The Partisan Showdown Over Mail-In Voting Has Only Just Begun

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Jarring scenes on April 7 in Milwaukee—where long lines of masked voters waited outside polling stations—could repeat nationwide in November, as the Republican Party digs in against a growing Democratic consensus that the presidential election should be conducted primarily by mail if the novel coronavirus persists.

Republicans and Democrats have been divided for years over how easy it should be to vote. Democrats push for wider access through simple registration on the assumption that high turnout works to their party’s benefit. Republicans, citing the risk of fraud, call for stricter voter ID rules. (Five states mail ballots to all voters. An additional 28 allow mail voting without a special reason, but they require voters to apply for a ballot.) Now the public-health response to Covid-19 appears to support the Democrats’ approach, and Republicans are fighting back.

Wisconsin’s Republican Party and a Republican-majority legislature pushed voters into the streets on April 7 despite public-health warnings and a state order to stay home. On April 3, Democratic Governor Tony Evers had called the legislature in to vote to delay the election. It adjourned in 17 seconds instead. Republicans then successfully sued to stop Evers from delaying the election himself and to overturn a federal court order easing absentee ballot requirements.

The Wisconsin situation mirrors a fight in Washington, as Republicans decry mail-in voting and Democrats seek to bolster it with federal stimulus outlays. “Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to statewide mail-in voting,” President Trump tweeted the day after the Wisconsin spectacle. “Democrats are clamoring for it. Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.”

Even state Republicans who’ve endorsed mail-in voting during the pandemic have resisted making it too simple, adding extra steps or limiting its scope. In Ohio, the Republican legislature approved a mostly mail-in April 28 primary but not mailing absentee ballot applications to voters. In Georgia, Republican Secretary of State Brian Raffensperger did mail out applications, though not to inactive or newly registered voters. Fellow Republicans were furious that he mailed them at all, to the exasperation of Francys Johnson, chairman of the New Georgia Project, a voting-rights group. For years, he says, the state Republican Party has routinely sent absentee ballot applications to likely GOP voters.

Claims that absentee voting allows fraud are not groundless. One example unfolded in North Carolina in 2018, when a Republican-funded operative was caught collecting and tampering with ballots from a Democratic-leaning area. But if absentee voting is more susceptible to fraud than in-person voting, the risk of either is extremely low, says Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School: “You are more likely to be hit by lightning.” She says the risk this year is even lower, with the virus deterring would-be fraudsters.

So far, the GOP fight against easy mail-in voting has been fiercest in Wisconsin, where the party was focusing on a close race for a state Supreme Court seat. Nervous citizens had swamped the state’s absentee ballot process, submitting almost as many applications as the total number of votes cast during the 2012 presidential primary. The volume led to a federal court ruling allowing an extra week for the absentee count and lifting a requirement that mail-in ballots include witness signatures. The GOP appealed and won in the U.S. Supreme Court the day before the election. Despite its efforts, the party’s favored judge lost.

Mail-in voting has disadvantages, including an increased likelihood that a mail-in ballot will be tossed, which leads to litigation, says Edward Foley, a professor at Ohio State University’s law school. But he says to expect a massive amount of mail-in voting come November, whether Republicans like it or not: “In a pandemic, the voter’s choice is likely to be a mail-in ballot.”
 
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