New York Times: How Prepared Are These 7 Battlegrounds for the Election? A Readiness Report

In Georgia, the state’s voting machines have malfunctioned in three consecutive elections this year alone.

In Pennsylvania, election officials are staring down possibly the biggest ballot processing backlog in the country, with no means of even touching the ballots until polls open on Election Day.

And in North Carolina, thousands of submitted absentee ballots are currently in purgatory, neither rejected nor accepted but “under review,” amid a back-and-forth court battle over so-called ballot curing.

Short on money, overworked and under enormous pressure, many battleground states are still in the process of standing up their electoral systems, a building-a-plane-midflight reality for a democratic process that is being challenged daily by court cases, new laws and surges in the coronavirus. …

In the second case, the state is keeping at least 7,000 absentee ballots with potential issues in limbo while a court sorts out a legal challenge on whether the North Carolina State Board of Elections can contact voters and allow them to fix, or “cure,” any issues with their ballots.

In that case, a federal judge on Wednesday blocked officials from allowing voters to “cure,” or address a missing witness signature but said that deficient information, like a missing or incomplete address, could still be cured. Appeals from both sides are pending. So now, thousands of voters whose ballots are in limbo — roughly about 40 percent of which belong to Black voters statewide — are awaiting word from county election officials as to how to proceed.

While that ruling is likely to draw an appeal, any prolonged legal uncertainty for the absentee ballots could threaten a voter’s opportunity to cure the ballot in time.

“The longer a voter says, ‘Oh I turned in my ballot, it must be good,’ when they do finally hear from the county, they might be more suspicious about it, considering how much disinformation there is going around,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at Common Cause, a voting rights group.