Democrats took the risk of pushing postal voting. It paid off | American News



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When the United States began shutting down this spring due to the Covid-19 pandemic, it turned the already high-stakes race of 2020 into a precarious balancing act.

Election officials across the country, many of whom were already underfunded and underfunded, began scrambling to find places where they could safely deliver in-person voting, and election officials, who tend to grow old, began to give up. Disastrous primaries in Wisconsin and Georgia offered alarming signals that America was heading for a chaotic general election.

Amid this chaos, states where few people usually vote by mail were suddenly forced to multiply and hold elections in which most people had to vote this way, in the hope of avoiding long queues and human contact amid the pandemic. As the year progressed, a clear partisan divide emerged. Donald Trump opposed the postal vote, while Democrats urged supporters to do so.

For Democrats, it was a risk. In many states, postal voting had not been used before – including the major battlefields of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. For voters accustomed to voting in person, postal voting offered a new set of rules and procedures to follow and a voter could have their ballot rejected even for a small mistake.

While Democrats have waged an aggressive legal battle to ease postal voting restrictions, many Republican officials have refused to do so. Congress has allocated a fraction of the estimated $ 4 billion needed to run an election with significantly increased postal voting. Despite serious mail delays this summer, Republican officials in Texas and Ohio have limited options for voters to return their ballots in person. Texas Republicans fought to prevent people from registering to vote online and sought to reject 127,000 ballots using drive-thru voting. Republicans in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina strongly opposed efforts to give voters more time to return their ballots and election officials to count them. In Alabama, the state’s top electoral official successfully went to the United States Supreme Court to prevent counties from offering street voting. In Oklahoma, after the state Supreme Court struck down a law requiring voters to have their ballots legalized, Republicans acted quickly to reinstate a revised version of the measure.

Now, almost a month after the election, the risk appears to have paid off for Democrats. The nightmarish scenarios hardly happened – there were no widespread mail delays, which led to millions of Americans being deprived of their voting rights, as many feared this summer. Instead, states with little experience with postal voting have been able to compete with more experienced states to conduct successful elections. Over 100 million people voted early, in person or by mail – a record number.

“I’m pretty convinced at this point that Democratic strategy and the Democratic advantage in postal voting was of critical and critical importance to Biden’s victory,” said Tom Bonier, CEO of TargetSmart, a data company. Democrat who tracks voter data. “There is absolutely no way we can achieve these record levels of voter turnout, nationally, without this massive adoption of postal voting.”

‘We worked our ass’: more Democrats voted by mail

Partisan struggles over the vote in recent years have been shaped by the belief that, generally, more people voting benefit Democrats. But research earlier this year showed that, overall, postal voting generally does not benefit one political party over the other. As Trump continued to attack mail-in voting throughout the year, some Republicans feared he was sabotaging his own voters, dissuading them from a voting method that might be more convenient and easier than go to the polls.

While the move to postal voting alone cannot explain the election results, Democrats have actually done well in places where many people have chosen to vote by mail, according to data collected by the Guardian and ProPublica. Counties where people voted by mail at high rates were more likely to switch democratically than they were four years ago.

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When it comes to raw votes, many of them came from large suburban counties that have swung heavily towards Democrats compared to 2016.

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Some of the counties that had high ballot return rates were the ones Trump took away in 2016 and 2020, but where Biden was able to squeeze his margins. In Pike County in northeastern Pennsylvania, for example, voters returned at least 93 percent of the ballots they requested. Trump raised the county in 2016 by about 26 percentage points. In 2020, Trump lifted the county by just 19 points.

Jay Tucker, chairman of the Pike County Democratic Committee, said there was no doubt that postal voting had helped improve the performance of Democrats this year. He said he and other organizers were able to closely track who requested a ballot and regularly follow up with those who did not return a ballot.

“We worked our ass on it,” Tucker said. “One of the biggest mistakes Trump made in this election was not supporting postal voting. Because I think a lot more people came out.

In Michigan, one of the places that rocked Democrats the most was Kent County, home to Grand Rapids. Trump won the county by four points in 2016, but Biden has won by six points this year. Eighty percent of people who requested mail-in ballots returned them, which helped Democrats run smoothly there, said Gary Stark, chairman of the county Democratic Party.

“I think the absentee vote was a higher turnout factor. I think a number of new voters used mail or mail ballots this time around. No way to prove it, but that would be my gut guess, ”he said.

‘Don’t trust the letterbox’: different views on mail ballots

America has experienced the highest voter turnout in a presidential election since the turn of the 20th century. Almost 160 million people – around 67% of those eligible – voted this year. And Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida who closely monitors voter turnout, said there were signs that expanding postal voting was contributing more to a higher turnout than those who did not, although he cautioned that he was still analyzing election data.

But repeated attacks by Republicans on the process appear to have shaken some voters’ confidence in the process.

The deadlines for the return of absentee ballots have been reversed as lawsuits were brought before the courts. Hundreds of election-related cases have gone to state and federal courts this year. The United States Supreme Court refused to lift restrictions on postal voting in the handful of them who reached it. It took federal legal action for the United States Postal Service to be transparent and make detailed commitments on how it would ensure the delivery of ballots in a timely manner.

“My mom was like, no, don’t put anything in the mail. Don’t trust the mailbox. Get it inside and drop it off, ”said Sonni King, who requested a ballot in the mail and returned it in person to a satellite polling station in Philadelphia days before the election. .

“I heard a lot about all the mail issues, the violation and all that so I felt it was a safer route,” said Brittany Davis, who voted in person on the day of the poll in Philadelphia.

“You hear so much in the news, in the media, I don’t know what’s true and how much is false, just [about] the ballots in the mail are messed up, people are not doing it the right way. So I just know that if I could get in, even though I had to wait, just to make sure my vote was 100% counted, I was going to do it, ”said Shofolahan Da-silva, who also voted in person in Philadelphia. .

There is also the fact that some communities had more difficulty voting by mail. As the election approached, black voters in North Carolina had their ballots overwhelmingly flagged for potential rejection.

Native Americans also faced serious barriers to voting by mail – the postal service on reservations can be unreliable and the nearest post office can be hours away.

‘Habit building’: expanded access could be here to stay

The success of postal voting this year could mean that more people will vote by mail in the future, Bonier said. That could mean more electoral infrastructure that supports sending and counting those ballots – a process that has sparked some of the biggest legal battles in the election.

“Historically, generally, when people vote once by mail, they do so again. It is habit forming, ”he says. “What we’ll see in terms of a trendline is that this election has represented a massive spike in interest in postal voting, and some of that is going to recede, but we’ll settle to a point where much more. more people in this country will vote by mail in the next elections than before 2020. ”

In Georgia, for example, people who voted by mail in the 2018 midterm elections were much more likely to vote by mail again in 2020, according to Guardian analysis of data from Georgia’s secretary of state. Of those who voted in both elections, around 78% of those who voted by mail in 2018 did so again in 2020. Only 34% of in-person voters in 2018 voted by mail in 2020.

Yet if states will continue to embrace the dramatic expansion of postal voting after a record-breaking election. Georgia Republicans, as well as Lindsey Graham, the senator from South Carolina, have previously suggested revising the rules regarding postal voting. Such an approach would be part of a well-documented Republican strategy to make it more difficult to vote to preserve party power.

“I think we might see a pullback. It would be difficult to justify this given the high turnout, and the goal should be higher turnout, ”Bonier said. “But just given the polarization we have observed specifically on this issue of postal voting, it is unreasonable to assume that there will not be at least some effort to restrict postal voting in the next election.”

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