism for what would happen after tie votes, which could in turn delay electoral processes, compromise ballot access for early voting, and potentially move decisions to the courts. SB 749 does say that, if an evenly divided state board cannot decide on an executive director, or if a county board cannot choose its chair, the General Assembly, currently in Republican hands, would step in. 

Republican lawmakers have criticized current NCSBE executive director Karen Brinson Bell for changes she approved to voting rules during the 2020 election. The new rules under SB 749 would allow them to seek her ouster if the state board deadlocks over her reappointment in 2025.

The bill passed the Republican-controlled Senate along party lines in June, and passed in a slightly modified form along party lines in the House on Sept. 19. It now awaits a final Senate vote.

Democratic Governor Roy Cooper has promised to veto the bill if it comes to his desk. In an Aug. 24 press release, he wrote, “The bill would change the structure of the state and county Boards of Elections in a backdoor maneuver to limit early voting and satisfy the Republican legislature’s quest for more power to decide contested elections.”

But Republicans hold a supermajority in both the House and Senate, meaning they have the votes to override Cooper’s veto. Both chambers adopted the bill by margins that fell short of a supermajority because many GOP lawmakers were absent the days of the vote. But not a single Republican crossed-over to oppose the bill, so the party remains on track to overturn a governor’s veto if and when the bill returns to the legislature.

None of SB 749’s three Republican primary co-sponsors in the state Senate—Deputy President Pro Tempore Ralph Hise, Majority Leader Paul Newton, and Sen. Warren Daniel—responded to multiple requests for comment on the bill.

During a Sept. 12 committee hearing on the bill in the House, Republican Representative Destin Hall argued that requiring bipartisan decisions from election boards would make North Carolina voters more confident that their state’s elections were being administered fairly. His Democratic colleagues, noting how the Republican-dominated legislature has often ignored minority input, were skeptical. 

“This is encouraging government not to work,” said House Democratic Leader Robert Reives.

Hall also said the possibility of intractable ties was a feature of the bill, not a bug.

“There’d be a stalemate, and by many ways, that’s by design,” Hall said of split election board votes. “No action would occur.”

North Carolina Republicans aren’t the only ones seeking to remake their state’s election administration bodies in a way that introduces the possibility of partisan gridlock. In 2016, Republicans in Wisconsin changed the state’s election governance from an odd-numbered nonpartisan board to an even-numbered board split between Democrats and Republicans. 

In the years since, the board has deadlocked on a number of issues, including most recently the reappointment of Megan Wolfe, a nonpartisan elections administrator who became a target for false conspiracies in the wake of the 2020 election. (The situation is now headed to the courts for resolution.)

But there’s no historical precedent for split decision-making boards in North Carolina, notes Chris Cooper, a professor of political science at Western Carolina University. From the state supreme court to county commissions, he points out, the state’s institutions are set up with odd numbers of members to avoid ties.

“There’s a reason we do this by design every time. I really can’t think of any example where there’s been a true deadlock in this way,” Cooper says. 

If Republicans and Democrats on election boards refuse to compromise, it could theoretically impact decisions on everything from disputes over voter eligibility to the certification of election results. Patrick Ganon, a spokesperson for the state elections board, declined to comment on the pending legislation. But many of North Carolina’s voting rights groups have drawn attention to early voting as a part of the electoral process that could immediately suffer from indecision.

Early voting is North Carolina’s most popular method of casting a ballot, employed by over 53 percent of voters in the 2022 general election. Those voters tend to lean Democratic: In the state’s 2022 Senate race, in-person early voters favored Democratic candidate Cheri Beasley by five percentage points, even as she lost the election overall by more than three percentage points to Republican Ted Budd. 

Under current state law, each county’s board of elections must unanimously approve a plan for the number and location of early voting sites. It’s not unusual for all members not to agree, and in those cases, the contested plan goes to the NCSBE for consideration. In 2022, the state board approved 14 of these non-unanimous plans.

If the state board were restructured according to SB 749, however, one party’s members could unilaterally refuse to adopt a county’s contested early voting plan. State law then mandates that the county would only have one early voting site, located at its board of elections office.

A single early voting site might work in some of North Carolina’s smaller counties. Tyrrell County in the state’s northeast, for example, had a population of just 3,245 as of the 2020 census.

But in larger areas, “such an outcome would be catastrophic,” says Bryan Warner, spokesperson for the nonpartisan democracy watchdog Common Cause NC. “It would gut early voting, overwhelm election administrators, and could require county residents to travel long distances and stand in long lines to cast their ballot early.”  

Wake County, home to the capital of Raleigh, had well over 1.1 million residents in 2020, and it established 20 early voting sites for that year’s election. “In a major urban area, [having just one early voting site] would be an important issue,” says Gerry Cohen, a Democrat who serves on the Wake County Board of Elections and is former special counsel to the General Assembly.

A recent study in the Election Law Journal authored by Chris Cooper, Michael Bitzer of Catawba College, and investigative reporter Tyler Dukes found that changing or eliminating early voting sites reduces voter turnout. The effect was greater for voters of color, who in North Carolina are more likely to be Democrats.

“Particularly in a competitive two-party state like North Carolina that has experienced a number of close elections in recent years, it is not an exaggeration to say that administrative changes to a polling location could impact electoral outcomes,” the study concludes.

The consequences are less clear for deadlock in other parts of the election system. While North Carolina law specifies deadlines for county and state boards to complete tasks like canvassing (confirming preliminary vote totals) and certification, it generally doesn’t outline next steps if those processes are delayed. Neither does SB 749. “It’s the Underpants Gnomes theory of election administration,” Cooper quips, referencing a crew of South Park characters with notoriously incomplete plans.

Voting rights groups’ biggest fear is that a failure by election boards to certify results would allow the General Assembly to intervene. Melissa Price Kromm, director of N.C. Voters for Clean Elections, warned the House on Sept. 12 that gridlock from SB 749 would let the legislature resolve ties, “even deciding the outcome of elections.”

Cohen, the Wake County elections official, believes such worries are overblown. He says state law clearly requires elections boards to certify results if there are no issues of fact. If one party’s members chose not to approve the results, he says, a judge would order them to follow the law under penalty of contempt of court. 

Such an order occurred last year in Arizona after Republican officials refused to certify the midterm elections. And in North Carolina’s Surry County, two GOP members of the county elections board were removed by the NCSBE after voting not to certify a 2022 municipal election.  

But given the current political climate, in which unfounded theories of voter fraud continue to circulate, it’s unclear what some elections board members might claim as issues of fact to justify a certification delay. It’s also unclear what sort of hearing North Carolina’s judges would give those claims. 

The North Carolina state Supreme Court, which came under Republican control last year, has so far been willing to make controversial rulings that favor the GOP. Its members have voted to permit previously illegal partisan gerrymandering, rolled back voting rights for thousands of North Carolinians on probation or parole, and restored a Republican-passed 2018 voter ID law that had been struck down as racially discriminatory.

If passed, SB 749 would take effect in July of 2024, creating new state and county boards in the final months leading up to the presidential election. That would chop a year off the terms of county board members who were sworn in just two months ago, and three years off the terms of the state board members seated in May.

“We have to go through another appointment process again. It’s really disruptive,” says Cohen. “I don’t own my position on the board of elections, but in life, you expect some sort of certainty.”

The post North Carolina May Increase Odds of Gridlock with Even-Numbered Elections Boards appeared first on Bolts.

But a host of more routine decisions made by Florida officials may be undermining the health of the state’s elections as well, even when they don’t seem directly related to voting rights.

To replace Warren as state attorney of Hillsborough County (home to Tampa), DeSantis appointed Susan Lopez, a member of the conservative Federalist Society. One of Lopez’s first decisions was to rescind a policy implemented by Warren to not prosecute bicyclists and pedestrians for certain traffic charges. A 2015 Tampa Bay Times report exposed the Tampa police department’s relentless ticketing of Black cyclists for things like having inadequate lighting, or riding on handlebars, a dynamic local organizers have labeled “bicycling while Black.” The report catalyzed a Justice Department investigation which ultimately confirmed the disproportionate enforcement.

New research shows how such low-level interactions with the police can undercut our democracy by reducing the number of people who participate in elections. A study I co-authored with fellow researcher Kevin Morris, published in December in the American Political Science Review, finds that traffic stops by police stops in Hillsborough County reduced voter turnout in 2014, 2016, and 2018 federal elections. 

Our study compared the voter turnout of Hillsborough motorists who were stopped by police shortly before and after each election. Drawing on information about each person’s turnout in past cycles, we found that these stops reduced the likelihood that a stopped individual turned out to vote by 1.8 percentage points on average. The effect held when accounting  for characteristics like race, gender, party affiliation, past turnout, and prior traffic stops to improve our comparisons. The discouraging effect of stops was slightly higher in 2014 and 2018. 

These results make clear that the collateral consequences of policing—including worsening outcomes for economic security, educational attainment, and health—also extend to political participation. If the communities who are most frequently subjected to policing are also discouraged from voting as a result, it could create a vicious feedback loop of political withdrawal. 

Why would traffic stops make people less likely to show up to the polls? Past research has already established that the most disruptive forms of criminal legal contact, like arrest and incarceration, discourage people from voting. Our study shows that low-level police contact matters in the same way. If a traffic stop makes a motorist fear that the government will harm them, it can prompt a withdrawal from civic life that political scientists call “strategic retreat.” Motorists might worry that a routine traffic stop could escalate into police violence, a more common outcome for Black people in particular. Beyond justified fears of violent victimization, voters might also bristle at the perception of being targeted to raise revenue through excessive ticketing. Accordingly, if incarceration ‘teaches’ would-be voters that their government is an alienating and harmful force in their lives, traffic stops could catalyze a similar form of ‘learning.’  

“I think that people see police as a part of the government,” Bernice Lauredan, director of voter engagement at Dream Defenders, an organization that champions voting rights in Florida, told Bolts. “I don’t believe any interaction with police is safe for people of color–having any interactions with police gives them a negative image of the government. And it may give them a negative idea of voting.” 

And while millions of white Americans have also been swept up in municipal ticketing efforts, the fines and fees in Florida as elsewhere disproportionately affect Black communities.

On average, we found that the deterrent effect was smaller for Black drivers: It reduced their likelihood to vote by 1 percentage point, compared to 1.8 for the overall population. We went further and looked at when voters had been stopped. If they had been stopped in the six months before the election, stops discouraged Black people from voting more than non-Black people. But as the time between a stop and the election increased, the effect weakened. That averaged out to a comparatively smaller effect over the whole two-year period. 

We think that this counterintuitive result might be a mix of two things: on one hand, Black Americans probably have less to “learn” about government from a traffic stop, considering that Black Americans are more likely to have a family member in jail than other Americans. On the other hand, Black Americans probably know that a traffic stop is more likely to turn deadly for them compared to white drivers, which could cause “anticipatory stress” that reduces willingness to vote in the short term. 

“Black folks and other people of color are criminalized in Tampa,” Lauredan says. 

While Florida Republicans have dialed up the use of criminalization to maintain political power, deep-blue urban dwellers also face the political ramifications of policing in their own backyards. 

In New York City, for example, Mayor Eric Adams has dramatically increased police presence and encouraged police to be more proactive in punishing behaviors ranging from public drinking and dice games to carrying unlicensed firearms. New York Governor Kathy Hochul has also announced plans to beef up a “hot spots” policing initiative that focuses on gun violence—quite similar to the Memphis police squad (“SCORPION”) that killed Tyre Nichols in January. Gun control policing efforts in New York could be driving a dynamic similar to the “strategic retreat” that our research demonstrated in Tampa—another study found that NYPD stop and frisk practices, which expanded significantly under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, may have reduced voter turnout in the 2006 and 2010 midterm elections.

New York City is no outlier with respect to increased police contact. In Chicago, for example, the yearly tally of traffic stops ballooned from 86,000 to 378,000 between 2015 and 2021. In addition to boosting city revenues through regressive taxation, these traffic stops also function as a pipeline for gun possession arrests (which have been steadily increasing over time, despite criticisms from local prosecutor Kim Foxx). 

The civic consequences of criminalization don’t stop at voting, either. Research also shows that Americans who have been stopped by police, arrested, or incarcerated become less likely to engage with a range of public institutions that they perceive as surveilling them. Sociologist Sarah Brayne calls this phenomenon “system avoidance,” and argues that the record-keeping practices of institutions like hospitals, schools, and banks—and the ability of state actors to surveil data from these institutions— justify why criminalized people withdraw from them. It’s an ugly realization—harsh punishments and increased carceral surveillance are causing lasting damage to the social fabric of criminalized communities. 

“The more communities are abused by the system, the more natural it is for them to feel alienated from it,” said Yannick Wood, director of the criminal justice reform program at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, an organization that advocates reducing the interactions between the criminal legal system and democracy in New Jersey. “They don’t feel like the system serves them, and they don’t feel like their voices are represented, or even respected.”

This is the most important takeaway from our research: American communities most likely to oppose “tough on crime” policy (thanks to their personal experience) are being pushed away from politics and from opportunities to steer policy change. 

In Tampa, ticketing practices work in tandem with an extremely harsh regime of felony disenfranchisement that drives Floridians away from politics more explicitly. Almost one-quarter of the 4.6 million Americans barred from voting due to felony convictions live in Florida. The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC) led the successful 2018 campaign to pass a state constitutional amendment restoring voting rights to Floridians with felony convictions, though their victory was diminished by subsequent state legislation requiring fines and fees payments before voting rights were restored, leaving more than 1 million people without access to the ballot. Traffic stops affect an even larger share of Florida residents.

“Criminalizing any kind of behavior can have unintended consequences,” FRRC deputy director Neil Volz told Bolts. “Voting is a reflection of our belief that we’re part of the system, that our voice matters, that we can take that past pain and turn it into something productive.”

The post A Police Stop Is Enough to Make Someone Less Likely to Vote appeared first on Bolts.

Each of the previous three states to consider voter-ID ballot measures—Missouri in 2016, and Arkansas and North Carolina in 2018—had approved them by at least 10 points each. In Arizona, a 2004 voter-ID measure that was less stringent than Proposition 309, had passed comfortably, too. At least on this issue, the concerns of organizations like the ACLU and the League of Women Voters kept being ignored.

But Arizonans on Nov. 8 bucked this history, despite Proposition 309’s huge fundraising advantage and the lack of organized opposition. They narrowly rejected the measure by about 18,000 votes, or 0.76 percent.

It was the first defeat in ten years for a ballot measure increasing voter ID mandates in the U.S., according to the National Conference of State Legislatures’ database. (Minnesotans rejected a voter ID measure by eight percentage points in 2012.)

Local advocates on both sides of the measure told Bolts that they were surprised by the outcome but explained it by naming several factors, starting with antipathy to Trumpism.

“Fundamentally, I just don’t think we can look at this one in a vacuum,” said Sarah Gonski, a Phoenix-based elections lawyer who has represented Democratic candidates in the state in recent cycles. 

The measure was placed on the ballot on a party-line vote by Arizona’s GOP-controlled legislature, which spent much of the past two years rehearsing the former president’s lies about widespread fraud in the 2020 election. This inextricably linked it to controversial, top-of-the-ticket Arizona candidates who ran for office this year on election denialism, local politicos said. Proposition 309 appeared just down the ballot from far-right election deniers Kari Lake, who lost the governor’s race, Blake Masters, who lost the U.S. Senate race, and Mark Finchem, who lost the secretary of state’s race. 

“I think that rejecting this initiative, which is a policy proposal that gets a lot of support usually, is intimately tied up with rejection of the Big Lie narrative that has pervaded Arizona’s political environment for the last two years,” said Gonski.

Bie Lie figures have been wildly successful in radicalizing people who previously trusted standard elections procedures. But their efforts have also made the broader electorate pay far more attention to once-obscure matters of election administration. Secretary of state races this year drew record spending, especially on the Democratic side.

Advocates in Arizona say this new context prepared many to more carefully consider proposed changes to voting rules than they may have in the past.

“I think that the population is a lot more interested in what used to be pretty dry, bureautic understandings of the way ballots are processed and the way election security is run,” said Gonski, who is now a senior policy advisor at the Institute for Responsive Government. “They’re paying attention and they’re interested to know so much more about elections and the way they work, and that does a huge amount for people understanding how secure our elections actually are.”

J.D. Mesnard, the Republican state senator who authored Proposition 309, has defended his proposals in recent years by saying that lawmakers should address people’s concerns about fraud even if there is no underlying evidence for them. In an interview with Bolts, he echoed the analysis that Arizonans voted down his initiative as part of rejecting efforts to revisit the 2020 election. 

“To the extent that anybody sees bills focused on improving the integrity and security of our elections, and thinks the only reason you’re running them is because of the 2020 election, this all gets tangled up with people’s sentiments about President Trump and 2020,” he said. 

Mesnard added that his frustration is with Democrats, not Trump: “I’m not trying to place blame on him; don’t get me wrong,” he said. “The opposition did a relatively consistent job of saying this is all feeding into the quote-unquote Big Lie.”

Then there’s the fact that Proposition 309 was a notably harsh voter ID law. It was more restrictive than the measures passed in the last decade in Nebraska, Missouri and Oklahoma. And it zipped far beyond the voter ID law Arizona adopted in 2004.

The measure would have required anyone voting in person to use a photo ID: This would have eliminated voters’ current ability to present two documents as alternatives to a photo ID—say, a bank statement, lease agreement, or utility bill. 

It would also have made it harder for Arizonans to vote by mail, a widespread approach to voting there. Ballotpedia found at least 75 percent of the state’s voters cast ballots by mail in every general election between 2014 and 2020. Proposition 309 would have added more requirements for mail voters: They would have also had to fill out and enclose an affidavit including their driver’s license or ID card number, the last four digits of their Social Security number, or a unique registration number assigned to them by the state’s elections office.

The state has enabled voting by mail since the early 1990s. By 2007, when the legislature created a permanent early voting roll, “Arizona had so many people voting by mail that we literally couldn’t keep up with the applications,” Patrick said.

She added, “Arizonans have been doing this for a long time, and they love to do it, until and unless you have a presidential candidate, and then an incumbent president, suggesting voting by mail is fraudulent.”

Patrick, who now works as co-CEO of The Election Center, the national organization representing state and local elections officials, said Arizonans have had a long time to observe that stricter voter ID requirements don’t just ensnare fraudsters. Not everyone has an identification card, and some who do have ID that lacks a photo or an address.

“These are people saying, ‘I voted for that proposition in 2004, but I didn’t think it would affect me because it was just about fraud and it was just going to affect those other people,’” Patrick said. “Arizonans remember that, and they know that you can be a valid, eligible voter and not have an ID that is required under these specific types of laws.”

Native voters would have felt the brunt of the burdens proposed under Proposition 309, The Arizona Republic documented in October. Many tribes use identity cards that lack photos or home addresses, or otherwise don’t line up with state government standards.

“The reality for Native Americans who don’t have the same type of access to services whether it is the government, or any other things, this just needlessly complicates our ability to vote,” Kris Beecher, a lawyer in Arizona who is a member of the Navajo Nation, told The Republic. Nationwide analyses show that voter ID laws burden more people of color and reduce their participation.

That was of primary concern for groups that advocate for tribal communities, said Angela Willeford, intergovernmental relations project manager for the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community.

“We’re nonpartisan, but we said ‘vote no on 309’, and we never do that typically,” she told Bolts. 

Arizona Republicans likely won’t be able to pass new statutes restricting voting rights for at least the next four years; the governor’s office flipped blue last month for the first time since 2009, handing Democrat Katie Hobbs a veto pen. But the GOP still controls the legislature, and lawmakers could vote again to place a measure like Proposition 309 directly on the ballot, circumventing Hobbs. Mesnard told Bolts he isn’t sure it will. 

Since their defeat, Republicans like Lake and Finchem have fanned false conspiracies about the results and some lawmakers have signaled they will take up the issue.

But Patrick said state and local elections administrators in Arizona are doing more public education than ever around how elections are run, and said she’s heartened that journalistic outlets are dedicating more resources to the elections beat. 

“We used to lament about toiling away in obscurity,” the former Maricopa County official said.

Opponents of 309 prevailed narrowly, but in defeating the measure, Gonski believes, “The people of Arizona started to say that we’re not prepared to give up easier access to democracy in exchange for more heightened security checks on top of what we have. They started to say, enough.”

The post In Rejecting Voter ID Measure, Arizonans Bucked History and Surprised Advocates  appeared first on Bolts.

Like many young people, Kristina Samuel started voting during college. She was a freshman biology student at Texas A&M University during the 2020 primaries, casting her first ballot that year at the Memorial Student Center in the heart of the school’s sprawling 5,200 acre campus. 

Samuel left what she thought was enough time to vote on Election Day, planning to visit the student center between her biology lecture that afternoon and a lab later that evening. But when she got there, the line to vote wrapped around the building, which was the only polling place on campus. Samuel, who says she waited about three hours to vote, recalls being the only person in her friend group who waited to cast a ballot in the election.

“I only stayed because I just knew how important it was, but I know so many people who are already on the fence about voting or who see it as a chore,” Samuel said. “They’re not going to wait in that three hour line.” 

Samuel, president of her university chapter of the voting rights group MOVE Texas, and other student activists have asked for a second campus polling place to accommodate the largest student body in the state, and one of the largest in the nation. This summer, however, local officials took the opposite approach. The Brazos County Commissioners Court in July decided to eliminate the student center as a polling place during the two weeks of early voting for the 2022 midterms. Now there will be nowhere on campus for students to vote between Oct. 24 and Nov. 4.

“I’m afraid the reality is that we’re going to have such lower student and young person turnout than we normally would in a very crucial election,” Samuel told Bolts. The student center will remain an Election Day polling place this year, but Samuel worries that eliminating the early voting there will lead to longer lines that deter students who try to vote on Nov. 8. 

Other TAMU students have denounced the majority-Republican commission for making this decision in early July, when most students were out of town for the summer. Ever since The Battalion, the university’s student newspaper, highlighted the exclusion in early August, they have asked officials to reinstate an early polling place on campus. The issue was not on the board’s agenda for its Aug. 30 meeting but several students attended to air their concerns. Sophomore Kevin Pierce stressed that the early polling place that officials picked instead for the precinct that includes the university—a new city hall building off campus—is about a half-hour walk each way for most students. 

“The reality is that it’s going to be a lot harder to vote, and there’s going to be a lot of people who don’t vote,” Pierce said.

“The convenience of the MSC (student center) as a voting location cannot be overstated,” echoed Christopher Livaudais, a junior and president of Texas Aggie Democrats. County records show the center has been an early voting location since at least 2016. Another student, Varum Vuppaladadiyam told commissioners that losing all early voting on campus after asking for an additional polling place “feels like a slap in the face.” The commissioners took no action on that day. A later meeting where they agreed to discuss the issue was canceled this week when two commissioners didn’t show up.

The TAMU students join a perennial fight to get or keep polling places on large college campuses in Texas. 

Students have fought for generations for equal voting access at Prairie View A&M University, the state’s oldest historically Black college and the second-oldest in the country. In 2018, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund sued on behalf of students when county commissioners refused to open a campus polling place for the same number of early voting days as in whiter areas of the county. The lawsuit followed decades of voter suppression against Prairie View students, including past attempts by officials to prosecute students for voting, as well as years of civil rights litigation and organizing over voting rights at the school; a federal judge decided against the students earlier this year, ruling that county commissioners had allocated early voting hours on an “objective and reasonable basis.” 

In 2018, the Texas Civil Rights project had to threaten a similar lawsuit to secure access to early voting hours for students at another large public university in the state. Miguel Rivera, voting rights outreach coordinator with the group, says that eliminating or limiting polling places on college campuses compounds larger patterns of disenfranchisement in the state. 

“These are all really big universities, and the demographics of our student population, our youth population, leans towards a population that is heavily people of color,” Rivera told Bolts. “This is just part of a long history in Texas of finding ways to disenfranchise specific segments of the population.”

Alex Birnel, advocacy director at MOVE Texas, says students in the state face numerous barriers to voting that can dissuade someone from casting their first ballot—from a voter ID law that accepts handgun licenses but not student IDs from public universities, to constantly shifting election laws and the cascade of polling place closures in the state over the past decade. Birnel also cited conservative attempts to stop schools from encouraging young people and staff to vote, and high schools across Texas that fail to follow a state law requiring them to offer at least two opportunities for all eligible students to vote every school year.  

“In Texas, we apply the idea of rugged individualism to voting—that if you really wanted to, you’d jump over the hurdle, climb the mountain, cross the river, jump over the moat of alligators to cast your ballot, but then we pretend rhetorically that it’s like going to the grocery store,” Birnel told Bolts. 

At the Brazos Commissioners Court meeting in July, one member dissented from the decision to remove the only polling site on campus. Russ Ford, a Republican, said his colleagues were “not really paying attention to what the people want and ask for,” adding, “we should be trying to get more people to vote, to make it easier to vote.” The four other commissioners, three Republicans and one Democrat, voted to approve the changes.

Nancy Berry, the Republican commissioner whose precinct includes the university, told Bolts that she recommended replacing TAMU’s early polling place with the city hall building after some of her nonstudent constituents approached her and asked for the change. She says they described campus as difficult to navigate for nonstudents.

“I had not heard from students, and I know all the students weren’t in, but we have a lot of students that come to summer school and they were in class and I didn’t hear from anybody,” Berry said, although county records show she was present at a July 2020 commission meeting when TAMU students delivered a presentation asking for more voting options on campus. “After we passed it, then I heard from students, and I’ve heard them loud and clear.” 

Berry and other county officials insist it was too late to change polling places for this November’s election by the time students started speaking out in August, although Bruce Erratt, legal counsel for the county, told local media after the Aug. 30 commission meeting that adding early voting hours at the student center for this election was “legal but not practical.” 

After ignoring the issue on Aug. 30, the commissioners added the future of the student center as a polling place to the agenda of their Sept. 13 meeting, and several TAMU students attended. But the meeting was canceled after two commissioners failed to show, in apparent protest of the county’s proposed tax rate, denying a quorum for the meeting.

Steve Aldrich, one of the commissioners who didn’t attend the meeting alongside Ford, told Bolts that the students protesting the change of early polling places should care more about property taxes, “because they end up paying them anyway…property taxes are also an issue for students.” Aldrich, a Republican, said he’s open to reconsidering the student center for an early polling place in future elections. But as for the possibility of two campus polling places, which was the goal for student organizers until commissioners slashed voting hours on campus this year, Aldrich suggested the cost of expanding campus polling places was too great. 

“I know for a fact that, from a cost perspective, the cities at least are on record as saying we don’t want to have more than one early voting center per precinct,” he said. 

Birnel says he hopes the debate over the polling place on campus ultimately sparks more organizing for greater investment in local elections infrastructure. 

“You can imagine this other kind of system, where we spend resources for local elections departments to hire staff to scale up our ability to reach people,” Birnel said. “You can imagine a state that cared about voting and would fund that, you can imagine a situation in which those local elections departments crowdsource from organizations that do outreach every day and develop best practices in order to turn the tide on the status quo.”

Birnel also pointed to climbing turnout among young voters in Texas in recent elections, which he calls “evidence of a Texas that’s changing.” 

“Every cycle we see those numbers, and it seems like it’s just a matter of continuing to organize young people,” Birnel said. “But for us organizers on the ground in the state, it’s also a matter of preserving the places where students can vote.”

The post Texas Students Are Again Battling the Closure of a Campus Polling Place appeared first on Bolts.

Still, Adona chose to run to be her county’s chief election official this year, after her boss decided to retire. What followed was an ugly campaign that drew attention from the Los Angeles Times after a mailer called Adona, who is Asian American, a “carpetbagger.” Adona has been furiously targeted by the local right since anti-mask protesters refused to wear a mask in the elections office in January, and a website sprang up to attack her.

One of Adona’s two opponents was the founder of a local group of election auditors; he claimed that the 2020 election was invalid and demanded an end to mail voting. The other, endorsed by local Republicans, called for new measures to address a supposed lack of election security, such as involving sheriff’s deputies in transporting mail ballots.

When the dust cleared last week, Adona won by an overwhelming margin. As of publication, she has secured nearly 70 percent of the vote against her two rivals, who received just above 30 percent combined.

Nevada County sticks out in California’s staunchly conservative northeast as a lightly blue area that voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and opposed Gavin Newsom’s recall last year. Still, Adona won by a considerably larger margin than the 14 percentage points by which Biden carried the county over Trump in 2020, or the 8 percentage points by which the recall election lost. 

Bolts talked to Adona about her reaction to her win and the political climate around voting procedures, and about what she would tell other election officials who face harassment. A self-proclaimed “elections junkie,” Adona recently received an award from the Election Verification Network, a national nonprofit, and contributed to a journal on election administration. She worked at the Democracy Fund, a foundation that works on buttressing democratic procedures, before joining Nevada County’s elections office.

Adona also addressed how election administrators can better help people register and vote; Nevada County has one of California’s highest turnout rates, though thousands remain unregistered, and the community’s spread-out nature carries challenges of its own. “Sending everyone a ballot is a great way to reach people,” Adona said, praising California’s recent reforms.

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After a difficult campaign, what is your reaction to your victory?

Obviously, I’m happy with the result. I think that in Nevada County, we have a large diversity of opinions out here, but I think for the most part, people want to see government employees with experience, they want their elected officials to act professionally, and they believe in hard work and fair play. And I think that’s what I represent. 

Your opponents lobbed false claims about the 2020 presidential election, which is something we’re seeing elsewhere in the country. How did that issue play out during your campaign?

What I have said, time and again, is that we run free and fair elections. I operate on facts, and the facts are that we had a smooth election and 2020, we had a smooth election during the gubernatorial recall, and again here for the 2022 primary. There are some people who try to stress test the system, and we catch them but voter fraud is so rare that it’s not going to overturn the outcome of any one election. I am an administrator, and out of all of my years working, I have not seen anything on a scale so large that it would cause me to worry about the election result. So I do invite members of the public, especially those who are skeptical, to come into our office to observe, ask us questions, and really learn how the process works.

One of your opponents demanded an audit of election results, and also attacked the reliability of mail voting. What is your response?

I think that, unfortunately, there are some people who’ve been fed a diet of myths and misinformation about the way elections work. I can say definitively that we audit our elections, and we do so under the law. From what I’ve understood, the type of audit that some of these folks are requesting is the same kind that occurred in Maricopa County, Arizona, and under California law, that is not a legal type of audit. We need to follow all of the procedures that are set forth by law, and one of those things is to only have authorized persons accessing voting equipment, any unauthorized access would decertify our equipment and probably result in penalties for election officials. I am not interested in creating liability for us. We follow the rules, we follow the procedures, we do accuracy testing ahead of every election, we do a post-election audit, we use only ballot paper that is certified by the state for use in California. We do it right. 

What was your reaction to the personal attacks that you also faced during the campaign?

It was hurtful, obviously, but it didn’t surprise me. It didn’t surprise me, one because there was an incident involving mask-wearing that occurred at my office that resulted in a restraining order against one of our citizens. And so I sort of expected that there would be some pushback on my candidacy. 

I think the other part of it is that there does seem to be a trend toward trying to intimidate or harass people who have demonstrated experience, and of the candidates who ran for my office, I was the only one with demonstrable experience. 

There have been many reports of harassment and intimidation against  election officials around the country. Have you had conversations about this with officials elsewhere? 

Oh, I’ve talked about it with my peers quite a bit. There was a wave of retirements after the 2020 election because I think it was really hard. In some cases, there were people who were going to retire anyway, and I think after many years of public service, one would think that you deserved to have a nice retirement. But there were others who maybe retired a little bit sooner than they wanted to because the environment just got too tough. And I respect that there are some people who choose not to speak publicly about that, but I’m pretty confident that fatigue from all of the threats, harassment and intimidation plays a huge factor for some people. 

Having just won this election with a towering majority, what would you tell other officials who may be sensing intimidation? 

What I would say to my peers is, one, you have an entire community who is on your side. So I think it’s comforting in a way to know that there are peers who understand what you’re going through. And what I’d also say is, the truth will be on our side; and I feel very fortunate that the truth was on my side because I was the one with experience, and I seem to have prevailed.

Nevada County has among the highest rates of voter turnout in California, far above the state’s average. What lessons do you draw from this?

If I had the magic formula for high turnout, then I would definitely package that up and sell it for a price. But I think that, for Nevada County, yeah, age is definitely one factor. I also think that Nevada County is highly educated and affluent. Statistically, the older you are, and if you own property, the more likely you are to vote. 

There’s also a strong culture of voting by mail here. Nevada County opted into the Voters Choice Act in 2018, an opt-in way of administering elections where you send everyone a ballot, establish vote centers and dropboxes, and permit voting for a long period. I think that sending everyone a ballot is a great way to reach people. 

So I would say to other counties, one great way to get people voting is to send them a ballot. And in California, we now have a requirement that all counties need to mail active registered voters a ballot, regardless of whether they’re part of the Voters Choice Act or not. [Editor’s note: California permanently adopted universal mail-in voting, meaning that every registered voter in the state will now be sent a ballot, last fall.]

Inversely, what are challenges for ballot access in a less dense, more spread out area like Nevada County?

I think that we have challenges that aren’t entirely dissimilar to more populated areas. We have a community of young people who, I think, aren’t used to voting, maybe don’t know so much about elections. So I think there’s an ongoing challenge to get at everyone. We do have a community college in Nevada County, and think that it’d be great to engage with young people even more. 

We also have a growing community of Spanish-speaking voters who could probably get more information from our office in Spanish, and perhaps, more engagement from our office for the Spanish-speaking community. 

We also have a very large unincorporated area; and everyone’s sort of spread out, so there’s a big chunk of our voters who may not have access to things like one of our drop boxes, they may have to rely on the US Postal Service to return their ballots. The good thing is that we have way more drop boxes than what is statutorily required of us. 

As of early 2020, about 14 percent of eligible voters were not registered to vote at all in Nevada County. How will you continue making sure that more people are registered? California adopted an automatic voter registration process but there are calls to improve it; are there ways to strengthen it?

California has automatic voter registration via DMV transaction, and there is an opportunity for the voter to opt out if they do not wish to be registered. You know, I think that the automatic registration program is sometimes confusing to voters: They’re not quite sure still how it works. So I think one of the things that we tried to do in our office is to let people know that voter registration is part of every DMV transaction, regardless of whether the voter wants that to be the case or not. I think the easiest thing, that I have no control over, is making sure that the interaction between the voter and the DMV results in clear directions for the voter on how registration plays a role in that transaction.

People retain the right to vote when detained in the local jail, but we often see major issues of access in this space. How do you ensure those eligible voters can cast ballots? 

We work with the jail facility, and we make sure to provide voter registration cards and information about elections. So if you are registered, and if your registration is updated, you receive your ballot while you are in custody at the jail. The inmate has to work with the facility in order to get that ballot, and then figure out a way to return it, but like I said we send everyone a ballot by mail. 

I think that, obviously, voter education is made tougher if you are incarcerated, so we do try to send materials and informational guides to people who are currently housed at the jail, and I think it’s up to them whether or not they want to participate. But you know, I do think that there’s probably a misconception that because you are incarcerated that you just don’t have the right to vote; there’s also the issue of someone who doesn’t realize that even though they’re on parole, they have a right to vote. There’s a lot I would like to be able to communicate to folks. . 

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post “The Truth Was On My Side”: Election Official Beats Back Fraud Conspiracies appeared first on Bolts.

As many states postpone primaries due to the coronavirus outbreak, Oregon still plans to hold its May elections. “Because Oregon votes by mail, we do not have to be concerned about social distancing issues at polling places that so many other states are struggling with,” Secretary of State Bev Clarno said last week. “Many states are looking to implement our vote by mail system as a safer way to conduct elections in November.” 

Oregon adopted a vote-by-mail system in 1998, and four other states have followed since (Colorado, Hawaii, Utah, and Washington). In these states, all registered voters receive a ballot; they then mail it back or drop it off at a designated location. 

Calls to expand vote-by-mail nationwide are now ubiquitous in the face of social distancing. 

California is moving in that direction. Officials in Arizona and New Mexico want authorization to send ballots to all voters. Advocates and scholars made the case for universal mail voting weeks ago. And some federal bills would help states get there. 

In many states, though, implementing vote-by-mail would require a lot of work. It is a shift that raises challenges ranging from logistics and capacity to concerns about voter access and safeguards against suppression.

To unpack these challenges, I talked to Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser at the Democracy Fund who in 2016 co-authored “The New Realities of Mail Voting” with the Bipartisan Policy Center. A former elections administrator in Arizona, Patrick was appointed to the Presidential Commission on Election Administration by President Barack Obama. 

We discussed how states should navigate the logistics of expanding mail voting and ensure that no one is left behind. Our wide-ranging conversation is transcribed below. 

“Time is of the essence,” she said. “Each individual state is going to have to look at exactly what their capacity is to get this stuff out.”

That’s largely because states are starting from vastly different rules. Some states such as Arizona would have little trouble implementing all-mail voting since mail voting is already widespread there. But many others, such as New York, have little experience processing large numbers of mail votes. In fact, in 17 states voters must still provide an excuse when they request an absentee ballot — a basic obstacle to scaling up the availability of mail voting that Patrick called on states to lift. (In one of them, Virginia, lawmakers passed a bill ending this requirement in February; it now awaits the governor’s signature. Pennsylvania took that step last fall.)

Patrick laid out basic logistical building blocks that states must promptly work through if they are to increase the availability of mail voting, let alone move toward Oregon’s system.

Who will print the ballots? How will instructions be designed? Will the return postage be prepaid? Who will process applications, stuff envelopes, and open them upon return, especially in small offices that lack elaborate equipment? Will voters be able to confirm that they sent ballots on time? And how will counties make sure to reach out to voters about mismatched or missing signatures before throwing away a potentially valid ballot?

Addressing these questions is crucial to ensuring that all eligible voters access and cast ballots. In 2018, Georgia’s populous Gwinnett County drew headlines and lawsuits for rejecting a high number of mail ballots, predominantly from people of color. Onerous requirements, missing resources, insufficient assistance, or a failure to check in with voters about potential issues could end up excluding many voters. Conducting such check ins is also important to guard against fraud, Patrick noted.

Advocates have also warned that even vote-by-mail systems need to retain in-person voting centers and in-person services, which some people need and others are likelier to use. Those must now also be retooled due to the pandemic, as the Brennan Center laid out in an extensive report last week. 

Patrick agrees. “States that have all-mail elections have offered some level of voter-servicing to cover eligible voters who may need personal attention,” she said. “You would just want to always make sure that there is still… some in-person solution for voters so they don’t fall through the cracks.” As examples, she pointed to Native voters with non-traditional addresses and to more transient voters who may need to update their registrations.

Voter registration also still largely rests on in-person interactions at motor vehicle departments and other agencies and by nonprofits that step up in places where public authorities do little outreach. Many states are behind when it comes to letting people register to vote or update their registrations online.  

“There are a variety of solutions out there,” Patrick said. “It’s just we all are going to have to be really creative and I think everyone’s head is reeling right now with the implications of what we’re facing.”

The Q&A was condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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As some states postpone their primaries, there are growing calls for states to ramp up vote by mail. States have very different rules at the present in terms of the availability and scope of mail voting. What would it take for states to move to a vote-by-mail system?

Right now you have two extremes. There are five states that already do all vote by mail, and where everybody gets their ballot mailed to them. 

There are other states, like California and Arizona, where large percentages of voters are already voting by mail, 70 to 80 percent of them. It would be easier for them to scale up.

But then when we look at the 17 states that require an excuse in order to vote absentee, numbers are very low; maybe single digit percentages of their population are voting by mail currently. It would be the most difficult for those 17 states to really ramp up in the same kind of way. [One of those states, Virginia, has passed a bill removing the requirement. It is on the governor’s desk.]

So there’s really a tiered approach: If this were to roll out, it would be easier for some states, and far more difficult for others.

What about the states between these two ends of the spectrum, between those states where all or most people receive a mail ballot and those states that still require an excuse to vote?

That interim is really a mixed bag. In most cases, voters have to still put in an application each time they want to vote by mail. What happens then is that more and more voters send in applications. When a tipping point happens and local elections offices can’t physically process applications in time, states establish a permanent list: When I lived in Arizona, I said I permanently wanted to get my ballot in the mail. Now in Arizona and California, they have 65-75 percent of voters getting their ballots by mail. At some point, it doesn’t make sense to have a polling place in every precinct if few of your voters are showing up in person. That’s when Colorado, Washington and others went to all vote by mail, but still have some in person options if we need to get a ballot replacement or need some additional assistance.

When you have everyone on a permanent list, that gives you the efficiencies in both time and resources to be able to put it towards getting the ballots out. For instance, in Georgia, they just moved their primary date; if they decide everyone has to mail in an application to get their ballot by mail, those local offices are going to have thousands if not tens of thousands, and in the large areas hundreds of thousands, of applications to have to process. That’s going to take a lot of time and resources and energy, as opposed to just mailing everybody a ballot to begin with.

So that argues for sending every registered voter a ballot, rather than waiting for applications. How should we keep the huge range in current practices in mind when thinking about what states should prioritize, given the time left until the remaining primaries and until November?

A lot of it is going to have to do with timing. Time is of the essence. It’s going to be difficult for the low participation-tiered states to ramp up and have voters make a request for the ballots and get the ballots mailed out and processed in time. Many of these small offices, it’s one election official (and they don’t just do elections, they’re also the clerk of the court and the assessor). For that person, they very well may be taking the ballot, folding it up by hand, putting it in the ballot envelope, hand-addressing it and mailing it out because now they may have a dozen or two dozen. If they suddenly have a few thousand of them, there just aren’t enough hours in the day. 

Each individual state is going to have to look at exactly what their capacity is to get this stuff out. Do they have the print vendors and the industry support set up? 

You’re describing very practical challenges, that this is about figuring out basic building blocks, like who prints these ballots and stuffs the envelopes.

Places like Nevada where they’re using a touchscreen voting system for their early voting, they actually haven’t been printing up ballots for those voters. That further complicates the challenge to moving solely to vote by mail for states that have a lot of voters that vote early in person and are not using paper ballots. For the states that are already used to printing up paper ballots, the challenge will be actually getting ballots mailed out. That’s where you run into challenges with buying envelopes by the millions, and it’s not like these are just regular old envelopes that you can go down to Home Depot and buy or to Office Depot.

If a state that now has 3 percent of their voters vote by mail decides we’re going to go all vote by mail, if they have poorly designed envelopes that have a lot of statutory requirements on all the language that has to be on there (the affidavits and all these things that we know can be a problem in going through the Postal Service mail stream), if they are just going to ramp up their existing program that doesn’t follow best practices, they’re going to have a lot of problems. Bad design is one of our biggest issues right now. If, however, states look to the other states that have already done this and have learned their lessons, we’re going to be far better off.

You’ve talked about challenges with processing applications (which can be reduced by sending a ballot to all) and with sending out the ballots. What about when voters return them?

The one good thing in all of this is that we don’t have to worry about whether or not the postal service can service that volume, because they can. Even if they had an influx of 300 million pieces, it’s nothing like their peak season, which is the holiday season. If the pandemic slows down delivery standards, there could be a slowing of the process; that’s where we need to make sure best practices are in place.

I think best practices in the return of the ballot is, one, prepay to postage if you can (that’s what Maricopa County does, what the state of Washington does). 

Allow for the ballots to come in after election day with appropriate documentation that they were mailed on time: Voters can mail back their ballot and have a postmark or other postal service data to make sure that their ballot was mailed by the close of the polls on Election Day, and that we’re not rejecting a ballot that comes in on Wednesday for Tuesday’s election. And also making sure that there are dropboxes to return them.

It’s also that states have a process in place for voters to remedy any issues. Some people call it the curing of the ballot: If a signature doesn’t match, election officials are reaching out to that voter in order to find out, did they really sign it and their hand was in a cast (which is what most of the answers were when I called voters), or is the voter going to say that I never signed my ballot, I haven’t voted. The curing is both making sure that an eligible ballot isn’t disqualified because the signature doesn’t match, but it’s also a security measure to identify if there was someone intervening on that voter’s ability to participate. 

If more and more states move to a vote by mail situation, results will be delayed, because people will take longer in getting their ballots back in, and then they have to be processed. I think that no matter what happens in November, everyone’s just going to need to be patient and make sure that all the eligible votes that are cast have time to be processed and counted accurately. When you talk about places like New England or Michigan, Wisconsin, elections are conducted at the very localest of levels. It’s in the village, in the town, maybe a township, and very rarely at the county level. When you have those very small units of government conducting the election, they don’t have central tabulation equipment to count ballots quickly. They would have the ability to do it if they’re given the amount of time it takes in order to do that kind of tabulation.

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You just mentioned dropboxes, and earlier you talked about all-mail states retaining in-person options. Alaska’s Democratic Party has announced it is cancelling all in-person voting for their primary, and replacing it with all-mail voting. So why do you think it’s important to maintain ways to vote in person?

Offering an in-person alternative has traditionally been important for voters who may need assistance in making certain that their registration is current and correct so that they get the correct ballot, or in overcoming obstacles they may face based on limited English proficiency or a disability. States that have all-mail elections have offered some level of voter-servicing to cover eligible voters who may need personal attention. 

Voters need to have an opportunity to come in person if they need to to remedy any problems that might arise, and to drop off their ballot. In Arizona, the majority of voters tend to not mail it back, they tend to drop it off on election day at the polling places. Solutions may look more like drive-thru voting than what we consider a polling location looks like.  I don’t see cancelling all in-person options as a possibility in November.

What other safeguards are needed in the mail voting system itself to ensure it leaves no one behind? Besides people who may need in-person assistance, as you mentioned, I’m thinking of people who may have trouble accessing mail. What have we learned from states, and what should new states be thinking of, in terms of guaranteeing everyone’s access to the ballot?

We know that in rural America and in Indian country non-traditional addresses can be a challenge for mail delivery and for addressing for voter registration purposes. Those are some known challenges that are being worked on. And so if a state were to move more to vote by mail, they would just want to be very conscious of that and work with both tribal leaders and their rural communities to make sure that it’s well defined where voters get their mail, whether it’s at a PO Box, or a cluster box like we have in in some areas.

We also know that homeless populations, individuals that are in shelters and things of that nature are also an additional challenge. And so just making sure that the already identified populations are being taken care of. Another one are care facilities and nursing facilities, which are not going to be polling places because we don’t want to send in the general population when we have the vulnerable population living in those facilities. Following some of these best practices that states that have done this have worked through is going to be really, really important.

One specific example of ballot access is that many people in jail and prisons can vote, for instance if they have not been convicted yet, which typically though not necessarily involves absentee voting, but often people aren’t able to access ballots. The Intercept just reported on this in Arizona. To what extent is shoring up mail voting, and putting in place this strong infrastructure, helpful for people to exercise their rights in spaces like prisons and jails?

For the last couple of years, felony re-enfranchisement has gotten a lot of attention. For me, it’s just as important and critical that voters who are awaiting trial have the capacity to interact. They haven’t had their rights taken away, they have every right to participate. I think that when there is a more robust system in place for absentee voting or vote by mail, all elements of the population would benefit, as long as everyone still has a focus on those populations, like incarcerated individuals, like voters in Indian Country, like voters in nursing facilities, that might need some additional attention to make sure that their rights are being equally represented.

Another challenge is that in-person interactions are central to how we think of registration, not just voting. Sme states don’t even have online voter registration. Even those that have people going to DMV or other government agencies, and automatic voter registration still often depends on those interactions. There are grassroots registration drives. If you deemphasize in-person interactions, what then can be done to protect registration?

I will tell you this is one of my big concerns. Currently, for those places that don’t have automatic or automated voter registration, we rely very heavily on our third party groups and nonprofit organizations and the political parties to help with voter registration. Because so many of those rely on that in person interaction (standing in front of the library, being at the county fair), those sorts of things are really not going to be happening right now. So my concern is exactly that states that don’t have an automatic or automated process will not get as many people registered to vote.

If the end goal is making sure that every eligible voter is registered and that their registration is current, how do we do that on the social media platforms and through other electronic means, if we’re not going to be able to have those in person interactions with people? Everyone is having to rethink all of the activities that we’ve done in the past.

Some states have not implemented online voter registration. Can they do that by the fall? What else should states be looking at?

With everything in elections it all kind of depends on the state. There are some states that have updated their systems with a vendor that has an online voter registration module, those states are more uniquely positioned to be able to do it quickly than a state that’s using their 20-year old statewide voter registration system; they will not be able to get it stood up in time. And that’s where we need to try and be creative and think through what are the best ways in which we can get people registered and whether that’s having a state make sure that they join ERIC and can identify unregistered voters on their DMV rolls and reach out to those voters proactively. 

There are a variety of solutions out there. It’s just we all are going to have to be really creative and I think everyone’s head is reeling right now with the implications of what we’re facing.

There are many reports in recent years of voter suppression, poll closures, disenfranchisement laws, which is to say about public authorities actively making it difficult for certain groups to vote. Now, a lot of what we have discussed would require good faith efforts on the part of state and local governments, lawmakers to change the law, and administrators. So there’s an asymmetry here between some of what’s been happening with voter restrictions, and what is needed at the moment. How do you think about this concern that some people may have that public authorities in many places are not good faith actors when it comes to voting laws?

I think, in the last five to seven years, there has been a lot of changes in election laws and policy across the country. More states have online voter registration. More states have automatic voter registration. More states have no-excuse absentee by mail. More states have in-person early voting. So opportunities for voters to vote and register, thankfully, I think are growing. That’s not to say that there aren’t specific strategies in some states to implement really strict voter ID, or other methods that would curtail certain people from participating. We now are all finding ourselves in a place and time where I understand that we need to think critically about the changes that people are implementing. I know for myself, I can only move forward with good faith efforts and try to speak on behalf of the voters to policymakers and policy implementers. There tends to be a blurring of the lines between the people who are making the laws and the ones who have to implement the election under those laws, and sometimes those two get conflated, and that’s not always necessarily fair. And that’s why I think a lot of election officials in some places are very happy when friendly litigation comes along.

In many states what we talked about would require changes in law. How much can be done, then, do you think, without needing a statutory change? 

First, is there the legislative political will to be more expansive and remedy some of the ways in which voters are able to interact with the franchise? If there isn’t, under emergency powers, what can a governor’s office do? And what can a secretary of state or a state board of elections do with their administrative powers? We’ve seen in the past secretaries of state issue directives to the county boards with the local officials on how to manage certain things. It’s all going to be a question of what is the action that’s being proposed, and then who has the responsible statutory authority to make that decision.

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In that spirit, I’d like to return to specific groups of states and how they can confront these challenges. For states that already have significant mail voting, like Florida, Texas or Arizona, but that do not send ballots to every registered voter, what would it take to put in place an Oregon-like universal mail program by November?

Arizona, 60 to 80 percent of their voters are already getting their ballot by mail. States like Arizona are positioned to go all vote by mail, they have the infrastructure, the local county governments are already processing large volumes; the county I was in [Maricopa], we had one and a half million ballots that we would send out, so adding another 500,000 to that is nothing. 

If the states that already are close to 40 or 50 percent of their voters are voting by mail, I think that they could move to a full vote by mail system by mailing out ballots to everybody and then offering the in-person solutions or in-person assistance for voters before election day. 

I think that Florida would probably be able to do it if they’re given enough time and resources. They also have a lot of early in-person voting, so it would be a little bit harder for Florida, but because they do have a third of their electorate voting by mail, the large jurisdictions have the right kind of central tabulation of equipment; they have the procedures and protocols set up to be able to expand. So I think they would be able to pull it off if given enough time and resources. But in some of these jurisdictions, people are literally hand opening up every single ballot envelope, and when you have a few hundred thousands of them, it takes a while. 

Let’s move to the states with the smallest amount of mail voting, states such as Virginia, which is now in the process of enabling no-excuse absentee voting, and other states that have not even done that. Let’s say they do in coming months. Still, you suggested it may be difficult for them to go all-mail by November. So what is it that you think they should think about in terms of how to protect voting?

I think those states should all remove the excuse requirement; if they don’t have the legislative support to do that, they should be designating which reasons voters can use for this pandemic. So is it they need to check the box for 7a, or what is it on the application? 

They also need to make sure that applications can be done online or by the telephone. I think that the recent [U.S. Senator Ron] Wyden bill that said applications can be sent electronically is really helpful, as well as making sure that voters could call in and request a ballot be mailed to them. and then making sure that they are implementing best practices like the design of the envelopes to make sure that they’re clearly marking their envelopes with the official mail logo so that the postal service knows these are ballots and can handle them appropriately.

So all of the practical questions you talked about come into play the most in those states since they have not done anything approaching the scale of a significant mail program.

Yes, it really comes into play in all the states that aren’t currently using best practices in their design. Virginia has had some major changes in the last couple of years, and they actually use ballot tracking systems, so they’re not as far behind as they were three or four years ago. But a lot of the New England states that haven’t seen a lot of vote by mail, and quite frankly, New York—the state of New York has very little vote by mail. Michael Ryan in New York City would have a very difficult time ramping up all vote by mail for all the boroughs by November. 

So then what does expanded mail voting look like in New York?

It is the case that you could mail out a ballot to everyone in New York City: They have other mailings that they do, they mail out other materials to all of their voters. 

But you would want to make sure that you still had some in person activity being offered because the population, one, is so vast, two it moves very frequently. So there are things that could be done, but you would just want to always make sure that there is still, particularly in New York State, some in-person solution for voters so they don’t fall through the cracks.

What is the role of the federal government in all of this? We’ve mostly talked about states, but you also mentioned Ron Wyden’s vote-by-mail bill. 

There are a couple of things that the federal government can do. One is to recognize that any bill that puts additional onus on the states and localities to move to a vote by mail situation needs to have some support monetarily and some resources. I don’t think there are counties out there that have the capacity or the ability to stand up full on vote by mail on their own.

If they are going to contemplate putting forth some legislation on vote by mail, that it should be promoting the best practices, even saying they should use ballot tracking and full service through the postal service. We already pay for the postage for military and overseas voters, so that is certainly something that could be contemplated for all vote by mail. I don’t foresee this Congress doing that, but I throw that in there.

The post “Time Is of the Essence”: How States Can Shore Up Mail Voting appeared first on Bolts.