2024 U.S. election: Will faster ballot counting prevent a 2020-style meltdown?
A young state senator in Michigan foresaw trouble before the last U.S. presidential election, warning of looming chaos in the counting of votes.
In fairness, this hardly required clairvoyance: the potential for problems was apparent, even months before the 2020 vote, with analysts, including CBC News, predicting near-certain bedlam.
It would take days to properly count Democrats’ votes because they tended to vote more often by mail, especially during the pandemic, and those mailed ballots would take longer to process; and Donald Trump would exploit that delay to delegitimize the election.
“We raised these flags over and over again,” said Jeremy Moss, a Democratic senator from Michigan who was then in his first term. He recalls pleading in vain for his opponents to pass a law that would let election administrators start processing mail-in ballots earlier, as is allowed in dozens of states.
“All of this was predictable, and indeed predicted.”
In an interview with CBC News this week, Moss insisted those delays had consequences, helping Trump whip up unrest, which culminated in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The Jan. 6 committee delves into what Donald Trump did, and did not do, as the Capitol was attacked by rioters. During their last hearing of the summer, the panel dove into the 187 minutes that Trump failed to act — despite pleas from aides and allies.
In Nevada, Cisco Aguilar describes his scare-scenario for this year: The electoral count is tied 266-266, and an entire nation awaits the count from his state, where he’s the top election official.
“That is my biggest fear that keeps me up in the middle of the night,” Nevada’s secretary of state said during a panel this year, hosted by the voting-access group Campaign Legal Center.
One thing Moss and Aguilar have in common: they’ve worked to change things.
In Michigan, Moss sponsored a bill letting cities start processing mail-in ballots eight days before election day. It’s one of several voting laws enacted by Democrats after they won control of certain state legislatures in the 2022 midterm election. In that same election, Aguilar won office in Nevada; he has informed state officials they can start counting mail-in ballots 15 days before voting day.
The new math on mail-in ballots
The bottom line is that this year, delays are no longer guaranteed. There’s a chance an election winner will be declared on election night.
And it’s not just because more people might vote in person rather than mail in their ballots like they did at the height of the pandemic; the rate of absentee voting surged from one-quarter of the electorate in 2016 to nearly one-half in 2020.
It’s also because there are new rules in several states that give election workers a head start on the time-consuming process of opening envelopes, checking IDs, confirming matching signatures and feeding ballots into machines.
In 2020, about five swing states lacked rules for early ballot handling. This included Nevada, where it took four days to declare a winner and Georgia which took even longer.
In Michigan, it took just one extra day, but on that day, an angry crowd of Trump supporters converged on a vote-counting facility in Detroit. According to Moss, the Michigan senator, that scene started a national trend.
This year, only two of those five swing states still have the same slower system. The three mentioned above updated their rules. But in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Republican legislatures blocked changes.
In Pennsylvania, the Republican-controlled Senate cited two reasons for stalling a bill passed by the Democratic-led state house: first, they said it should be paired with a new voter-ID law, and second, they noted that early results could be leaked, unfairly influencing the election.
The net effect of all these reforms is that to see days of suspense like in 2020, it would take a very close electoral count, hinging on very specific states.
Pennsylvania has become a true battleground state, with Donald Trump’s campaign launching a legal battle to throw out votes and Democratic supporters rallying to oppose what they call interference.
Delay helped ‘idiot’ conspiracy theories fester in 2020
Al Schmidt, Pennsylvania’s top election official, would rather not relive that experience.
He recalls with incredulity the frenzy that befell his state four years ago, describing how people drove up to Pennsylvania’s vote-counting headquarters from Virginia with guns in their cars because they’d read that counterfeit mail-in ballots from China were being shipped there by the Mafia.
“I’m sorry, I’m laughing. It’s not a funny thing, it’s just so absurd,” Schmidt, a Republican, said during the Campaign Legal Center event in June.
“People [start] acting out because they believe a lot of this nonsense that they might simply read from some idiot uncle on Facebook.”
After the 2020 election, some states started reaching out to national organizations to inquire about best practices.
Officials started to contact the National Conference of State Legislatures to ask what their peers had done to count mail-in ballots quickly, and how they kept the results secret.
The advice: Copy Florida
“One of the most common questions we got was, ‘How the heck did Florida do it?’ ” said Wendy Underhill, the group’s director for elections.
Her advice: Start processing early. Open the envelopes, check signatures, confirm voters’ identity, remove ballots, put them in piles, slide them all into counting machines — and then do nothing with them until election night.
“You don’t hit ‘count’ [on the machine]. You just hit ‘scan’, basically,” Underhill said in an interview.
“And then, on election night after the polls close, that’s when you hit ‘count’ — and, boom, it’s already got all of the scanned images in there.”
Watch highlights of our coverage of the U.S. presidential election.
So why haven’t all states done this? Especially when dozens have been successfully counting faster.
The blunt reality, says Michelle Kanter Cohen, is that some are operating in bad faith. As senior counsel for the Fair Elections Center, a non-partisan voting-rights group, she doesn’t specifically mention any politicians or parties.
The people fighting against a faster vote-count, she says, are the same people trying to foment distrust in elections.
“For election-deniers who want to sow doubt about an election result, it’s to their advantage to not have the final result on election day,” she said. “These are not good actors.”
Georgia, however, makes for an unusual case study.
The Republicans who control that state have allowed faster ballot-processing, unlike their party’s lawmakers in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
They have passed dozens of new laws. One says processing of mail-in ballots can start weeks before the election, while counting can start at 7 a.m. on election day. Another says these ballots, in fact, must be counted immediately — within an hour of the polls closing.
The count is just one front in the fight
And that’s where critics cry foul: “This is an impossible and overly burdensome requirement,” the American Civil Liberties Union said.
Georgia serves as a reminder that the battle over election rules is multi-faceted. In 2020, even after the votes were counted, there were legal fights, power-struggles on county election boards and a failed attempt to disrupt congressional certification on Jan. 6.
Now Trump and his allies have promoted a plan that could stall Georgia’s vote certification. Under a rule change adopted by the increasingly partisan state elections board, any of the state’s 159 counties could delay certification as they investigate fraud. The Democrats are suing.
In Michigan, Moss says he hopes things go more smoothly this time. But he notes that just as election officials learned from 2020, Trump has, too.
In a victory for former president Donald Trump, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that all presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for some ‘official acts’ but may still be prosecuted for ‘unofficial acts’ once they’ve left office. About That producer Lauren Bird explains what the ruling means for the legal challenges against Trump, and just how far presidential immunity extends.
And if Trump loses, Moss says he’ll use every tactic he can.
“We all have an expectation he’s going to fight it until the next Jan. 6. So we’re on guard — and we’re being vigilant about new forms of conspiracies and lies,” he said.
And after the election? “Hopefully, we’ll just be done with Trumpism once and for all,” he said.
Published at Sun, 18 Aug 2024 18:39:34 +0000
Doctors and aid workers prepare for mass polio vaccinations in Gaza amid pause in fighting
At the clinic in Khan Younis, Dr. Tasneem Abu Al-Qambaz writes a prescription for a little girl with a fever. Her mother is concerned it might be polio after the first confirmed case in Gaza in 25 years was announced this week.
On Abu Al-Qambaz’s desk is a box filled with vials of the polio vaccine, in preparation for the widespread vaccination effort starting Sunday during what’s being called a humanitarian pause in fighting.
“Due to the dirty water, dirty food and the lack of detergents, polio started to attack our city,” Abu Al-Qambaz told CBC freelance videographer Mohamed El Saife. “The WHO decided to bring back a vaccine for all children ages one day until 10 years.”
Israel came to an agreement with the World Health Organization (WHO) for a series of three-day humanitarian pauses in different areas of the war-torn territory to allow polio vaccine rollout.
The WHO aims to vaccinate more than 640,000 kids, or 90 per cent of Gaza’s children under 10 through the 1.2 million vaccines already delivered; 400,000 are still on their way to the strip.
The WHO has already said the time allotted probably won’t be enough.
In July, polio was detected in six wastewater samples from Deir al Balah and Khan Younis tested by Israel and international organizations.
Poliovirus is highly infectious, spreading through contact with feces of an infected person, or contaminated food or water. In its most severe form, it can cause paralysis, trouble breathing, or death. It mainly affects kids under five.
“Polio is a direct consequence of the war,” said Casey Harrity, global director humanitarian program quality at Save The Children.
More than 1.2 million doses of polio vaccine have been delivered into Gaza, with more to come. Health workers are trained, and a phased vaccine campaign will roll out this weekend — but the WHO chief is cautioning that the time allotted to execute the phased campaign is ‘unlikely to be enough.’
Displacement makes vaccination harder
As the war approaches its 11th month, much of Gaza’s sanitation infrastructure and health infrastructure has been destroyed. And international organizations have reported raw sewage flowing through displacement camps, many of which already have poor sanitation.
Harrity says displacement will be another obstacle for teams on the ground trying to get as many needles into arms as possible during the temporary pause in fighting.
“In the month of August, nearly 300,000 people were displaced, some for the sixth, seventh, and eighth time from relocation orders issued by the Israelis,” she said.
More than 2,180 staff have been trained to provide vaccinations and information about the campaign to people in Gaza. The pauses will run between 6 a.m. and 3 p.m. on three consecutive days, and will begin in central Gaza on Sunday before moving to the south and then up to the north, WHO officials told Reuters.
The pauses could be extended for a fourth day in each phase, which the WHO said would likely be needed.
WHO, UNICEF and the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA will carry out the campaign. Rik Peeperkorn, the WHO’s senior offiical for the Palestinian territories, said there would be nearly 400 places where parents could bring their children to receive the oral vaccine.
He said there are also 300 mobile teams that would be used to reach children in more difficult places.
“It’s not ideal,” said Peeperkorn in Geneva Friday. “We think it is feasible if all of the pieces of the puzzle are in place.”
In order to effectively vaccinate and ensure immunization against polio, a booster must be administered in a month, meaning these same organizations will have to negotiate another humanitarian pause to vaccinate children again.
Infectious diseases spreading
The planned pauses are unconnected with negotiations that have been underway for months to try to agree to a halt in the fighting in Gaza and return Israeli and foreign hostages in exchange for Palestinian detainees held by Israel.
“Ultimately the only solution to safeguard the health of the children of Gaza is a ceasefire,” said WHO Director General Tedros Ghebreyesus. “The best medicine is peace.”
Back at her clinic in Khan Younis, Abu Al-Qambaz finishes seeing her last patients.
“A lot of infectious diseases have spread here in Gaza,” she said.
Most of Gaza’s hospitals were damaged or destroyed with only 17 out of the 36 hospitals in the territory partially functional and less than half of the 132 primary health centers still operational, according to WHO figures.
The Israel-Hamas war began after the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel killed 1,200 people and saw 250 hostages taken into Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023. The retaliatory incursion into the strip has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Published at Fri, 26 Jan 2024 09:01:20 +0000
