Voting & Elections

“But it’s the implementation and access to those drop boxes that become the question,” McClenaghan said. “The lines for our primary in August were cars in line to drop off their ballots on election night.” Among the challenges, she said: Figuring out where drop boxes are and which ones are available round the clock, as opposed to only when staff are present. She recommends voters check with their local Supervisor of Elections office. “It’s a new thing,” she said, “so everybody’s learning.”

The House is poised to pass a modified COVID-19 relief package to provide assistance to Americans whose lives have been upended by the pandemic, and to bolster pillars of our democracy strained under the national health crisis. The Senate must act after refusing to move on a more robust relief package passed by the House in May. It is past time for Senate Republicans to move to help the American people instead of focusing on trying to ram through the confirmation of another Supreme Court Justice while ignoring the plight of their constituents.

"In June, Georgia voters were denied their right to vote when polling places ran out of ballots. If Secretary Raffensperger has taken any action to prevent that from happening again -- for example, by increasing the number of paper ballots in each polling place -- we haven’t heard about it."

“Double voting is not really an issue in the United States,” said Common Cause Director of Voting and Elections Sylvia Albert, adding that “it’s really hard to vote twice.”

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.”

The Trump administration attorneys said the lawsuit was premature since it’s impossible to know who will be affected by the exclusion order before the head count is finished and whether the Census Bureau will come up with a method for figuring out who is a citizen. But Gregory Diskant, an attorney for one of the plaintiffs, Common Cause, said waiting to challenge the president’s memo until after the apportionment numbers are turned in would create even greater problems.