PBS News Hour: Mail-in voting amid pandemic and protests previews challenges for November election

PBS News Hour: Mail-in voting amid pandemic and protests previews challenges for November election

“I am trying to see today as an opportunity to show the cracks in the system that we can fix before November,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for voting rights group Common Cause. Albert said there is concern that in the November election, people who request absentee ballots will not receive them, and there will be fewer polling places as counties consolidate them in response to the pandemic. “There needs to be a rational level of consolidation that ensures that communities who especially have not used vote by mail in the past or cannot use vote by mail — such as disabled communities or people without addresses, homeless, transient — that there are enough polling locations to serve those people,” Albert said.

Five minutes before polls closed in Washington, D.C., and 55 minutes after the city’s curfew went into effect, James Harnett arrived at his polling place a mile from where hundreds of protesters stood outside the White House.

Harnett estimated nearly 100 voters were in line, trying to stand six feet apart, when police in two cruisers patrolling the streets told voters over megaphone that they were violating the curfew and had to go home.

Harnett said another police officer assigned to the polling location “frantically ran around telling people they could stay in line.”

The ongoing pandemic combined with protests made for the perfect storm for election mishaps, said Harnett, who serves on local government. “Many predicted this is something that would happen.” …

It was one illustration of many across the country showing some of the challenges of handling more mail-in voting as localities prepare for November’s elections.

While many cities and states are offering more ways to vote, or offering new kinds of locations, their budgets have not increased, leaving questions about how state and local governments will bear the costs involved in accommodating more mail balloting — from paying additional staff to physically printing thousands more ballots. They are also facing opposition to expanding voting by mail from President Donald Trump and other prominent Republican lawmakers arguing, without evidence, that the process opens up elections to fraud.

Voting rights activists are hoping setbacks now will become lessons learned and lead to solutions later.

“I am trying to see today as an opportunity to show the cracks in the system that we can fix before November,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for voting rights group Common Cause.

Albert said there is concern that in the November election, people who request absentee ballots will not receive them, and there will be fewer polling places as counties consolidate them in response to the pandemic.

“There needs to be a rational level of consolidation that ensures that communities who especially have not used vote by mail in the past or cannot use vote by mail — such as disabled communities or people without addresses, homeless, transient — that there are enough polling locations to serve those people,” Albert said. …

According to Albert, mailing ballot requests to voters is one possible solution to encourage turnout, but to do that states will need the funding as “elections officials do not have the staff and infrastructure to deal with the number of requests coming in.”

“That’s something that we can prepare for,” she said. “We can create online absentee request portals. We can hire more staff. We can purchase machines to stuff ballots and send them out. These are things that we can do to prepare if we have the resources to do so.”