Washington • When Colorado’s 3.5 million voters help select a president this fall, their choice will be made almost entirely by mail, via ballots in postage-paid envelopes dropped off in mailboxes or, more commonly, in bins scattered statewide.
Not so in Alabama. As the law now stands, all voters must cast their ballots on Election Day, at their designated polling places, unless they vote absentee. And getting an absentee ballot is so hard that fewer than 55,000 of 1.7 million voters cast one in the last election.
Election experts, voting rights advocates and a chorus of Democrats are urging states to switch as much as is possible to voting by mail for the November election. Their aim is to ensure that the vote is not plagued by the same nightmare scenario that occurred this past week in Wisconsin of voters in masks and gloves going to polls — or staying home — amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The Republican governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, endorsed the idea Thursday, saying the state would hold its election by mail in November if health risks were still an issue. The Republican secretary of state in Iowa, Paul Pate, raised the same prospect. Elsewhere, Republican opposition, like court filings and President Donald Trump’s baseless charge that voting by mail is riddled with fraud, leaves the future of that effort in doubt.
But even if those hurdles were cleared, many, if not most, states would face daunting financial, logistical and personnel challenges to making mail balloting the norm — and a deadline that would turn it into a breathless sprint.
“Switching to voting by mail, even in states with no history of it, can absolutely be done, and quite likely it may need to be done,” said Judd Choate, the state elections director in Colorado, which made the change six years ago. “It’s just a matter of how bumpy it is.”
Those potential bumps are vividly illustrated by a sample timeline prepared for states by the federal Election Assistance Commission. It lays out scores of steps, like procuring software, training staff and getting federal post office approval of ballot envelopes, that would have to be completed between April 1 and Election Day on Nov. 3.
For a number of states that already allow a large share of voters to vote remotely, the road would be considerably smoother. Five states — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington — conduct elections almost entirely by mail. Twenty-eight others and the District of Columbia allow voters to cast absentee ballots by mail without providing a reason, although participation is dampened in states that make voters apply for ballots in every election instead of providing them automatically.
Some of those states have impressive rates of balloting by mail, including big states like Arizona, California and Florida and smaller ones like Montana and North Dakota. But for Alabama and others accustomed to handling only trickles of mail ballots, a quick transition to voting by mail would be wrenching. Most of those states are in the Southeast, but not all: In New York, only 3.5% of ballots in the 2018 midterm election were absentee.
Still, for all the concerns about the impact of the virus on the presidential election, the six swing states most likely to determine the outcome in November — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina and Arizona — all allow broad access to voting by mail.
The election in Wisconsin offers a cautionary example of what could happen to a state unprepared for a mostly mail election. In the 2016 presidential election, voters there cast some 145,000 absentee votes by mail; in Tuesday’s election, there were over 1 million. The state’s election officials regularly process high volumes of absentee ballots, but the last-minute cascade left them swamped, said Kenneth Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin.
The coronavirus pandemic is giving some states a taste of what an all-mail election in November would look like. The National Conference of State Legislators has tracked legislation or executive orders that could potentially increase mail balloting in more than a dozen states, both Republican- and Democrat-led, in response to the health risks of voting at polling places.
Ohio is among the states that have already acted. It is planning an all-mail primary election April 28 and is sending postcards to voters telling them how to obtain a ballot and a postage-paid return envelope. Georgia, Iowa and West Virginia are doing much the same. New York issued an executive order allowing absentee voting without an excuse for its upcoming primary, Alabama has temporarily lifted its absentee-voting restrictions and Michigan has ordered that its primary election in May be conducted by absentee ballot as much as possible.
Some states are encountering resistance. In New Mexico, where 27 county clerks have petitioned the state Supreme Court to allow them to send mail ballots to voters for its primary, the state Republican Party has intervened, arguing that voting by mail encourages fraud. Missouri’s attorney general, Jay Ashcroft, has told county clerks that he does not have the power to allow “no excuse” absentee voting. And Republicans are opposing calls by Democrats and local election officials for all-mail voting in Arizona’s primary election — even though 4 in 5 voters already do so.
Few if any states have begun to apply their mail-ballot experiments to the November election, said Wendy Underhill, who directs the elections and redistricting program at the Conference of State Legislatures. Voters who try mail balloting generally prefer it, she said, which can generate support for a switch.
But any decisions would have to come quickly, said Choate, the Colorado elections director.
For states that rely mostly on polling places, adapting to mail voting means a sea change in equipment and planning. Tasks like printing and tabulating ballots that can be spread over local election offices when people vote in person become more demanding, and often more centralized, when elections are conducted by mail.
In most states, Choate said, only one or two printing companies have the capacity and sophistication to print the huge numbers of ballots and envelopes needed. Many also lack enough equipment to prepare them for mailing.
States where voters’ ballots are fed by hand into scanners at every precinct would now have to buy high-speed scanners to tabulate ballots, and probably move most counting to a central location to save money. People would have to be hired and trained to process ballots and verify vast number of signatures. And additional workers would have to deal with large numbers of voters whose ballots were rejected because their signatures had changed or their marks for a candidate were unclear.
The voters would have to be trained, too, to navigate a balloting process most had never experienced.
“A presidential election sees the largest percentage of infrequent voters,” said David J. Becker, the director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit organization working to promote public confidence in elections by making them better run. “They’re not familiar with how to mark a ballot or what the deadline is, and that’s particularly true when you have a complicated ballot — Florida probably will see a 10-page ballot.”
“Voting by mail is voting without a safety net,” he said. “If you’re in a polling place and make two marks on a ballot for president, the machine will reject the ballot.”
Huge numbers of rejected mail ballots could confound tabulation and delay results.
And then there’s the cost of postage: To ensure that only qualified voters receive ballots, Colorado sends a postcard to every registered voter before an election and clears the mailing list for ballots of any voter whose postcard is returned as undeliverable. Mailing ballots also costs money. So does giving voters a postage-paid return envelope.
Tammy Patrick, a senior fellow and expert on voting administration at the Democracy Fund, said the $400 million that Congress allotted for elections in the coronavirus stimulus package potentially would cover postage and some printing and processing costs of national balloting by mail. Others say $2 billion or more would be needed to cover all expenses.
But there are savings as well: States with all-mail voting eliminate the cost of staffing and equipping most polling places — the single largest cost of an election, Choate said — and keep just a few sites for voters with special needs. Printing costs can actually drop because stacks of spare ballots no longer have to be printed to prepare for unexpectedly high turnouts. In fact, one study of the switch to all-mail voting in Colorado concluded that major expenses fell by 40%, to about $10 per voter from $16.
Michael McDonald, a political scientist and elections expert at the University of Florida, said he worried that the complexities of conversions could prove a high-wire act for states.
“They don’t have the equipment,” he said. “They have to print all these ballots, send them out, manage absentee ballot requests and then once the ballots come back, tabulate them all. God forbid they’d have to have a recount.”
Still, he and most other experts say that the risks of not preparing to hold an election during a pandemic far outweigh such complexities, much less concerns about political advantage.
“Even in a best-case scenario, the at-risk status of individuals and social distancing are going to make this election like none we’ve ever had before,” Trey Grayson, the former Republican secretary of state in Kentucky and a national authority on election administration, said in an interview. “We have an opportunity to be in a better position if we make the decision today to have more vote-by-mail options in November.”
Republicans needn’t fear losing any perceived electoral edge, he and others said, because the coming election already is so epochal that expanded mail-in balloting is unlikely to attract many new voters. Democrats could remove another concern by limiting voting by mail only to the November election, to eliminate complaints that they were trying to lock in a permanent advantage.
“As this becomes more partisan, each political party is going to go to its corner,” said Sylvia Albert, the director of voting and elections for Common Cause, a leading voting rights advocate. “But there’s a way to find the middle.
“We have to get the ball moving now,” she added, “or Wisconsin is going to be what November looks like everywhere.”