We are now just 17 weeks from Election Day in November, with the nation still in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic, and in many parts of the country, including California, it’s getting worse, not better.
The debate rages on over the best way to ensure fair, safe voting this fall, with many states planning to expand voting by mail, but President Trump has undermined that almost daily by warning the election will be rigged.
A team from Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has come together to address this unprecedented situation and figure out how to protect democracy during a pandemic, as well as what still needs to be done and can be done to make sure the maximum number of Americans can vote this fall without fear of contracting the virus.
Nathaniel Persily—the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and former Senior Research Director of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration—is co-directing the Stanford-MIT Project on a Healthy Election. He joined “The State of California” on Tuesday.
As you said, there are unprecedented challenges for this elections and we are facing historic challenges with respect to polling places, mail balloting and voter registration. We never, as a country, have had to change our electoral system in such a massive way in such a short period of time.
So, we are trying to work with former election officials and other experts in the election field to try and make this transition possible because we only really have about one or two months to try and make the critical decisions for what’s going to happen in November.
It’s a good thing we had those crises during the primaries when the stakes were lower, but they are a sort of ‘canary in the coal mine’ as to what mine happen in the fall. What we’re seeing here is that even though millions of people are going to vote by mail for the first time, there are still tens of millions of people who want to vote in polling places. So, we have to dedicate resources to both to mail and polling places to make sure that people can safely vote and not be waiting in line in order to cast a ballot.
In general, I would put them in the categories of people, places and things.
We need more people to volunteer in the polling places that are going to be there. One of the things we’ve seen is that most of the senior citizens that volunteer in the polling places are taking themselves out of commission this year, so some jurisdictions have lost half of their poll workers. We need more people to work the polling places.
We need polling places. The traditional polling places, like senior living centers, fire houses, even schools, are shuttered right now and not open to outsiders.
And we need things. Just as in the larger economy, which needs PPE and other protective gear, we need that in the election sphere, as well, in addition to all kinds of other material that we hadn’t planned on for this election. There’ll be a hundred million more pieces of paper that need to be dedicated to election outreach this time for mail balloting, special envelopes, special machinery that we need in order to run this election.
We’re running into the same kinds of supply chain problems that we saw with ventilators and face masks, but we’re seeing it in the election realm.
I’ve given up hope on Congress. Congress is either going to appropriate more money, as they should, or they won’t. And even at the state level, the states have made most of their critical decisions. But you’re right, the place we have to work is with the localities.
We have strong connections with the relevant localities and the battle ground states, and that’s where we’re focusing our efforts. To some extent, it’s about offering person power to them to say, “We can take this slice of the problem, we can try to develop a plan for mail balloting for you, here are some polling place design tools, polling place citing tools and the like,” because right now they’re really scrambling for help and we’re going to try to provide it.
I tend to think the debate over mail balloting is actually over. That might be a minority position. You’re right that the president has been tweeting quite a bit about fraud and the like, but as you go further down the election administration hierarchy, that issue becomes much less partisan because the local election officials, whether Republican or Democrat, their main reservation is to not have their picture on the front page of the newspaper the following day.
So, for local election officials, they desperately want as many people voting by mail as possible so they don’t have long lines and chaos in the polling place in the midst of a pandemic.
While we have to make sure that mail voting is dome securely and that we have all the fraud protections that all the states currently implement. It’s going to be a critical part of story in how we vote in November with at least 70 million people casting their vote by mail.
Well, there’s something called the ‘Election Administrator’s Prayer,’ and that is, “Oh God, whatever happens, don’t let it be close,” because if it’s a close election, naturally, we look under the hood and see all kinds of problems that have emerged. So, I am concerned that there is going to be—even if there isn’t fraud or irregularities—the fact that we’re going to have to wait many days in order to figure out who the winner of this election is, will cause people to delegitimate the results. An election where half the votes are cast by mail is a different kind of election than we’re used to and we have to have patience, which is in quite short supply these days.