How The Coronavirus Could Deny You The Right To Vote Safely

The new coronavirus has robbed Americans of plenty, from graduations and proms to baseball games and concerts to the most heartbreaking thing of all: the final goodbyes with loved ones who die from COVID-19.

The next possible casualty?

Americans’ faith their vote will be counted — if they can vote at all.

This year, election officials across the country are bracing for a crush of mail-in ballots from voters who may not be willing to risk in-person voting during a health crisis.

Voting by mail faces two big problems: a U.S. Postal Service that could be severely slashed by November and, if it survives intact, the cost states would incur from an expected huge influx of people mailing their ballots.

Nothing about the runup to the Nov. 3 presidential election has been normal. The boisterous rallies to get voters fired up about their candidates have not happened. Primary elections have been postponed or switched to vote-by-mail contests.

And now the post office is going broke — more broke than it was before the pandemic caused a dramatic drop in revenue from first-class and direct-marketing mail.

No one thinks the Postal Service will go away completely.

But limiting delivery to a few days a week or slowing the movement of mail would hamper the ability of states that already vote exclusively by mail — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington — and would cripple other states, already financially strapped, where mail-in ballots supplement in-person voting, according to those who favor lending the agency money.

President Donald Trump has warned that he won’t allow the Postal Service to receive any loans unless it cranks up prices dramatically, putting its abilities in jeopardy ahead of the election.

“The impact of the loss of the U.S. Postal Service in this fall’s election would be devastating for our democracy,” Washington state Secretary of State Kim Wyman said this week on a conference call with reporters. “The United States Postal Service is integral in our success as a country, ensuring everyone can vote in arguably the most important election in 100 years.”

The Postal Service has faced almost no criticism over the years for its delivery of absentee and vote-by-mail ballots and their return to election offices for counting.

But that could change.

Wyman, a Republican, and Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos, a Democrat, are leading a call by the National Association of Secretaries of State for Congress to give the Postal Service a no-strings-attached $10 billion loan to nudge the post office toward solvency and ensure it maintains its full capabilities at least through the November election.

“Do we really want people to have to put their health and safety at risk in order to use what is a constitutional right?” Condos asked.

Election officials want to avoid what happened in April when Wisconsin went ahead with in-person voting in its primary. Lines backed up for hours as voters maintained social distancing. Poll workers were in short supply. Only a fraction of the polling places were open.

At least 52 confirmed coronavirus illness cases are directly linked to the election, according to Wisconsin health officials.

Third-Class Service?

Americans have consistently found the Postal Service the most trusted among 13 agencies, according to Gallup polls.

But politicians are putting their own stamp on the value of the Postal Service.

The most recent stimulus bill authorized a $10 billion loan to the Postal Service, but the Treasury has yet to approve it. And without steep rate increase, Trump told reporters at an April 23 signing ceremony, he won’t allow the loan.

“The Postal Service is a joke because they’re handing out packages for Amazon and other internet companies, and every time they put out a package, they lose money on it. So Amazon and other internet companies and delivery companies are dropping all of their — not all of them, but a big portion of — packages into a post office, and the post office is supposed to deliver the packages, and they lose a lot of money.”

Companies such as Amazon use the post office’s priority flat rate that allows them to ship packages, regardless of weight, to anywhere in the country for $8.30. The rate increase Trump wants would raise the cost to ship those packages to at least $41.50, said American Postal Workers Union President Mark Dimondstein, who joined Wyman and Condos on the call.

Analysts say the Amazons of the world actually help the Postal Service’s finances. Package delivery is one area in which the Postal Service makes money, and rate hikes would wipe out any financial incentive that internet shipping companies have to send their packages through the U.S. mail and worsen the Postal Service’s debt spiral.

GOP Opposition Isn't Universal

Trump is conflating his criticism of the post office and a bailout with his opposition to voting by mail. He said last month on Twitter that “Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to state wide mail-in voting.”

“Democrats are clamoring for it,” he wrote. “Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.”

Kentucky Republican Congressman Thomas Massie took a similar doomsday approach, saying on Twitter that “universal vote by mail would be the end of our republic as we know it.” The speaker of the Georgia House, also a Republican, said it would be “extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia.” Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey said vote-by-mail “raises the potential for voter fraud.”

Not all Republicans agree with Trump. And neither do the best studies on voter fraud, which find it to be minuscule.

In Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine and Secretary of State Frank LaRose, both Republicans, are vote-by-mail advocates. Rather than postpone the state’s primary election, Ohio put expanded mail-in voting to a test Tuesday after approval by the Republican-led legislature.

Ohio is a no-excuse absentee voting state, which means voters don’t have to give a reason for wanting to put their ballots in the mail, and it also allows early voting. A statement from LaRose’s office said the state’s history showed that “Ohioans can be confident that their vote-by-mail ballots are as safe and secure as the votes cast on Election Day.”

Provisions for voters to cast mail-in ballots are universal in the United States, but 16 states require a lawful excuse, such as travel or a disability, according to the National Vote at Home Institute. As the coronavirus threatens the safety of elections, five states — West Virginia, Alabama, Indiana, Delaware and Massachusetts — have set those restrictions aside. Four of those states have Republican governors.

Trump and other Republicans’ public crusade against vote-by-mail elections may have minimal effect. Six swing states — Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — already offer no-excuse absentee voting.

Support for elections by mail is rising amid the pandemic, though deep partisan divides show Trump’s public campaign against it may be working. A recent poll by The Associated Press and the NORC-Center for Public Affairs shows the idea is favored by 47 percent of Democrats and 29 percent of Republicans.

Voter Fraud Practically Nonexistent

Voter fraud is practically nonexistent in the states that conduct elections exclusively by mail and elsewhere, according to a database of national election fraud since 2000.

Constructed as part of a national investigative reporting project funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the main finding is this: The nation has had 2,068 cases of alleged election fraud since 2000, which included five presidential elections.

Of those election fraud allegations in the past decade, 491 involved absentee ballot fraud in races where billions of votes were cast. Eighty of those allegations were in the five states voting exclusively by mail, leading the investigators to conclude fraudulent votes are a tiny fraction of 1 percent of all votes cast. A wealth of other studies have debunked the myth of voter fraud.

One of the most prominent recent cases of voter fraud involved a Republican operative in North Carolina in the 2018 midterm election. The state’s Board of Elections ordered a new election in the 9th Congressional District after finding compelling evidence the operative had arranged to destroy and alter absentee ballots cast.

Strings On Aid Mean Some States Can’t Use It

Congress has set aside $10 billion to loan to the Postal Service, but it needs approval from the Treasury Department, which won’t dole out the money unless conditions are met. Those conditions have some people fuming.

Trump instructed the Treasury not to approve the loan unless the cost of mailing packages is raised dramatically.

That’s one issue that could hamper mail-in voting.

The other problem is the cost to states.

Congress allocated $400 million in election aid to the states but let it go through only after Democrats agreed to the 20 percent match at the insistence of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, another fierce vote-by-mail opponent, Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a former presidential candidate, told The Washington Post.

Condos and Wyman said the match requirements put the relief out of reach for some states, including those spending every spare dollar on the coronavirus and others that can’t accept the money without the approval of state legislatures that aren’t in session, they said.

“State revenues are plummeting across the country, and this means some states will not be able to utilize that money,” Condos said.

Besides, he said, “I don’t see a 20 percent match for the business community, so I’m not sure why all of a sudden we have to have a 20 percent match.”

The relief package fell far short of the meeting the $2 billion Democrats estimated would be required to prepare for an onslaught of mail-in ballots, and it also didn’t require states to make the option available to all registered voters when elections occur in national emergencies.

U.S. military personnel have voted by mail since the Civil War without the political rancor defining this year’s voting debate on Capitol Hill, Condos said, noting that both “blue states and red states rely on the Postal Service as an essential service … vital to our democracy.”

While Trump sees “tremendous potential for voter fraud” with vote-by-mail elections, Condos and other Democrats see an effort to suppress the vote without it.

“Many disenfranchised Americans have fought tirelessly for, and in some cases are still fighting for, national standards” with uniform vote-by-mail provisions, he said.

Dimondstein, the postal union president, said it’s “shameful” to exploit the health crisis to “undermine and destroy the post office,” calling it “the most devastating, full-blown attack for voter suppression since the 1965 Civil Rights Act.”

And it's chock full of irony, he noted.

Trump himself uses the post office to deliver his ballots.

“He trusted us to do that,” Dimondstein said. “We were proud to move the president’s ballot, and we look forward to doing that on a nonpartisan basis in the days to come.”

This article originally appeared on the Across America Patch