How the Coronavirus Pandemic Intensifies the Fight Over Voting Rights

By Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker

07 April 20

rises, even horrific ones such as the circumstance that the coronavirus has visited upon us, can nonetheless create opportunities for the leaders tasked with navigating them. The September 11th attacks empowered the George W. Bush Administration to pursue an ambitious (and wrongheaded) foreign-policy agenda that it would have otherwise had much more difficulty enacting. The subprime-housing crisis allowed Barack Obama and congressional Democrats to enact financial reforms that would’ve been more vigorously opposed in the period before the crash. And, two months in, the COVID-19 pandemic has already given Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán the cover he needed to eviscerate democracy in his country (the principle applies to both democratic leaders and authoritarians—and, in the case of the current President of the United States, a man who is technically the former, with the mentality of the latter).

For the most part, Donald Trump’s attempts to tie the crisis to other parts of his agenda have been as clumsy and inept as the Administration’s response to the crisis itself. On March 10th, he tweeted, “We need the Wall more than ever!”—presumably to stem the spread of COVID-19, despite the fact that air travel was the primary means by which infected people were arriving in the United States. In a bizarre digression during a press briefing, last Wednesday, he held that the spread of the virus occasioned a renewed commitment to the war on drugs. There is, however, an area in which the novel-coronavirus pandemic dovetails exceptionally well with part of Trump’s agenda and that of the Republican Party in some states: voter suppression. From the outset of Trump’s term, his canards, such as his claim that three million people voted illegally in the 2016 Presidential election, have been used to bolster attempts to make voting more difficult. Speaking on “Fox & Friends” last week, Trump denounced aspects of the two-trillion-dollar stimulus package that are meant to shore up voter access in order to offset the impact of the virus on the upcoming elections. Overcrowded polling places and hours-long waits to vote have become a standard feature of American elections—a problem in normal times and a public-health hazard in the current one. Referring to provisions that Democrats pushed for, Trump said, “The things they had in there were crazy. They had things—levels of voting that, if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Among the “crazy” things Democrats proposed was funding for a nationwide vote-by-mail option for the Presidential election, to insure that people, particularly those in vulnerable populations, would be able to cast a ballot even if the coronavirus remains a significant health hazard in November. (Oregon, which conducts its statewide elections entirely by mail, has consistently high voter turnout, including in one recent election that witnessed an eighty per cent participation rate.) The bill ultimately included four hundred million dollars to fund voting by mail, a sum far below estimates for how much it would actually cost to launch a national program of this scale ahead of the election.

Some portion of the pandemic’s effect on voter turnout is tied to the nature of the problem itself. The virus has already caused the Democratic National Committee to postpone the Party’s national convention by a month, until August, and, as of Monday, has led fifteen states and one territory to postpone their Presidential-primary elections, along with other state and local elections held on the same day. The result is not only that the primary race between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders has been frozen—leaving their respective delegate counts looking like the score in a baseball game that’s been rain-delayed—but also that the eventual nominee will have spent at least two months of prime campaign time without being able to directly engage with voters he will need to motivate.

A more troubling dynamic, however, is seen in a case where the election had not been postponed. The Republican-led legislature of Wisconsin refused to postpone the primary from its slated date, on Tuesday, even though going out to vote would conflict with an ongoing stay-at-home order that Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, had issued. Evers criticized the legislators for forcing the public to “choose between their health and their vote.” (The legislature had also balked at Evers’s call to mail ballots to all three million registered voters in Wisconsin.) On Monday, he issued an executive order suspending in-person voting and postponing the election until June. Republicans filed a motion with the conservative-dominated Wisconsin Supreme Court to block the order, and the Court granted the motion. Ben Wikler, who chairs the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, told me of a potential implication of holding a vote in the middle of the pandemic: Republicans, owing in part to their faith in Trump, who downplayed the threat of COVID-19 for weeks before and during the outbreak in the United States, are still less likely to see the coronavirus as a serious threat.

Last week, Gallup noted a twenty-seven-point difference between Republicans and Democrats who were “somewhat or very worried” about being exposed to the virus. In theory, at least, that might translate into a Republican electorate that is less wary of showing up to polling places. The G.O.P.’s approach to matters of voting can be broadly described as efforts to curate the electorate in its favor. In Wisconsin, the pandemic may facilitate and amplify those efforts. All this is given added weight by the fact that retaining Wisconsin is key to Trump’s reëlection bid. Both the G.O.P. and the Democrats have been playing close attention to a state Supreme Court race there in which a Dane County Circuit Court judge, Jill Karofsky, is challenging the conservative Justice Daniel Kelly for a seat on a court that will likely hear an ongoing case regarding the legality of an attempt to purge more than two hundred thousand voters from the Wisconsin rolls ahead of November.

It’s difficult to predict how all this will play out in November. Biden has had comparatively low visibility in the past three weeks, yet he has paradoxically increased his lead over Trump in the polls. In other ways, though, the cumulative effect of the pandemic would seem to favor incumbents. Trump doesn’t have the power to postpone the Presidential election himself, which is set for November 3rd, and it is unlikely that Congress would do so. But state legislatures hold a great deal of sway in how their individual elections are run, and twenty-nine of the fifty legislatures in the country are controlled by Republicans, who have frequently opposed measures such as lengthening early-voting periods and making absentee voting (much less voter registration) easier. Both measures would reduce the likelihood that polling places become outbreak centers. Pairing mail-in voting with onerous voter-I.D. requirements would similarly (and unevenly) diminish the electorate. (In Wisconsin, the state Republican Party had been suing county clerks to prevent them from informing voters that, because of the pandemic and the Governor’s stay-at-home order, they could cite an “indefinite confinement” provision that would free them from the I.D. requirements.)

Like the epidemiological questions that have preoccupied us for the past weeks, the political questions confronting us are opaque, open-ended, and, to no small degree, frightening. An invisible microbe has illustrated, more than any of the other serial debacles of the Trump era, the immense dangers posed by a President with Trump’s limitations. It’s possible that his abysmal handling of the crisis will tank his reëlection chances. But it’s also worth considering the possibility that the same microscopic antagonist could facilitate a tide of voter suppression that would help him keep his job, even as he demonstrates how unfit he was for it in the first place.