Boston Globe: Republicans fight expanded mail-in voting as coronavirus makes in-person elections dangerous

Boston Globe: Republicans fight expanded mail-in voting as coronavirus makes in-person elections dangerous

“If states around the country do not alter the current election procedures, they will be the next Wisconsin,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at the public interest watchdog group Common Cause. “This has now turned into a political fight.”

WASHINGTON — Forrest Lehman, an elections director in central Pennsylvania, watched Wisconsin’s primary unfold in the news last week with a sense of horror.

The snaking lines of masked voters risking their health to cast ballots in the middle of a pandemic and the sharp drop in polling sites in Milwaukee and other urban areas were a real-life premonition of what could happen if Pennsylvania holds its own primary, rescheduled to June 2, with in-person voting. …

Elections experts say expanding mail-in voting will be key to stopping widespread voter disenfranchisement in the remaining primaries — and, crucially, the November general election — as the coronavirus turns the simple act of voting at the local polling place into a potential public health nightmare.

But as the pandemic has spread in recent weeks, many Republicans from President Trump on down have remained staunchly opposed to some efforts to expand the practice, turning the once-mundane issue of mail-in balloting into the latest front in the party’s years-long effort to toughen voting rules.

The fight in Wisconsin, where Republicans in the state and a conservative majority on the US Supreme Court stopped Democratic attempts to postpone the election and loosen limits on absentee voting in it, could be the opening salvo in a new phase of the nation’s long-running battle over voting rights that has been turbocharged by the coronavirus outbreak.

“If states around the country do not alter the current election procedures, they will be the next Wisconsin,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at the public interest watchdog group Common Cause. “This has now turned into a political fight.”