National: How the Spanish flu nearly derailed women’s right to vote | Ellen Carol Dubois/National Geographic
“These are sad times for the whole world, grown unexpectedly sadder by the sudden and sweeping epidemic of influenza,” wrote Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, in a letter to supporters in 1918. “This new affliction is bringing sorrow into many suffrage homes and is presenting a serious new obstacle in our Referendum campaigns and in the Congressional and Senatorial campaigns,” she continued. “We must therefore be prepared for failure.” Suffragists had been fighting for women’s right to vote for 70 years, and victory seemed almost in reach. Even with the United States fully mobilized for World War I. President Woodrow Wilson had come out in support of a constitutional amendment, and the House of Representatives had passed it. Then the Spanish flu struck, and the leaders of one of the longest-running political movements in the country’s history had to figure out how to continue their campaign in the midst of the deadliest pandemic in modern times. (See how some cities 'flattened the curve' of the flu pandemic.)Editorials: The Simplest Way to Avoid a Wisconsin-Style Fiasco on Election Day | Edward B. Foley and Steven Huefner/Politico
The fiasco surrounding Wisconsin’s April 7 primary election is still fresh: In the middle of a viral pandemic, crowded, in-person voting took place despite the governor’s stay-at-home order, while tens of thousands of voters did not receive absentee ballots in time to cast eligible votes by mail. Two election eve judicial decisions added to the confusion. Unfortunately, the November elections are at risk of looking similar. With coronavirus likely to remain a threat for months, some form of voting by mail, including in states historically unfamiliar with high rates of absentee voting, will be a public health necessity. But one issue with mail-in ballots, whether a state uses them just for absentee voters or for the entire election, is that they need to be postmarked or delivered to a polling station no later than Election Day. If local election offices can’t handle the increased demand for absentee ballots and voters don’t receive their ballots in time to cast them by Election Day, those voters are disenfranchised. And that, in turn, could lead to heated, possibly prolonged disputes about election outcomes. But there’s a fairly straightforward way Wisconsin could have avoided its mess—and the rest of the country could do so in the fall. In fact, this solution already exists, albeit in a limited context.Georgia: Voting in Primaries Could Look Much Different Amid Pandemic | Emil Moffatt/WABE
Thousands of absentee ballots for Georgia’s June primary elections are set to be mailed out on Tuesday. Early voting locations will re-open their doors in less than a month in advance of Election Day, June 9. It’s all set against the backdrop of the coronavirus, which has already wrought havoc this spring on voting in the state, delaying the state’s primaries not once, but twice. “Historically in Georgia, we are a people that enjoy voting in person, about 95% usually,” said Gabe Sterling, Chief Operating Officer with Georgia’s secretary of state’s office. But with concerns over the spread of the coronavirus, Georgians have flooded county elections offices with absentee ballot applications. As of Sunday, some 526,000 applications had been received. Georgia has had “no-excuse” absentee voting since 2005, but voters have used it relatively sparingly. But after the March 24 presidential primary was pushed back, the secretary of state’s office began a push to get more people to vote by mail by mailing absentee applications to all 6.9 million registered voters.Indiana: Election commission approves in-person early voting the week before the June 2 primary | Alexandra Kukulka/Chicago Tribune
Early voting at the polls will be limited to the week before the June 2 primary election, according to a recent decision by the Indiana Election Commission. On March 20, Gov. Eric Holcomb announced that the state’s primary election will be moved from May 5 to June 2 because of the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Secretary of State Connie Lawson said March 20 that her office, along with the chairmen of the Indiana Republican and Democratic parties, agreed to postpone the election to June and they created recommendations for the Indiana Election Commission to consider. The election commission met March 25 and approved 11 recommendations, including allowing everyone to cast an absentee ballot by mail “without having a specific reason to do so,” grandfathering absentee ballots already received and moving all election dates by 28 days, according to a Secretary of State Office press release.Missouri: ACLU Explains Its Lawsuit To Force Vote-By-Mail Option | Sarah Fenske/St. Louis Public Radio
In Missouri, you may only vote by mail if you apply for an absentee ballot — and cite one of just six specific reasons detailed in state law. Among them are illness or disability, or the fact you’ll be traveling out of the area. “Fear of contracting COVID-19” is not listed among them. But the ACLU of Missouri believes that should, in fact, be sufficient cause to cast an absentee ballot. Working in concert with the Missouri Voter Coalition, the organization filed a class-action lawsuit last Friday against the state of Missouri, the Missouri Secretary of State and a few local boards of election. It argues that the “illness or disability” clause in state law should include those staying at home to avoid the coronavirus, since it specifically mentions “confinement due to illness” as a qualifier.Pennsylvania: How hard will it be to vote during the coronavirus? It depends on where you live. | onathan Tamari and Jonathan Lai/Philadelphia Inquirer
If you’re a Pennsylvanian who wants to vote by mail this year, you can — but make sure your ballot arrives by 8 p.m. on Election Day. If you’re in New Jersey, you have more time. Your ballot will be counted as long as it’s postmarked by Election Day and arrives within 48 hours of the polls closing. Across Pennsylvania’s northern border in Erie County, N.Y. (home to Buffalo), some polling places open more than a week before Election Day and are scheduled to be available over two weekends, for convenience. In Erie County, Pa., a few miles south, voting early is less flexible. You have to do it with an absentee ballot at the county election office. Weekend hours aren’t certain. (The same goes throughout Pennsylvania.) As states scramble to adapt elections for the coronavirus pandemic, the rules vary widely, each set by seemingly small bureaucratic decisions that together determine how easy or hard it is to vote — and how many people do or don’t. The Republican National Committee, meanwhile, has set aside $10 million for legal battles against efforts to make it easier to vote, arguing that looser laws could lead to fraud (though studies show election fraud is rare).Texas: Drive-thrus and free pencils: Texas plans for July elections with in-person voting | Alexa Ura/The Texas Tribune
There will be an election in Texas in mid-July, apparently with polling sites, election workers and voting machines in place so people can cast their ballots in person. How many voters might be willing to risk a trip to the polls during a pandemic, though, remains unknown. As Texas Republicans work to block the expansion of mail-in balloting during the coronavirus crisis, local election administrators across the state are deciphering how to safely host voters for the July 14 primary runoff elections — and eventually the November general election — under circumstances unseen by even the most veteran among them. Looking to expand curbside voting, some election officials are considering retooling parking garages or shuttered banks with drive-thru lanes. Rethinking contact during a process that requires close proximity, others are toying with the idea of buying hundreds of thousands of pencils that voters would take home after using the eraser end to mark their ballots on touch-screen voting machines.Wisconsin: At least 7 new coronavirus cases appear to be related to Wisconsin’s election, Milwaukee health commissioner says | Alison Dirr/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Officials have identified seven people who appear to have contracted COVID-19 through activities related to the April 7 election, Milwaukee Health Commissioner Jeanette Kowalik said Monday. Six of the cases are in voters and one is a poll worker, Kowalik said. By the end of this week, officials hope to have additional information on the cases that were reported between April 7 and Monday, she said. That includes an answer to whether any of the seven cases resulted in death and whether the cases were concentrated at any of the city’s five in-person polling locations. "There needs to be a little bit more analysis so we can connect the dots, that's why case investigation and contact tracing is so important," she said. Asked how to conduct contact tracing at polling sites when anyone present was surrounded by numerous strangers, Kowalik referenced doing broad notification for people who were present during a certain time frame.Singapore: Political parties warned of cybersecurity threats, election interference | Eileen Yu/ZDNet
With general elections expected to be held within a year, Singapore's political parties have been issued advisories about the threat of foreign interference and cybersecurity threats. They are urged to seek out precautionary measures to safeguard their ICT infrastructure, data, as well as online accounts. The city-state's Ministry of Home Affairs, Cyber Security Agency, and Elections Department on Monday said there had been many reports of foreign interference over the past few years in elections overseas, including the French presidential and German federal elections in 2017 as well as the US mid-term and Italian general elections in 2018. These were attempts by foreign actors such as other countries, agencies, and individuals to assert influence over elections in a sovereign state, said the Singapore government agencies. "Singapore is not immune and we need to guard against such nefarious activity as we head towards our own General Election, which must be held by April 2021," they said.National: Coronavirus Likely To Supercharge Election-Year Lawsuits Over Voting Rights | Pam Fessler/NPR
Election year legal battles around voting procedures are nothing new. But their scope and intensity are growing this year amid deep partisan polarization and the logistical challenges presented by the coronavirus pandemic. The legal fights are expected to heat up in the coming weeks. Exhibit A is a new lawsuit filed by Democrats in Nevada Thursday challenging the state's plans to conduct a mostly all-mail primary June 2 and to drastically limit in-person polling sites. Democrats say the moves — including automatically sending ballots only to active voters who have taken part in recent elections, but not all registered ones — are an infringement of voter rights. Republicans counter that Democrats want to overturn rules intended to protect the integrity of the state's elections and would unnecessarily put voters' health at risk. Both Democrats and Republicans are turning to the courts to try to ensure that rules governing this year's election don't disadvantage their side. The litigation campaign has taken on a new urgency with the pandemic and its impact on people's willingness and ability to go to the polls in person.National: Mail-In Elections Can’t Be Built Overnight. Here’s What Will Happen If Every State Tries. | Tierney Sneed/Talking Points Memo
On Thursday, a niche trade organization called the National Association of Presort Mailers held the first of what is expected to be a regularly scheduled organization-wide teleconference. The call was to discuss a daunting task with which its members will be deeply involved: printing, packaging and mailing ballots for a general election in the midst of a pandemic. On the call, the companies with the most experience working in the election space issued a dire warning to their colleagues, according to the leader of the trade group: with longstanding orders from established mail-in voting states, these companies said, they were already at capacity for printing and mailing operations for November’s election. If more states and localities sought to expand their mail-in voting operations, those vendors — who typically work with the western states that already conduct massive absentee voting operations — would need to purchase more equipment. But obtaining that equipment takes several months, National Association of Presort Mailers president Richard Gebbie told TPM after the call, and vendors wouldn’t make that seven-figure investment without the contracts to justify it. The conundrum, Gebbie fretted to TPM, is that if election officials wait even more than a few weeks to put in those orders, it would be too late for those vendors to scale up their own capacity.National: Election Modifications to Avoid During the COVID-19 Pandemic | Michael Morley/Lawfare
As we approach the presidential election this November, election officials are developing plans to deal with the unique risks posed by the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. I have written about how states have grappled with past election emergencies and am participating in a nonpartisan task force and interdisciplinary working groups to offer recommendations to ensure that election officials are adequately prepared to face the challenge before us. The recent crisis with the Wisconsin presidential primaries demonstrates the importance of states having election emergency statutes that adequately empower election officials to respond to unexpected crises, as well as contingency plans for implementing that discretion. Just as important as discussing the affirmative steps that officials should take to address the COVID-19 crisis, however, is identifying those they should avoid. Because so many groups and experts, along with my previous work, have focused on the first task, it’s time to tackle the second.National: Coronavirus could cripple voting in November. But it depends where you live. | David Wasserman/NBC
America's decentralized system of voting means states enjoy broad leeway on setting election rules. Many voters may not realize that state procedures vary widely on everything from registration deadlines, ID requirements and types of voting machinery to who is permitted to vote absentee and when mail-in ballots must be postmarked in order to be counted. But in the coronavirus pandemic, a lack of federal election funding, partisan disunity and legal disputes could produce last-minute logistical confusion and drastic disparities across state lines in voters' ability to safely access a ballot. Last week's election in Wisconsin ignited outrage from voting rights advocates, who claimed courts' refusal to grant Democratic Gov. Tony Evers' last-minute request to suspend in-person voting and extend the absentee ballot return deadline forced voters to choose between democracy and their health. The April 7 balloting turned into an administrative fiasco of mass polling-place closures, backlogs that caused 11,000 absentee ballot requests to go unfulfilled, and at least 35,000 voters receiving absentee ballots with incorrect return instructions.National: Coronavirus threatens to hobble voter registration efforts | Sara Swann/The Fulcrum
The coronavirus has already drastically compromised campaigns and voting this year. The next looming casualty looks to be registration drives. With about 95 percent of the population under states' orders to stay at home this spring, face-to-face "Get Out the Vote!" crusades so typical in election years have ceased to exist. Civic engagement groups, now forced to operate entirely online, are expressing alarm that a significant share of people who want a say in electing the president this fall won't be able to get on the voter rolls in time. The country's digital divide already makes accessing online registration forms and information difficult for many Americans, particularly in low-income and rural areas. And for some 28 million across nine states, it's not an option at all because they have to complete actual paperwork. Groups focused on creating new voters, and then making them the core of efforts to boost turnout, say they're determined to rise to the challenge. The Covid-19 crisis has underscored the importance of their mission, they say, and their staff and volunteers are using the unprecedented situation to get more creative in their approaches.National: Coronavirus may stop hundreds of thousands from becoming citizens in time to vote in November | Suzanne Gamboa/NBC
Cancellation of citizenship oath ceremonies and in-person interviews because of coronavirus means hundreds of thousands of people may not naturalize in time for November’s elections. If ceremonies and interviews remain shut down until October without remote alternatives created by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, about 441,000 people who would have been citizens would be deprived of the chance to vote, according to Boundless Immigration, a technology company that helps immigrants apply for green cards and citizenship. “USCIS did the right thing by pausing live oath ceremonies and live interviews, there’s no dispute about that,” said Doug Rand, cofounder of Boundless Immigration. “The problem is USCIS hasn’t come up with a next step and come up with remote pathways for people to take the oath and do interviews,” said Rand, a former adviser to President Barack Obama on immigration.National: Will the Pandemic Keep Third Parties Off the 2020 Ballot? | Bill Scher/Politico
The pandemic may have robbed Donald Trump of a growing economy. It may have trapped Joe Biden in his basement. But it may yet do something even worse to the Libertarian and Green party nominees: Keep them off the ballot in many of this year’s key states.
In 2016, the Libertarian Party was on the general election ballot in all 50 states; this year, it has secured ballot access in just 35. Similarly, the Green Party—which in 2016 had its best election ever by making the ballot in 44 states, with a further three states granting the party’s candidate official write-in status—has qualified for the November ballot in only 22 states.
Several of the elusive ballot lines are in states that in 2016 were either narrowly won or flipped from red-to-blue. At present, neither the Libertarian Party nor the Green Party has qualified for the ballot in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Iowa or Minnesota. Additionally, the Green Party has not secured a place on the ballot in Arizona, Georgia or Nevada, and the Libertarian Party is missing from Maine.
To get on the ballot in the remaining states, they need to collect and submit petition signatures. And in a normal year, they would be on track to do just that. But because of the deadly coronavirus—and the social distancing and stay-at-home orders to minimize its spread—after March 6, “petitioning was over in the United States,” as Libertarian Party executive director Daniel Fishman told me.
For America’s third parties, this is nothing less than an existential crisis. Without ballot access, national pollsters won’t feel obligated to include Green and Libertarian candidates in their surveys; voters will be less aware of their nominees and platforms; journalists will be less likely to pay any attention to them; and the probability diminishes that either the Libertarians or Greens can reach the holy grail of 5 percent of the popular vote—the point at which they would finally qualify for federal campaign matching funds.
But for the Democratic and Republican Parties, the absence of third parties from the ballot in key states makes 2020 genuinely unlike any presidential election in recent memory—minimizing the chances for “spoiler” candidates, while giving both major parties something they did not have in 2016: a two-person presidential race and a simpler path to victory.
Now, don’t count out the Libertarians and Greens just yet. There are multiple fronts in the fight ahead, as they see it, and they’re prepared for battle on each one.
What the Libertarians and Greens want most is for states to waive all remaining petition signature requirements. On March 30, Vermont did just that, via emergency legislation signed by the governor. (The Libertarian Party was already on the ballot in Vermont, but the legislation added a state to the Green Party list.) Ballot Access News reports that “[i]t is believed that Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont will soon issue an order declaring political parties that are ballot-qualified for at least one statewide office to be deemed ballot-qualified for all partisan federal and state office, for 2020” (though the Libertarians and Greens have already qualified for the presidential election there).