Elections

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Voting during a contentious presidential election and a pandemic is more than a little overwhelming. Like many Americans, you may have designed a plan to vote by absentee ballot months ago, when 3 November felt a lifetime away, and no one knew how election day would look. Maybe you were unsure of where you would be, geographically speaking, and voting by mail felt like the safest option. If you’re like me, when the time came to request your absentee ballot, you submitted your information and waited for the ballot to arrive in the mail, but it never did.
I requested my absentee ballot for New York on 14 September. Two weeks later, the status on my ballot tracker read “out for delivery” but no ballot ever arrived. One of my roommates requested her Pennsylvania absentee ballot on 5 October and it has reportedly been on the way since 19 October. Last week, the Queer Eye star and Texas resident Jonathan Van Ness shared on Instagram that his absentee ballot was marked out for delivery weeks before but never arrived, and the election board couldn’t locate it.
Why hasn’t my absentee ballot arrived if I requested it before the deadline?
As states grapple with the challenges of voting during a pandemic, people across the country may find themselves without an absentee ballot days before the election for a multitude of reasons. An absentee ballot request form “may be marked invalid if it’s not completed according to the specific instructions or if it was submitted by the postmarked date, but not received by the deadline”, says Carolyn DeWitt, president and executive director of Rock the Vote. To make matters worse, “if a voter submitted an absentee request that was deemed invalid, they may not receive notification, in which case a voter may be waiting for a ballot that will never arrive”.
Another one of my roommates believed she had properly requested her California absentee ballot online, only to learn that she needed to physically submit an absentee ballot request to her local board of elections as well. Meanwhile, the US Postal Service has been struggling to meet the demands of increased absentee ballots amid delayed services this year.
Did states have enough resources and time to set up voting by mail?
In short, the answer is no. While five states have conducted elections by mail for years, including Oregon and Colorado, the rest were forced to adapt in a matter of months. “It takes most states several years to transition to a vote-by-mail state, but the pressures and restrictions of Covid-19 have put significant pressure on election officials while the federal government has failed to provide adequate resources,” says DeWitt. “There are logistical hurdles – from the purchasing, printing and mailing of millions of absentee request forms and absentee ballots to the processing and counting of absentee ballots.”
Congress has granted $400m in election aid to states but the Brennan Center for Justice estimated $4bn would be needed to create “free, fair, safe, and secure” elections across the country. Donald Trump has also admitted to restricting funds for the USPS in hopes of curbing mail-in voting. With the entity responsible for delivering absentee ballots under-resourced, ballots may remain in processing or lost through election day.
What is the best way to track my absentee ballot’s status?
If you requested an absentee ballot but have yet to receive it, you can track it online or by calling and emailing your local election official, says Ben Hovland, chairman of the US Election Assistance Commission. It may be possible to visit your local election office and speak with a representative, depending on your jurisdiction.
How do I vote if my absentee ballot is lost?
In the case that your ballot isn’t located, you have a few options. First, check if an absentee ballot can be picked up from your local election office. If so, you or a trusted person may be able to grab and drop it off in a ballot dropbox or at your local election office quickly.
The more obvious choice – voting in person – is also an option but comes with a few hoops to jump through. “Most states will require the voter to complete a standard affidavit or another form of documentation confirming that they never received the ballot. Then, the voter will be allowed to vote in-person,” says DeWitt. These affidavits are available at polling places and would be submitted with your in-person vote. “In some cases, voters may have to complete a provisional ballot that will be counted once it’s been verified that the voter did not already vote.” This is the case in states such as New Jersey, Alabama, Texas and California.
Provisional ballots are a safeguard to ensure people only vote once, explains Hovland. They are theoretically counted as long as you don’t submit a completed absentee ballot, but there’s no guarantee. The 2018 Election Administration and Voting survey reported that about 38% of provisional ballots were rejected in the 2018 election. Reasons for this included a voter not being registered in that jurisdiction, having the wrong ID, and having already voted. Canceling your absentee ballot before voting, as Van Ness reported doing, may allow you to vote in person.
If your only option is voting in person, but the idea of doing so during a pandemic is frightening, there are a few precautions you can take, says Hovland. If possible, avoid peak voting times before and after work, as well as lunchtime. Check to see if early voting is happening in your district, and keep in mind that the polling location may be different than your voting place on election day. Some jurisdictions also provide voters with the ability to check wait times in advance of leaving to vote.
What if my absentee ballot comes at the last minute?
While the USPS advises against mailing your ballot later than a week before the election, if your ballot shows up between now and election day, you can still use it. Some states, such as Michigan and New York, allow you to drop it off in person or invalidate it at the polling station and cast your vote there. In certain places, such as Florida, voters may be able to have their ballots delivered by someone else, says DeWitt. Some jurisdictions may provide ballot pick-up for disabled voters.
To find out more about your state’s rules and practices for absentee ballots, visit the below resources:
Vote.org breaks down absentee ballot rules by state
The ACLU outlines voter deadlines and laws More

Remarkably, in these fractious times, President Trump has managed to forge a singular area of consensus among liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats: Nearly everyone seems to agree that he represents a throwback to a vintage version of manhood.After Mr. Trump proclaimed his “domination” over coronavirus, saluting Marine One and ripping off his mask, the Fox News host Greg Gutfeld cast the president in cinematic World War II terms — a tough-as-nails platoon leader who “put himself on the line” rather than abandon the troops. “He didn’t hide from the virus,” Mr. Gutfeld said. “He was going to walk out there on that battlefield with you.”Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia tweeted an altered WrestleMania video in which the president was portrayed as pummeling senseless an opponent with a spiked coronavirus head. “President Trump won’t have to recover from Covid,” Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida gloated. “Covid will have to recover from President Trump.”Meanwhile, the putatively liberal news media was conjuring its own version of the boxing ring: with Mr. Trump in one corner as atavistic chest-beater and Joe Biden in the other as evolved exemplar of feminist-sensitized manhood.Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden “evoke different brands of manliness,” a Washington Post article argued: Mr. Trump channels “old-fashioned machismo” — “aggressive, physically tough, physically strong, never back down” (in the words of a gender-equity educator, Jackson Katz) — while Mr. Biden models what Mr. Katz calls “a more complex 21st-century version of masculinity,” defined by “compassion and empathy and care and a personal narrative of loss.”But what if the one thing people agree on, they’re wrong about? What if Mr. Trump’s style of bullying and bombast aren’t relics of the old manhood, but emblems of a masculinity very much au courant? If that’s so, we may be fooling ourselves in declaring that his noxious model is heading for a natural extinction.Mr. Trump’s handlers have long packaged him as a leatherneck commander, à la “Sands of Iwo Jima” — the embodiment of a retro virility that American society supposedly once celebrated until feminists torpedoed it.Mr. Gutfeld isn’t the first to have reached for World War II metaphors when describing the president: Steve Bannon noted during the 2016 race that Mr. Trump’s popularity was “predicated on that Greatest Generation determination, that grit,” while paying homage to that era’s manhood as “the guy in the trenches, the guy that had to climb the cliffs” on D-Day.Others in the inner circle put it differently: “The era of the ‘Pajama Boy’ is over,” Sebastian Gorka, soon to be a White House deputy assistant, gushed in December 2016. “The alpha males are back.”Except that the coming alphas would be gun fetishists in Hawaiian shirts, storming state capitols and planning the abduction of a governor they called a “tyrant bitch.” Greatest Generation, really? How about the opposite?The masculine archetype of the 1930s and ’40s was the anonymous common man who proved his chops through communal building, not gunslinging. In a 1932 speech, Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared that “the man of ruthless force had his place in developing a pioneer country” but he now endangered the nation.“The lone wolf, the unethical competitor, the reckless promoter,” he said, “whose hand is against every man’s, declines to join in achieving an end recognized as being for the public welfare, and threatens to drag the industry back to a state of anarchy.” New Deal America championed a manliness of usefulness, demonstrated through collective service and uncelebrated competence.The ’30s ideal of heroic civil servant carried into World War II, and was enshrined in Ernie Pyle’s battlefront dispatches valorizing unsung grunts — “the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys.” Pyle disparaged the silk-scarfed “flyboys,” whose camera-ready star turns Pyle instinctively distrusted.Of the grunt ethic, Pyle wrote, “We are all men of new professions, out in some strange night caring for each other.” This service-oriented prototype of manhood — tending to the needs of others, providing protective support, spurning the spotlight — was essentially a maternal masculinity, all the purported qualities of motherhood, recoded for the Y chromosome.If anyone in the race is channeling that precept, it’s Mr. Biden, who, a day after federal officers tear-gassed peaceful protesters to make way for Mr. Trump’s photo-op outside St. John’s Church, called the presidency “a duty of care — to all of us.” Ernie Pyle would have worn a mask, because it comported with the masculine ethos of his era: shielding others from harm, being enlisted in the country’s defense.Mr. Trump could not be more at odds with that ethic. His is a Potemkin patriarchy, the he-man re-engineered for an image-based, sensation-saturated and very modern entertainment economy.How to characterize this new form of masculinity? In a word: ornamental.Contemporary manliness is increasingly defined by display — in Mr. Trump’s case, a pantomime of aggrieved aggression: the curled lip, the exaggerated snarl. Display permeates his ratings-obsessed presidency. It’s why he chose his vice president (he “looks very good”) and his former defense secretary (“If I’m doing a movie, I’d pick you, general”). The chief executive of Newsmax, Chris Ruddy, noted of his friend Mr. Trump’s inclinations, “It’s more about the look and the demeanor and the swagger.”Ornamental manhood is the machismo equivalent of “I’m not a doctor but I play one on TV.” Or, in the boogaloo movement’s version, “I’m not actually a soldier but I wear camo and walk around downtown with my big gun.” (In Mr. Trump’s case, it’s “I’m not a successful builder but I played one on ‘The Apprentice.’”)The great shame is not that Mr. Trump brought an anachronistic masculinity into the Oval Office, but that he used the Oval Office to market a very modern brand of compensatory manhood — with a twist.The hallmarks of contemporary ornamental masculinity — being valued as the object of the gaze, playing the perpetual child, pedestal-perching and mirror-gazing — are the very ones that women have, for half a century, struggled to dismantle as belittling, misogynist characterizations of femininity. The preoccupation with popularity, glamour, celebrity, appearance — what are these qualities but the old consumer face of the Girl? If Mr. Trump is reclaiming a traditional stereotypical sex role, it’s one that long belonged to women.Why have so many of the modern-day grunts who mourn the loss of “old-fashioned” manhood hitched their wagon to a silk-suited flyboy? Since at least the 1990s, and at full tilt in the era of social media, men have been faced with a quandary: how to define their sex in a culture where visibility, performance and marketability are the currency. You could say that Mr. Trump has, if nothing else, found a way. But he’s done so not by defending the Greatest Generation man, but by abandoning him.The gender gap in this election can be simply explained. Most women are turned off by the toxic displays of chest-beating that many male voters — notably but not exclusively white — find exciting. That level of ostentatious macho arrived in the Oval Office on a wave of 21st- century male insecurity. We should pay attention to that wave because it’s not receding.Women were trapped in their ornamental cage because they were locked out of productive work and economic self-sufficiency — assets now increasingly denied to men. But if men respond to the frustrations of modern manhood by retooling a shopworn and castoff model of ornamental femininity, then we’ll all be in trouble.If he wins the election, Mr. Biden’s success, but, more important, the nation’s success, will depend in part on his ability to re-enlist Mr. Trump’s foot soldiers into what all of us want — a meaningful role in a mutual effort that serves the greater good.The postelection battle — still to be declared and still to be determined — is not over whether Mr. Trump’s version of masculinity is old or new. It’s whether American manhood will come down on the side of nurturance or narcissism. The vintage won’t matter.Susan Faludi is a journalist and an author, most recently, of the memoir “In the Darkroom.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

In Georgia, a database that verifies voter signatures was locked up by Russian hackers in a ransomware attack that also dumped voters’ registration data online.In California and Indiana, Russia’s most formidable state hackers, a unit linked to the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., bored into local networks and hit some election systems, though it is still unclear why.In Louisiana, the National Guard was called in to stop cyberattacks aimed at small government offices that employed tools previously seen only in attacks by North Korea.And on Tuesday night, someone hacked the Trump campaign, defacing its website with a threatening message in broken English warning that there would be more to come.None of these attacks amounted to much. But from the sprawling war room at United States Cyber Command to those monitoring the election at Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft, experts are watching closely for more “perception hacks.” Those are smaller attacks that can be easily exaggerated into something bigger and potentially seized upon as evidence that the whole voting process is “rigged,” as President Trump has claimed it will be.The phrase comes up every time Christopher Krebs, the Department of Homeland Security official responsible for making sure voting systems are secure, talks about the biggest vulnerabilities in this election. His worry is not a vast attack but a series of smaller ones, perhaps concentrated in swing states, whose effect is more psychological than real.Perception hacks are just one of a range of issues occupying election officials and cybersecurity experts in the final days of voting — and their concerns will not end on Election Day.One theory gaining ground inside American intelligence agencies is that the Russians, having made the point that they remain inside key American systems despite bolstered defenses and new offensive operations by Cyber Command, may sit out the next week — until it is clear whether the vote is close.The Russian play, under this theory, would be to fan the flames of state-by-state election battles, generating or amplifying claims of fraud that would further undermine American confidence in the integrity of the election process.The Iranians would continue their playbook, which American intelligence officials see as more akin to vandalism than serious hacking, filled with threats in mangled English.But American experts have warned local officials that come Nov. 3 the Iranians may seek to paralyze or deface the websites of secretaries of state, affecting the reporting of results, and create the impression of being inside the voting infrastructure even if they never were and the election results have not been compromised.Here is a look at some of the potential threats and what has been learned so far in a year of behind-the-scenes cyberbattles.Protecting the MachinesGovernment officials are trying to assure voters that voting machines are hard to hack on a large scale: They are almost entirely offline. States and counties use their own systems, and the breadth and diversity of those systems, the argument goes, make it nearly impossible for a single attack to target all of them.But that does not eliminate the risk. At the University of Michigan, J. Alex Halderman has turned his laboratory into an arcade of voting-machine vulnerabilities and found ways to create “attacks that can spread from machine to machine like a computer virus and silently change election outcomes.”Others point out that no one needs to hack every state to cause havoc. In a tight election, an attacker could target Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit or Milwaukee and delay the reporting of results from an electoral battleground.The other weak point in the diversity-as-security claim, election security experts say, is the constellation of contractors that support elections across multiple states and counties. “The claim that diversity is protecting the election is a logical fallacy,” said Harri Hursti, an election security consultant. Mr. Hursti worries about a scenario in which ballot scanners could be reprogrammed to read a vote for Joseph R. Biden Jr. as a vote for Mr. Trump or vice versa.“A single point of failure could compromise election infrastructure across multiple counties and states,” Mr. Hursti warned.His concern is strictly cautionary, but not unheard-of. Not long after the 2016 election, a National Security Agency whistle-blower revealed that VR Systems, a Florida company that provided check-in software to multiple states, including critical swing states like Florida and North Carolina, was compromised by Russian hackers before the vote. There is no evidence they used that access to affect the final vote.BackupsThe constant drumbeat of cyberattacks and foreign interference has forced states to put safeguards in place. States have been working to print paper backups of voter registration data, and they have been phasing out machines that leave no paper backup.Mr. Krebs said that next week about 92 percent of all votes cast would be “associated” with some kind of paper record, up significantly from four years ago.Election 2020 More

Doug Mills/The New York TimesHappy Almost Election Day! I know it’s been a tough road, people, but you’ve been doing a great job. And since your vote is basically all about how you regard the last four years of Trumpdom, here’s a quick quiz. Let’s see how much you remember about the guy you may be allowed to start forgetting very soon.
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Updated March 30, 2020 Candidate Pct. McHenry* Patrick McHenry* 62,403 71.7% Johnson David Johnson 14,225 16.3% Walters Ralf Walters 10,404 12.0% 87,032 votes, 184 of 184 precincts reporting * Incumbent More

Updated March 30, 2020 Candidate Pct. Davis Moe Davis 52,665 47.4% Collias Gina Collias 25,213 22.7% Price Phillip Price 12,549 11.3% O’Shea Michael O’Shea 12,418 11.2% Woodsmall Steve Woodsmall 8,378 7.5% 111,223 votes, 304 of 304 precincts reporting More

Updated March 20, 2020 Candidate Pct. Trujillo Gus Trujillo 6,995 42.2% Sagan Greg Sagan 5,752 34.7% Gassaway Timothy Gassaway 3,825 23.1% 16,572 votes, 359 of 359 precincts reporting Advances to runoff More

Like Babe Ruth pointing a bat over a fence, Donald Trump last month called his shot.
“I think this will end up in the supreme court,” Trump told reporters, referring to the election. “And I think it’s very important that we have nine justices. I think having a 4-4 situation is not a good situation.”
Earlier this week, Trump got his ninth justice, with the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the seat vacated by the late justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
But is the 2020 presidential election really headed for the supreme court? Here’s a look at the situation:
Can Barrett hand Trump the election?
Probably not. The most likely scenario is that American voters alone will decide the election.
For all its flaws and added complications this year from the coronavirus pandemic, the US elections system has basic features to ensure a high correlation between the vote that is cast and the result that is announced.
It is highly decentralized, with thousands of jurisdictions staffed by members of each major party, all using different technologies and independently reporting results, which can be reviewed or recounted, with both sides and the media watching out for irregularities before, during and after election day. It might take awhile, and the tragic story of disenfranchisement in the United States continues, but elections officials have vowed to deliver an accurate count.
Sometimes, however, US elections are very close, and in an era of nihilistic partisanship, court fights during elections are becoming increasingly common. Such disputes might land with increasing frequency before the supreme court.
It is extremely rare for a presidential election to land before the supreme court. In 1876, five justices sat on a commission that decided the 1876 race for Rutherford B Hayes over Samuel Tilden.
In the modern era, it has happened just once, in 2000, after the Florida state supreme court ordered a recount in a razor-thin race that the Republican secretary of state said George W Bush had won. Republicans challenged the recount order and the case went to the supreme court, which sustained the challenge and stopped the recount.
How might a 2020 election-supreme court scenario unfold?
The supreme court has already issued two significant rulings in the election, one that allowed ballots received in Pennsylvania up to three days after election day to be counted, and a second blocking ballots received in Wisconsin after election day from being counted. Lower courts have issued numerous decisions on issues around voting and counting.
Republicans in Pennsylvania have vowed to renew their challenge to ballots received after election day, and if they can push the case back to the supreme court, they might find victory this time with Barrett making a majority.
But if the supreme court ends up getting involved in a major way in the presidential election, it would likely be to weigh in on a question that is not yet clear because we don’t know what legal conflicts will play out in which states.
In Bush v Gore (2000), lawyers on the Republican side argued that the state supreme court had usurped the legislature’s authority by ordering a recount. The supreme court stopped the recount, not by relying on the argument about the court bigfooting the legislature, but by finding that different standards for vote-counting in different counties violated the equal protection clause.
Is there a chance Barrett would recuse herself from any case involving a president who appointed her so recently?
At her confirmation hearing, Barrett dodged just this question. “I commit to you to fully and faithfully applying the law of recusal,” she said. “And part of the law is to consider any appearance questions. And I will apply the factors that other justices have before me in determining whether the circumstances require my recusal or not. But I can’t offer a legal conclusion right now about the outcome of the decision I would reach.” More