If the primary elections are an indication, the Nov. 3 general election is on course to be a nightmare.
Not only will we likely not know the election’s outcome in a timely manner, but many voters will be prevented from casting their votes.
In Tuesday’s primary election in Kentucky, polling locations were reduced from the usual 3,700 to 200 due to a shortage of poll workers amid the pandemic. Louisville, population 600,000, had only one voting station open.
As of this morning, most results were not known.
On June 9, swaths of voters in Atlanta were forced to wait between six and eight hours to vote in Georgia’s primary election.
New voting machines were part of the problem in addition to poll workers receiving little to no training in advance of the election, which slowed down the process considerably.
There, too, only a fraction of available polling sites were open, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, overwhelming poll workers at those open.
In early April, Wisconsin suffered the same fate. Reduced polling sites led to interminably long lines with the result of disenfranchising thousands of voters.
That such a scenario could be repeated hundreds of times over in our large cities come November, is not a stretch of the imagination.
ADVANCE VOTING by mail would seem to be a good alternative.
It’s easily accessible, it’s pretty much impenetrable to election fraud, it helps alleviate the hassle of Election Day lines, it yields a higher turnout, and, most importantly, in these times of a global pandemic it would be infinitely safer to vote from home rather than at a public polling site.
Even without the pandemic, voting by mail is catching on. In the 2018 midterm election, almost 1 in 4 votes were cast by mail.
Five states conduct elections entirely by mail: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and Utah.
Experts say that as a nation, we’re not prepared if a majority of voters opted for mail-in ballots for November’s election. Neither the postal service nor election officials have at this point the infrastructure to handle millions of paper ballots.
One glimmer of hope: Democratic Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Wisconsin and Ron Wyden of Oregon are sponsoring legislation giving additional funding to states so that they can keep polls open 20 days in advance, ensure mail-in voting and train a new generation of poll workers.
