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On Wednesday, my colleague David Leonhardt wrote about the battle Democrats and Republicans are waging over voting rights. “In almost every instance,” he noted, “Democrats are trying to make it easier for Americans to cast ballots, and Republicans are trying to make it harder.”
But despite the political and epidemiological challenges arrayed against them, Americans are participating at record levels. With five days still to go before Election Day, the number of early votes cast by mail and in person, more than 80 million, has already exceeded half of the total votes cast in the 2016 election.
That amount of turnout is “stunning,” according to Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist and voting expert. Does that mean the Republican strategy might be failing?
A fight in a much longer war
Even before the coronavirus, the United States had made it harder to vote than any other affluent democracy:
The United States is one of only seven countries in the 37-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that don’t hold elections on a weekend or a holiday.
While many countries put citizens on the voter rolls by default or promote voter registration, signing up to vote here is a cumbersome, opt-in process.
Some Americans find out too late that they cannot cast a ballot because they lack photo ID or were erroneously purged from voter rolls, and millions more are made automatically ineligible because they were convicted of a crime.
Shortages of equipment and poll workers often cause unreasonably long waits, especially for Black voters. In the 2016 election, voters in Black neighborhoods waited 29 percent longer on average than voters in white neighborhoods, according to one study.
As the Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has argued, being forced to wait eight hours in lines to cast a ballot, as some early voters have been in Georgia, amounts to a kind of poll tax: “For most workers, time spent in line is money in the form of lost wages and labor hours. For low-income workers in particular, long lines may prove so economically ruinous that they may not vote at all. Given the uneven distribution of long lines, this is the point.”
None of these obstacles is novel, but many have become more prohibitive since the Supreme Court struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, which was passed in 1965 to end the de facto disenfranchisement of African-Americans. The court ruled that one of the law’s key provisions was based on outdated data and therefore unconstitutional, effectively eliminating the requirement that states with a history of racially discriminatory voting laws gain federal approval before making minor changes to voting procedures, like moving a polling place, or major ones, like redrawing electoral districts.
The consequences of that ruling have been stark: Hours after the decision came down, Texas enacted a strict photo ID law. Other states soon followed suit, and the seven years since have seen suspect poll closures, cutbacks to early voting, an uptick in illegal voter purges and other forms of voter suppression.
The pandemic factor
When the coronavirus crisis hit, states took measures to facilitate safer elections, like expanding the use of absentee ballots and early in-person voting, which opened a new front of legal contestation. As of last week, lawyers have filed more than 400 lawsuits, across 44 states, over issues related to pandemic voting:
In Wisconsin, Republican officials have fought to discount any mail-in ballots that arrive after 8 p.m. on Election Day, a move the Supreme Court upheld on Monday. In an opinion that mirrored President Trump’s rhetoric, Justice Brett Kavanaugh argued that counting absentee ballots after Nov. 3 could sow “chaos” and “potentially flip the results” of the election. (In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan responded that “there are no results to ‘flip’ until all valid votes are counted.”)
In Texas, Greg Abbott, the Republican governor, cited largely baseless claims of voter fraud as a justification for imposing a limit of a single drop-off box for absentee ballots per county, including the state’s largest, Harris, which is home to 4.7 million people. On Tuesday, the Texas Supreme Court upheld the policy.
In Pennsylvania and North Carolina, two key swing states, Republicans have challenged laws extending the period for accepting mail-in ballots after Election Day. But on Wednesday, the Supreme Court upheld the new deadlines.
The effort to discredit and discourage mail-in voting is being spearheaded by President Trump, but as The New York Times Magazine documented in a five-month investigation, it is also the culmination of a decades-long disinformation campaign by the Republican Party and others to suppress votes, especially those cast by Black and Latino Americans.
That is not to say voter suppression is just a red-state issue. New York, despite its progressive reputation, has had some of the most restrictive election laws in the nation, and New York City’s politically unaccountable Board of Elections is uniquely plagued by nepotism and dysfunction. During early voting this week, many city voters — including the mayor, Bill de Blasio — reported having to wait hours at the polls, in violation of state regulations. “The powers that be don’t care,” the director of a state government watchdog organization told The Times.
Reading the turnout tea leaves
The high levels of early turnout now on display have raised questions about whether the Republican strategy to suppress the vote is backfiring. In Texas, for example, Governor Abbott’s emergency declaration limiting drop-off sites for absentee ballots may have galvanized voters in Democratic-leaning areas like Harris County, whose early vote count as of Wednesday was rapidly approaching the total number of ballots cast there in the 2016 election.
“Efforts to suppress votes in Texas and across the South have very often been done in secret, in smoke-filled rooms, in ways the public can’t fully digest,” Chris Hollins, the county clerk of Harris County, told Mother Jones. “When it’s thrown in your face like it has been this election season, voters are responding by saying, ‘I’ll show you,’ and coming out in record numbers to have their voices heard.”
What’s more, in states where party registration data is available, about 47 percent of all early voters have been Democrats, while just about 30 percent have been Republicans, suggesting that Democrats are banking an early advantage. That discrepancy may reflect in part the mistrust of mail-in voting Mr. Trump has generated in his base, which his campaign and its surrogates are now spending millions attempting to counteract.
Yet the polarization of the use of mail-in ballots is also what gives some Democrats concern: Mail-in ballots have a higher rate of rejection than those cast in person, as Thomas B. Edsall writes for The Times. In Pennsylvania alone, more than 100,000 mailed ballots may be thrown out because of a court ruling on an envelope policy.
Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and parts of Michigan — three important battleground states — also won’t start counting mailed ballots until Election Day. Because those votes could take days or weeks to process, the results reported there on Nov. 3 are more likely to show early leads for Mr. Trump, who might take it as an opportunity to declare premature victory.
That would be a “doomsday scenario” for Democrats, and it’s certainly one that lawyers in both parties are preparing for. In the meantime, the most responsible option for voters and observers might be to take a step back from the prediction business. “It’s lazy to simply throw up one’s hands and say we don’t know what will happen, so feel free to call me lazy,” writes Philip Bump at The Washington Post. “We don’t.”
Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.
MORE ON THE ELECTION
“Trump Isn’t the First Conservative to Try to Limit the Vote” [The New York Times]
“How Long Will Vote Counting Take? Estimates and Deadlines in All 50 States” [The New York Times]
“Facing Gap in Pennsylvania, Trump Camp Tries to Make Voting Harder” [The New York Times]
“Biden Is Not Out of the Woods” [The New York Times]
“The State That Could Decide How Far Republicans Will Go to Win” [The New York Times]
WHAT YOU’RE SAYING
Here’s what readers had to say about the last edition: Three paths for reforming the Supreme Court.
Viki from Colorado: “In my mind, one of the big problems is that we allow Supreme Court justices to be approved on a simple majority of the Senate. … If we required two-thirds, or even more, the nominated justice would need to be more moderate to appeal to both sides of the aisle.”
John from North Carolina: “Article III states, in part, ‘Judges … shall hold their offices during good behaviour.’ Good behavior is not defined. It is common practice in most endeavors to subject subordinate employees to a periodic review of their job performance, often annually. Since the Senate approves the appointment of a judge, it seems appropriate for the Senate to periodically review the performance of judges to determine if they are exhibiting good behavior.”
Darcy Harris, a professor in the thanatology program at King’s University College at Western University, from Canada: “One major change affecting life appointments is the increased longevity that is now a part of normal life in developed countries. Where a Supreme Court judge may have lived for 10-15 years max after being appointed to the Supreme Court prior to 1900, it is now an expected prospect that people live well into their 80s and 90s, which could mean life tenure for more than double the amount of time now than in the past when the Constitution was written.”
Peter from Australia: “Appointing anybody to any position for life is incredibly stupid.”
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
