The November Election Is Going to Be a Nightmare

By Paul Waldman, The Washington Post

01 April 20

resident Trump has a unique propensity to blurt out what others will only imply, and on “Fox & Friends,” the president offered a revealing lament about the proposals House Democrats had made for the rescue package that eventually passed.

“The things they had in there were crazy,” he said. “They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

That may be an exaggeration, but what is clear is that the November elections could be an absolute mess, not just in how difficult it could be to vote but in determining a winner as well.

The Democratic proposal Trump was referencing would have given money to states to aid in conducting this year’s elections, which have been complicated so severely by the coronavirus pandemic. In addition to the funding, it would have required that states make mail-in voting available to everyone (right now many states require you to have an excuse they consider valid to vote absentee) and in the case of a national emergency, mail ballots to every registered voter.

Because of Republican objections, those requirements didn’t make it into the final bill. It did include $400 million in funding to help states prepare for November. That will help, but it’s unlikely to be enough, as states will have to scramble to print more mail ballots and pay for postage, create more dropoff locations, hire people to process ballots, create online registration systems, and inform the public of the changes. The Brennan Center estimates that shoring up the election system in the wake of the coronavirus will cost $2 billion.

And states will struggle to make up the difference on their own. The pandemic and the recession are already putting a terrible strain on state budgets, and no one think the rescue package’s $150 billion in aid to states and localities is sufficient. So the idea that states will shift large amounts of money to their election systems in this time of need seems more hope than reality.

But Trump is right in his essential premise: If we made it too easy and convenient for people to vote, Republicans would lose more often than they do now.

At the very least, we can say that most Republicans think that’s true. Which is why they have spent the past few years doing everything they can to erect barriers to voting, particularly for African Americans, poor people, students, residents of cities and anyone else who might be too willing to vote for Democrats.

They aren’t going to suddenly be gripped by a feeling of civic oneness to do what they can to make the election run smoothly and fairly. It’s more likely that we’ll see just the opposite, with fights over who is going to be allowed to vote and how intensifying as we get to November.

We should say that there are some Republicans working to make voting easier. In Ohio, for instance, the Republican secretary of state wanted to mail ballots to all voters for the primary — but the GOP-controlled legislature would only let him mail postcards with instructions on how to request an absentee ballot, inserting an extra layer of paperwork and putting the onus on voters.

Meanwhile, Republicans are being told by their own side that any attempt to expand mail voting is a liberal plot to allow widespread fraud and potentially steal elections.

That’s despite the fact that five states — Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Hawaii and Utah — already conduct all-mail elections with little complication and healthy turnout.

But Republicans are convinced that Democrats are just taking the opportunity of this public health crisis to push their preexisting election reform agenda. And to a degree, that’s true. It just happens that part of this agenda — letting anyone vote by mail if they want to — is absolutely necessary when we’re in the midst of a pandemic that makes it dangerous for people to gather in large groups.

So we’re likely to see fights at the state level as Democrats move aggressively to make sure everyone can participate in November while Republicans resist those efforts. You could see it particularly vividly in states where power is divided. That includes the battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina, all of which have Democratic governors and Republican-controlled state legislatures.

If that all weren’t frightening enough, consider election scholar Rick Hasen’s nightmare scenario, one that derives from the time it takes to process what will inevitably be an unprecedented number of mail ballots:

What if Trump is ahead in Michigan and Pennsylvania on election night and he declares victory, but after millions of absentee ballots are processed a week or so later Biden is declared the winner in those states and wins the election? Will Republicans believe Trump if he claimed the later count was the result of fraud, despite all evidence to the contrary?

If you think America is divided now, imagine if Biden is declared the official winner while Trump claims that in fact he won and tells his supporters that the election is being stolen from them.

We still have time to reinforce the election system, prepare for November and mitigate the chaos. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that one way or another it’s going to be a mess. The only question is how bad it’ll be, and whether we can make it to the other side with our democracy intact.