Vote-By-Mail

Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at Common Cause, also noted that fears over mass voter intimidation efforts in past years have not materialized, even when Trump urged supporters to go to the polls in 2016. “He likes the chaos, he wants to create chaos, because he thinks it benefits him,” Albert said. ‘We don't want to give him what he wants, which is fear and intimidation and chaos.”

President Trump further attempted to confuse voters and undermine the integrity of our elections tonight. Instead of encouraging people to participate in the political process, he continued to spread lies to try to delegitimize the election results. Voters should know the truth: voting by mail is a secure, tried, and tested process with checks, balances, and safeguards. 

“This could be 2000′s hanging chad in Pennsylvania,” said Suzanne Almeida, interim director of the state chapter of the nonpartisan watchdog Common Cause. “Potential challenges, delays in results, questions on which ballots count and who counts them — there are just a lot of questions, and that could open up Pennsylvania to a lot of uncertainty.” The group is working with election officials statewide, emphasizing clear and consistent guidelines for dealing with questionable marks, such as when a voter circles a name or uses an X or a checkmark rather than filling in the oval — or even crosses out one selection and marks a second.

“The federal judiciary is not being a great avenue for relief,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at Common Cause, a nonpartisan nonprofit. “Some state courts have provided more. And that’s where you’ve seen more orders for expanded access.” ... The Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s ruling extending the ballot receipt deadline could be the first case to go before the U.S. Supreme Court. Normally, decisions made by a state’s highest court are the last word on election matters. “What this appeal is saying is that that state court got it so wrong that it can’t stand,” said Albert, adding, “That’s unusual.”

Some inconsistencies likely arose from confusion over the last-minute court rulings, according to Jay Heck, state director for Common Cause Wisconsin, a government watchdog group. The appeals court reversed the district court’s lifting of the witness requirement just days before the election, he noted, leaving election officials disoriented. Heck also pointed to Wisconsin’s “unusually decentralized” election administration system, in which 1,850 separate municipalities handle voter registration and absentee ballots.

“The silver lining of this decision from the state Supreme Court is now that we know the rules, we can educate voters about the rules,” said Suzanne Almeida, director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, a good-government group that works on voter access matters. “And I have every confidence that voters can learn the rules right. There are plenty of ways, plenty of places in election law where we require voters to know specific steps that they need to take. This is just one more of those,” Almeida said.