Wisconsin voting mess sends a message for November
Exercising your right to vote in America shouldn't involve waiting in hours-long lines and risking your health.
But that was the situation on Tuesday in Wisconsin, which pressed ahead with its primary despite the coronavirus pandemic and a shortage of poll workers. Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, had wisely tried to postpone the election until June 9 and expand absentee voting. Late Monday, however, his executive order was overruled by the highly politicized Wisconsin Supreme Court.
The mess in Wisconsin, one of the most important battleground states in the upcoming presidential election, should serve as warning for the rest of the nation. With the possibility of a second-wave outbreak of COVID-19 this fall, and in the absence of an effective treatment, it's prudent to start planning for a presidential election conducted primarily by absentee ballot.
November's national elections might seem like a long way off, and the coronavirus conditions will, everyone hopes, be considerably improved seven months from now.
Time is growing short, however, given all the things that states must do between now and then to prepare to transform their elections in case the coronavirus threat persists when Americans go to the polls nationwide.
For that reason it is imperative that states get busy now ordering absentee ballots, devising ways to distribute them and figuring out ways to count them once they come in.
Opposing view: Vote-by-mail delivers an array of problems
The stakes are enormous. The presidency will be on the line in November, along with control of Congress.
In recent days, President Donald Trump has made it clear he's not a fan of mail-in voting. "I think a lot of people cheat with mail-in voting," he said at one of his coronavirus briefings. "It shouldn't be mail-in voting. It should be: You go to a booth and you proudly display yourself."
There are downsides to vote-by-mail, though not necessarily the ones Trump has in mind. Rapidly going from in-person voting to exclusively mail-in ballots is likely to disenfranchise some voters. At the very least, a state would need to engage in a fairly robust publicity and outreach campaign to pull this off. And more realistically, it would need to plan for some in-person voting, perhaps through a reduced footprint of sites, with expanded early-voting hours and public-health precautions.
It would also need to work through some other issues such as paying some staffers — since the traditional senior citizen volunteer workforce might be understandably reluctant to participate — and ways to sanitize voting equipment.
None of this is cheap. Furthermore, the states, which are already facing huge public safety costs amid declining tax revenues, are limited in their ability to borrow and will need help from Washington. Recently passed legislation includes $400 million for elections, which is a decent start but not enough. The nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice estimated that $2 billion would do the trick.
The legislation sets aside $500 billion for bailouts for airlines and companies deemed to be of national security importance. Certainly, safe and fair elections are a matter of urgent national security as well.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Wisconsin's voting mess carries a warning for the other 49 states: Our view
