“Vote early, vote often” is ascribed to corrupt elections in Chicago. In the UK the only way to vote early is by using a postal vote, a privilege much abused by Matron in old folks’ homes.
In countries where I have been an election observer the only one to allow early voting was Belarus. It struck me as being unsatisfactory, to say the least. Now I read that the United States of America, a country I look up to as a democracy that acted as the world’s policeman in the 20th century (think Dixon of Dock Green), also have early voting – in Belarus it started five days prior to Election Day, in many US States weeks before. In 1992 only 7% of voters voted early either in person or by post. This rose to 36% in 2016 and will exceed 40% this year. There have been no allegations, yet, that these early votes are fraudulent or corrupt. However, the practice will lead to a higher turnout and is likely to benefit the Democrats, the dump Trump party. For political balance the other party call their opposition leader the hidden Biden.
I like to think much of my uneasiness about the US Presidential Election next month is because I read fake news and know that I am not competent to assess the scope of cyber interference. Frankly, if Robert’s, Bertie’s and my brains were all put in a Magimix it wouldn’t produce the brains of even a hundredth of an Alan Turing.
Next Tuesday I was booked on an Air France flight to Tbilisi via Paris on an Election Observation Mission. It left at 06.25 am which was a bit daunting but it would have been a rich source of blogging material. A core team and Long Term Observers are in Georgia but participation by Short Term Observers has been cancelled. However, the OSCE will observe the US election. A core team of eleven election experts will be based in Washington DC and thirty observers will fan out (!) to observe voting in twenty-eight states, says The Washington Post. Frankly they will find it hard to collect compelling evidence in such small numbers. There were in excess of a thousand observers in Ukraine last year.
If you don’t give a toss about what I think, stop reading now. I think the two party system that served Great Britain so well hundreds of years ago (Whigs and Tories) is not sufficiently nuanced to serve today’s larger, more sophisticated electorate. And the same goes for the United States. But I wonder who will be the captain of the ship in the USA?
According to the United States Election Project, as of 12:01AM EST October 24th, early voting in America totals 54,246,796 of which 37,891,514 were votes by mail and 16,355, 282 were in person votes. At this rate, it’s possible that by November 3rd, the day of the actual election, the total of early balloting may approach 1/2 of all the votes cast in the Presidential election, now estimated around 150,000,000. According to the Brennan Center For Justice, extensive research reveals that voter fraud–be it mail-in, early or day of voting–is very rare. Yet, despite this truth, expect to see unending litigation challenging a significant percentage of the votes, particularly in the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida. It is very possible, because of the volume of anticipated legal action, that the official outcome of the U.S. Presidential election may not be known until December 14th, the date when the Electoral College meets and certifies the results of the contest. The 2020 election cycle will undoubtedly prove to be an incredible strain on democracy in America and, sadly, its future from the perspective of this point in time looks frightfully gloomy.
In case anyone is interested in how it has worked in previous elections in the U.S. . . .
Where I live in Oregon on the west coast of the U.S., there has been mail-in (or drop-off, if you’ve left it to the last minute) voting since 1991 for local elections, and in 1998, Oregon voters overwhelmingly approved voting (only) by mail for all elections. Two years later, Oregon became the first State in the U.S. to conduct a presidential election via mail-in voting (with voter participation at an astonishing 79%).
Despite the rhetoric, as Ned York points out in his comment, there is no evidence that voting by mail increases fraud:
“A database of election fraud reports maintained by the conservative Heritage Foundation reports approximately 1,200 allegations of voter fraud – for which there were 1,100 criminal convictions – for voter fraud since 2000. Of those, only 204 allegations, and 143 convictions, involved mail-in ballots. That is a tiny fraction of the roughly 250 million mail-in ballots cast over those two decades. In addition, problems are extremely rare in states that rely primarily on vote by mail.”
(https://theconversation.com/research-on-voting-by-mail-says-its-safe-from-fraud-and-disease-141847 — see the handy color-coded map of the status of mail-in voting, by state)
A search of that Heritage Foundation Web site turns up 15 cases of fraud in Oregon over the past 19 years. Over 100 million ballots were mailed and over 60.9 million votes cast in Oregon during this period.
To further increase voter confidence here in Oregon, each ballot can be tracked by the person who cast it:
“Every ballot has a unique barcode so voters can track their ballot on our My Vote website. We also encourage voters to take advantage of the hundreds of conveniently located drop sites throughout the state to drop off their ballot in person,” Clarno said. “We will continue to work with our partners like county clerks across the state to make sure all Oregonians know the best options to return their ballots, whether it’s through the mail or in secure drop boxes to meet election deadlines.”
(Oregon Secretary of State Beverly Clarno, as quoted by Fox News)
There are other safeguards in place to protect against fraud: voters must sign the outside of the envelopes in which their ballots are mailed so that the envelope signature can be matched against the version on file in order to establish its legitimacy — before any contents are known. To protect the privacy of the vote, there is a privacy sleeve that prevents the envelope being held up to the light in an attempt to decipher the voter marks on the enclosed ballot. The signature verification teams are separate from the teams that open and count the ballots. There can be observers of all affiliations in both places, though it sounds as though we won’t have any from the OSCE make it out to Oregon.
Having voted for many years in New York using rickety machines with hard-to-move parts and imprecise settings, with a perfunctory glance at a tiny signature on my ID to verify my identity, I find the process here in Oregon inspires more confidence.
There is no evidence that voting by mail gives one political party or group an advantage, as it seems to increase turnout across parties, ages, and ethnic groups. Thus, the narrative the President and some in his party have continued to spread about mail-in voting leading to more fraud seems to make the most sense when considered as a tactic to pave the way for ex post facto challenges to the legitimacy of election results, as Ned York describes.
Lest you think voting by mail is only favored in liberal places like Oregon and Washington, it is worth noting that the rather conservative and rural eastern portions of both states also support mail-in voting (not just the liberals in the big cities). More to the point, the states of Colorado (historically a bit more Republican in national votes; more recently seeming to favor Democrats) and even heavily conservative Utah (where Republicans do quite well, thank you very much) also have universal voting by mail.
There is a definitely a sense among Republicans in some areas that higher voter turnout gives the advantage to Democrats. This has led to Republican or conservative groups suing to block mail-in or absentee voting measures advanced even by Republican elected officials who are trying to ensure safer voting during the resurgent pandemic.
In my home state, Texas, the Republican governor has insisted there be only a single location in which to drop off a ballot in each Texas county, and is still fighting in the courts to retain this plan, long after voting has begun in Texas. The absurdity of this can be seen in Texas’ largest county, Brewster, which, at just over 16000 km.sq. is a bit smaller than Slovenia, and larger than Montenegro, Kosovo, Cyrus, Luxembourg, et al. (and Northern Ireland, for that matter). Perhaps even more ridiculous is the single drop-off site reserved for the 4,713,325 residents of Harris County (which has about a million more people than the country of Georgia).
I had better climb down off my soap box (no, no — I am not touchy on this topic at all). Sadly, I fear that many Americans these days prefer to live in their bubbles, seeking news only from sources that agree with them and interacting only with those who will not challenge their entrenched opinions. This makes it easier for Russia, Iran (which has been sending Americans threatening e-mails containing personal details and purporting to be from armed right-wing groups demanding Republican votes) and other interfering parties to play on paranoid fears about the election here.
That said, the actual work of elections is largely done by local elected officials and over 900,000 citizens who mostly volunteer at the polls, and there are safeguards in place to keep things honest in every county. If nothing else, the sheer scale of things makes significant interference in election outcomes (as opposed to the early reporting about them) unlikely. So I am hopeful that we will muddle through and that Americans will be confident in the eventual outcome of the election, however many bumps in the road here may be along the way.