While much of the recent attention on mail-in voting has focused on the U.S. Postal Service or on the likelihood of voter fraud, there is a lesser-known, looming problem for the November elections.
Approximately 8,000 local election offices will have a role in carrying out the election. These offices manage almost 186,000 voting precincts and rely on state, county and local employees to run elections.
Some of these offices are poised to handle mail-in voting during the COVID-19 pandemic. Others are not.
Recognizing this, the Center for Tech and Civic Life and The Center for Election Innovation and Research recently announced that Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg committed $300 million to help state and local officials administer elections.
To carry out an election by mail, each of these hundreds of thousands of offices and employees will need to coordinate to make sure that ballots are processed in a fair, consistent and timely manner.
It’s a complex process, and each state has its own set of rules regarding how to distribute, manage and count ballots.
The Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution grants states the right to regulate and administer elections. This means that, while Congress has passed laws to expand election access and protect voting rights, the legal framework governing both federal and state elections varies by state.
8,000 local election offices will have a role in carrying out the election.
This results in a highly decentralized electoral system.
Money is one of the most important factors influencing how state and local governments run the 2020 election.
In some states, local governments must bear the entire financial burden of election administration. In others, state governments will reimburse local authorities for certain electoral costs such as ballots or other voting equipment.
Regardless of who bears the financial burden of elections, the universal and most frequent complaint from those who administer elections is a lack of resources.
The true cost of election administration – printing ballots, maintaining voting equipment, compensating election officials and disseminating voter information – is unclear. Some estimate it at $2 billion per year.
Ensuring all voters have access to vote by mail is even more costly.
Because not all states are equally prepared for mail-in voting, some states have to invest much more to ensure that they are able to process an increased volume of mail-in votes.
For example, five states use vote-by-mail as their primary means of election administration. But more than 80% of voters in other states cast ballots in person on Election Day in 2018.
Introducing more widespread mail-in voting to states like these typically involves legislative changes, new government contracts and coordination across a variety of state agencies such as local elections offices and chief elections officials, boards, or commissions, and new procedures for counting votes.
The financial implications of the COVID-19 pandemic have made the switch to mail-in voting even more complicated. Decreases in state revenue mean that some state and local governments cannot afford to invest in election administration.
While the federal stimulus package did provide $400 million to help state and local authorities, states are required to match 20% of the funds they receive. Some states simply do not have the money.
Even if mail-in voting theoretically is available across most jurisdictions, citizens likely will have different voting experiences depending upon where they live.
Even in normal circumstances, election administrators rarely operate under clearly defined procedural processes or have effective training. This tends to result in variation with respect to how they implement election law and interact with citizens.
If a state’s election administrators fail to follow uniform procedures for issuing, processing and counting ballots, then the Constitution’s guarantees of equal treatment and fundamental fairness are violated.
History suggests that making sudden policy changes to election administration without paying attention to the administrative burdens they create can bring implementation risks and constitutional challenges.
Jennifer L. Selin is a Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy assistant professor at the University of Missouri. Distributed by The Associated Press.
