Welcome to Democracy Update, a newsletter about efforts to reform the toxic impact of money in politics, the Electoral College, gerrymandering, disenfranchisement, and all forms of voter suppression.
(Image via Whitehouse.gov)
It’s become painfully clear coronavirus will still be around come November, and we can’t have millions of Americans packing churches and school gyms to vote.
There’s an incredibly obvious solution to this problem and a faction of powerful people vocally opposed or conveniently silent when it comes to enacting this obvious solution.
Sound familiar?
Just like masks, the simplest and most obvious method for reducing viral transmission, have become a controversial issue due largely to fatal and cynical equivocation from some political leaders like the president, such is the case for expanding mail-in ballots for the November elections.
This is not partisan
Similar to the campaign against masks, misinformation abounds when it comes to opposition to mail-in voting from Trump, Attorney General William Barr, and a host of predominantly Republican state and local officials.
Fact check articles are easy to find, so I won’t spend time here rewriting those, but one thing that really drives home the cynicism of this all is that Trump himself votes by mail, in addition to many members of his administration.
It’s worth noting, this isn’t a partisan issue at all. Just like wearing masks so more people survive the coronavirus is an objectively better outcome, allowing more people to vote while remaining safe from coronavirus is necessarily better for democracy.
A Pew survey found there is broad public support for allowing all voters who prefer it to cast mail ballots during the pandemic.
Many Republicans support, or at least don’t oppose, calls to expand mail voting.
Republican Secretary of State Kim Wyman of Washington, one of five states that uses mail ballots as the main way to vote, cut to the core of the issue in an interview with the New York Times.
“Every one of us, whether we’re a Democrat, Republican or an independent, or any minor party in there, needs to be working toward making sure our democracy works.”
Logistical considerations
One actual risk of increased mail voting is that large numbers of votes could be arbitrarily discarded for reasons such as a voter’s signatures on the ballot not matching close enough to the signature election officials have on record.
Nowhere is this issue more prevalent than New York, where election officials discarded 34,000 mail ballots — 14% of the total cast— in 2018.
Another issue is that mail-in voting, if not administered properly, can discriminate against disabled people such as blind voters.
Going back to the earlier comparison with the mask “controversy,” the main difference, as you can see from the above issues, is that expanding mail-in voting is not at all simple. It requires planning and infrastructure.
Most importantly, local election officials need resources.
Will Congress step up?
With just a few months until Election Day, voting rights groups have shifted much of their attention to pushing Congress to act.
The original coronavirus relief bill approved in March included $400 million for elections. But that’s not nearly enough.
The Brennan Center, a think tank that advocates voting rights, has estimated it will cost at least $2 billion and recommended Congress allocate $4 billion for states to use.
The Democrat-controlled House included an additional $3.6 billion in election funds in its followup coronavirus relief package passed in May, but the Senate has no plans to take up that bill.
The good news is that Senate Republicans are not opposed to providing funds to support elections. This week, Sen. Roy Blunt said he’s "prepared to look at more money for the states to use for elections this year," and announced the Rules Committee, which he chairs, will hold a hearing on the matter on July 22.
Georgia: a cautionary tale
Disasters in state primary elections this year have been harbingers of what November could look like without proper funding and organization. Mail ballots went missing in several states like Maryland, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., and voters who showed up in Wisconsin and Nevada had to wait in line for hours.
Georgia is truly in a league of its own right now when it comes to election incompetence under the leadership of Gov. Brian Kemp, who was singularly corrupt in administering elections in his previous role as Georgia’s secretary of state.
Equal Citizens this week released a retrospective on Georgia’s June 9 primary. This paragraph is long but give it a careful read because it’s truly breathtaking.
In Fulton County, which encompasses much of Atlanta and its suburbs and is the state’s most populous county, voters were told they could email requests for absentee ballots. But this process resulted in many applications being “lost”. The high number of requests froze email accounts and jammed printers. The election office was also understaffed after being hit by COVID-19. One Fulton County elections employee died and another was hospitalized. Even some voters who applied as early as April, such as state senator Jen Jordan, still did not receive their ballots before Election Day. And when absentee ballots did come in the mail, it appears that the vendor did a sloppy job. For example, former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams said she received a ballot that came with a return envelope that would not open. She tried steaming the pieces of paper, to no avail.
In contrast, Kentucky saw collaboration between the state’s Democratic governor and Republican secretary of state, which led to increase access to voting by mail and very high turnout (though there were hiccups too).
Bill Nye has better things to do!
None other than THE Science Guy released a video last week encouraging (to put it mildly) people to wear masks. The video is sharp and funny, and it went…viral 😷
I like this video but I also wish it didn’t exist. Let me explain why.
The main victims of the mask “controversy” are obviously all the people who unnecessarily got sick because of it.
But in addition to them, think of all the time, effort, resources, and emotional energy that has been spent on public debate over this, not only from experts and but also us lay folk who rightly help amplify the message of the experts.
Experts have more important things to do!
The time and resources of health officials and scientists is a precious societal commodity right now.
This is the cynical one-two punch of people like Trump, who attempt to debase foundational knowledge to benefit from the ensuing confusion: They encourage people to believe regressive ideas and disrupt the work of people who are genuinely trying to improve society.
Now, I’m not saying I had better things to do this weekend than to spend hours writing this, but let’s say the same concept applies to all the election researchers and journalist fact checkers who have spent countless hours correcting the public record on expanding vote-by-mail efforts 🙃
Rapid Fire Democracy Updates
Washington DC is about to join Maine, Vermont, and Puerto Rico as the only locations to fully abolish felony disenfranchisement. The DC city council approved a bill last week to allow people incarcerated for felonies to vote, and the mayor is expected to sign it into law.
On the same subject, a joint policy task force including members appointed by Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders has recommended restoring voting for all formerly incarcerated people. Currently, each state has its own rules. Some don’t allow voting for people during parole/probation periods, others force people to repay all fees/fines before restoring their rights, and some states permanently bar people who served felony sentences from voting.
One more on this subject: Last week, voting rights groups in Florida asked the Supreme Court to lift a stay that will prevent hundreds of thousands of people who served felony sentences from voting in the state’s upcoming primary and general elections. After the state’s voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment in 2018 restoring voting rights, the Republican-controlled government passed a law saying people who served time for felonies must repay fees and fines before registering to vote. A federal judge ruled this to be akin to an unconstitutional “poll tax,” but an appeals court put a hold on this ruling while the state’s governor continues his legal battle against it.
Massachusetts has confirmed a petition for a ranked choice voting ballot initiative has collected sufficient signatures to be part of the November election.
Michigan Republicans lost their latest in a string of legal challenges to the state’s new independent redistricting commission. If this update seems banal, please watch the documentary Slay the Dragon, which highlights the incredible grassroots campaign to end partisan gerrymandering in the state that succeeded against all odds. A Michigander named Katie Fahey started the campaign with a Facebook post and carried it through despite having no political organizing experience. She is a true hero 🇺🇸
A new analysis concluded that successful gerrymandering tends to lead to subsequent voter suppression efforts based on observations of North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the states where the party “that won a majority of state legislative seats received only a minority of the total statewide vote.”
To hell with special interests, members of Congress all too often have their own interests at mind. A new investigation by the fantastic startup news org Sludge (check them out and support them!) found nearly 100 representatives hold positions at private companies and there are examples of them pushing legislation that would give them millions of dollars of tax benefits. Public disclosure rules for this type of behavior offer very little transparency.
On a national level, charismatic politicians like Bernie Sanders can raise incredible sums of money by only accepting from small donors. But a new report from the Campaign Finance Institute shows this is not the case on the state level, where nearly 75% of contributions come from big money donors and PACs. Public funding for elections could do a lot to level the playing field.