We’re going to have a catastrophe’: US faces
November election fiasco
The fight
to vote
US
elections 2020
The chaotic scenes in Georgia’s primary this week
could be a foretaste as states fail to take urgent action to secure the vote
Sam Levine
in New York
Fri 12 Jun
2020 12.00 BSTLast modified on Fri 12 Jun 2020 13.19 BST
Voters in
Georgia’s primary election this week struggled with long lines, new equipment
and social distancing.
The alarm
bells have been going off for months, but the election fiasco in Georgia on
Tuesday made it clear: America is ill-prepared to hold a fair presidential vote
in November, and is dangerously close to having an election disaster.
The Georgia
contest offered the most alarming preview to date of what could happen in
November without major overhauls, training and planning. Voters stood in line
to vote for upwards for four hours, saying they never received mail-in ballots
requested weeks ago. Local officials, forced to consolidate polling locations
because of Covid-19, were unable to manage the influx of voters and struggled
to operate new voting equipment.
Experts
worry that poll worker shortages, long lines and other delays in processing
requests for absentee ballots will only get worse in November, when there will
be more voters. Since March, voting advocates have been calling on states to
prepare for an election like no other, and quickly implement plans that
accommodate a surge in voters casting their ballots by mail for the first time
as well as robust turnout at the polls.
One
estimate places the cost of upgrading vote-by-mail systems across the country
at $4bn.
“We’re just
going to have a catastrophe in November,” said Michael McDonald, a professor at
the University of Florida who studies elections. “We’ve already passed the point
of catastrophic failure. It doesn’t get any better if we have two to three
times the number of people who are trying to vote in these polling locations.”
Not every
primary in the Covid-19 era has been a disaster, and there has been strong
turnout in many states as Americans have embraced voting by mail at
unprecedented levels. But Georgia was far from the only place where there have
been serious election problems.
Voters in
Nevada waited hours in line to vote in the state’s primary on Tuesday, even
after the state moved to conduct its election largely by mail. Earlier this
month, election officials in Pennsylvania and Washington DC struggled to meet
the crush of requests for absentee ballots and voters in the nation’s capital
waited hours to vote. Voters in Baltimore, Maryland didn’t get ballots and
faced long lines. In April, voters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, waited hours to
vote in the state’s primary as the city was forced to condense its usual 180
polling places into just five.
Most
glaring, voting groups say, has been the disproportionate impact the election
failures have had on communities of color. LaTosha Brown, a co-founder of Black
Voters Matter, told Politico it took her three hours to vote in her majority
African American precinct in Atlanta on Tuesday, but she saw no line at a
polling place in a predominantly white area later in the day. State officials
have launched an investigation into what went wrong in Fulton county, which
includes Atlanta.
“Black
voters in particular appear especially hard-hit,” said Kristen Clarke,
president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights
Under Law, which has closely monitored the primaries. “In some parts of the
country, it feels like officials are making reckless decisions that are a
recipe for disaster.”
Social
distancing is ignored as voters wait in an hours long line to vote at Fulton
county’s Park Tavern precinct in the coronavirus-delayed Georgia presidential
primary election in Atlanta, Georgia.
Even before
Covid-19, there were concerns about mass disenfranchisement in November; the
pandemic has only exacerbated them. Donald Trump is already making repeated
baseless accusations of voter fraud in what appears to be an effort to lay the
foundation for contesting the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
Activists
were already deeply concerned about the mass closure of polling places and the
Covid-19 pandemic has given election officials justification for doing so. More
than 1,600 polling places in jurisdictions previously covered by the Voting
Rights Act were closed between 2012 and 2018, according to a report by the
Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. That includes 214 polling
places in Georgia.
Democrats
and voting rights groups are also pushing states across the country to extend
the deadline by which absentee ballots need to arrive to be counted. Many
states require the ballots to arrive by election night, a cutoff that could
leave eligible voters disenfranchised. In Wisconsin, Democrats secured a court
order requiring the state to count ballots as long as they were postmarked
before election day and arrived within six days of the election.
More than
79,000 ballots that normally would have been thrown out were counted during the
extension (Trump won the state in 2016 by just under 23,000 votes).
There is
also growing concern about plummeting voter registration in recent months and
an unprecedented Republican effort to monitor the polls and challenge the
eligibility of voters who appear, something that could result in voter
intimidation. The Republican National Committee, freed from a decades-old court
order prohibiting them from such activity, is seeking to recruit up to 50,000
volunteers.
The window
for states to understand the problems from their primaries and implement
solutions for November is rapidly closing. Recommended deadlines for purchasing
necessary equipment and other measures are approaching and in some cases have
already passed. Republicans in Congress have also scaled back funding to help
states run elections, allocating just $400m so far, a small fraction of the
billions experts say is needed. The Republican National Committee also plans to
spend at least $20m to oppose efforts to expand vote by mail.
“If no one,
legislators/advocates/voters/election officials, listens to what is being said
it will be a debacle in November,” Tammy Patrick, who works on election
administration at the Democracy Fund, said in an email. “The primaries have
been the canary in the coalmine.”
New
state-issued voting machines proved problematic in a number of locations in
Georgia’s primary.
Meanwhile,
there have been some encouraging signs. After Wisconsin’s chaotic April
primary, the state’s bipartisan election commission released a detailed
analysis of what went wrong and unanimously voted to send an absentee ballot
application to all voters who hadn’t requested one for November. The commission
also moved to give local clerks – who were overwhelmed by ballot requests
during the primary – more help. California announced in May it would send a ballot to all registered
voters. Michigan – which saw extremely long lines at the polls during its March
primary – is also sending an absentee ballot request to all voters.
But other
signs suggest states may move in the opposite direction. In Georgia, Brad
Raffensperger, the state’s top election official, refused to acknowledge
systemic problems in the way the election was run this week, instead blaming
local election officials. In Iowa, Republicans are considering legislation that
would prohibit the secretary of state, Paul Pate, from sending absentee ballot
applications to all voters, something Pate, a Republican, did ahead of the
state’s June primary when there was record turnout. Ohio Republicans are also
considering legislation that would bar the state’s top election official from
paying for postage on absentee ballot requests and the ballots themselves.
“On the one
hand, it’s very concerning,” said Amber McReynolds, CEO of the National Vote at
Home Institute, which is advising election officials on how to prepare for
November. “On the other, what I would say is that this is a wake-up call.”
Stacey
Abrams, the 2018 Democratic nominee in Georgia who put voting rights at the
core of her campaign, said some states were better positioned for November
“because those states have an intention of actually letting every person vote”.
“It is not
that we don’t know the answer. It is that the Republican party in particular
has been resistant to solving the problem and that will put our elections in
jeopardy,” she said.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário