Donald Trump’s campaign to undermine faith in an election he expects to lose means that the states—especially the battleground states—need to make sure voting and vote-counting go smoothly. There’s good news and bad news on that front. In Pennsylvania, there’s a lot of bad news.
The New York Times is tracking the challenges facing elections officials and voters in seven key states, and ranks Pennsylvania dead last, after even Georgia. Republicans have gone to court over every move the state has made to try to make it easier and safer to vote in the pandemic, successfully delaying those efforts. The state doesn’t have in-person early voting and mail ballots can’t be counted until Election Day—legislation to change the latter is hung up in the Republican-controlled state legislature. Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar has allowed counties to add a satellite elections office where people can vote absentee in person in addition to the existing county elections offices where in-person absentee voting is allowed, but only seven counties have done so. This all adds up to few in-person votes ahead of time, a lot of mail-in votes—683,000 returned so far, out of 2.7 million ballots requested—that have to be counted on Election Day, and Republicans committed to continuing chaos.
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Georgia is the next worst, and we all know about Georgia: long lines, especially in areas with lots of Black voters; a problematic new voting system that slowed the lines during primary voting; and state elections officials prone to lying about problems with that new voting system or anything else. The possibly good news is that the Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, claims he has added bandwidth to the voting machines to help speed lines. We’ll see about that. The definitely good news is that Georgia has early in-person voting and people are taking advantage of that, with more than a third as many votes cast so far in 2020 as were cast in the state in 2016. Voters are determined to keep their state’s awful elections officials from messing this up too catastrophically.
Then there’s the good news: Arizona, which took a week to count enough votes to declare a Senate winner in 2018, will be counting absentee ballots starting 14 days before Election Day, and Maricopa County, where the majority of the state’s population lives, expects to have most results on election night. (And if Joe Biden wins in Arizona, Trump’s possible paths to victory get narrower, and the overall assessment of the likely results in other states shifts.)
In slightly less good news, Michigan has plenty of drop boxes for ballots, and the state legislature made a change to allow absentee ballots to be processed but not counted starting the day before Election Day. That’s still ridiculously late, but it’s an improvement over not until Election Day, and the state has run a successful poll worker recruitment program that means there shouldn’t be staffing problems. Vote tallies will come in slowly, allowing Trump to lie about what’s going on, but it looks like there is at least a plan to handle the votes.
Florida will find a way to be a mess, one way or another—it’s a big state with close elections that is always finding a way to get things wrong. But for what it’s worth, elections officials say that they will have processed in advance all the mail ballots that arrive before Election Day, so they won’t have a backlog to deal with.
If Arizona and Florida really come up with results on election night, we’ll know a lot about the shape of the race. But Republicans, especially in Pennsylvania, are doing their best to ensure that Trump has the chaos he hopes to feed off of.