National

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…

National: Coronavirus Intensifies Legal Tussle Over Voting Rights | Brent Kendall and Alexa Corse/Wall Street Journal

Intense court battles over voting rights and election security always promised to be part of the 2020 election cycle, but the coronavirus has added new urgency to the cases, which are multiplying nationwide. This month’s fight over when and how Wisconsin voters would cast their ballots marked the unofficial start of the litigation campaign. In the two weeks since, courts in several other states have issued notable decisions about conducting elections during a pandemic, and a host of new lawsuits has been filed. “Before I’d ever heard of the coronavirus, I was convinced that this was going to be a record year for litigation,” said University of California, Irvine law professor Richard Hasen. “Now I’m even surer of that fact.” Voting-rights fights have been growing for years, a function of tighter voting regulations in several Republican-led states, intense partisanship and a realization that electoral rules can affect outcomes in close races. The cases have nearly tripled since 2000, the year of the Bush v. Gore showdown, Mr. Hasen said. According to his new book “Election Meltdown,” the 2018 election year saw a record 394 cases, surprisingly high for a nonpresidential cycle.

National: Voting by mail in the spotlight as U.S. Congress debates how to secure November elections | Richard Cowan/Reuters

Congress is scrambling for ways to safeguard the Nov. 3 U.S. elections amid the coronavirus pandemic, with a partisan fight shaping up over a Democratic proposal to require states to offer the option of voting by mail. President Donald Trump, seeking re-election this year, and some of his fellow Republicans have voiced opposition to expanded voting by mail, citing concern over ballot fraud – a worry that Democrats dispute. Democrats have said election procedures will need to change this year because many voters will be reluctant to stand in long lines or enter crowded polling sites for fear of infection. In recent years, Democrats also have accused Republicans of pursuing policies in some states to make voting more difficult in a bid to disenfranchise Democratic-leaning voters. Congressional Democrats are pushing for additional funding for election aid to states in the next round of coronavirus-response legislation expected to be crafted by lawmakers in the coming weeks.

National: Voting in the pandemic: Why mobile applications are not the answer | Brent Hansen/GCN

As we all sit together in isolation, it seems only natural to begin to ask the question of how voting for public office will take place across the U.S. The prevailing sentiment indicates that some type of new online system in place of in-person or current absentee methods may offer a solution. Popular media is giving voice to opinions from election officials and political leaders that some extraordinary measures must be taken to ensure elections can continue despite shelter-in-place directives. These opinions are tempered with the acknowledgement that such extraordinary measures must have equally extraordinary security safeguards to protect both the integrity of the votes and the personal information of the voters. That’s sensible, but at the same time we must acknowledge that mobile application safeguards are not yet ready.

National: Democrats accuse Trump administration of voter suppression in mail ballot fight | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

Democrats are accusing President Trump and his allies of using the novel coronavirus to suppress minority votes as they rally for federal funding to increase voting by mail during the pandemic. They point to last week’s primary election in Wisconsin where Democratic efforts to delay the vote were stymied by Republicans and mail-in ballots never arrived for some voters. As a result, many voters in heavily African American Milwaukee County and elsewhere were forced to stand in blocks-long lines and risk contracting the virus to cast their ballots. “What we saw in Wisconsin … is its own most cynical form of voter suppression,” Oregon Gov. Kate Brown (D), whose state votes almost entirely by mail, said during a call organized by the advocacy group Stand Up America. “That they would require Wisconsin voters to risk their health and risk their lives in order to vote is suppression of the highest order.” Brown and other Democrats are urging up to $4 billion in federal funding to ensure mail-ballot access for all voters across the country. The calls underscore how the pandemic and the chaos in Wisconsin have broadened the coalition pushing for major changes to the voting system. They’re also uniting groups that sought changes to protect elections against hacking by Russia and other adversaries, and those who want to ensure ballot access laws don’t disenfranchise minorities and lower-income voters.

National: Trump Denigrates Vote By Mail, But Troops Have Been Doing It For Decades | Courtney Bublé/Government Executive

President Trump and other Republicans have alleged that voting by mail is not secure, but some election experts and former military officials say otherwise, noting that U.S. troops and civilians posted overseas have been doing it successfully for decades. As the presidential election coincides with the novel coronavirus pandemic, many states have adopted vote-by-mail for their primaries and caucuses and support is growing among election officials to expand such efforts for the general election in November to heed social distancing guidance. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and White House coronavirus task force member, said on CNN on Sunday, that he “can’t guarantee” in-person voting will be possible or advisable in November due to the ongoing pandemic.

National: Mail-in voting benefits neither party, is nearly fraud-free | The Fulcrum

Voting by mail does not help Democrats more than Republicans and does not incubate fraud — but does generate a bit more turnout, a pair of academic studies out Thursday conclude. The twin reports, one from Stanford and the other from the Union of Concerned Scientists, come as the debate about making elections more flexible in the face of the coronavirus has become increasingly partisan. Although voting in person, the method used by three-quarters of Americans before this year, currently poses serious health risks to both voters and poll workers, President Trump is opposing efforts to broadly expand absentee balloting by November. He says the GOP will suffer and that a wave of widespread cheating will be the major reason. There’s no evidence of such partisan advantage in the detailed results from the past dozen elections in California, Utah and Washington. They were analyzed by the Democracy and Polarization Lab at Stanford, which chose the states because each steadily expanded voting by mail, county by county, in the last two decades so that it is now nearly universally used.

National: Historic shifts seen in support for mail-in voting | Maggie Miller/The Hill

The coronavirus pandemic is leading to major shifts in how Americans vote across the country and is forcing some of the most restrictive voting states to embrace change in their election procedures. The change is most apparent on the East Coast, where governors from New England to the South are signaling a new willingness to expand voting measures such as early voting and mail-in ballots, and on Capitol Hill, where leaders including Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) are strongly in support. Support for these efforts is spurred on by the public, with Democracy Corps finding in a poll conducted over the past month that more than 70 percent of Americans living in key battleground states are in favor of no-excuse absentee voting, which allows for voters to request an absentee ballot without having to state a reason. Some Republicans, including President Trump, are still staunchly against voting by mail, arguing it could lead to voter fraud and lessen election chances for the party.

National: Vote-by-mail states don’t see the rampant fraud that alarms Trump | Bridget Bowman(Roll Call

States are expecting an increase in voters wanting to mail in their ballots as the coronavirus pandemic has made in-person voting potentially dangerous. And some — most notably the president — have questioned whether mail-in ballots are secure. President Donald Trump has repeatedly said voting by mail has a high potential for voter fraud, despite recently casting an absentee ballot in Florida himself. But officials in states that conduct elections entirely by mail say fraud is extremely rare, and they also have measures in place to protect against ballot tampering. The question for other states is whether, and how quickly, they can ramp up similar protections ahead of November. Trump and others questioning the security of mail-in ballots do have a recent, high-profile example in North Carolina’s 9th District, where the 2018 election results were thrown out after a Republican political consultant was accused of tampering with absentee ballots. Proponents of voting by mail pushed back, arguing that there is little evidence of fraudulent ballots and that no system is perfect. “If someone really wants to perpetrate fraud, I think they probably could in any system, including voting at a polling place,” said Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman, a Republican. “So no system is completely free of the potential of fraud.”

National: Emergency election money is available. But some states struggle to claim it | Carrie Levine/Center for Public Integrity

April 16, 2020

Some states aren’t sure if they can claim their share of emergency funds Congress approved to help states meet pandemic-related expenses for administering 2020 elections, citing conditions on the money. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which is coordinating the flow of $400 million to the states, had received request letters from 37 states as of Tuesday. For some of the remaining states, a major obstacle is a requirement that they match 20 percent of the federal money with their own dollars — at a time when the coronavirus outbreak is straining state budgets and draining surpluses. The National Association of Secretaries of State has told lawmakers that the matching requirement will be “extremely difficult” for states to meet. Election officials from both parties have also raised concerns and said Congress should lift or reduce the match requirement.

National: Why vote by mail triggered a partisan battle ahead of November’s election | John Whitesides and Julia Harte/Reuters

April 16, 2020

The drive to expand vote-by-mail options during the coronavirus pandemic has emerged as the centerpiece of a growing political fight ahead of November’s election. President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have attacked the idea of expanding mail balloting, arguing it is vulnerable to fraud and openly worrying that easier voting would hurt their party’s chances in November. Democrats and voting rights groups say it is a way to protect voters from the deadly virus, and that a failure to guarantee that option amid a pandemic will disenfranchise millions of Americans, especially the poor and African Americans who are deemed more vulnerable to the virus and who tend to vote Democratic. Last week’s turbulent Wisconsin elections, which went ahead after Republicans blocked Democratic efforts to delay in-person voting and expand absentee balloting, illustrated the partisan divide – and the mounting urgency to find a solution before the Nov. 3 U.S. election.

National: The Massive Obstacles in Front of National Mail-In Voting | Lisa Hagen/US News

April 16, 2020

Wisconsin’s primary last week was the first real-time example of the challenges of conducting in-person voting in the middle of a full-blown pandemic: long lines that complicated social distancing procedures and severe staffing shortages that led to a low number of operating polling sites. And now the aftermath has amplified calls for greatly expanding vote-by-mail across the country. But the implementation of more mail and absentee ballots is facing an array of hurdles – political, logistical and legal – as nearly two dozen states and territories prepare for the remaining primaries over the next three months and gear up for a general election that some believe will yield massive turnout. “What I think Wisconsin has now demonstrated is the canary in the coal mine if we don’t have emergency procedures to have in place” says Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida who specializes in elections. “The good news is we still have some opportunities to do preparations for next elections, and the next hurdles are these primary elections coming up.”

National: How a Supreme Court Decision Curtailed the Right to Vote in Wisconsin | Jim Rutenberg and Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

The Wisconsin spring elections were less than a week away, and with the state’s coronavirus death toll mounting, Democrats were challenging Republican plans to hold the vote as scheduled. In an emergency hearing, held via videoconference, John Devaney, a lawyer for the Democrats, proposed a simple compromise: Extend the deadline for mail ballots by six days past Election Day, to April 13, to ensure that more people could vote, and vote safely. “That’s going to be much more enfranchising,” said Mr. Devaney, arguing one of the most politically freighted voting-rights cases since Bush v. Gore from his bedroom in South Carolina as his black lab, Gus, repeatedly interrupted at the door. The presiding federal judge, William M. Conley, agreed, pointing out that clerks were facing severe backlogs and delays as they struggled to meet surging demand for mail-in ballots. Yet with hours to go before Election Day, the Supreme Court reversed that decision along strict ideological lines, a decision based in large part on the majority’s assertion that the Democrats had never asked for the very extension Mr. Devaney requested in court. It was the first major voting-rights decision led by the court’s conservative newest member, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, and it was in keeping with a broader Republican approach that puts more weight on protecting against potential fraud — vanishingly rare in American elections — than the right to vote, with limited regard for the added burdens of the pandemic.

National: Internet Voting Is ‘Not Secure’ and Blockchain Won’t Help, Warns Scientific Body | Yael Grauer/CoinDesk

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to roil elections and voting officials look for solutions, scientific experts are warning against the dangers of voting online. The American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Center for Scientific Evidence in Public Issues has written an open letter to U.S. governors, secretaries of state and state election directors to express concern about the security of voting via the internet or mobile apps. The AAAS letter has been signed by renowned cybersecurity and computing experts and organizations. It reflects research from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and other organizations. “At this time, internet voting is not a secure solution for voting in the United States, nor will it be in the foreseeable future,” the letter reads, pointing to undetected manipulation of votes, privacy violations, malware intrusions, and the potential for denial-of-service attacks and other vulnerabilities. Internet voting, which includes voting via email, fax, web and mobile app, has no meaningful voter-verified paper record, the letter states, which makes it impossible to conduct a valid audit of the results.

National: State election officials scramble to ‘not become Wisconsin’ amid coronavirus fears | Abby Phillip/CNN

President Donald Trump has drawn a line in the sand, opposing efforts to expand mail-in voting across the country in response to the threat of the novel coronavirus. But state election officials — including many Republicans — are already preparing to make stark changes to voting procedures anyway, in some cases dramatically expanding the availability of voting by mail amid the threat of Covid-19. Their objective is simple: avoid the chaos and confusion that unfolded in Wisconsin last week by radically changing the way many Americans vote. “I want to try to avoid circumstance of long waits and poll workers in hazmat suits. I want to relieve some of the pressure on the poll workers,” said Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, a Republican. “The solution is to expand absentee voting.” Trump’s false claims that mail ballots are “very dangerous” and “fraudulent in many cases” have not stopped efforts, even in red states, to expand access to mail-in voting.

National: As Pandemic Imperils Elections, Democrats Clash With Trump on Voting Changes | Carl Hulse/The New York Times

A showdown is taking shape in Congress over how far Washington should go in expanding voting access to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, with Democrats pressing to add new options for voters and President Trump and Republicans resisting changes they say could harm their election prospects in November. Democrats are determined to add new voting requirements for November’s general election to the next stage of coronavirus relief legislation, a move that Mr. Trump and Republican leaders have vowed to oppose. But it is one that Democrats believe is necessary and all the more urgent in light of the confusion and court fights surrounding Wisconsin’s elections on Tuesday. With public health officials encouraging social distancing and staying at home to slow the spread of the virus, the prospect of millions of voters congregating at polling places around the country to cast their ballots this fall appears increasingly untenable and dangerous. But the fight over whether the federal government should require states to offer other options — by allowing voting by mail, extending early voting and instituting other changes to protect voters and voting rights — is emerging as a major sticking point as lawmakers look to pass a fourth emergency aid measure in the next few weeks.

National: Pandemic spurs court fights over mail-in voting | John Kruzel/The Hill

Election officials are scrambling ahead of the November vote to ramp up alternative methods like mail-in voting as the coronavirus pandemic raises concerns about the safety of in-person voting. That dash to expand polling options could bring a new wave of court fights around the 2020 election, legal experts say. As states move to bolster balloting options — or face challenges to such plans — both sides in the debate are likely to take those decisions to court. And when Election Day arrives, questions over the handling of mail-in ballots could lead to more court fights. “We do not want the election resolved in the courts and so I hope it does not come to that,” said Richard Pildes, a law professor at New York University. Legal experts say the nightmare scenario would be a situation resembling the Supreme Court’s decision on Bush v. Gore, which was seen as an ideological one that undermined both the legitimacy of the court and the 2000 presidential election results among critics of the decision.

National: Democrats fear for November after Wisconsin voting spectacle | Natasha Krecki and Christopher Cadelago/Politico

Democrats looked on in horror last week as thousands of voters in Wisconsin trekked to polling places and waited in lines for hours to cast ballots in the midst of a pandemic. Now national Democratic Party leaders are scrambling to head off a similar spectacle in November, in what promises to be the most consequential partisan struggle between now and Election Day. They are seeking billions of federal dollars to prepare for an election in which voters can’t safely go to the polls in person. The party is combing through voting rules, state by state, with an eye toward expanding early voting and vote-by-mail. The Democratic National Committee has deployed “voter protection directors” in 17 states to defend against what they view as moves to block access to the polls. And the DNC is partnering with state Democratic parties to help voters navigate the process of obtaining mail-in ballots and combating what the DNC characterizes as “misinformation” from President Donald Trump. With Republicans mounting a multimillion-dollar legal campaign to combat Democratic lawsuits to expand voter access — and Trump asserting without evidence that mail-in voting is ripe for fraud — the situation in Wisconsin has set off alarm bells among Democrats about their readiness for a battle that could determine whether Trump wins a second term.

National: Why you can’t trust your vote to the internet | Brett Winterford/CyberScoop

A common adage in information security is that most startups don’t hire their first full-time security engineer until they’ve got around 300 employees. If an app only stores public data and has no need to authenticate users, that might not present much of a problem. But when an app needs to be trusted to protect the confidentiality of a person’s political preference, it’s something else entirely. It’s why Tusk Philanthropies — an organization devoted to bringing mobile voting to the masses — is playing matchmaker between a half-dozen mobile voting startups and the security experts that can help bring them up to snuff. The team at Trail of Bits — a boutique software security firm based in New York — was commissioned by Tusk in late 2019 to conduct a thorough ‘white box’ security test of mobile voting app Voatz, an app used in five states. The testers would have full access to all the source code and documentation they required to discover security gaps and recommend fixes. The code looked sound, as it was clearly written by highly competent engineers. But after waiting over a week for technical documentation they requested from the startup, the Trail of Bits team had nothing to work off beyond a single page that amounted to a security policy.

National: Senators, bipartisan state officials press Congress for more election funds | Maggie Miller/The Hill

A group of Democratic senators and bipartisan secretaries of state from across the nation piled on the pressure Thursday for Congress to include funding to help states grapple with holding elections in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. In a phone call with the press, Democratic Sens. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Ron Wyden (Ore.), and Chris Coons (Del.) stressed the need to send states at least $2 billion to implement increased mail-in voting, expand early voting and hire and train younger poll workers less vulnerable to the virus. They argued this was particularly important following the Wisconsin primary this week, during which voters were forced to vote in-person following a 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court that the state would not be allowed to count absentee ballots mailed in after Election Day. The decision led to long lines and confusion at some polling places in the state. “Our goal today is to finally generate real, bipartisan support in the Congress for safe voting so our country does not see another grotesque spectacle like we did this week in Wisconsin,” Wyden said.

National: Trump: GOP should fight mail-in voting because it ‘doesn’t work out well for Republicans’ | Quint Forgey/Politico

President Donald Trump on Wednesday directed Republicans to “fight very hard” against efforts to expand mail-in voting amid the coronavirus pandemic, suggesting that such a shift in ballot-casting practices would yield unfavorable electoral results for the GOP. “Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to statewide mail-in voting. Democrats are clamoring for it,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.” The president fiercely criticized mail-in voting as “horrible” and “corrupt” during the White House coronavirus task force’s daily news conference Tuesday, but also conceded that he voted by mail in Florida’s primary last month. Trump offered no legitimate explanation for the discrepancy between his position on mail-in voting and his personal voting habits, but insisted “there’s a big difference between somebody that’s out of state and does a ballot, and everything’s sealed, certified and everything else.” In other instances of mail-in voting, however, “you get thousands and thousands of people sitting in somebody’s living room, signing ballots all over the place,” Trump claimed.

National: Why Republicans Are So Afraid of Vote-by-Mail | Jim Rutenberg, Maggie Haberman and Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

President Trump and his Republican allies are launching an aggressive strategy to fight what many of the administration’s own health officials view as one of the most effective ways to make voting safer amid the deadly spread of Covid-19: the expanded use of mail-in ballots. The scene Tuesday of Wisconsinites in masks and gloves gathering in long lines to vote, after Republicans sued to defeat extended, mail-in ballot deadlines, did not deter the president and top officials in his party. Republican leaders said they were pushing ahead to fight state-level statutes that could expand absentee balloting in Michigan, Minnesota, Arizona and elsewhere. In New Mexico, Republicans are battling an effort to go to a mail-in-only primary, and they vowed on Wednesday to fight a new move to expand postal balloting in Minnesota. The new political effort is clearly aimed at helping the president’s re-election prospects, as well as bolstering Republicans running further down the ballot. While his advisers tend to see the issue in more nuanced terms, Mr. Trump obviously views the issue in a stark, partisan way: He has complained that under Democratic plans for national expansion of early voting and voting by mail, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

National: After chaos in Wisconsin, fight intensifies over how to carry out presidential election amid pandemic | Evan Halper and Janet Hook/Los Angeles Times

The political and legal chaos that engulfed Wisconsin’s primary Tuesday marked the beginning of a national battle over how democracy will function in the middle of a pandemic — a months-long struggle that could tip the balance of power between the major political parties. At stake is the most basic function of a democracy — the ability to hold elections that partisans on both sides regard as valid. That consensus, already eroded in the Trump era, is now being further undermined. Prompted by Republicans’ refusal to postpone the state’s primary, the Wisconsin meltdown whipsawed voters with on-again, off-again election plans, polling locations drastically reduced, and makeshift protections against contagion. It provided the most public view so far of partisan tension over election rules and how they threaten to sow chaos in upcoming primaries and the general election. Republicans for years have viewed measures to expand access to the ballot as attempts by Democrats to gain an advantage. In the current crisis, they have launched a coordinated national effort to limit the ramp-up of absentee and mail-in voting, which have been urged by independent election-integrity experts in the face of the coronavirus. If the pandemic continues into the fall — or if the virus recedes during the summer and then returns, as many experts expect — that could force millions of voters to choose between casting their ballots and safeguarding their health. The battle is playing out now because states that don’t currently allow widespread mail-in balloting would have to begin changing their systems soon to have any hope of pulling off a mail-in election in the fall.

National: Experts: Internet voting isn’t ready for COVID-19 crisis | Brett Winterford/CyberScoop