SOME OF THE MOST iconic images from the Florida recount in 2000 were handfuls of men and women sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, sometimes nearly cheek-to-cheek, straining toward an election official holding a ballot for the group to recheck and record.
This year, a groundswell of painstaking work begins on the front end of the election. The pressing issue at the moment isn’t a ballot recount—though that could happen—it’s counting the ballots in the first place.
As the coronavirus pandemic spread, many voters began requesting absentee ballots to cast their votes by mail. Meanwhile, election officials in California, Nevada, New Jersey, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., mailed ballots directly to all registered voters for the first time. (Five other states already had been conducting their elections primarily by mail: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington.)
In the primary season earlier this year, mail-in ballots accounted for at least half the votes cast in the 37 states where the data were reported, according to Pew Research. That’s at least double the number that voted by mail in the same precincts in the general election in 2016.
In Pennsylvania, the ballot numbers swelled to a tsunami: Nearly 1.5 million voters opted for mail-in ballots in June primaries. That’s 17 times the number that voted by mail in the 2016 primaries. The tidal wave overwhelmed election workers and delayed results in some contests by weeks.
Consider the timetable election officials face: Pennsylvania state law doesn’t allow workers to start processing the ballots until Election Day. That’s doable in a normal election year, but when an unprecedented amount of paperwork piles up, the process inevitably takes longer.
Some workers do use machines for parts of the process, and officials in Philadelphia used a $10 million grant to invest in new machinery ahead of the contests. But that work still can’t begin until 7 a.m. on Election Day.
That’s when workers will feed ballots into a machine that rejects any without a signature on the outer envelope. Another machine will open the outer envelope, and election workers will pull out the “secrecy envelope” inside. If voters didn’t place their completed ballot in the required secrecy envelope, the ballot is tossed out. (It’s called “a naked ballot” and considered invalid.)
Workers place the secrecy envelopes into a slicing machine that opens them. The workers then pull out the paper ballots, unfold them, and feed them into a tabulation machine one by one. The Los Angeles Times reported Philadelphia officials expect to have 22 people processing several hundred thousand ballots beginning on Election Day.
Not only could the count of mail-in ballots already in hand take longer, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in June that officials could count ballots postmarked by 8 p.m. on Election Day up until Friday of election week. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld that decision.
Since Democrats are opting for mail-in ballots at higher rates than Republicans, the slower process could lead to what some political scientists call “a blue shift”: Results could show Trump winning Pennsylvania on election night but shift toward Biden as more mail-in ballots are processed.
The process isn’t the same everywhere. Each state sets its own rules for voting, and 34 states allow election workers to start various forms of processing mail-in ballots days or weeks in advance, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
In Florida, for example, a 22-day head start on processing and tallying votes could help avoid major counting delays. (It’s a felony to release the results early.)
But in at least two other closely watched swing states, tight timetables stand: Wisconsin workers can’t process mail-in ballots until Election Day. Michigan lawmakers voted in September to give election workers a 10-hour head start on processing mail-in ballots before Election Day.
In Pennsylvania, the Republican Legislature and Democratic governor came to a stalemate over a plan to give election workers more time to begin the process. That makes Pennsylvania a key state to watch on election night, especially considering how close the contest there ran in 2016: Trump prevailed over Hillary Clinton by 1 percentage point, and it became a critical win for him.
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October 22, 2020 at 06:23PM
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