With the election now 15 days away, states are scrambling to adapt to mail-in voting regulations amid the coronavirus pandemic. Some, like Pennsylvania, have struggled to keep up with the avalanche of inquiries from panicked voters who don’t understand why their ballots have been rejected, the Washington Post reports, and where others are having difficulty with the registration process. “When we get so many calls, it’s almost like a denial-of-service attack,” Marybeth Kuznik, elections director of Pennsylvania’s Armstrong County, told the outlet. “We can’t get anything else done here.” Lawyers for both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are reportedly “flooding into the state,” anticipating a close race that could be decided by legal minutiae.
The chaos in Pennsylvania is being mirrored in other states. Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina are facing scrutiny regarding their electoral process, and whether they’re adequately prepared to receive an incredibly high number of ballots. In Georgia, where in-person early voting began last week, some voters had to wait upwards of 11 hours to cast their ballots. Record numbers are partly to blame, but so too are faulty voting machines, which according to the New York Times “have malfunctioned in three consecutive elections this year alone.” A lack of paper ballots and long wait times were reported in June during the primary in predominantly minority neighborhoods.
While Florida has an almost 20-year history of voting by mail, this year’s numbers are still unprecedented. According to the Times, “more than 2.4 million ballots had been returned to election offices as of Sunday afternoon,” and “400,000 more Democrats have returned mail-in ballots than Republicans.” (Large numbers of Republicans are expected to vote in person.) In North Carolina, according to the Guardian, Black ballots are being disproportionately rejected. As of last week, “40% of rejected ballots—2,871—were from Black voters, even though they comprised only 16% of the overall ballots returned.” (A spokesman for the state board of elections told the Guardian that some data may be outdated.)
With votes liable to be thrown out due to a mismatched signature or an incomplete address, certain states, including North Carolina, have started offering mechanisms to fix some of the errors and effectively “cure” the ballot, according to CNN. But the state Republican Party is reportedly pushing to give partisan inspectors the right to challenge ballots they believe were improperly cast—a process that could severely delay the vote count. Republicans have made it clear that they won’t hesitate to contest ballots, extending the potential for unrest in swing states long after election day.
High turnout in states like Georgia, where almost 1.5 million people have voted (a 152% increase from 2016), have punished a system already under strain thanks to upheaval in the U.S. Postal Service. Given the circumstances, it’s more and more likely that November 3 will mark not the end of the long slog of campaign season, but the beginning of a still more agonizing process.
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