Tens of thousands of votes with mistaken candidates or voter names in Ohio and New York. Pennsylvania ballots tossed in the trash and dozens of prosecutions for the counts.
The enormous increase in demand for mail-in ballots due to the coronavirus three weeks before the US presidential vote is challenging the country’s ability to pull off a reliable election.
President Donald Trump believes it is ripe for bribery to vote by mail and has vowed to contest ballot counts.
“Away from control. Vote Rigged!!! “After reports that ballots with the wrong representatives sent to 50,000 citizens of Columbus, Ohio, a crucial state Trump wants to win for reelection, Trump tweeted on Friday.
Yet election observers agree that the procedure is going smoothly, amid some headline events, so far.
“There will be implementation failures all along its way,” stated Kevin Kosar, an American Enterprise Institute political analyst.
“The good news is, these errors are happening, but early on, they get caught,” he stated.
Horror Stories Primary
According to the University of Florida’s US Elections Initiative on Monday, almost 75 million mail-in ballots have been submitted or demanded so far this year, more than twice the 33 million in 2016.
But mistakes and failures in printing and mailing the ballots, incidents of mishandled ballots such as in Pennsylvania, and allegations of persons getting more than one vote have stoked attacks on the idea as a whole.
The concerns are backed by horror stories from the primaries early this year, especially in New York and Wisconsin.
Tens of thousands of persons in both states either refused to collect their mail ballots or got them too late to vote. Postmarks were not set on thousands of ballots by the postal service to indicate that they mailed on time.
Amber McReynolds, chief executive of the National Vote At Home Institute, stated that in the news and social media, a few incidents have erupted but “are not universal.”
“It is 2020, and everybody is incredibly responsive,” she said.
Simple printing and envelope insertion mistakes were the problems with Ohio and New York ballots that should have eliminated with proper supervision.
Is everything all the time going to be perfect? Oh, no. There will never be a flawless election” stated McReynolds.
“If we have two challenges out of 8,000 jurisdictions in two counties, then the bigger story is that it operates well in other locations.”
McReynolds, a retired Denver, Colorado, election director who helped set up the state’s compulsory by-mail voting scheme, said everybody is concentrating on postal ballots this year.
But in-person voting has its issues, she argued, especially computer breakdowns and long queues, a specific problem considering the Covid-19 pandemic, including those seen in Georgia on Monday.
“I think there are more issues with in-person elections, actually,” she said.
The Lawsuits
Today, on the day of the November 3 election, there would be difficulties. Three primary swing states that could determine the leader, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, McReynolds said, have not allowed itself enough time to open, check, and then to count millions of mailed ballots.
Kosar says the probably hundreds of cases sought over how to count mailed votes, as well as other procedure concerns, are what scares him.
Republicans have sought to reduce the influence of mail-in voting, as polls indicate that Democrats are far more likely to mail their votes to Republicans rather than to vote in particular.
They fought for a court decision in Pennsylvania to throw out votes if the elector chose the wrong envelope.
Republican lawyers secured a decision in South Carolina forcing observers as well as electors to sign envelopes for ballots. The question of votes refused may be critical.
In Florida, the 2000 presidential battle among Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore was settled by a 537-vote difference and angled on the Supreme Court blocking a massive recall that should have preserved thousands of discarded ballots.
